Glen Wolyner was one of the early salespeople hired by Bloomberg LP.

It was 1986. After college, Glen spent three years selling bonds at Citibank. He didn’t love the job and while on vacation in Hawaii sent his boss an Aloha postcard saying he quit.

When he got back, a recruiter said there was a firm started by a hot shot former trader from Salomon Brothers named Mike Bloomberg that he should meet.

Glen met with some of the firm’s executives. He remained lukewarm.

One Sunday, while Glen was at home in Brooklyn, the phone rang. It was Mike Bloomberg.

“It’s Bloomberg, I’m sending a car for you.”

The car picked him up in Cobble Hill and whisked him to an office on Madison Avenue. Mike was there with his two young daughters who were playing on the floor.

Glen said they spent the entire day chatting about random topics. Toward the end, Mike asked him to explain what he did every day at Citibank.

Glen said he used an HP 12C calculator to price “strips,” securities created by stripping out interest payments from government bonds. Glen said he was so proficient that it only took him an hour to run the numbers.

Mike pivoted in his chair and started typing on a Bloomberg terminal. He hit a couple keys and calculated the strip prices for a Treasury bond in seconds.

That moment captured the quantum leap in technology from handheld calculators to terminal applications that explains how Bloomberg became Bloomberg.

“I decided then and there to take the job,” Glen said.

He asked when he should start. Mike told him to come in the next day.

Glen arrived at 7 a.m. on Monday only to realize it was President’s Day. The only other person in the office that day was Mike.

The Bloomberg terminal has become such a part of the financial firmament that it’s hard to visualize the company as a startup or remember there was a time Mike worked weekends to recruit sales reps.

Glen’s story captures the freewheeling feel of that era, when you could send a car to pick up someone without asking and expect the person to show up for work before doing any paperwork. That wouldn’t happen these days.

It also shows traits I recognized having worked for Mike’s company for three decades.

Mike was in a hurry to make decisions on projects and people (“I’m sending a car”), but also willing to invest the time to get them right (spending a day with a candidate).

Glen left Bloomberg in 1999 and is now the President of Northstar Risk, a provider of complex customized analytics for hedge funds.

While Bloomberg pioneered calculators for government bonds, Northstar Risk is building a system to assess risks on bespoke trades with multiple factors.

Four decades have taken the industry from a startup like Bloomberg to one like Northstar Risk.

It underscores how computing power has changed the financial world.

But it is also a reminder not to underestimate the potential for change when someone new figures out how to build something that does in seconds what currently take hours.

(Part of a series of management lessons learned from three decades at Bloomberg)