What 15 Bosses Learned From Their First Big Job

Extractive Summary of the Article | Read | Listen

Everyone remembers their first meaningful job. It might have been scooping ice cream in high school or cleaning golf carts at the local club. Or it could have been the first stretch in a real office after college. In this month’s CEO Diet (a monthly series in Bloomberg Businessweek), it’s the hard-won lessons that continue to underpin success today.

For David Solomon who has been the chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. since 2018 and an employee there since 1999, “You learn a lot about serving people when you work in customer-facing retail, and I carried some of those foundational lessons throughout my career.” A major takeaway: “The value of focus and paying attention. When the line was long, I needed to get the flavor and toppings right.”

Now he’s the president and chief operating officer of Uber Technologies Inc., but when he was growing up, Andrew Macdonald focused on a different mode of transportation: golf carts.  The job taught him that setting goals makes even routine work feel meaningful. It also taught him discipline.

“My first job was at Lehman Brothers, the largest bank failure in history,” says Katerina Schneider, CEO of the wellness and supplements brand Ritual.  She also taught herself how to work hard and not get burned out. “If you are specific about doing work that aligns with what you find interesting and gratifying, you can work much harder for much longer without burning out.”

As CEO of Legal & General Group Plc, António Simões oversees the UK’s largest asset management company, with about £1.2 trillion ($1.6 trillion) in total assets.  He spent the summer working in the back office at an accountancy firm, filing financial reports in alphabetical order.” He says he still remembers it fondly. “It taught me early on about the importance of work ethic, how to work as a team and the joy of earning my own money.

“The Walt Disney Co. taught me two lessons,” says Bing Chen. He’s now CEO of the Asian Pacific community nonprofit Gold House; before that he was YouTube’s first global head of creators and built much of what’s become a multibillion-dollar business.  If you can’t do the ‘small’ things, why would we entrust you with the big ones?” Chen also shares a lesson from Rich Ross, the former chairman of Disney Studios, whom he calls his longest-term professional mentor: “Your job is not to be impressive; if you’re in the room, you’ve impressed. Your job is to be memorable.’”

Long before Gregg Lemkau was co-CEO of BDT & MSD Partners LLC — the merchant bank that merges Michael Dell and Byron Trott funds — and a board director of BlackRock Inc.  From his work in childhood in the construction, “I learned the power of disposable income as I blew my summer earnings seeing Van Halen in concert four nights in a row.”

Since 2023, Billy Hult has been the CEO of New York-based Tradeweb Markets Inc., which operates electronic trading platforms and has an approximately $26 billion market cap; prior to that he was the company’s president. But back in the day he had a very different job. “I was a betting clerk at an OTB [off-track betting] in the South Bronx.  The job taught him how to process information and think quickly.

“My first real job was on The Apprentice: Martha Stewart, which is not exactly a traditional on-ramp to a career,” says David Karandish, founder and CEO of the AI-powered support platform Capacity. Reflecting on that singular experience, he says I learned early that business rewards tenacity and stamina.”

Since 2017, Julie Cartwright has been the president of Pvolve, the workout brand that counts Jennifer Aniston as a partner, investor and brand ambassador. One of Cartwright’s early, memorable jobs was working in a retail store, stocking CDs.  It taught her how to show up professionally and take pride in her work.”

“My first job was at IBM in their Paris headquarters as an intern, teaching executives how to use what were then some of the new Microsoft tools,” recalls Robin Vince. Since 2022 he’s been the CEO of BNY, the oldest US bank.  “Saying yes to things that might have intimidated me at the time. It’s a principle I’ve most recently applied to AI. I had to invest in my own learning before we could bring the company along.”

Ariela Safira, founder and CEO of mental health platform Zeera Healthcare Ltd, might just win the prize for most memorable first job. She was a kids’ karate teacher.  She learned from her teacher to simply love people.

Kenneth Himmel is president of Related Ross LLC, the South Florida-based real estate company with $10 billion in development in Palm Beach. He’s been crucial to curating dining rooms in Related projects.  I learned the value in creating an experience: both from a business perspective but also to appreciate it as a guest.”

“I started on Wall Street during the height of the [’90s] tech boom,” recalls Veronica Miele Beard, co-founder of the popular Veronica Beard fashion brand.  Her learning from her first job is “Relationships are everything — connecting on a human level is what drives trust, loyalty and long-term success.”

show less