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In 1981, after Salomon Brothers was acquired by Phibro, Michael Bloomberg was pushed out of the partnership with a payout of roughly $10 million. He used it to found Innovative Market Systems, which built a bond-analytics terminal that Wall Street had not asked for. Merrill Lynch became its first customer, ordering 20-odd terminals in 1982 and later buying a 30% stake, and that business grew into the Bloomberg terminal.
Bloomberg says he got ahead at Salomon by arriving before everyone else and staying later. The senior partners, who also came in early and stayed late, had only him to talk to. Showing up consistently turns proximity into relationships, information and responsibility that more gifted but less present colleagues never get offered.
Start building before the plan is complete. Put a working product in front of real users quickly and refine it from what they actually do with it. Making mistakes by acting beats being paralyzed by analysis: errors of commission can be fixed, but the opportunity lost by waiting cannot be recovered.
Bloomberg's firm controlled every layer of what the user touched: the data, the analytics, the delivery, and even the custom terminal hardware and keyboard. This let it make exact product decisions and change them fast without depending on outside vendors. It also made the terminal hard to replicate or displace.