Brian Rooney Retires

When people ask me about managing their careers, I often mention a former colleague Brian Rooney.

In the late 1990s, Brian Rooney reported to me when I was the New York Bureau Chief at Bloomberg. A few years later I reported to him working in the company’s product group.

The lesson is that you should always behave as though roles could be reversed.

Last week, I caught up with Brian Rooney to discuss his retirement from Goldman Sachs.

Brian spent his four-decade career almost entirely at two elite firms – Bloomberg and Goldman. He’s been at the forefront of a period of extraordinary technological change in the creation and distribution of financial news and information.

He started his first job as a journalist in 1986 calling police and fire dispatchers on behalf of local radio stations and ending it by deploying large language models and AI agents against the vast corpus of Goldman research.

Brian grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, Whitefish, Montana, and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where his father ran a U.S. Geological Survey camp near the Yemeni border. He went to boarding school in Massachusetts and studied journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.

His first job at the Bay City News, a wire service feeding Bay Area TV and radio, paid him $13,000. After stops at the San Jose Business Journal and UPI, he was recruited by Bloomberg to come to New York and started in September 1991.

A year later he was dispatched to the company’s Princeton bureau to help manage a new class of reporters who had been hired right out of college and put through a crash course in business journalism. He was named Princeton bureau chief in 1993 and then tapped to move back and become New York bureau chief in 1994.

Around that time came a defining moment in Brian’s career and the history of Bloomberg. Editor-in-chief Matt Winkler was visiting Moore Capital – the hedge fund founded by Louis Bacon – and they complained that there was no way on Bloomberg to see the big stories of the day. Everything was just a relentless scrolling feed, a blizzard of information.

Overnight, Brian jury-rigged a system to organize stories ranked in order of importance. He then worked with a programmer to build the application, which was later known by its acronym, TOP. It became the No. 1 news function, helping Bloomberg elevate its reputation for journalism.

Brian would later go on to oversee a team of editors who managed the selection of TOP stories, underscoring a theme that continued throughout his career: that the curation of stories and the news judgment required to define what matters can be as important as the content itself.

In 2005, he was asked to join the news group in the company’s Product division and oversee engineers building applications to disseminate news. One of his first notable efforts was to provide terminal users with a way to determine which stories were the most read, the READ function. He added a unique alert, NI READSPIKE, that would trigger whenever hundred of clients all clicked on the same headline.

One of his early moves was to recruit me to join him in the product group. I had spent 16 years working in Bloomberg News and would eventually spend the same amount of time in Product. 

Almost a decade later, Brian left for Goldman. It was a surprise since he was seen as a Bloomberg lifer. He says he wanted to test himself and see if he could succeed at another top company. He was hired to help the firm elevate its research content. In practice that meant improving the presentation and distribution, specifically making it accessible via a new digital portal.

It’s hard to remember now, but at the time most Wall Street research was distributed either via mail or email as a PDF attachment. Brian helped drive Goldman’s reach and reputation by selecting reports to highlight, giving them an added design polish and posting them online.

Inside the firm executives and analysts noticed that the additional effort paid off by raising their visibility with clients. One success was the creation of a monthly report known as Mindcraft compiling long-lived and thematic research.

Recent years have been dominated by AI, specifically applying LLMs and agents to improve the ability for clients to search for information. Goldman – like other Street firms – has the challenge of operating in a highly regulated environment, serving clients who don’t tolerate hallucinations. 

Next, Brian is heading to Vermont where he has a farm and is developing an orchard of 20-plus varieties of heirloom apples. He says every variety of tree has a unique story. The Esopus Spitzenburg was a favorite of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello; He and his wife were married under a tree bearing Twenty Ounce Pippins.

He recognizes the seeming incongruity of an abrupt move from Goldman’s gleaming offices on 200 West Street to rural Vermont.

But he says he is playing the long game. Some of the trees he is planting now will take ten years to bear fruit.

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

BLOOMBERG IN THE 1990S: Rare photo of Brian Rooney and I in the late 1990s when he was the TOP editor and I was the New York Bureau chief.

MORE BLOOMBERG IN THE 1990S: Even rare action photo of Brian as TOP editor and me as New York bureau chief for Bloomberg.

FATHERHOOD: Interesting chart from Derek Thompson about how fatherhood has changed in terms of spending time with kids.

AI CLAUDE USAGE: If you are a young person struggling to find a job. Claude is the way.

NOT EVERYONE GETS TO RETIRE: My feed continues to be filled with former jouranlists who are being laid off. It’s a tough job market out there.

Please reach out if you have any thoughts about today’s newsletter. I enjoy hearing from readers. Send me a message if you want to talk or meet up if you are in NYC.

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