Bloomberg's Coaching Lines

In partnership with

_{Sign up to receive Surface Area or follow me on Linkedin or Twitter. DM me to talk about ghostwriting from my agency, Principals Media}.

In professional sports there is a concept of “coaching lines.”

The idea is that you should judge a coach by how well they train assistant coaches and how well those people do when they leave to manage other teams.

It also applies in business. Jack Welch famously taught a generation of managers at General Electric while Julian Robertson, the founder of the hedge fund Tiger Global Management spawned scores of Tiger Cubs. In tech, we have the Paypal Mafia.

Last year, I met several founders including Craig DeWitt, the co-founder of Skyfire, and was surprised to learn many spent time early in their careers at Bloomberg.

Bloomberg is an excellent company, but having worked there myself for three decades it never struck me as a breeding ground for entrepreneurs. It’s a tech-focused company, but it’s not Google, Microsoft or Meta.

I wondered whether Bloomberg had its own version of coaching lines.

To answer that question, I turned to Jason Saltzman at Live Data Technologies. The company maintains a jobs database of more than 90 million white collar professionals.

I was surprised when Jason said 1,133 ex-Bloomberg employees (out of 43,965 current and former employees in the database) started companies in the past five years. Moreover, as the accompanying chart illustrates, the trajectory seems to be increasing.

Jason broke down the data to provide a granular analysis showing almost one third of the founders were engineers, while 15 percent worked in sales. (For the purists, Jason’s classification system doesn’t track exactly with how Bloomberg buckets employees.)

Only 4% worked in the News Department which didn’t surprise me, though notably one of them was Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic. (I also found myself on that list after co-founding Pricing Culture, an AI content generation company.)

The data showed that about 40% of the alumni founded tech startups and most were located in the New York area, where Bloomberg is based. The company has a small San Francisco outpost.

Generally, the founders spent relatively short times at Bloomberg, typically a few years as a junior engineer or in the sales training program. Craig DeWitt from Skyfire is typical: He spent three years as a product specialist.

One startup, Distributional, which tests and evaluates AI models, has two ex-Bloomberg co-founders. Scott Clark was an intern and Keith Laban spent 11 years there.

It’s an open question how long you have to stay at a place to be impacted. And obviously most of the founders like Clark learned far more at other places they worked afterward. Nevertheless, I tend to believe we all absorb lessons from all our experiences.

Some other ex-Bloomberg founders that stood: Ashley Zahabian (Integrate), Yang Han (StackAdapt), Dan Ryan (VergeSense), Justin Kim (Hupo) and Alessandro Asoni (Clockwork Labs).

I suspect that the fact that Bloomberg is suddenly spawning a growing number of founders is also about how the modern economy, especially in America, has become an entrepreneurial engine.

It’s what happens when you combine a market that tilts economic rewards towards initiative with a surplus of engineering talent and abundant venture capital.

It’s possible that other companies like Bloomberg that have hired large numbers of engineers in the past decade are also becoming breeding grounds for new startups.

Perhaps I’ll check with Jason to crunch more numbers.

There’s a reason 400,000 professionals read this daily.

Join The AI Report, trusted by 400,000+ professionals at Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Get daily insights, tools, and strategies to master practical AI skills that drive results.

Sign up now for free and work smarter, not harder.

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

THE MARKET: I’m starting the year bullish. Not sure if that is a good idea.

GLOBAL WARNING: Snowmobiling is evaporating - even in Canada.

THE RAVE: Who killed the rave? Paul has a theory.

ARTIFACTS: I find it amazing that we still have Lincoln’s hat and that it’s in a museum.

MORE ARTIFACTS: It’s even more amazing that we have Charlemagne’s sword. Allegedly.