Mapping Out Latin America

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In 1992, Latin America was fast becoming a hot destination for investment.

I was a 26-year-old junior reporter in New York writing about the deals U.S. investment banks such as Goldman Sachs were doing in the region.

One day I got a call from Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief Matt Winkler asking me to recruit a team of journalists to expand coverage in the region.

I had no experience hiring people and had never been to most of the countries. There was no information accessible on the World Wide Web to do research.

I just flew to each major city and asked around.

There was no master plan, budget or really much oversight.

It seems insane in hindsight, but more preparation probably wouldn’t have helped.

Over the next few years, we opened seven offices and hired dozens of reporters and editors.

To keep track of everyone, I printed out a map and taped the names of the journalists next to each country. (Canva didn't exist yet!)

We were so young, and it happened so fast! No one had any idea Bloomberg would grow into the world's dominant financial news operation.

Startups these days all seem to have metrics and budgets and five-year plans.

Investors want estimates for ROI (return on investment) and TAM (total addressable market) before making a move. You are supposed to hire the A team because they 10x your effort.

Bloomberg didn’t do any of that. The company expanded into Latin America with a small group of reporters because clients asked for more coverage.

The Latam team - myself included - was not the most experienced or talented or celebrated group of journalists, but we were determined and focused and worked hard.

Something underappreciated about Mike Bloomberg is how he leveraged content to build his brand.

Mike viewed news as a kind of advance guard for sales of the Bloomberg terminal. News articles did of course contribute to the product. But they also advertised it.

As he wrote in his biography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg: “Each news story is a product demo. More demos lead to more revenue. More revenue leads to more stories and then even more revenue.”

Soon after we opened the beachhead, we were joined by salespeople including Chuck Garcia, Dan Parke and Pamela Haahr. They expanded the tiny outposts I opened into large, professional operations.

Three decades later, some of the pioneers on my map are still at Bloomberg including Philip Sanders, Mike Smith, David Papadopoulos, David Scanlan and Viviane Rodrigues.

The rest are scattered.

Here they all are, re-assembled:

Thomas Black. Eduardo Garcia, John Moody, Katherine Baldwin, Peter Wilson, David Papadopoulos, Bob Willis, Charles Penty, Heather Walsh, Mike Smith, Simon Romero, Alex Spatuzza, Christian Plumb, Jeb Blount, Shasta Darlington, Vivianne Rodrigues, David Scanlan, Rick Jarvie, Jake Keaveny, Susan Schneider. Not on the map: Eric Arzubi, Herb Lash, Thomas Atkinson, Christian Plumb, Jim Craig, Elzio Barreto, Bob Willis, Andrew Noel, Carlos Camacho, Justin Carrigan and Michael Molinski.

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

BLOOMBERG’S LATIN AMERICAN TEAM: I don’t remember exactly when this was taken but it was sometime in the mid 1990s. We did a retreat.

MEXICO CITY: Eduardo Garcia in the inaugural Mexico City office.

SANTIAGO: Philip Sanders in the first Santiago, Chile office.

COLOMBIA: David Scanlan and Philip Sanders with me in Colombia for a World Bank conference.

COLOMBIA: David Scanlan and Philip Sanders at a conference in the 1990s.