Roy Bahat became head of media business Bloomberg’s $75m corporate venturing unit in 2013 and is a self-professed man obsessed.
His first obsession is as a husband and father of two but after that it is being “obessed with how we make work – the thing we do with more waking hours than any other – better”.
He said: “In 2013, Bloomberg gave me the opportunity to turn my obsession into my job when we created Bloomberg Beta. I believe the fastest way to make change is to build extraordinary technology companies, and, these days, machine intelligence companies in particular [after his partner Shivon Zilis did a study of 2,500 such startups in 2014 and updated it this year].
“There was a time when tech was the outsider, the underdog. Now it is the industry, and it is time to act like it, which means taking responsibility for the things [that we are introducing into the world]. Take self-driving cars. One of the top professions for US men is truck driver. I think the top job across both genders is cashier [another role being disrupted by technology].”
While many venture investors are only beginning to realise the importance of branding and positioning to entrepreneurs to try and tap the best dealflow, Bahat has gone further than most in optimising his own work.
As Bloomberg Beta says on its Github page: “Founders are our customers.” With a team in New York City, incuding GCV Rising Star Karin Klein, and San Francisco, where Bahat is based, completing at least a deal per month, it seems the customers like what they are hearing.
In an interview with TechCrunch in February, Bahat said: “We open sourced the model for our fund and it has all been updated continuously over the years on GitHub. We [separately] realised that as a small fund focused on the early-stage market that you cannot see all the deals in your space, even in a narrow domain.
“There are people we love working with, so we started backing them through a program that we call our Open Scouts Program. We run it through AngelList and instead of making soft commitments, as many do on the platform, we have committed to giving these three angels – Max Simkoff, Shruti Gandhi, and Parker Thompson – a certain amount to invest behind every deal they fund.”
Bahat was founder and chairman of gaming console company Ouya, which exited last year in a trade sale to Razer. He was previously president of IGN Entertainment and a vice-president at media group News Corporation. He was also director of strategy for NYC2012, the bid by New York to run the Olympic games. He worked as a senior policy director at the office of the mayor in New York between February 2002 and November 2003, when Bloomberg’s founder Michael Bloomberg began office as mayor. He was previously an associate at consulting firm McKinsey & Co. He has an MPhil in economics from Oxford University and read social studies at Harvard University.
Editor update:
The partner who did the Machine Intelligence landscape is Shivon Zilis, not Zhivon Zilis. Additionally, Roy was at City hall until Nov. 2003, instead of 2013 as originally written.