Hangar LP Mike Bloomberg on the Intersection of Government and Tech

February 2023

One of the best perks of the job at Hangar is getting to work with incredibly interesting people on really big problems. They’re our customers, our collaborators, and sometimes even our investors. 

Each and every one of them has a different perspective, but given their experiences and perspectives, all have insights that appeal to an ever broader audience. And so, we’re launching a Q&A series with these friends of ours.

To kick off the series, we called on Mike Bloomberg, 40-year tech entrepreneur, three-term NYC mayor, long-standing U.N. Envoy, relentless advocate on issues such as climate change, gun violence, and public health, one of America’s most active philanthropists, and current Chair of the Defense Innovation Board. Mike is one of Hangar’s first investors. He understands our portfolio’s customers because he was one, has lived the challenge of building and selling new technologies, and is willing to commit to the importance of the work with his time and his capital.
 

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Q: As a mayor, CEO, and philanthropist, you’ve always been a big believer in public-private partnerships and collaboration across business and government, which is at the heart of our company’s mission too. Why? What do those partnerships bring to the table that makes them effective in helping solve big problems?

A: Public-private partnerships can do a lot to support innovation and experimentation. For instance: It’s hard for governments to justify spending taxpayer dollars on untested ideas, but private funding can support experiments that, if they succeed, governments can then take to scale. Businesses tend to be better at innovating, but governments have resources and reach that private businesses can’t match. Neither has a monopoly on great ideas. When you bring the two together, amazing things are possible.

In New York City, public-private partnerships helped us create new parks and housing, the nation’s largest bike-share program, programs to fight poverty, a training academy for principals, and much more. And cooperation across the public and private sectors really is critical to meeting all the big challenges facing the world – from fighting climate change, to expanding economic opportunity, to preparing for the next pandemic.

Q: Having led a company and a city, how are the challenges similar or different when it comes to innovation?

A: In business, products that don’t perform well are ended, but often in government, programs that don’t work well often receive more funding. Once a government program has started, it’s very hard to end or replace it, even when it’s failing. Governments are also more risk-averse, because the press seizes on failure and amplifies it. Leaders in government can help encourage innovation by incentivizing people to take risks and standing up for their teams, even when good ideas fail.

Our foundation is working to support more of that kind of experimentation, including through competitions. We created a Mayors Challenge that invites cities to propose promising new ideas, then awards prize money to help the best of them come to life. We also support the Earthshot Prize, which was created by Prince William to help find and support entrepreneurs and government initiatives that are tackling big environmental issues in new ways.

Companies also face challenges to innovation, including complacency. Even though Bloomberg has been around for 41 years – and grown steadily over that time – we still think like a start-up, with a culture that emphasizes transparency, collaboration, and a willingness to take risks. We try to anticipate what customers will need before they know they need it – and then build it. Not every new idea works out, but the ones that do give us a first-mover advantage that is very difficult for competitors to overcome.

Q: Late last year you were named chair of the Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Board. What’s the goal of the board and how are you approaching the role?

A: The board brings together leaders from across U.S. businesses and academia to share insights. The goal is to ensure that our military has access to cutting-edge innovations in technology and data, and that our service members are fully benefiting from the ingenuity of the nation they’re protecting. The basic idea is one that holds true in every field or industry: the more people work together, across the public and private sectors, the faster we can make progress. That’s truer than ever in an increasingly complex and interconnected world in which technology is advancing at unprecedented speed.

Q: You have a bit of wisdom that you brought from Wall Street to City Hall and now to your foundation: In God we trust, everyone else bring data. How did your administration apply that in New York and how are you helping other governments put data to use?

A: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Just to give a few examples of how we used data in New York: We created the city’s first Chief Data Officer position to look at how we could better capture and utilize data across city government. We created a grading system to measure progress at public schools, which helped to bring transparency and accountability to schools and empowered parents to make informed choices about their children’s education. We created the 311 system, which gave us enormous amounts of data about the challenges and concerns of residents and how well we were doing in responding to them.

At our foundation, data is at the center of everything we do. We’ve created a number of programs to help cities better collect and use data and set expectations that policies should be backed up with data, not assumptions, which is too often the case in government, at every level. We also lead a number of efforts to help leaders use data to tackle big challenges, including climate change and air pollution.

Q: Bloomberg Philanthropies has shut down nearly two-thirds of coal-fired power plants in the U.S., half in Europe, and is set to close a quarter of the world’s coal plants by 2025. As a champion of climate technology innovation, what has inspired you most to invest so deeply?

A: Fighting climate change, improving public health, and growing the economy all go hand in hand. The effort to end coal use is a great example. Coal-fired power plants are the single biggest source of global carbon emissions, and they also spew deadly pollution into the air and water that sickens and kills people. Clean energy is increasingly cheaper than coal in much of the world. So replacing coal plants with clean energy as fast as possible, and stopping new coal plants from opening, provides many benefits.

As we’ve seen in the U.S. and Europe, philanthropy has an important role to play, and working with partners, we’ve helped communities stand up for their right to clean air and water. The faster we can make progress, the more lives we can save and the better our chances of avoiding the worst harms of climate change.