CAA (with Michael Ovitz)

1. DRDavid Rosenthal0:00

   I was watching you with Bill Murray at the 92nd Street Y. [laughing]

2. SPSpeaker0:03

   How great is Bill, right?

3. DRDavid Rosenthal0:05

   He's, like, the worst interviewer ever, but he's hilarious. He's Bill Murray. [chuckles] We'll let you talk more than Bill did.

4. SPSpeaker0:12

   Who got the truth? [upbeat music] Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth?

5. BGBen Gilbert0:29

   Welcome to season nine, episode eight, the season finale of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs, and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

6. DRDavid Rosenthal0:45

   And I'm David Rosenthal, and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco.

7. BGBen Gilbert0:51

   And we are your hosts. He was the most powerful man in Hollywood for two decades. He is responsible for movies and TV shows you love, like Late Night with David Letterman, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, Rain Man, Goodfellas, and literally hundreds of others.

8. DRDavid Rosenthal1:08

   Rain Man!

9. BGBen Gilbert1:08

   We are here today with Michael Ovitz to tell the story of Creative Artists Agency, CAA, the legendary talent agency he founded in 1975 that changed the power structure in Hollywood forever, and not just Hollywood. As many of you probably know from our earlier episode this season, Michael and CAA inspired none other than Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz to similarly change the power structure of Silicon Valley.

10. DRDavid Rosenthal1:34

    Boy, did he ever! Ugh, what a great way to end the season. I am so pumped. Before we dive in, for the last time in season nine, w- I would like to welcome our presenting sponsor, Pilot.com. Pilot is the backbone of the modern financial stack for startups. They themselves, as you know, are backed by all-star investors like Sequoia, Index, Bezos Expeditions, and Stripe, and they are truly the gold standard for startup bookkeeping. Now over to our conversation with Pilot co-founders Waseem Daher and Jessica McKellar. So as we come to the end of the season, let's turn to Pilot as a company itself. Not only do you serve startups, but obviously you've been an incredibly successful one, having raised over $150 million from Sequoia, Index, Bezos Expeditions, and Stripe. So I'm curious, what advice would you have for all the founders listening who are earlier in their journey or maybe haven't even started a company yet but are thinking about starting one someday in the future?

11. SPSpeaker2:38

    Real talk, thing number one is you need to pick a problem or pick a market where you can actually build a company that can make money. But leaving that aside, I can say this from having worked with Waseem and our co-founder, Jeff, for nearly 15 years at this point, Pilot is our third company. We've been through two acquisitions together. Having a founding team that works well together, that is values-aligned, really does make a difference for maximizing the chance of having a successful business, and it's such a precious thing that we found each other, and I know at least I'm never gonna let go of them.

12. SPSpeaker3:13

    In addition to the team being really important, I think it's critical that you really remain focused, which is your company has one job, which is to make a product or service that your customers wanna give you money for. In other words, you have to be laser-focused on solving a real hair-on-fire need for your customer base, and anything that you're doing that is not in service of solving that hair-on-fire problem is, frankly, time you're wasting.

13. DRDavid Rosenthal3:40

    Well, I can't think of any better note to end our time together this season on, nor, frankly, any better [chuckles] pitch for why all startups should be using Pilot for all their bookkeeping and tax and CFO needs. Thanks so much to both of you for joining us for this whole season.

14. SPSpeaker3:56

    Thanks for having us.

15. DRDavid Rosenthal3:58

    You can learn more about Pilot and whether they can help your company eliminate the pain of tax prep and bookkeeping by going to pilot.com/acquired. And thanks to Waseem and Jessica, all Acquired listeners, if you use that link, you will get 20% off your first six months of service. Thank you, Waseem, Jessica, and all of Pilot.

16. BGBen Gilbert4:20

    No kidding. And, uh, listeners, before we dive in, many of you already know this, a ton of you have already subscribed, but the LP Show is now publicly available in all podcast players for free. So only the, uh, first two weeks of, of brand-new episodes are, uh, are in the private feed. Everything else, you can go search Acquired LP Show in the podcast player of your choice and get all those episodes. Now, without further ado, our conversation with Michael Ovitz.

17. DRDavid Rosenthal4:49

    Michael, welcome to Acquired.

18. SPSpeaker4:52

    Thank you very much.

19. DRDavid Rosenthal4:54

    It is so great to have you here with us. Uh, so we're thinking today, of course, this being Acquired, we're gonna start all the way back, way before your time, tell the history of the Golden Age of Hollywood, New Hollywood, and then leading into you and CAA, of course. But, uh, uh, like any good, uh, any good creative story here, uh, creative artists, we're gonna steal from your book [chuckles] and we're gonna start in medias res, uh, and then rewind, just to set the stage for what's to come.

20. SPSpeaker5:27

    Just don't ask me any hard questions.

21. BGBen Gilbert5:30

    Deal. Maybe.

22. DRDavid Rosenthal5:31

    Well, I think you'll enjoy telling this story. Um, can you tell us the Jurassic Park story?

23. SPSpeaker5:36

    [laughing] You must be like me and like dinosaurs.

24. DRDavid Rosenthal5:39

    [laughing] Well, that was, that was the key to all of it, right? Was that, like, everybody likes dinosaurs.

25. SPSpeaker5:46

    I think that was... That's accurate. That's what got that movie made, basically.

26. BGBen Gilbert5:51

    So you had a pre-existing relationship with, with Michael Crichton, but he hadn't produced any new material in a while. Is that right?

27. SPSpeaker5:59

    So Michael w- was a client of mine from starting when, uh, in the late '70s.

28. SPSpeaker6:07

    ... and we developed an extraordinarily close personal relationship that went way beyond our professional relationship. And I literally talked to him every day of the week, and I did that not because he was a client, partially because he was a friend, but mostly because he was one of the smartest and most interesting people.

29. DRDavid Rosenthal6:36

    He was really like a Leonardo da Vinci type, right?

30. SPSpeaker6:39

    He was amazing. Here's a guy who was a medical doctor, screenwriter, director, travel writer, um, short story writer, novelist, and just was probably the greatest guest to ever have at a dinner party, because he could talk about anything with an extraordinary depth of knowledge. And it's fascinating to me, because later we'll talk about another friend of mine who I love putting together, and that's Marc Andreessen. Um, the two of those guys probably suck９０% of the brainpower that God gave away in their birth years. [chuckles] Um, they're just, like, extraordinary. But Michael ran into a very tough patch, really tough patch, and a lot of writers and creative people, and you've probably heard the expression, "writer's block," you know, they occasionally just... it doesn't flow. Artists have it as well. I have a friend who's a phenomenal painter, and she just couldn't get it together for six months. She couldn't-- It just wasn't coming out. And I think that Michael was in a position where he was going on a couple of years, and he just wasn't happy with what was coming to him, and I used to z- have lunch with him once a week. And what happened is that I would push him constantly at the lunches to try to see if I could ignite a small spark. And at one of the lunches, when things seemed the bleakest, he said to me, "What do you think of three people, age younger and maybe one a little older person, stranded in an amusement park off the coast of South America, and the core of the amusement park are prehistoric animals?" And I looked at him and I said: "Wow! My young son likes dinosaurs, I like dinosaurs, and my dad likes dinosaurs. This is really an extraordinarily interesting idea." And we then talked for almost three hours about paleontology, about, is it possible you could breed these type of beings in the twentieth century? Could it be made real? Is it possible with, in those days, with the kind of technical know-how that was available in the '90s to do it? And we came to the conclusion that it was worth him sitting down and trying to write it. And lo and behold, he sat down, and five months later, he called me up, he said, "I'm sending you a draft of a book about what we talked about." And he sent it over, and I remember sitting down around six o'clock in the evening, six thirty, I had something to eat. I had left the office early, and I just started reading typewritten manuscript pages, and I didn't finish until around three in the morning. And I called him at seven AM, and I said, "This is the best thing you've written in ten years." And I said, "I just couldn't stop turning the pages." Just as an aside, one of the great tests of whether something works or not is how quick you turn the page. And you know from readings, just recreationally, if you turn the page, you like the book, and I just devoured this book. And I said to him, I said, "Look, at... This is brilliant. It'll make an amazing book. It'll make an amazing movie." And I said, "There's only one guy in my mind that can make this movie. There are not two guys or three guys or four guys. There's one guy, and if we don't get him, I would be worried about what this movie looked like." And he said, "Who?" And I said, "Steven."

Episode duration: 1:57:12