The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 10 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ovitz: Golden Age Hollywood moguls were far more ruthless than CAA
“If you go back to the moguls of the thirties, forties, and fifties, the mayors, the Thalbergs, the Harry Cones, the Jack Warners of Warner Brothers, William Fox, you know, founded Fox Studios. These guys were tough as nails. They took no prisoners. They made u…”
Ovitz: CAA's culture ate Hollywood just like a16z's ate venture capital
“Our culture ate the entertainment business. It just did, and so did the Andreessen Horowitz culture.”
Horowitz: a16z adopted CAA's organizational design and culture for venture capital
“It was one of organizational design culture and things that turned out we'd use in venture capital.”
Ovitz: CAA could not have succeeded using a less aggressive approach
“Someone asked me the other day, do you think you could have done it differently in the day? And I don't think that we could have because we were in a cutthroat business to start with.”
Chris Lyons: Andreessen Horowitz was modeled after CAA's service model
“The firm was actually built off Of CAA's model, and Ovitz was on the board of Mark and Ben's company, and so that's where they originally got the idea for A-sixteen Z and having a service-based model”
Andreessen: CAA served as the structural blueprint for founding a16z
“When we had to find a historical model for what we were doing, it turned out to be CAA, because that, that just mapped much more to what we had in mind, because there hadn't been a precedent like that applied in the Valley.”
Horowitz: a16z calls all employees partners, a practice borrowed from CAA
“Everybody here we refer to as partner, that was taken from CAA. We got a lot of criticism of that early, but it worked well because we're in the services industry, and look, if you're representing the firm, you are a partner.”
Ovitz: Steven Spielberg committed to direct Jurassic Park within 12 hours
“We give it to Steven Spielberg. He calls The next morning at six a.m. And says, I'm doing this after reading it. That's unheard of for a director of that stature to commit in 12 hours to it.”
Horowitz: CAA became the world's top talent agency within 15 years
“The fact that he was able to create, by far, the most successful talent agency in the world, 15 years after starting, 75 years after vaudeville, is an impossible business story.”
Ovitz: Under 25 companies controlled global media when CAA was founded
“Anything that you would read or see or hear was controlled by under 25 companies around the world. You had four television networks in the United States. You had seven motion picture studios that had all the distribution, and without that, you couldn't get you…”