Michael Ovitz | All-In Summit 2024

00:00:00.000 | The legend I don't sing that lately the legend Michael Obitz is in the building arguably one of the most successful talent agents ever

00:00:07.320 | He rose from working in a mailroom to become a super agent representing some of Hollywood's biggest stars one doesn't

00:00:13.900 | Get to a place of success

00:00:16.340 | without having made mistakes

00:00:18.700 | People say all kinds of things about him really really all kinds of things about him

00:00:23.940 | We went out to win and when you go out to win you make certain sacrifices

00:00:27.420 | We were tough and we were aggressive and I had a philosophy of win at all costs when we did

00:00:33.320 | The cost was huge rise or fall

00:00:36.680 | On our own deeds our own brains our own willpower

00:00:40.580 | It's no crime and being vulnerable with people everybody has an issue

00:00:44.420 | I want to leave the planet a little better than when I came on please join us in welcoming Michael Obitz Wow

00:00:50.480 | Thank you so much

00:00:56.420 | Michael

00:00:57.500 | All right, we have

00:00:59.500 | We have been trying to make this happen for three years. You're a hard one to get a hold of yeah

00:01:05.420 | If you don't know Michael

00:01:09.220 | You shouldn't be here

00:01:11.780 | Michael

00:01:16.300 | Co-founded CAA and his book is fantastic by the way. Yeah, who is Mike Ovitz?

00:01:22.260 | Yeah, it's such it's such a read you could just skim through it by like read right through it because it goes by so fast

00:01:27.620 | It's incredible in

00:01:29.540 | 1975 where

00:01:31.540 | You know, Michael is really known for transforming Hollywood and transforming the media business

00:01:37.620 | one of the big innovations of many in Michaels career has been the

00:01:42.180 | the innovation of packaging which really changed the power dynamics and the trajectory of

00:01:48.180 | How content was made in Hollywood?

00:01:51.700 | Michael's had we were just talking about this kind of three careers

00:01:54.540 | Both as the founder of CAA and then later a partnership with Andy Grove in

00:02:01.100 | 1993 where you formed the CAA

00:02:03.820 | Intel Media Lab and

00:02:06.700 | really tried to bring technology to Hollywood and then later joined up with Marc Andreessen and

00:02:13.140 | have helped Marc and Ben since then scale up Andreessen Horowitz and really change how Silicon Valley operates and

00:02:21.380 | It's just an incredible

00:02:23.380 | Reinvention story but one where it seems you've brought a similar sort of set of innovations in all three phases

00:02:30.580 | maybe you can tell us a little bit about those three major transitions and

00:02:34.940 | the you know, the the way that you kind of made the decision to kind of reinvent yourself and

00:02:41.060 | Bring technology and media together. Well, first of all

00:02:44.620 | Thank you for having me. I I'm honored to be here. I

00:02:50.620 | Must say I've been going up to the valley since

00:02:53.320 | 1992

00:02:56.020 | Probably hard for most of you in the audience to believe this, but I'm much older than all the guys up here

00:03:00.820 | and

00:03:03.060 | these are four of the

00:03:05.060 | not just the smartest but the

00:03:08.220 | most effective

00:03:10.660 | Men that I've met up in the valley with respect to what they do how they do it

00:03:15.900 | And then lastly I have tried since they started the all-in

00:03:20.700 | Podcasts I have applied 15 times to be a bestie

00:03:25.620 | And I have been rejected by one of the four up here which I will not say which one

00:03:34.460 | But we all want to have what they have and I was saying to David in the

00:03:43.220 | Backstage, it's so fantastic how they've set something up. That is so interesting to listen to to learn from

00:03:50.300 | Even to push up against you don't have to agree with it, which is what I like about it

00:03:55.380 | But to hear it from something we all want in our lives

00:03:58.540 | Which is close friends where you can say whatever you want as a matter of fact some of the stuff they say to David I find

00:04:05.060 | offensive, but

00:04:11.140 | So back to the question, um, I

00:04:13.420 | have an insatiable appetite for information and

00:04:18.380 | for

00:04:20.540 | Trying to stay up

00:04:22.380 | With things that are current I started in the entertainment business when I was 17 years old, believe it or not

00:04:28.620 | I was the first tour guide at Universal Studios. They had hired five men and five women and I

00:04:36.460 | really learned so much about

00:04:40.460 | the media business and and how

00:04:43.220 | They made entertainment

00:04:45.780 | Because Universal was in every area in film television music books everything and it's all the same by the way

00:04:53.780 | It's just different

00:04:55.700 | Iterations of it. It's all made to entertain people and I got the bug. I went to UCLA

00:05:02.780 | Took me three years to get out of there

00:05:05.580 | I couldn't get out of there fast enough, but I went to the first class and the last class

00:05:10.260 | that's why when I was here I got really scared because I

00:05:14.220 | Kind of missed the classes in between because I worked full-time at 20th Century Fox and just had a blast

00:05:21.220 | And then I went into the agency business in my early 20s. I was at Universal as a tour guide. I saw

00:05:29.540 | these men

00:05:32.340 | And women dressed really well being received well by everybody on the studio lots and I I said, well, that's interesting

00:05:40.340 | What do they do?

00:05:41.100 | I found out they were agents and I realized I could get a very wide education and I've always been interested in

00:05:47.860 | Making myself smarter about things because I'm not I don't have the gift that a couple of these guys up here do which is

00:05:55.540 | For all of them, which is raw intelligence. I've I've got

00:06:00.340 | Uneducated intelligence. I have to really work at it and I really enjoyed

00:06:05.500 | That time and and getting into it

00:06:09.060 | We broke off when I was 26 a bunch of us for a whole series of reasons from the William Morris ages

00:06:15.180 | He started CA with a very simple thesis

00:06:18.360 | which was that we were going to do something as a team rather than individually and

00:06:25.220 | It just worked really well artists enjoyed having a group of

00:06:30.420 | Individuals to talk to which is not dissimilar to what these four guys have accomplished

00:06:35.300 | Artists liked being surrounded by multiple people with different skill sets. So that worked really well

00:06:42.700 | in

00:06:45.740 | 1992

00:06:47.740 | You could smell in LA

00:06:50.900 | Something going on up north but the thing about Los Angeles and the inner and particularly the entertainment

00:06:57.100 | Community is it's an incredibly

00:06:59.540 | Siloed community. They don't accept people very well from the outside

00:07:05.140 | Which by the way makes it very inbred and it's not particularly wise

00:07:11.180 | It may be smart for the moment, but it's not wise

00:07:15.300 | So I started going up to San Francisco to see what was going on up there and then in the middle of 92 I called

00:07:22.640 | cold Bill Gates and

00:07:25.380 | It wasn't the Microsoft of today. It was a small company and I went up and met with Bill and

00:07:32.500 | Then he introduced we talked for four hours

00:07:36.060 | about where

00:07:38.780 | My business and his business could converge and the only thing I will tell you is neither of us had any idea

00:07:45.540 | But it was the start of a discussion

00:07:47.740 | Bill introduced me to a man named Nathan Myrvold who I'm still friendly with today who was the first CTO of Microsoft and

00:07:54.940 | I was an advisor to

00:07:57.340 | Three of the four major record labels and I remember being at one of the music

00:08:05.660 | labels that had 25% market share and there were stereo speakers in there and Nathan had said to me I

00:08:12.260 | can't explain this to you, but

00:08:14.860 | Music's gonna come from up there. I had no idea what he was talking about and

00:08:20.500 | I advised all four companies that something was happening and that hard goods weren't gonna be able to be sold and

00:08:28.660 | I got fired by one of them. I

00:08:32.460 | Got thrown out by the other three. They thought that Nathan was crazy

00:08:37.340 | They didn't understand what Microsoft was and they had no interest in computers or anything

00:08:43.300 | Digital and then from there. I went and met Andy Grove. We started a dialogue and we brought

00:08:49.780 | Every conceivable piece of hardware and software

00:08:53.500 | Available to Los Angeles put it in our Beverly Hills building

00:08:59.140 | The top of the building had like eight dishes on it

00:09:02.540 | it looked like we were going to take off and

00:09:04.540 | We invited everyone from the entertainment business to come in and see and test all this

00:09:10.460 | To wrap this up

00:09:14.020 | It was a great thing and a sad thing

00:09:18.780 | We knew something was coming. We had no idea what

00:09:23.420 | but the business did what it always does it put its head in the sand and no one looked to San Francisco and

00:09:29.740 | Today when I meet with people in the business

00:09:34.300 | It's interesting when I explain to them how?

00:09:37.940 | Streaming has basically changed the legacy business forever, and it will never change again

00:09:45.140 | And it's all because everyone that we worked with refused to embrace

00:09:51.660 | Change which to me is

00:09:53.660 | Sort of the mantra of my life. I want to change I've changed my life personally

00:10:00.100 | I've changed careers three different times

00:10:02.620 | It's all about learning and about pushing yourself and it wasn't just media because you were very early to helping

00:10:10.060 | Company like like Palantir as an example. It's not just hey Michael Ovitz is a Hollywood guy or a media guy

00:10:16.660 | You were an advisor to a pure tech company. Yeah, can you tell us a little bit about what you did with Palantir?

00:10:22.940 | And how you got involved in what role you played?

00:10:25.940 | so in 99 a

00:10:28.500 | Young man named Mark Andreessen who happened to have been on the cover of Time magazine

00:10:33.540 | Barefooted which I thought was really weird

00:10:36.700 | and

00:10:38.660 | He called me cold. I didn't know who he was frankly. I had heard of him

00:10:43.260 | I had heard of him because we were doing work for Jim Clark

00:10:46.940 | who Mark was in business with and

00:10:50.620 | He had a company that was very close to the media business at the time

00:10:55.460 | I guess you could say was a pre Adobe type business and I

00:11:00.540 | Met with Mark and I can't explain to you what happened, but we went to a lunch that was going to take an hour

00:11:07.380 | I'm not long on lunches

00:11:08.980 | I don't do one hour zoom and I hate long calls because you can't get anything done

00:11:14.020 | So I thought we were going to be an hour. We were four and a half hours and at the end of that

00:11:19.420 | He said well you come on the my board with Ben Horowitz. We're starting a company called loud cloud and

00:11:26.780 | I said explain it to me and he did and I had no clue what he was talking about. I

00:11:31.380 | Just didn't understand it

00:11:33.500 | He said all this data is going up in the sky and all I could think of was Nathan telling me that about music

00:11:39.420 | And I said well now two smart guys really smart guys a lot smarter than me are talking about what's going on up there

00:11:46.420 | So I went on Mark's board

00:11:48.820 | I'm still involved with them 25 years later and

00:11:52.380 | Mark basically

00:11:55.780 | introduced me to

00:11:58.060 | Everyone up in the valley Reid Hoffman Peter Thiel Mark Zuckerberg

00:12:01.700 | everybody that he dealt with and

00:12:04.220 | One of the guys he introduced me to was Peter Thiel who I just had dinner with last weekend is one of the smartest guys

00:12:10.400 | I've ever met and

00:12:12.860 | He put a ton of his own money into Palantir. He had no investors. He had a small investment from DARPA. I

00:12:21.020 | Had no clue what they did, but he called me up. He said can you help me?

00:12:26.660 | because we are

00:12:28.660 | In business with the US government and they don't pay very well and that I could empathize with

00:12:35.500 | They they take a lot of money in tax, but they don't pay very well

00:12:40.260 | And I said, what do you want me to do? Because you know my

00:12:43.860 | coding

00:12:46.220 | is a bit limited and

00:12:48.340 | He said I want you to help get come up set up a commercial business. So without going through a long boring story

00:12:56.880 | After Peter got a dozen phone calls being criticized for bringing me in to do this

00:13:01.800 | Which he actually enjoyed by the way, which is what I love about him

00:13:05.460 | I met with Alex Karp for three months in his office

00:13:09.840 | I was living in San Francisco three days a week and I looked at everything they were doing

00:13:15.320 | they only had at the time about 25 30 engineers and

00:13:19.200 | Came up with some ideas

00:13:22.760 | starting with three silos

00:13:24.760 | narrowed it to advertising health care and finance

00:13:27.720 | got rid of the two of them quickly because finance was a no-brainer the whole world had gone under with the mortgage crisis and

00:13:36.440 | Palantir actually had an algorithm

00:13:39.040 | that you could plug an address of a house into it and they

00:13:44.640 | did this after I asked them to you could plug an address of a house and it scraped a

00:13:50.960 | Million data points within one mile of the house how many kids were leaving private school?

00:13:56.160 | how many hamburgers were sold how many dry cleaning stores closed it was like a

00:14:00.840 | brief in a nanosecond of the economy and

00:14:04.400 | JP Morgan

00:14:07.240 | couldn't offer mortgage for the life of them if they wanted to because

00:14:11.800 | They had local branch managers who loved their jobs. All the mortgages were underwater. They didn't want to make a decision

00:14:19.720 | We put Palantir online

00:14:22.120 | They got permission to plug the address in and whatever the bid-ask came up. They get close

00:14:28.020 | We promised we deliver in 90 days. I always over

00:14:32.480 | I always under promise and over deliver and

00:14:36.120 | We delivered in 55 days and we saved them a hundred and fifty million dollars to the bottom line in that

00:14:43.420 | 55 day period and

00:14:45.760 | That became a request from them. The only problem they had is they forgot

00:14:52.160 | To make a deal with me

00:14:54.560 | for the software

00:14:56.760 | so they had this unbelievable result and no deal and

00:15:00.920 | They offered I think two million for a

00:15:05.760 | One-year license for five years and I called Peter and he was just dancing on his desk

00:15:12.000 | He couldn't believe it and I said I turned it down

00:15:15.320 | so

00:15:17.320 | He said

00:15:20.080 | You've lost your mind and started yelling at me as only and in a nice way and I said just give me

00:15:25.600 | 15 days I used to be an agent and he said okay in any case 15 days later

00:15:32.080 | They came back and they made a deal that was

00:15:35.240 | many many multiples of that price and they became the first of the commercial business at Palantir and then

00:15:44.800 | And now today their business

00:15:46.800 | As it was just added to the S&P sorry, they were just that yesterday and they 60/40 I'd say commercial versus

00:15:54.200 | Government government Michael. Can we talk a little bit about the movie business the entertainment business?

00:16:00.460 | We were just watching all this generative AI and I got the sense you were looking at it

00:16:06.000 | With either anger contempt or sadness

00:16:12.120 | You've made such amazing or you know, it orchestrates such amazing seminal works

00:16:16.880 | During peak cinema something Friedberg Sachs and I grew up in

00:16:21.680 | Defined, you know a lot of the way we look at art and now it feels like it's lost in many ways

00:16:27.400 | I'm curious when you see people making things with generative AI

00:16:31.000 | What happens to your heart and to your mind?

00:16:34.920 | It's a great question Jason and I'll tell you why first of all

00:16:40.520 | Streaming is basically destroyed the legacy business. You've probably all seen in the press

00:16:45.160 | What's going on with Paramount where the Ellison's have purchased the company at a price?

00:16:50.080 | That's probably 20% of what it used to be

00:16:53.040 | It was one of the great seven horsemen of the entertainment business business

00:16:58.720 | I was talking to David about and Jason earlier

00:17:01.840 | There's the entertainment business went from a you get paid upfront and then you get a piece of the profits

00:17:09.400 | So since streamings come you get paid up front

00:17:12.000 | There are no profits your products in the ether your books in the ether your songs in the ether

00:17:18.000 | Music is a little better because thanks to Daniel Eck. Everybody gets a royalty, but it's very different than it used to be

00:17:25.280 | So streaming has destroyed

00:17:27.960 | The business that I grew up and it's why I wanted to get out of the entertainment business. You could see it coming

00:17:33.640 | secondly, I

00:17:37.360 | Think that the if you look past that and you look to AI right now

00:17:44.480 | It's bittersweet

00:17:47.280 | The things that can be done are mind-boggling. We just saw a slight example

00:17:51.640 | I'm involved with a company out of Germany with three

00:17:56.240 | Young PhDs from the University of Heidelberg. They have just released their first product

00:18:03.920 | Of text-to-video. I've never seen anything like this in my life

00:18:08.680 | visually

00:18:10.880 | You can say what you want and it shows up and I mean, it's perfect

00:18:15.880 | The technology is staggering and I've seen every one of them for obvious reasons

00:18:22.720 | the people that work in this community and

00:18:26.240 | 250,000 people in Los Angeles make their living in the media business

00:18:33.760 | They are all afraid of one thing and that is are they going to have a job or be able to work?

00:18:41.000 | So if you talk to a production designer

00:18:44.300 | the man or woman

00:18:46.880 | who comes up and draws and designs every shot so they can light it and figure out continuity and

00:18:53.560 | Who's wearing what and what they're gonna shoot so they can get their two minutes of film in?

00:19:00.200 | 12 hours because that's what you get you work to 12 hours a day. You get two minutes of usable footage. I

00:19:07.360 | Am working on a project right now with Netflix and a production designer I am

Michael Ovitz | All-In Summit 2024

Chapters