YouSaid · the spoken record

Strauss Zelnick

lines on the record: 85
first: 2023-10-10
most recent: 2023-10-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Of empathy for others. I think I was more inclined to feel empathy for other people. I think you could go in the other direction if you're like, hey, I got the short end of the stick, so screw you. But that was not my way, I thought. Challenging things occur in people's lives. Most people have tough things in their life. At some point, almost everyone. So I think it brought me to a place of great ambition and also turned me in the direction of empathy, but it took me a while to get there. The ambition and perfectionism loomed large for probably the first 35 years of my life. And then with some measure of success because things came relatively early to me and a lot of personal work, I reached a point of bringing out probably some of my finer qualities and maybe mitigating some of the qualities that were driven by this childhood baggage in a negative way.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think great loss when you're little, and I have multiple childhood losses all by the age of ten lead to one of two things typically. One is a sense of victimization and that can really lead to pretty failed life or a sense that I'm going to work really hard to overcome this or really hard so this doesn't happen again or really hard so I'm not at risk. And I think that's where it took me, which is I was already a bit of a perfectionist and I think that that put a fine point on being a perfectionist, which was challenging for me personally, but frankly professionally a good thing. I hate to say it, but it's within reason it stood me in good stead now with a lot of work I think I've balanced that out so for me it was sad and a motivator and I think it also caused me to see life as potentially temporary. I was in a hurry because I thought wow things could really change and not change for the better. And it also because I did come from that I did on the side.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I lost both my parents when I was a kid and my aunt and uncle took my siblings and me into their home and raised us as their children.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I have a great relationship with all three of my kids, but if they were candid, it's not like they would sit here and come up with a lot of superlatives, okay? I think they would say that excellence really matter to me, and I think they would say that integrity mattered and pursuing their passions matter to me. But I think they would probably arrive at the conclusion that excellence really mattered.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's this hackney term now people want to be seen, but the truth is people want to be understood and people want to be acknowledged and people want to be cared for. And I actually really care about other people. I really care about my friends and my family and my teams. Genuinely care about them. And people know that. And I will move heaven and earth to help them achieve their ambitions. And they know that too. And then I do that. I don't just talk about it. I actually do it. And I do it without noise or smoke or flourish or congratulations. I just take it on. It's my job. I do it. And I do it, I think, quietly and with a sense typically of gracing kindness.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People achieve their own personal or professional goals. And I wouldn't talk about them because they're private to those people. But probably the things, if I'm proud of anything, I would be pride in that. And that's probably where also I've been able to make a real difference. But some of the masterpieces, yes, there's some really cool deals that I've been involved with and really cool properties. But all that stuff's ephemeral and deeply ephemeral. Whereas the stuff that I've focused on that matters, I probably can't quote or wouldn't quote to you. And if I did, maybe it wouldn't even mean anything to you, but it does mean something to me. Helping other people achieve their potential, helping other people live great lives, helping other people do interesting things and helping other people become happy and productive. If I have something that was my own masterpiece, it would be that. And then I've done a couple cool things along the way that I'm really proud of, but probably not going to talk about them.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I have enough. I would say humility, but it's simply just awareness of reality and to know that I'm not living in masterpiece land. I think some of the products that we put out are masterpieces, but they're not my masterpieces. There are creative folks' masterpieces. And I get to tag along and enjoy the fruits of that labor, but they're not mine.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lesson behavior. So I'm not a power focused person, but achievement very much. I like doing things. I really like doing hard things. I probably like doing hard things too much. And that speaks to my physical activities. It speaks to my friendships. It speaks to my marriage, my relationship with my kids, and very much speaks to my business career where I chose to do turnarounds that other people would not touch, including take two. I like to do hard things. I think there's an element of ego baked in there because it's kind of cool to say I took on this really huge challenge and succeeded. And my business career, frankly, does have a lot more success than lack of success in it. I've had plenty of stuff that went wrong, but never lost money on a deal. I've never failed to repay debt. I've always created a value for shareholders, and I'm really proud of that. And some of those deals have been incredibly hard. So I tend to be motivated by achieving hard things.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business school, they had a class that discussed motivation. At that time, they said there are three things that tend to motivate people in business. Money, power, and achievement. I thought, oh, that's interesting. So money. I definitely was ambitious to make a good living. I didn't come from wealth and I wanted to have a nice life. But I didn't have a desire and I knew this about myself for endless amounts of money. I didn't need to be the richest person in my class, never mind on earth. And I didn't find money motivating as a thing of its own. I found money motivating in terms of being able to pay the bills without worry and educate my kids and live nicely. So I didn't think money was my motivation. And I was right about that in the fullness of time. It's not really something that motivates me. Power definitely not because first of all, I don't think business executives are powerful. I don't enjoy exerting my will over other human beings. I don't enjoy being bossy. And when I found myself engaging in that behavior, I'm not proud of it. And thankfully, that behavior is long in the past sort of adolescent.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Means running a really tight ship, that means not having resorts and jet planes and private dining rooms and campuses and security guards and all that crap. We don't have any of that. I'm here today in your studio. I showed up. There's no downstairs with a little earpiece with a notepad saying, Mr. Sound, it's time to go. I don't have any of that. It's a big company. It's a $28 billion enterprise. I don't have a staff with me today. I got dropped off and walked into my own power and carrying my own iPad, and that's how we operate.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and generally speaking, with creative matters, you have to be at the front of the line. With business matters, you don't have to be at the front of the line. With matters that sort of bridge the two, like AI, you have to be close to the front of the line, but maybe not at the front of the line”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Innovation is being the first company to get into mobile, not the last. Why is that important? Because if you choose right, you create outsized value. We miss the boat. I miss the boat on that. Now, in fairness, when mobile business was coming about, we were really still doing a turnaround and we had to focus on our core business, which was console. But it's also true that I greatly underestimated the potential of the mobile business. I don't want to make mistakes like that.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, our strategy from the beginning has been and remains to be the most creative, the most innovative, and the most efficient company in the entertainment business. I wish I could say we were all those things, we're not. We still aspire to be those things. I think on good days we're the most creative, but not always, and certainly there are other very creative companies. On good days, we're the most efficient, but not always we have work to do. And on very good days we're the most innovative, but that's the area that probably needs the most work because innovation and efficiency don't necessarily go together. That's what we aspire to do. We would like to be the number one pure play in the space. We're now number three if Activision gets bought by Microsoft, we will become number two by default. Still someone ahead of us. So we got some work to do. And that's not just for bragging rights. Your number one, you probably enjoy a higher valuation and you probably have even better access to talent.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I trust you. We know each other. Done. I'm sending over dev kits. And by day seven, we were a multi platform company. And thankfully, we were because, again, 3DO got launched. We sold a few units. We had a couple of bundles. We did okay. But we were a Sony supplier, obviously Sony's PlayStations had been hugely successful.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turns out you recruited one of your two co founders from Sega, and so the team here really isn't very interested in letting you have a license. No. And we went to Nintendo and said, there's the other big platform player. And they said, okay, thank you very much. They were Japanese. We'll get back to you in a couple days. They call back a couple days later. We just realize that all of your engineers have been recruited from Nintendo, so we don't think we're going to give you a license. So I'm like, oh my gosh, second fail. I'm suck at 3DO. Very fortunately, Sony had decided they were going to get into the video game business right then and they didn't have any third parties. Third parties are companies not owned by the hardware purveyor who make titles for the system in question. Luckily, the new head of Sony Interactive was an old friend of mine, Olaf Olafson. This is like day six. I flew to New York meeting with Olaf, thankfully, and said, here's what we're doing at crystal dynamics. We'd like license to be your first third party. And he was like, you know what? This looks interesting.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had taken our wealth, my family's wealth, which was de minimis, but it was a few bucks. Yeah. And now you're telling me that we could put out the games we're working on now, and no one might be able to consume them because they have the wrong equipment. Oh my God, first fail. This is like day three on the job, and I called up the folks at Kleiner Perkins and said, we need to become a multi-platform company. And they were like, no, no, you're going to make games for 3DO. I said, yeah, we're going to keep making games for 3DO. But if 3DO fails, I don't want us to fail. So we can't have that as dependencies. We're going to have to make games for other platforms. They didn't like that very much. By the way, 3DO did fail. strategically sound that we did this because why have two losses in a row as opposed to just one and then my next fail so then i was like okay great i'm gonna go see in those days sega and nintendo and explain that we're gonna make games for them not knowing that they had to agree and understand that notion so i go meet the president of sega who is an old friend of mine luckily and i said we'd like to license to make games for you at this point i figured out day four like you need a license okay we'll see calls me back the next”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On their technology, but that's how the interactive entertainment business works. I show up in Silicon Valley first day at work thinking that we're making potentially the best hits because that was the story that I was told when I was recruited. I was like, we're going to make the highest quality stuff for this rapidly growing medium. And then I realized within a day or two that we were only making it compatible with 3DO. And then I was like, so tell me, what's the install base of 3DO? And the answer was it's zero. I was like, oh my God, I've taken my entire career. You're looking at the only person on earth who's ever voluntarily stepped down from the job of president of a major film studio. I've done that. I didn't get paid or anything. I got fired and got paid. I walked away without getting paid and walked away from my bonus that year. And then I took my entire net worth and invested it in Crystal Dynamic Stock. I was a larger shareholder. I was bigger shareholder than the Kleiner Perkins.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many defining moments, but usually defining moments for me are when I've gotten it wrong. When I went to Crystal Dynamics, I didn't understand anything about the characteristics of the interactive entertainment business. So I'd been recruited to go to this company. And Crystal Dynamics was started to make 32-bit games for a new platform called 3DO. And I didn't realize, and this is amazing to say, but it's true, that there were different platforms interactive entertainment. I came from movies. When you made a movie, it's not like you could put in regal cinemas, but not national amusement cinemas because they had different equipment. Or worse, that you needed a license from Regal or National Amusements to actually exhibit a movie.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many people work on the project and that the project is largely created in a computer. Not entirely. We have motion capture. We have voice actors. We have physical actors. It's a multi-year project and the bulk of the creative work is digital. And that's very different than recorded music, which is unless it's dance music, electronic dance music is really largely analog, converted to digital. And motion pictures and television, which are still entirely analog, unless it's an animated movie or special effect. That's very distinctive. It also makes it harder and it requires other skills. One of the reasons that Hollywood talent has some translated to interactive entertainment is you actually have to have a certain kind of technical education to work in interactive entertainment that you do not need to work in filmed entertainment or television or music for that matter.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't be surprised. The other thing is if you want to have that kind of communication in your organization, then you can't shoot the messenger. You can't be a screamer. You can't be a hysterical. You can't react. I've gotten some really bad business news in my career, like really bad news. And I don't think I've ever raised my voice at bad news. I don't think ever. And I've gotten some really bad news.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just do it. That's great. That's how you end up being non compliant. That's how you end up tanking your company. That's how you overleverage your company. That's how you go bankrupt. That's how you go to jail. I do care how you do it. I really care how you do it. You have to do it in the right way. It has to be consistent with our strategy. It has to be consistent with our culture and it has to be legally compliant and ethically compliant. Everyone knows that. But I do believe in delegation. I just want to know what's going on. When there's a problem, I want to be the first call, the first call. I am including the middle of the night. Even recently, I will occasionally have people inside the organization. Now we're a big organization if you include ZMC. It's a very big organization. And I have people say, here's what's going on. I'll be like, when did this come down? And they'd be like, a week ago. And I was like, and I didn't know about it. And they were like, we didn't want to just show up with a problem. We want to show up with some solutions. I like that is a really great thing that you thought about. I want to know about the problem. You don't have to show up with a solution. I want to know with a problem. I need to know.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think these days, pretty much people have gotten the memo. I think there was a period of time where people believed that my stated desire to be a friend to talent combined with our decentralized approach meant that I had no clue what our labels were doing and they would just tell us what they're doing and then we would have to live with it. And that completely misunderstood what actually goes on, which is we have a highly communicative and deeply intertwined senior management team across label and corporate. And we have a lot of creative independence at the labels and frankly independence among executives because people are given jobs to do and then we want them to do their jobs the way they see fit. We have lots of communication. I'm a fan of saying I believe in delegation with communication among the most dangerous words you can say at a corporation are I don't care how you do it.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is let's drive margin where we can and acknowledge that in certain other instances, as long as the margin's acceptable, it may be a bit inferior to margin in other areas. But on balance, we want to have the largest possible pie.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We stay away from huge pronouncements and massive shifts in the absence of market evidence, because if you own intellectual property that matters, you can be late on a platform and still be just fine. You don't have to be the first to the party with a marketing idea or platform support, although we often are. You don't really get paid for that. If you're in the content business, you get paid for the content. I'm a believer that in business, if you don't have to vote, don't vote. If you don't have to make a choice, don't make that choice. Keep all your options open. And we try to be where the consumer is. We try to use every distribution method that we can. We try to be ubiquitous. We're not the kind of people who think about if I shut down all of this over here and I have that, I can drive more margin there. I'll worry about how to get the consumer there. We think about, let's have the broadest possible business, let's meet the consumer where the consumer”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is I'm open minded. I want to listen to others. I care about their opinions. I have no trouble saying that I'm wrong. I have no trouble changing my mind when there's new evidence. But when we've agreed upon a course of action or in certain limited instances I've decided on a course of action, I know you have to have conviction and you have to pursue it to the end.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do need to, as leaders and decision makers, be willing to take in as much information as we can within reason, synthesize the information successfully, and arrive at a conclusion, and then more often than not, we better be right. And in those situations, you do have to act with conviction. There's an executive who is brilliant, I'm not going to say his name, at Fox. I think he understood the entertainment business better than almost anyone else. He was well known to. And certainly he was as brilliant about the entertainment business as Barry was and is. But he was a lawyer by training, and he didn't like making decisions. So he would equivocate. And he would at times just analyze and equivocate so much that the moment would pass. So what I learned is you do have to decide. You got to decide. That's what you're paid to do. And the hardest thing I do is make a decision when everything's unclear. What I'm willing to do is, if you have been able to tell from this conversation,”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The abs was of intelligence, there is no good role for boldness, and we've seen that with people. I think having conviction when you know something and that something is rooted in the facts is valuable. I think having conviction when you don't know something, but you know what?”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what does that mean? Because I'm not insecure about my intellect, and I was aware of my lack of experience. What it meant was I realized I was going to school and this person was willing to be my teacher. Not sure he'd see it that way. I imagine I caused him no shortage of frustration, but he was an amazing leader. He got the best out of me. He got the best out of a lot of people. He had flaws and has flaws. We all do. My style is quite different than his, but was his style and is his style effective, highly effective.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a phenomenal leader, but there are so many of them in the private equity business, Don Goguel, again a person of modest demeanor, quiet confidence, a brilliant person. He's got a great brain, a truly kind person. Barry Diller is a great leader, very different style and a very tough style, and not to everyone's liking, very much to my liking. He was pretty critical boss, but I'm really critical of myself. And I knew when I was 32 years old and I was president of Fox, I knew I didn't know anything. And I told you I almost failed. I was not unaware of the fact that I was nearly failing. This was very obvious to me. So having a really smart boss who understood the entertainment business better than anyone else was prepared to teach that to me and would engage with me. He had the patience to engage in robust debate. It was amazing. And I used to say like I would argue with him all the time. And I don't know, 98% of the time he was right, which is incredible because I am reasonably intelligent and well versed in what I do.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really fortunate. I have a lot of mentors. They have different characteristics. It takes different qualities. There isn't one approach. The best I haven't seen, but I think many people would agree was one of the great leaders of all time, was George Washington and Abraham Lincoln actually were great leaders. Washington particularly was known to be an amazing leader and I've read a bunch of presidential biographies that I've seen Dick Parsons was a great leader and he too truly cared about people. He's also super smart. He makes really sound decisions. Dick Parsons was CEO of Time Warner. He was one of those people who could synthesize huge amounts of information and arrive at the right conclusion who was politically savvy without being a political person have to get up really early in the morning to get over on Dick Parsons, but never had a negative word, always had a smile, always engaged with you as though you were the most important person in the room”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It transfers into leadership because I think showing up feeling good and presenting yourself as the best version of yourself is compelling to other people. Helps you lead. Showing up looking like you had some weird surgical procedure to look 30 years old is not going to be a benefit. My face looks my age. Give me a few years maybe. But you don't see me and say, oh my God, this guy's 30 years old. You see me? And so maybe I'm going to get really lucky and you say maybe this guy's in his late 50s. That's how I ought to look. I'm not trying to look different than I am. And if I were, that would be terribly off-putting to people, as you would expect. But I think it is compelling when you show up and you're reasonably well-dressed and doesn't mean you have to spend a lot of money in clothing, but you're together and clothing is clean and it fits you and you have a haircut. Your skin is not gray in ashen. You don't smell bad. And all of that stuff actually does matter. And I think it's a sign of respect for yourself and respect for others to show up as your best self. And that does include how you present yourself physically.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I certainly wouldn't have expected at 30 that I would be 66 years old and my primary training buddy is 24 and we train at the same level and he's a fitness model and that he choose to have me as his primary training buddy. That wouldn't have occurred to me. It wouldn't have occurred to me that this morning I trained with 10 incredibly fit people and I was right there with them. And the oldest person in that group was probably 32. And it wouldn't have occurred to me that I could feel this way. When I was 30, 66 was really old. And it didn't occur to me that I could feel the way I feel at 66 or still be standing straight up and still be the same height I was when I was 18 and still be the same weight. I'm wearing the same size clothing I wore 30 years ago that I'd feel the way I do. I feel amazing.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And get hit by a truck. I hope I won't, but I could. And I got really engaged in this. And I thought if I rode a good enough book, then maybe I would help other people. And that goes back to my view that one of the most successful parts of my life has been driven by being of service to others. The book actually sold really well. It sold well over 100,000 copies. I continue to run into people who say I read your book and I lost 30 pounds and I feel great.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would be to take that position, but rather that you have an opportunity to be your best self without regard to your chronological age, and that you can do a lot of things for a really long time despite aging. I don't believe it's possible. I'm not one of the Silicon Valley guys who believes I'm going to live to 150. To the contrary, actually, there's very little evidence that anything I'm doing really changes your lifespan much. Maybe change your lifespan by about five years on the outside. There's a lot of evidence that you change your health span. Peter Atti was my doctor for four years. He wrote the forward to the book. He and I share a view that health span is what matters. And if Peter were sitting here, he would not say, oh, Strous is in great shape. He's going to live to be 105. First of all, he'd acknowledge he didn't know how long I'm going to live. Secondly, he would acknowledge that everything I'm doing and I do what he recommends maybe gives me five more years. And that's barring some kind of getting ALS or something that I could get without knowing I'm going to get it or having a horrible accident. I could walk out.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And fitness, when I saw the effects of getting engaged in taking care of yourself by going to the doctor, taking care of yourself by eating reasonably well, I don't have a hugely strict diet, but I eat reasonably well. I'm not overweight. Taking care of yourself by getting lots of exercise and taking care of yourself by having a spiritual practice and a community. And all of those things together have brought me a really good life and a life that I want to keep engaging in. I wrote the book because about seven years ago, because my good friend Dave Zenko, who had been editor-in-chief of men's health, said, this is amazing. You're in your late 50s, knocking on the door of 60 at the time, and you're in great shape and you look good and you need to explain to people like how this is possible. And becoming ageless really does not take the position that you're not going to age or you're going to age in reverse, tempting as a”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my entree into this was just purely vanity. I started aging. I thought, I just want to keep looking good as long as I can. And then I think it just became. Can I do this thing at a high level even as I age? And then it turned into a community and that made it just incredibly powerful. So it started from this very unimpressive place of vanity, got to a challenge, and then it turned into big part of my social life, which is I have this tribe.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conventional wisdom when I was at BMG, which was one of the major label groups, was the boy bands don't work and Clive Calder brought out Backstreet Boys. And conventional wisdom was that girl bands don't work. And then we had Brittany Spears and Christian Aguilera and keep going. Conventional wisdom was that rock and roll was dead for a period of time and the RCA records brought out Dave Matthews. The list goes on. And in motion pictures, conventional wisdom was a comedy has to have big stars and big concept. And then we brought out Home Alone, starring Macaulay Culkin, who no one knew. And that was the highest-grossing comedy of all time. The biggest hits are by their nature unexpected, which means that you can't organize around them with AI. So I'm not worried about AI eating our collective lunches in the entertainment business.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bottom line is derivative IP is generally speaking not going to be hugely successful, but could be moderately successful at certain times. I never liked doing derivative IP. That's when you notice in the film business there are three movies being made about Robin Hood at the same time. All huge hits are by definition unexpected. Good example, interactive entertainment is Red Dead. Before Red Dead was released, conventional wisdom in the interactive entertainment business was Westerns Don't Work, period full stop. Westerns don't work. Red Dead comes along completely unexpected spectacular production values. Really something no beautiful game spectacularly beautiful and emotional. No one had seen it before and it was a huge hit. An example from my recorded music days was”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get a multiple that reflects that if you deliver solidity and permanence or something close to permanence, you're going to get paid for that. But it happens to be consistent with our DNA and how I like to look at the world. But it is true that if I were just cravenly selfish and said, you know what, I'm going to get out of Dodge in five years. No matter what, come a hell or high water five years from now, and I just want to have the maximum share price when I get out. Yeah, stop investing in new IP, period.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you could take the position that it's not going to matter on my watch. Now, I expect to live forever, and I like what I do, so not expected on my watch is not a good rubric for me. I've been at this for 17 years and I want to keep doing it forever. But also even if I did look at the world that way, I build all my companies forever. And this is true at ZMC as well. We know we're going to sell a company within ten years of buying it because our fund documents require us to do so. But we're building that company for twenty or thirty years. And we do that because it's the right thing to do, because our stakeholders are not just our financial investors. They include our colleagues at the companies, include our customers who deserve the best and need the best if they're going to bring us their wallets. So we've always been willing to invest beyond our hold period. You, of course, do get paid for that too. If you deliver a buyer a phenomenal company, you're going to.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you need to do both. If you only focus on your winners, unfortunately they are not forever. All hits eventually do degrade, all being a bit of an overstatement. I don't think Grand Theft Auto is ever going to go away, and I don't think James Bond has ever gone away. As long as they're treated well. But pretty much everything else has a decay curve. And so if you only bet on your winners in perpetuity, you run the risk of burning the furniture to keep warm. That's a mistake because then you knowhare to sit and eventually you're burning the siding of the house. We always invest in new intellectual property, and that's why today, I think we have 16 franchises at Take 2 that have each sold at least 5 million units in an individual release. The riskiest part of the business. It's costly when you get it wrong. And it's tempting for a management team not to do it.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is less true. I think you don't tend to see really messed up companies anymore. We do now and then, and we still are happy to take those companies on, but it's relatively unusual compared to some of the stuff we saw at the beginning of ZMC.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Undisciplined, I should say, about how they spent their money. And so they had resorts, planes, huge asset creep, and it was very lumbering and inefficient. It was a screaming bargain. The market cap of the company was like $350 million. And it was clear to us that you could like triple the EBITDA essentially overnight. And we tried to take it private. We failed because we just weren't experienced enough to pull it off. But we did put it in place. Someone else bought it, and that's exactly what happened. And within a couple years, it was worth $3 billion. You don't see deals like that anymore. They just don't exist. They've been driven out of the marketplace.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assets that were off topic and their balance sheets were screwed up and some simple choices would clean things up. I looked at a company I can say the name of the company when I was a restaurant actually that my boss Austin first was a wealthy individual and he was interested in perhaps doing some”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wouldn't be all businesses. Remember, we're talking about a failing business. A successful business? No, in the ordinary course they're doing this. We're actually at ZMC. We just walked away from a deal because the company was pristinely managed and we didn't think there was much we could do to improve matters and was fully priced. It was hard to create a return. We see companies all the time where they're well run and that includes their vendor management programs. And no, if I said to you, yeah, just give me any company and I'll fix it. That would be the height of arrogance. Actually, I think it's hard earned to find turnarounds in a market like the US because private equity actually is an asset class has injected a lot of efficiency and a lot of best practices into enterprise. And in the 1960s, you could find incredibly sloppy businesses with very sloppy business practices. You don't really see that anymore. When I started my career, you would still see companies where they own.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're like looking around saying, I can't believe you didn't fire that goofball yet. These are obviously a company that's failing, does not have a first-class staff. And we were there long enough to know who was good and who wasn't as good. By the time we're actually doing the headcount reduction, people are like, thank God, you're letting that person go. They shouldn't have been here anyway. And they're not looking over their shoulders wondering if their job is next because we tell them, look, we know enough to know we're like one and done. That's just typically how we go about cost reduction. We cut $40 million out of the annual expenses of the company in six months. I don't think we'd completed that in three months, but in six months we had. So it became clear to the Gregs of the world there weren't many of them. It would take two, that, okay, they're not dumb. They're not terrible people, and they seem to be making pretty sound decisions. I don't think they said, oh my God, this is the A-team and I'm so glad. Wow, I just love stress. I can't wait to have a cocktail with them. And it was none of that. It was, okay, on balance, these guys are not so terrible and they're making...”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they fire people. It's the first thing they do. That's the last thing we do. You know what the first thing we do is we get a list of the top 10 vendors to the company because all companies have vendors who supply goods and services to them. We get the list of the top 10 and then we go to the top 10 vendors and we renegotiate their contracts 100% of the time. We can usually save a material amount of money doing that. We go back to the team and we're like, look, we just saved 15 million bucks a year just by renegotiating contracts. And people are like, wow, that's pretty impressive. Oh, and by the way, we didn't fire a soul. And then we're like, let's go a little deeper internally and see what other efficiencies we combine. And then we find another whatever, five or ten million dollars in the case of a company the size of take two. And we do that for a couple of months. And only after we've searched in every corner for every efficiency we can find do we actually have to do the inevitable headcount reduction, which we do once. We're honest about it, and then we move on. By the time we got to the headcount reduction, most of the people of the company...”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without litigation, without any money spent, without any press articles, without any noise. And the word sort of got around, oh, this guy maybe isn't a complete idiot. It was exactly the opposite of what I did at Fox. I didn't go in with Let me fix these 10,000 things. I went in and said, how can I help you? They had a problem. I solved the problem. And we did a bunch of that. We did a bunch of problems solving. And we didn't do things that would annoy people unnecessarily. We had to reduce the cost profile of the company. I've done that many times. Most people, when they reduced cost profiles of companies, they take them over. What's the first thing they do?”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly what I would do when I said it. And they knew that there was a really significant risk that we would win that injunction, and they stood down. So that was on Sunday. So on Monday morning, I was able to say to the label in question, we got that problem. Problem solved.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And make something that's basically derivative and then claim it's not derivative. That's quite difficult to do. This studio was doing it because Tektu was a laughingstock to the extent anyone cared about TekTo was a laughing stock in the business. This was the game that couldn't shoot straight and they didn't think anyone serious would do anything about it. So they got a call from me. They at that point knew like someone serious was in charge at least. But then I called back the next day and I said, listen, I'm really suggesting you don't do this. And they said, well, are you planning to sue us? If we do. I said, actually, no, here's what I am going to do, though, just so you understand. I'm going to let you go ahead and invest $75 million in the movie that you want to make on this. And about two weeks before you release the movie, I'm going to go to court. And based on your infringement of the underlying intellectual property, I'm going to get an injunction and you won't be able to release it. That's actually what I'm going to do. Now, the people who are hearing this call had seen me in action before. They knew what I did and didn't do. They knew I don't threaten people. They knew I actually do know something about intellectual property law.”
2023-10-10 · Invest Like the Best · Strauss Zelnick - Playing to Your Strengths - [Invest Like the Best, EP.347] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source