Know Your Customer

The formula of entrepreneurs with staying power is simple; Build something essential and Sell it to the people with money to buy it. 

Before Michael Bloomberg was a politician and a clean energy advocate, he was an entrepreneur. Salomon Brothers fired him in the 70s and used his severance package to start Innovative Market Systems.

His thesis was that Wall Street traders would pay a premium for high-quality information delivered via computer terminals. He was right. Bloomberg earned the insight from years inside the industry and knew that an information advantage translated into millions of dollars.

Create that much value, and firms won’t hesitate to pay a $24,000 subscription fee.

Bloomberg terminals are now the primary platform of operations in finance. Hundreds of thousands of terminals generate billions in annual revenue profitably. That opens the door for an even more significant impact.