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Michael Ovitz

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2024-01-09

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2024-01-09

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1. “Would I fail to mention in answering your question and I apologize is we looked from the nineties very carefully at being agents for engineers. That was the first thing we did. And we couldn't figure out a financial business model because you'd get them a job and then they'd have like a long contract and commissioning their salary didn't sound appetizing at the time for the amount of work were we made a mistake is frankly commissioning their options. Right.”

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

2. “And Andy did a ninety second two minute animated about how it starts from the raw material all the way to when it's implanted in the computer and then what it does when it's inside and we ran that as a loop continuous and we tried to show our clients what the future was going to look like even though we really weren't sure. But between that and then meeting Andreessen and working on Ben and Mark's board and reading the white paper and meeting guys like Teal and Reed Hoffman and just some of the smartest people. It bookended the other smart set of people I met creatively.”

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

3. “We did the Intel CA Media Lab in ninety three, and we took a room in our building and turned it into every piece of hardware that was transitioning to software and over the air transmissions. And the CA building had like three giant satellite domes on it. And we were on the corner of Wilshire and Santa Mac, and people thought like it looked like a spaceship in Andesent part of the deal was we'd have two CA staff there and two Intel experts on chips and how the chips worked in the computers and Andy to his credit at our suggestion made a animated short of how a chip works because none of us frankly understood it. You could have explained it to me till you were blue in the face. Patrick and I wouldn't have understood what you were talking about.”

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

4. “Future. I got to just give you this message. And it was interesting the guys that embraced it and the guys that didn't. And some guys just went down with a ship. They just wouldn't let go. And other guys dug into it really quick. You look at someone like Lucian Grange who's been brilliant at navigating the digital of it all. And then you look at other guys whose names I don't want to mention who just sat on their hands and decided to go old school. Listen, a lot of studios that we worked with we would advise them that in our travels in the valley and very few people from LA went up north and we were going up there a lot. We did a deal I met Andy Grove, which was one of the highlights of my career as an agent and as you know was one of the founders of Intel.”

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

5. “It was one of those epiphany moments. I would have never thought of that, and here's a guy who's telling me that this is going to happen and he's got what I call positional power, which is he has knowledge, and he's in this field, and he's got an idea that I better pay attention to. I was a consultant at the time for multiple record companies. I was a consultant for Warner Records. I was a consultant for RCA, and I was a consultant for Birdlesmon and for Sony. I went and told my story that Nathan told me to all the guys that were friends that were running these businesses. And it was interesting the responses went from you're insane to it's good, but no one will ever replace ultimately, you know, packaged hardware hard goods. And I said, look, I don't know, but I feel an obligation.”

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

6. “We're going to cross, and it was a couple months later that I met a guy who I'm crazy about to this day named Nathan Mirvold, who was the number three guy, the CTO of Microsoft, who looked at me one day and we were standing in a room and there was a stereo speaker in the room and a stereo set up and he said Michael I just want to warn you about something and this is out of the blue and I said what's that Nathan? He said see that stereo speaker I said yeah he said you know that music that comes out of that little tape that's in the cassette player I said yeah he said you're not going to need that at some point in time I said so where's the music gonna come from and he pointed to the sky”

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

7. “Over the years starting when I in the early nineties when I first travelled to the valley ninety three I called Bill Gates cold and I asked to see him he was fantastic and he invited me to dinner up at Microsoft and I went up flew up. We had four hours with he and Steve Balmer at a sushi bar talking about a future that none of us really had our arms around, but we both decided that we both did things at some place somehow.”

   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 just can't do it. You could probably do it in the slower moving businesses like movies, not in television or music where the businesses move. They turn on a dime. But you could probably do that in the book business and in the movie business. They move very slow.”

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

9. “We'll call you back, which was anathetical to how I was trained in the business which is always have an answer. When I was a young agent, the guy I worked for always had an answer and I used to listen in on his calls and half the time he was filled with”

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

10. “Other companies were still sleeping, and by nine thirty ten everyone had every piece of information that everyone else had, which was great because we'd then go out and call everybody else's clients whose meetings were starting at nine thirty, and by eleven thirty when they finish their clients had all the information from us, which accelerated our growth curve, which was a foundation of our business which was constant momentum. So to me, scale is information, information is knowledge, knowledge is power, and it gives you a facility to move quickly and efficiently and with authority because it made no sense to be able to say to someone a made up answer. Matter of fact, we had a rule that if you don't have an answer, you say to the client or to the person you're talking to, I do not have an answer to that.”

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

11. “who are solo practitioners who are very good at it, but I said to him Scale gives you information and knowledge is power. And if you've got multiple people that communicate by the way, and that's one thing at CA that no one could beat us on, everybody knew everything about everything because there was no politics, no one held anything back. If you positioned your associates, you shouldn't be at the company. You could position anyone you wanted except your associates and your clients. And you did your fighting outside the firm not inside. But if you have scale, the amount of information that we got in the fifth year versus the first year was geometric. It was to a hundredth power because you had all these men and women sitting around a table. They would share their previous day at eight o'clock in the morning.”

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

12. “They wanted to scale because they wanted to be different. They wanted to provide full services to the community of creators. And Josh wanted to provide service, but on a more one-on-one basis. So you could go to both places for financing, and you'd get fabulous advice, but from one place you'd get more singular person advice, and from another place you'd get teams of people that would be specialists in every area. But to answer your question on the scale, I just had this discussion with someone you and I know well together about why scales important versus not important this person took the position in a meeting with me that scale is not necessary in the investing world, and he had some good points, and there surely are a lot of investors.”

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

13. “I'm a firm believer that scale is critical and I have a lot of friends that disagree with me and there's no right or wrong answer. There's no right or wrong answer. You look at two successful companies in the investment world, they were both of which I worked with and are phenomenal and run by really brilliant guys. If you look at Josh Kushner you've had on this podcast and you look at Mark Andreessen and Ben Horwitz, they've both been crazy successful and one and I've worked with both sides. One didn't want to scale big at the beginning which was Josh and he runs a very large AUM with a very small lean staff and Mark and Ben wanted to build an institutional scale which differentiated them from every other VC. As a matter of fact the minute they opened their door”

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

14. “Luckily for me, probably more than we have time for. I may have been the luckiest person to work in the film business and television and books and music because I caught the tail end of the golden years in those businesses.”

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

15. “So, you're going to have to do Schindler's list. He says, okay. And he said, is there anything else? I said, well, Schindler's list is going to have to be shot in black and white. And I thought he was going to come through the phone because if you did it in those days, there were video cassettes. You couldn't sell a video cassette in black and white. There was no audience for it. But Sid said okay and he said, okay, what's the bad news? I said, we own it and you don't He said okay let's do a deal and we did a deal in twenty four hours”

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

16. “Man who ran Universal got him Sid Scheinberg, who worked, ran Lou Wasserman's business, and he was very close to Stephen'cause he gave Stephen a start in the business with a universal television movie called Duel, and they were very good friends, and I said, Sid, I've got good news and bad news for you. He said, what's the good news? And I said, the good news is we've got a Michael Crichton book, Stephen Spielberg's going to direct it. It's ready to go. We've got a screenplay. We've got a budget, and we'd like to offer it to you first. You got a day to think about it. Frankly, I don't think there's much to think about, but I'm not running your company. And we want a very unique deal on this where we're partners with the studio. And we also are going to want to add Schindler's list to the deal.”

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

17. “It was a great start. We went out and got a budget done by Frank Marshall and Kathy Kennedy. Frank was my college roommate and he was a great producer and Kathy ran Stevens Company and got a budget and Stephen was probably the only director that could have actually pulled this off because technology at that time wasn't our friend to make dinosaurs look so real. And we got a budget. We hired a writer. Michael took a stab with the writer in a script. We started to get a script. We knew getting financing would be a negative problem, not a positive one. Negative in that there was seven to ten financial submissions to make, but only one would get it. So you're going to have a lot of people upset because it's that good. So we made a decision to go to one place, one place only, and give them a take it or leave it in twenty four hours. So we went to Universal and I called them.”

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

18. “About 730 my phone rings. Stephen said, I'm in. I mean, he didn't say any said I'm in. It was odd because we had no studio. We didn't have a screenplay. We didn't have a cast. We didn't have money. We had a book. And Steven Spielberg committed to it.”

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

19. “And Stephen, the Steven stories equally as interesting. Stephen's one of the greatest directors in the history of the cinema. And I call him that morning. I guess I called him around 11, 12 o'clock at home. And I said, I read something last night that just blew me away. And he said, who is it? And what is it? I said, it's from Michael Crichton. I'm not going to tell you what it's about. I need you to read this tonight. You're the first and only person that I'm giving this to. I said, you don't have to tell me Kate Capsho, who's fantastic, who's his wife. I actually knew her before Stephen did. She was an actress in the community and really well thought of. And I said, I'll call her. So I called Kate and I said, I need permission for Stephen to read tonight instead of be with the kids. And she was great. She said, okay, sent the book over and next morning.”

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

20. “Crazy thing occurred that just pulled you out of your seat, and it was like a graft that went flat and then spiked and then came down to flat. It was called pacing. And it's something that stayed with me for my whole career. Michael was an expert at the build, and then it just keeps going. And he teases you in Jurassic Park when you hear the T Rex in the cage.”

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

21. “Yeah, there's certain things where they're intended to unfold slowly. Originally when I started in the business in the sixties European films were known to have the camera linger on characters and scenes much longer and they had a different pace. I think they closed the distance with American films over the years French films still did a lot of that. They're much more introspective, I think that I think if you watch something like Terms of Endearment, for example, it's brilliantly weaved together, but it's not a fast movie. I think a lot of it depends on the subject matter. I had a client named Dick Donner, who was a brilliant directed Superman and the original Omen, and he was a fantastic man. And he used to say to me, when you're reading something, just think there's a clock in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. So like on Omen, every fifteen minutes.”

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

22. “When you think about it, but you don't realize it. So I said, Michael, I know what you're doing in the first 10 pages. I want to see the whole thing and I want to see it in the next four months. I said, you can do this. And he went seven days, seven nights. And four months later called me up, said I want you to come get the book, and I dropped by his house. I picked up a galley. I went to the office, I went home and read it, and spent all night reading it, and I couldn't stop turning the pages, and I call them at seven o'clock in the morning and I just said, you know, you're just so full of it.”

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

23. “Interesting. I never thought about that way, but it's so true. Yeah, he's kind of teaching her how to be a pal. Andromina Strain.”

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

24. “I said like right now, and he left the hotel, and lo and behold he calls me back about a week later he says I have ten pages and I said great, let's just finish the book Let's just finish the book and I knew to read the ten pages was irrelevant because every Crichton idea is an education for the first quarter of the story like in Jurassic Park the first”

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

25. “Not stars, just three average people, two young people and a middle thirties person, and they get lost in an amusement park off the coast of South America. And I go, yeah, tell me more, and he said, And in that amusement park, some scientist has bred prehistoric animals. And I looked at him and I said You can't. I said, Are you sick? Are you out of your mind? I said My son loves dinosaurs, my young son, plays with toys that are dinosaurs all the time. I love dinosaurs and my dad loves dinosaurs. You just hit the entire demographic. And I said, you got to go write this.”

    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 every breakfast has to be an hour, every lunch has to be two hours and every dinner has to be three hours, and every meeting has to be an hour. That's nonsense. They should go as long as they take to get something done or accomplished, because in essence, that's what we're doing. But with him, it was different I could sit and yak all day. And finally, I said to him, I said, you have to write. You just have to do something. Let's take a rejected storyline that you had in the past. And he had pitched me a story that he had in the past which was really interesting. It had to do with volcanoes, which he did tons of research on everything. If you watch some of his films, you're always educated at the beginning. Think that you become an expert in twenty minutes on something, but you really aren't, but he's prepping you. And he said, well, I had one idea, but I think I'm not sure about it. And I said, what's that? He said, well, what if you had three characters?”

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

27. “Also, a kind of lonely life, you don't have anyone to interact with. And finally, I said, let's go to breakfast one morning. I want to get you out early and let's see if we can do. And we went to breakfast at the Bel Air Hotel that we met at like eight o'clock in the morning and we just sat and talked for about an hour. And by the way, I didn't do that a lot because I didn't have time. Time was my enemy. And if I spent forty-five minutes at breakfast, that would be.”

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

28. “walking around telling people that he was buried working on an original. The word original could mean book, screamblay. It was amorphous by design. We didn't want anyone to think that he had writer's block or he couldn't work, and so we literally would tell the community on incoming requests for his work that he was working on his own thing and on outgoing. We just talk about him like he was unavailable. But the reality was he was doing nothing but eating, sleeping, and sitting around and watching TV. And he just couldn't find anything that was interesting and he was a little down in the dumps, frankly. You know, you go up and down as a creative person.”

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

29. “You know, it's a very, very difficult thing to address, and I'll tell you why. Michael said that as advice to other people. The one thing about Michael is he was often in his own head and didn't take his own advice. So there was a period of time where I couldn't get him to write a word for two years. It was beyond writer's book. He just didn't have anything that was interesting to him. And I used to go see him and stop by he lived near me in West LA and I'd stop by him, you know, like every other day to see him and for ten minutes and I couldn't get him. I just couldn't push him over the hill. The agents were basically.”

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

30. “You're going to actually end up with 10 different movies. The stories will be the same, but each director is going to pick their own cast, each director is going to pick their own cinematographer, each director is going to pick their own production designer, each director is going to pick the person that does the music. And everyone's different. So the films are going to have some different looks, some different feel, different pacing. The editors are all different. Michael understood that really well.”

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

31. “He could swivel from creative topics which are very difficult because creativity is so misunderstood. There's so many different kinds of creativity, but there's one common denominator amongst it all, which is somebody has an idea and they try to verbalize it or write it down. And then somebody, if the creator doesn't have the money, move it forward, they have to present it to somebody so somebody that's listening to it has to be able to hear the song in their head or see the story in their head or run a movie in their head that parallels the creative idea and a kind of interesting fact to consider is that if you take a screenplay and you give it the ten different directors”

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

32. “and he made it simple I would go to him with issues because we were not just business partners we were friends I mean I'll never forget I went to him once along the lines of the quote that you mentioned and his attitude was if you can't control it don't worry about it and he always had these short little sayings and one time I went to him I said you know I'm very concerned that this deal I've been working on for nine months is cratering and it was really upsetting to make us I'd put so much time and energy and I had so many company people involved in it as a team and he looked at me and he said well there's always another racetrack so his attitude was look again you can't control it there's nothing you can do about it talking to him was a treat he always had interesting insights”

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

33. “But isn't that amazing that he wrote short stories, he wrote novels, he wrote screenplays, and he wrote art critique which is really hard to do, particularly if you write it so people can actually understand it, because most art criticism is almost incomprehensible. Arcane. It's just difficult to understand.”

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

34. “Love this idea. Michael was one of the most important people that ever entered my life. His advice was always short and poignant. He loved to be a contrarian on everything. We had lunch once a week for thirty years and lunch or dinner and would talk about art. I don't know if you know this, but he wrote the definitive catalog resonance on Jasper John's for south. Wow, no, I didn't know that. Yeah. Somehow I'm not surprised.”

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