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 19 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: The lens for evaluating tech founders and creative artists is identical
“Nothing. I had founders start with an idea, and usually nothing else. Let's put off to the side a technical founder who may have come up with a fabulous algorithm that no one else has, but he still has to have an idea for it. What's he gonna do with it? What's…”
CAA secured private school admissions for clients' children through agency donations
“One of the things we pioneered at CA was We literally service the clients on everything. They wanted to buy a house. We helped them. They wanted to buy a car. We knew all the dealers. They wanted to get their kids into private schools. We had contributed to th…”
Ovitz confirms James B. Stewart's DisneyWar accurately portrays his Disney tenure
“I mean, they wrote a book about it called Disney Wars, and it's quite accurate. Jim Stewart is not a guy that Writes things that aren't true in anything he does, and it just didn't turn out the way I thought it was going to turn out.”
Ovitz: European business culture causes failed founders to hide in embarrassment
“And in Europe, if they fail, they're embarrassed, and they go hide.”
CAA disrupted Hollywood by proactively packaging talent rather than waiting
“We weren't going to wait for offers. We were going to aggressively try to put things together and package which hadn't been done, and we'd never let anything go out that wasn't surrounded with like-minded creative people.”
Ovitz: Service professionals must keep clients at arm's length, not be friends
“I used to preach to all of our people to not think their clients were their friends and to treat them appropriately at arm's length and don't Confide in your personal life. They don't want to hear it. They may tell you they do, but they're not interested. Plus…”
Ovitz: Relationships with corporate executives and counterparties are purely transactional
“I'm just talking about with other executives and things like that. They're transactional. And people you're on the other side of the fence from, people that run companies, they're not real. They're usury.”
Ovitz: CAA operated with no corporate titles or vice presidents
“There are no politics in this company. It's an egalitarian group. We didn't have officers. There were no vice presidents. I didn't have a title. No one had a title. We're all agents.”
CAA secured jobs for fired studio executives who helped them early on
“We also kept a list of executives that got fired, and the executives that helped us At the first five years of the company, we're given priority for jobs, and we got every one of them a job. Every one who got fired who helped us when we had nothing.”
Ovitz relentlessly calls people up to ten times until they answer
“If I call you and you don't call me back, you'll hear from me in a couple hours, and you'll hear from me 10 times till I get you on the phone. And I have no ego about it. I don't play this stupid game that a lot of my friends play.”
Ovitz ruthlessly purges unhelpful contacts from his calendar every Sunday
“Every Sunday, I review my calendar from the prior week, and I carry forward Those that I enjoyed and want to meet again. I carry forward people that I made money with. I carry forward people I learned something with. And I delete people that I found irritating…”
Ovitz: Only three Treville Capital employees are over age 32
“I think at the company, there's three people over 32, and I'm one of them.”
Ovitz caps all investor and pitch meetings at exactly 20 minutes
“I don't like the meetings to go more than 20 minutes. I tell them up front. I don't book an hour. I like to give people back what I call bonus time, and I say that at the end of every Zoom. I don't do long phone calls”
Ovitz: CAA represented every single cast member on Saturday Night Live
“We represented every single person on that show, and everyone thought we were nuts, because in those days, if you did TV, you couldn't get a movie.”
Ovitz: Stripe's Collison brothers are two of the smartest founders he has met
“He and his brother, John, are two of the smartest guys I've ever met, and a lot smarter than me.”
CAA enforced a same-day mandatory response rule on internal written notes
“There are cards with your name on it, and the system was, if I wrote you a note, and it was hand delivered by someone in the mail room on your desk, it had to be answered by the end of the day.”
Ovitz: CAA and Andy Grove founded Intel Media Lab in 1992
“In 1992, I was lucky enough to meet a guy named Andy Grove, who was the co-founder of Intel, and we created the CA Intel Media Lab in Beverly Hills to educate the secular head-in-the-sand entertainment business about what was coming around the corner.”
Ovitz: Record label CEOs rejected 1990s warning that physical media would vanish
“I told three of the five record companies I consulted for that all their packaged goods were going to disappear, because Nathan Mirvold, who is the smartest guy, was employee number three at Microsoft, was CTO, said to me in a meeting one day in the nineties, …”