Michael Ovitz

“There's a line, this is tied to a line that that Ovid said to me where he says, only founders understand founders.”

“Mark Andreessen, who actually modeled his venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, on what Ovitz did at CAA, had a very similar line, and this is the way he describes what I feel is the same exact phenomenon.”

“Mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.”

“He winds up brokering like multiple billion dollar deals. I think one of them was like six and a half billion dollars. No, again, no other, none of his other competitors, no other agent was doing this.”

“Retirement is lame. Retirement is fatal. You need something to push forward and focus on and improve every single day.”

“If you have picked partners that don't have the same ambition levels of you and you try to do new things, like all the things I just listed, you're actually also going to be criticized by insiders, which are people inside your company, your co-founders. I mean…”

“Within the first 10 years of CAA, 10 years after founding the company, they had like something like 75% market share. Of, you know, his industry.”

“Work 10% less. Optimize for the long term.”

“Cause you know, he had read about the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's and the Ford, but he thought it was an edge to introduce people to other incredible founders that very few people have heard of”

“One of the innovations he had was decide the decision that, Hey, we're all going to service every single agent inside of CA is going to service the clients together. We, it's essentially like a giant swarm of agents where in the past, you know, you were assig…”

“With no papers to renew, our clients had no anniversary to jog them into thinking about leaving us.”

“He says, they sent me a check for ten million for the ads. I returned the check with a post-it note attached. Hey, let's discuss this. We did, and they wind up talking to the people at Coca-Cola. I was friendly but unrelenting, and they finally sent me a new c…”

“Ghostbusters became the second biggest film of the year, grossing more than two hundred and ninety five million dollars. As our clients collected our clients collectively got 30% of the gross, and they get 10% of that, so that means CIA gets three percent of t…”

“They handed me a colossal check to distribute as I saw fit, a hundred and thirty five million dollars. After paying the bankers and all the consultants, I was left with sixty million dollars for CAA, which would be about a hundred and ten million today.”

“Nothing in Hollywood is anything until it's something, and the only way to make it something is with a profound display of belief. If you keep insisting that a shifting set of possibilities is a movie, it eventually becomes one. I think that is just like a com…”

“I see now that I could have worked as much as 20% less, and it wouldn't have cost me. If I worked even 10% less across 30 years, that's three extra whole years of life.”

“We would poach people by assumption. We would behave as if we were the client's agent already, and make their dreams happy, and then they would sign.”

“After copying the scripts in bulk, we slapped on bright red covers with white CIA logo and planted hundreds of them in beauty parlors, restaurants, and doctors offices.”

“We've grown so big enough that we were able to package movies with multiple clients, which was a common practice in television, but not in film. Nobody was doing this in film. CAA was the first to orchestrate the entire development process.”

“I think it was within, like, the first 10 years of founding of CAA, and they had, like, a 75% market share of their entire industry”