Answer extracted from the Founders podcast — listen to the full episode below.
How should an employee make themselves indispensable to advance their career?
Become physically present before everyone else and visible long after they leave—Bloomberg arrived at 7 a.m. when even his boss was still asleep, stayed later than anyone in the office, and made himself available for any request his managing partner needed. By age 26, this relentless omnipresence had turned him into a trusted confidant and set him apart from peers competing for advancement.
At Salomon Brothers in the 1970s, Bloomberg understood that career momentum comes from being the person your boss thinks of first when opportunity or crisis strikes. He didn't just show up—he showed up early enough to be there before anyone else, and he lingered long enough to handle whatever came up after hours: client calls, conversations, tasks that only a select few were trusted with.
This wasn't performative busyness. Bloomberg was solving real problems and being genuinely useful. When his managing partner Billy Salomon needed to borrow a match, discuss sports, or make important calls to major clients, Bloomberg was already there. The episode explores how this accessibility built a relationship that lasted through major career transitions, including Bloomberg's shift from sales and trading into computer systems supervision—a role his bosses asked him to take on because they trusted his judgment and work ethic completely.
"The more you work, the better you do. It's that simple. I've always outworked the other person."
Michael Bloomberg — Founder and Owner, Bloomberg. Bloomberg spent 15 years at Salomon Brothers starting as a clerk in 1966 at age 24, rising to become a close associate of managing partner Billy Salomon. After being terminated at age 39 with $10 million in compensation when Salomon Brothers was sold, he used that capital to start Bloomberg, building it into one of the world's most valuable privately held companies over 15 years.
The strategy works because it addresses a fundamental truth about advancement: your boss will promote the person they see most, trust most, and feel most confident relying on. Presence alone isn't enough—you must be present and productive, available and useful. Bloomberg did both at scale.
This principle doesn't require 12-hour days forever (though Bloomberg certainly worked them during his 15 years at Salomon Brothers). What it requires is showing up early enough and staying late enough that your availability becomes a recognized edge—the thing that makes you different from the other talented people around you. The full episode contains more details on how Bloomberg translated this early career discipline into the work ethic that later defined his entrepreneurial success.
How proximity and trust compound over time
Bloomberg's advancement to managing partner material happened not through a single spectacular achievement but through consistent, unglamorous reliability over years. Every morning he was there. Every night he stayed. His boss didn't have to think about whether Bloomberg would be available—he just was.
This created a feedback loop: the more visible and reliable Bloomberg was, the more substantial projects and relationships his boss trusted him with. The more responsibility he earned, the more he proved worthy of even greater trust. The episode details how this relationship survived a major career pivot, with his bosses confidently asking him to leave his lucrative sales and trading role to oversee computer systems—a move that should have been a demotion but became transformative because the trust was already unshakeable.
The insight applies across industries. You cannot advance past people if they don't know you exist. You cannot be promoted into roles of responsibility if your boss hasn't observed you handling smaller responsibilities first. Presence creates visibility, visibility creates opportunity, opportunity creates advancement.
See also
What early career skill did a major financial executive develop through low-status sales and trading work?
Bloomberg learned the meta skill of sales and the importance of actually picking up the telephone and talking to customers directly, a foundational discipline that shaped how he thought about communication and customer relationships throughout his career.