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Michael Ovitz

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134
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2024-01-09
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2024-01-09
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  1. “Religions are the most important thing anywhere and anything, whether it's personal, professional, family, servicing your life and your relationships is more important than anything. It's as important as your health because good relationships help you be healthy. But the idea of building a mystique today about a business I think is almost impossible because everything's an open book. I mean, my God, we didn't have a website called the Glass Ceiling when I started CAA. No one would but we took care of our people. We were very concerned about our assistance because they made up the culture of the company too because they were talking to people. Listen, they were talking to all the assistants of all the people we were dealing with. So if one of my assistants was talking to your assistant and your assistant gets a good feeling about it and you happen to say to your assistant something and he or she responds to you, that response is going to have.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I was asked about this class I was teaching last year and someone asked me the same question and they said if you started the company today would you do then I said absolutely not I would never go near that not with social media or any of the tools that are out there I said I'd probably if I started see which I don't think is possible by the way to start it today in this environment I don't think it's doable but I said I probably would take the Warren Buffett approach and pick up the phone and talk to anybody that called me which is a better way to do it because there's no secrets anymore there is no secret there is no mistake everything's when you go to Google and you can find out anything you want about anybody”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And the doors open, and we walk out, and I just couldn't stop laughing. It was about building a mystique because it's the same reason like Mark and Ben built scale. How do you differentiate? There's a hundred and two hundred, a hundred VC firms on Sandhill Road. You start up thirteen years ago and so what? Who cares if you're Mark Andreesen and Ben Hortz? What have you done for me lately? And do you know how to invest? You may know how to operate a business, but do you know how to pick a business? I mean, I thought they did, but who knows? So the reality is you have to have a mystique. You have to have an act. You have to have something to put forward. It just doesn't happen by accident. If you've got a technology, that's great, but we don't all have code that is RIP that no one else has. We don't have that. You have an idea. So we tried that in it, worked until it didn't, and then in retrospect.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And it worked to a point, I will tell you a side story that's kind of funny as I was in an elevator with Paul Newman. We were going up to an editing bay here in San Francisco in Chelsea. It was like twenty flights up in the elevator and Paul and I had just had dinner and it's like 7.30 and in walks some woman, some elderly lady with a shopping bag and she looks at me and she looks at Paul and she looks at Paul a second time. She looks at him and she goes mister McQueen, you were so good in that movie about the fire in the buildings. And Paul looks at her and doesn't skip a beat, he says, you know somewhat. You ought to look at that other guy, Newman. He was really good too.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “want to spin stories. We didn't want to be part of that. And that's what everybody else did. It kind of set us apart, and by doing that it created a mistake around the company, like a cult kind of mistake, and it was defined intentionally, like if there was a screening, one of the mailroom guys or gals would let me in the back door. And that was after we made it, by the way. That was 10 years to get to that point. I didn't walk in places with celebrities, no notoriety. Who is that guy? It was all about getting people to wonder that great line in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid were Newman turns to Redford and the Pinkertons are chasing them and he goes Who are those guys? So the whole idea is to get people to wag their tongues about who are those guys how do they do what they do? Why do they? do what they do”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “But you haven't seen me, but I'm watching. And that's the feeling. But that feeling wasn't allowed to occur in my day because every one of those actors had a kind of distance from the public. So I decided the best thing we could do since we're handling confidential careers and we were going to do the opposite of what our competition did is. We're not going to talk about them. I'm just not going to talk to the press. I don't want anybody taking pictures of me or my kids. I don't want to be in gossip columns. I just want to be behind it and I don't want to be in front of it. And if someone wants to write something, they can say whatever they want, but they're not going to give my cooperation. And we had a rule which in those days you can enforce you couldn't today. No one in the company except for our head legal counsel was allowed to talk to any reporter. We didn't want to give background.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “At the hospital. Yeah, one of the great actors and comedians of our time, John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd. And just the list was endless of who we were lucky enough to be involved with. And they were real movie stars. When you walked into a room in a restaurant with those people, the restaurant just quieted down. You didn't know anything about them, but you saw their work on screen, so you kind of thought you knew them. I was having a drink with a friend Scott Wapner the other day here, and I hadn't seen him in a while and we were laughing because I said, you know, Scott, I live with you every day. So I feel like I've seen you.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “You have to understand that when I was working in the entertainment visit, there was no Instagram and no Facebook and no reels and no TikTok, and celebrities were really celebrities. I mean, I had the privilege of representing Paul Newman and Robert Redford Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Bob De Nero, and Merrill Streep, and Bill Murray, one of the greatest.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It's very defensive. It's a defensive move, and I'm an offensive player. So I had long talks with him, and in the last eight weeks in his inimitable way he's managed to suck me into... I spend most of my time in restructuring his business and recruiting terrific investors and raising more money and exposing him to different people. And I watch him sit with, like I had him sit yesterday with a guy I'm crazy about named Kevin Warshoe. I have giant respect for. He's got what I call entries and teal Crichton style brain, and he works with Stan Druckenmiller, who I have great respect for, and I took Ali to meet him, and I was proud of how Ali held his own gaze against Kevin. That's not an easy task I sometimes struggle. Not only understand what he's saying, but, you know, hold my own.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Patrick, he wrote it. It was every day, an hour and a two hours. And the more I talk, the more I respected his brain power. And I did a deep dive on his business, and it was really good. And it's a secret. It's a miracle he raised the kind of money he did because he had nobody vouching for him. He had nobody saying, hey, this guy's really good. No third party. And if he did, it wasn't at the right level of introduction. I started working with him about eight weeks ago, and the more I work with them, the more I like what I'm doing. To me, building is the most fun. Building CAA was so much more fun than getting to the end result because once you're at the end result, you kind of feel like every day you're wieterp and you walk into town and someone's going to shoot you in the back.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “It's the engines, not 12. So it's not like a frog. It's like five 12 cylinder engines and has got endless energy and I saw a lot of things in him that I had when I was his age as far as drive and desire and not wanting to move back to the San Fernando Valley where I was raised and I talked to him every single day through the summer he absolutely ruined my summer”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “We both know them and I saw something very special in this guy in ten minutes. It didn't take me long. But on the other side it was very clear to me that he'd built a really interesting business and no one knew who he was. And he was having trouble getting in certain doors and he hadn't little credibility even though he's putting up 12.5% returns for 10 years and his deal investing analytical capability was off the charts.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So a very close friend of mine lives here in New York, named Eric Lane was at lunch with me last Monday he's the president of Tiger, used to be a goldman, fabulous guy. At lunch with me said he met some young guy who is incredibly smart and has a fund and he gave him a little bit of money and he thought I should meet him because I love meeting young people. I mean for me I have no interest in spending time with anyone my age I don't want to be around anybody in my chronological age or within ten years. And I said, great. He said he's in his early 30s and he's really smart.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “To make this work, and it's going to help the country, and he's getting support from the government, which he should. He's raised a lot of money. He's hired some of the greatest mines in the country. He's basically trying to build ships in this country. And I met with him. And I said, James, this time you've gone off the reservation. I mean, do you know how hard that is? And I listened to him and he convinced me in about 30 minutes why this mission was important, why I had to invest, why it was going to work. And his commitment to was second to non-Idiversity. And it's about him. He's going to make it work.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Is a good point for me. It doesn't always mean it's perfect, but it's a very good point. He had a business that I thought was interesting, but I don't invest in hardware businesses. There are too many things that can go wrong with him. And sure enough, he did this business as a great product. And of course, it failed. He's got a business now that is so amazing and so smart and so important to the country. It's like he's on a mission. He's like on a mission from above”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And I met him. He was 20, God, I think. Bearling 20, and he looked like he was 15. And he was 20 till he opened his mouth and the stuff that came out of it blew me away and I invested in his first business. He was a teal fellow, which to me was a very good. I take all of the Points like Sura to weigh the talent in a teal fellow is he?”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “than I am on thinking I invest in people. If they've got a decent idea, and I feel the founder is talented and dedicated and believes in his or her idea, I will invest in them. And I will invest if I don't like the idea sometimes. And many times I've done that and the company's failed. But the second idea has been amazing and I've made my money back. But it's all about the people. There's a young man that I'm very fond of in San Francisco named James Proud.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And he said, that's exactly what we do for a living. And I said, wow, I never looked at it that way. He was 100% right. That night I canceled everything. I had the next thing. The next day I flew to San Francisco and rented an apartment. And I moved up there three days a week and started and I was doing the exact same thing that I did before exactly as predicted. And meeting with founders was no different than meeting with someone who wanted to be an actor, a director, or a writer. And you had certain other criteria that were added to my outline of what I felt was important to judge talent and to see if it was someone I wanted to work with or invest in. My investing is a bit different than a lot of other people's. I'm probably less detailed on diligence.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “He says, Well, this is an intervention. I thought he was kidding. He was not kidding. He said, you are running around New York and we all think that you're wasting your time. And he was brutally direct about it as only people in the digital space can be. And he said, You have to stop doing what you're doing, which is generally consulting for a lot of different businesses. I was out of the agency business, and you have to move to San Francisco and you got to get into the investment area. And I said, I don't know what you guys know about investing. And they both said it's very simple. You put talent together with money and got them distribution.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “First of all, it's all the same, which is odd, but it's the same, and it's different, if that makes any sense to you. Okay, it's different in certain categories, but it's the same underlying fundamental principles. I was once asked when I transitioned into full-time being up in the valley, which was thanks to two guys, Mark Andreesen and Herb Allen and Laura Andreessen, who stage an intervention with me in New York City on the upper east side twenty years ago. Well, basically they invited me to dinner at six thirty, which is a half hour late for Herb'cause he likes to eat dinner at late lunch hour. He learned that from his father who was one of my mentors, Herb II, who I learned the investment banking business from, and Herb III and Mark and Laura met me for dinner I had no idea what I was going for and sat down and Mark just looks”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “watching something he did the other night with Quentin Tarantino and I've seen it ten times and there's certain scenes in there that he does that just he and Sam do these scenes together they're just absolutely brilliant and we blew it”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “to help you pick talent. It's a fantastic tool because if somebody doesn't say something that has some correlation to the way he speaks about movies, they're missing an element that they need to have greatness. Now the ratio of right to wrong is good, but it's not flawless. You miss people sometimes. I remember early on we made a mistake. We missed John Travolta when we were kids. I was twenty seven or eight he was doing like welcome back Cotter and he played this character and we all thought he had one dimension. We were just wrong we were just dead wrong we made a mistake and you got own up to it I admit that all the time he's brilliant he's a great actor he's played a zillion characters”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “It's the same thing with meeting with talent. And in the world I come from, you get about ten minutes to make a decision if you have time to keep going. Because if it's not something that you think is going to work, you got to stop it because time's your enemy in anything you do, in anything, even recreation times your enemy. And you can't keep going. So I taught myself and all of the people we work with taught themselves to kind of look at a lot of nonverbal cues and listen carefully to what somebody says and you get a sense and then compare that in your cognitive scale of things other people you've talked to so meet with a director and you want to have an amazing conversation about film talk to Martin Scorsese if you want to use Martin Scorsese's brilliance.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “It was someone you get certain cues that are both social and intellectual that give you a frame of reference about drive, about emotion, about deportment, about looking at you when you talk to them, about different tiny, it kind of reminds me of a Sarah painting, the Sarah the Pointalist. If you look at a two inch square of a Sarah picture, you see a bunch of points and dots. You look at a four inch square, more points and dots, eight inch square, more points and dots, sixteen inch square. Maybe you see a little bit of a figure. thirty two inch square? Ah, there's two figures sitting over there, and then as it gets bigger, the picture appears, and it pierces your eyes and the sensory perception puts all those dots together into something that's quite extraordinary. It was one of my favorites.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Because you're going to build what I call frame of reference on what's good and what's bad. Because every art show has in it by any artist. I don't care who they are. They've got maybe twelve to fifteen pictures they've worked on for the last year, and probably two of them are masterpieces, five or six or seven of them are somewhere between the best and average, and two of them should have never gone in the show. They should have been edited out of the show. And that's how you learn taste and what works and what doesn't. And it's not dissimilar with human beings. I don't think I could have done this perfectly at the beginning of my career, but I was lucky enough to start in the entertainment business when I was seventeen, and I met a lot of people. And the more people you meet, the easier it is.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “That's a good question. It's very difficult to describe it any other way than it's very much like collecting art in a strange way. Everyone asked me how do I start collecting art on mentoring three young people in San Francisco right now that want to start art collection. So I A sent them a bibliography of books, a list of the top galleries and fifty artists that are on the contemporary that they should look at their work. And they said, what are we doing with all this? And I said, You're looking at pictures. Why are we looking at pictures? Because if the more you look at and you can never look at enough, your brain will automatically automatically cognitively put a weight of zero to ten on anything you look at. And you're going to remember the zeros and the tens and forget the rest, and that's all you need.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “And people, they would look at it and they would just register and then they'd say something to somebody or the image was in their head. It was the logo on a red background. So that's what we did.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Red magazines sitting amongst time and people in Newsweek and fortune and business week, there's a CA cover. With a script”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And I shall tell you why it's a primary color. It is a reactive color. If you want to have fun sometime when you have nothing to do, Google the science of color, it's absolutely mesmerizing to read about the science of color and what colors stimulate subconsciously in your brain. And I said, but here's what it is. It's only going to stimulate one thing. People are going to see it. Okay, they said. And I said, here's what we're going to do. We printed a thousand old scripts of movies that had already been made and TV shows that already made. We put them in script covers. And I had mailroom guys go drop them off at every doctor and dentist office in Beverly Hills and Westwood on the coffee table. He just opened the door and dropped it and left. And all these people that were going to their doctor or their dentist sitting amongst Time magazine, these were the times when people.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I chose a primary color for script cover red, and someone said, What are you doing that for it so not other people had like mostly white, you know?”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “manipulative frankly we knew that the screen curtain went down at seven thirty people were seated from seven to seven fifteen, none reserved seating, twelve hundred people in the auditorium, and we would go in groups of ten and walk down the aisle together and say hello to people and no one thought much of it until subconsciously there was a buzz. Oh CA's here and we did things that seemed ridiculously simple and thoughtless frankly but they were manipulative and create an image for in a business that's all image. We designed script covers and I, as you know, love art. You've been to my house and I'm”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “I always like to say that we were a blend of American team sports, Asian philosophy, and just plain old outworking everybody else. And then I kind of put a dash of Alexander Dumas' three musketeers on top of it all for one and one for all sounds trite, sounds stupid, but in nineteen seventy four it worked because we did everything as a group, so when we started, five of us that started the place would attend every meeting and go to every event. Then there were ten of us, then fifteen, then twenty, then thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, and like one screening occurred in the entertainment business, which is how movies and television shows were exposed to the community always ahead of release dates.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “You'd look stupid. And then also, who badmouthed somebody at somebody who doesn't believe in themselves and is really insecure? There's no positive gain to the equation in bad mouthing somebody. And I just want to hear.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “To me it made no sense because I worked with a guy when I was twenty two years old when I was an agent of William Morris, a manager, a very famous guy had a huge client list, and I'd sit on the phone with him and all he would do was badmouth everyone around him, including his partner. It was kind of a subtle badmouth thing, you know, and I realized early on it wasn't attractive, and it also made me think he was really insecure because I said to myself, why is he doing this to his own partner? He should be telling me his partner is the greatest thing since the wheel and get me to deal with the guy so he doesn't have to take my calls and his attitude was he was putting everybody down so we used to say to everyone we worked with you don't have any gain of momentum in bad mouthing somebody you kind of look weak we didn't let anybody badmouth”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “It takes momentum and heat and diligence and follow-up, follow-up is critical. You can't in any business, even if you're building chips, if you don't have follow-up, you're not going to build a business. If you don't touch base with someone after you've had a first contact, I was telling Ollie at lunch the other day meeting someone isn't enough. The first meeting is easy. Anyone can get a first meeting. It's the fifth meeting and how you're perceived that's critical. And if there's no consistency and follow up, there's no building the business. And I don't care what business you're in. You've got to have follow-up.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “And you're brilliant, but you can only do two things a year, maybe, and probably knowing you you're going to do one thing every three years, there's plenty to go around, but it'd be nice if you guys all work together and all of a sudden you see heat with Pacino and De Nero and Michael Mann all three clients of the agency may have been doable without that, but probably a lot easier and a lot less friction under the same roof. So our thesis was everybody should be with us, which really irritated people because that's like unholy. But our attitude is being the clubhouse and partake in the wonderful information. Material that comes in for everybody and if you've got everybody you get everything, which sounds pretty simple and by the way it is, but it was like no one takes.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “So when we sign Dustin a couple years in I asked him to help us get De Nero and Picino and you know he kind of looked at me. I said wouldn't you rather know what they're doing rather than not and they should know what you're doing? You're only an actor who can do”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Outgoing and incoming that's both, and creating this momentum is not stoppable, and it builds on itself to the hundredth power. So if you had two hundred agents, it builds to the two hundredth power. And one can't compete with that. It's not an accident that we ended up with the best. Clientless or the most film packages are most musical tours or most books on the New York Times bestseller list each week. It fed on itself. And you talked about competition internally. We had a very simple thesis, which was if you have a competitive actor that you are worried about, so if you're Dustin Hoffman Al Pacino and Bob De Nero, you traditionally have wanted separate agents.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “You have to realize what that did. You had 150 agents in all different fields at 1.200 going out, covering the community between New York and LA in all creative areas, everything. Taking that information, reporting it back into a meeting every single day, sharing it unfiltered, no cards held close to the vest, and then doing two to three hundred calls a day”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “And the fear of failing and a desire to make it for the right reasons, and it can't just be financial, by the way. You've got to want to do something with your gains that's socially important. That's a very important item for me. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. I've been blessed with meeting really great founders and working with some of the brightest young people in our country. I think that if you don't want to put the time and effort in and you don't have a belief, if you don't believe in your idea, don't start a business. And if you can't do momentum, I did two hundred fifty close day, but I wasn't the only one. We all did. The whole business did. The company, it wouldn't have worked with just me. And that's a critical distinction to make. We had a partnership and we had 150 agents.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “But basically, if you don't have energy and you don't want to make a time commitment and you want to have Kind of an easier life you shouldn't try to start a business. I don't know a founder that I've worked with anywhere. They isn't driven like the snow, and if you can't keep that pace up for twenty years, and I mean that, there's no business I've ever seen that can get up and running in under seven to ten years. I don't know why it's that number, but if you look around and start seeing when businesses hit critical mass, it's seven to ten years, and if you don't have the energy and the desire and that burning sensation in your gut.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “signed a lot of clients because a couple of the agents the more senior agents who had these radio carphons used to give up way too much information to their assistants or compatriots on an open line and we would just jot it down. Which was like to me, it was like crazy. We had one guy who had a phenomenal client less than I was twenty. Eight or twenty nine and this guy I discovered every morning drove forty five minutes to his office. And every morning he'd get on the phone with his assistant and one of his junior agents, and he would go through problem areas. And I just sat in my car and took notes. And started calling his clients. It was unbelievable. He gave me a roadmap.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I think you just hit on all the keywords. I mean, if someone wants to build a business to me, and I only speak for myself, everybody has their own opinion, but foundationally, momentum is critical. Building a knowledge bank is critical, surrounding yourself with people as you recruit that can take your job is critical. Not being afraid is critical, being on what I call a positive role is critical, no negativity. And momentum is built by action not in action. And that action one creates themselves. So we didn't have internet when we started, so we didn't have email or text. A big thing for us in the early days was car phones, which were radio based, by the way. They weren't digitally based. You were on an open radio channel. As a matter of fact, it's one of the ways.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “He's sitting there in madras shorts and a Hawaiian shirt neither of which matched, and he looked at me and he said, I'm not even going to say it.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Small thing, but a big thing speaks statement. And we tried to take as much positional power advantage as we could out of nonconsequential items, basically, and it worked. When you walk in a room and you're dressed properly and the people you're negotiating with are sitting there in jeans and a t-shirt or a polo shirt, you kind of just feel better about yourself in those days. I can't say that now because I got thrown out of the valley for wearing a blue suit to my first Andreess and Horwitz board meeting where everyone there, a friend of mine named Mike Volpi, looked at me and said, are you kidding? He said, What are you, what are you nuts? There was a guy in the room, one of the portmerences, had shorts, he had mattress shorts on his name was Mike Homer, great guy, a legend in his day.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “T shirt. Is that a suit on the last three days? And we're in Midtown. And I remember coming here for business in the mid-town. Everyone had a suit on, every woman had a very smart outfit on, and good God I was the only Yan Milosina coat and tie. As a matter of fact, the guy I was having lunch with berated me for ten minutes. So it's a very different world today, but in those days I wanted our people to have positional power and I look for every edge so we did multiple things. One, we had a ten page bibliography of what we felt they needed to read on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis because knowledge is power. We had a dress code that we never mentioned, just led by example we had hours which we never mentioned were led by example. The partner's cars were the first in the morning and the last to leave. We had a thesis that you never allow anyone to buy you a meal or let you ride on their private plane without them. You can't be bought”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “into a room, a man walks in a room, he's got one act. He is what he is. There's like no changing that a woman walks in a room and she can be tough, she can be sympathetic, she can be a mother, she can be aggressive, she could get upset. She's got a toolkit that's insane, and we liked having women around, but we led by example, so all of us wore suits, and the women and men dressed every day. And I was talking to someone about this today because we're here in New York and I was in a suit yesterday for a meeting I had with Allie and I told him to wear a suit, which was kind of shocking to him.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Talks like a CTO, walks like a CTO is the CTO of a company moving up a mile a minute, and when he opens his mouth, really smart stuff comes out. So that's positional power yet, it's best because when he walks in the room, he already knows his luggage has been checked in ahead of him. And we used to use that at the agency in non tangible ways. So for example, this is going to sound today's world very stupid, but when we started in 74, we insisted that everyone wear a suit and all the women we had a lot of women executives, by the way, because in those days we felt probably sixty percent of our staff were women, and we always felt that women actually had an edge against men being better agents.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Positional power is kind of a loose term I use to describe someone like Nathan Mirvold. He's a perfect example. He walks in a room and there's many dynamics to positional power. One is you really have to have some brain power or it's a non-starter. I mean, you can't be stupid and have positional power. I guess someone once argued with me that if you were a banana country dictator you might be able to do that. You killed enough people. You might get away with it, but it's not the positional power I'm referencing. So Nathan walks in. Looks like a”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “That would have worked. But who the heck knew that those options were going to explode like they did? But today I'm involved with two young guys that have a company called Human Capital. And they started a business basically representing engineers for free. And they send those engineers to companies to get them jobs. But what they've done that is brilliant as they track all the engineers and they have recruiters at the top schools in the country and they have the biggest database on engineers that are starting of anybody that I know. I think the two guys are brilliant. They've got a business that no one else has, so they're now investors, but they get an inside look from the creators”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source