#53 Who Is Michael Ovitz?

What I learned from reading Who Is Michael Ovitz? by Michael Ovitz. ---- Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first give a gift [0:01] Michael's first jobs + finding his first love [7:02] the foul-mouthed magnates [19:49] starting at the bottom / being hungry for knowledge [24:50] I don't want to be standard in any way [32:30] the revolt begins and the founding of CAA [36:05] know the history of the industry you are in [46:30] a warning for all entrepreneurs [53:44] what influenced CAA's culture [59:27] becoming the thing you hate [1:02:10] a typical day's schedule [1:07:00] problems with co-founders [1:11:30] the fastest animal on the field [1:15:13] I was tired / The end of Michael Ovitz's time at CAA [1:19:15] Ron is gone [1:25:07] a new beginning / meeting Marc Andreessen [1:32:00] reconciliation [1:38:00] ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  I always told our agents, "Make your clients think they're your friends, but remember that they're not." Yet it would be my clients who would stay loyal, for the most part, and my friends who would betray me. Jay Maloney, the agent I thought of as a son and as my eventual successor, would join the agency's posse of young Turks who disowned me after I left CAA. Michael Eisner, my great friend who ran Disney, would hire me as his number two, then publicly humiliate me and fire me after 14 months. And Ron Meyer, the blood brother I started CAA with, would leave to take a big job at Universal after I'd negotiated for both of us to go there,

• 0:45David Senra?

  and then disparage me all over town for 20 years. I made it my life's work to understand people, to grasp what made them tick. I'd been certain that I was too wary to misplace my trust and too smart to be duped. So I'd like to think that these betrayals were random and flagrantly unwarranted, and that I was the victim of some perverse instinct that destroys all human intimacy. I'd like to think that the problem was just that the tools and strategies I'd used to get to the top inevitably created resentment, even among those who shared in my success.

• 1:28David Senra?

  That everyone hates a winner. That just because I sought money and power and intimidated everyone to get them, it didn't change me. But I did change, of course. "Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first give a gift." Okay, so that is from the prologue of the book.

• 1:54David Senra?

  That I want to talk to you about today, which is "Who is Michael Ovitz?" by Michael Ovitz. So this book is going to be probably a little different from what we normally discuss. So yeah, we're going to cover his early life. We're going to cover what made him want to become an entrepreneur. We're going to cover some of the strategies that he used. But a lot of this book is what he's discussing here in the prologue, mistakes. He's very honest and open about the mistakes he made. And it almost all comes down to not really business mistakes, but mistakes with people, which I find so fascinating. And I think what I'm saying now will make more sense once, once we get towards the

• 2:36David Senra?

  end of the podcast too, and you see kind of the whole arc. Okay, so before we jump into the book, just a few things I want to go over with you. First of all, my name is David. Welcome to Founders, if this is your first time listening. The concept of this podcast is pretty straightforward. Every week I read a biography or an autobiography of an entrepreneur and I just share the ideas that I learned that I thought were interesting. This is not meant to be a review or a summary of the book by any means, just things that I wanted to remember for myself. So a lot of times when I'm reading, I make a lot of highlights and then notes as well. So then I can go back later and remember everything I learned. And if you're interested in getting this book after you listen to this podcast, or

• 3:20David Senra?

  if you want to see any of the, I think we're up to like 50 books now that we've covered so far through the podcast, a great way to do that is go to amazon.com/chop/founderspodcast. Not only will you see all the books I've done in the past, but you'll also see that book, next week's book early, because a lot of, a few of you have emailed saying you wanted to make this kind of like a book club. So that's a way to do that. The second thing is if you want to get in touch with me, this is another idea I got directly from you guys.

• 3:52David Senra?

  Best way to get in touch with me is just you can use, you can find me on Twitter. It's @DavidSundar1 and I'll leave obviously the links and everything I talk about in the show notes and at founderspodcast.com.

• 4:05David Senra?

  Oh, the show also has its own Twitter feed. And this Twitter feed, I just publish quotes from past podcasts that I like or that I want to remember and that's @founderspodcast. And last but not least, in addition to taking a lot of notes and highlights on books, on entrepreneurship, I take a lot of notes and highlights on podcasts about entrepreneurship, specifically directly from entrepreneurs' own brains. So if you want to get on my private email list and you want to see those notes, you can do that at foundersnotes.co. Okay, so I want to jump back into the book and this, I think it's going to be a little

• 4:45David Senra?

  bit more chaotic than our normal, like the normal podcasts that I do. And so I'm just going to jump around. Some of these are entire stories that I found interesting and some are just random quotes or random ideas. I would say this more so than most other books is going to follow more of like a barbell effect where I'm going to spend a lot of time, most of the podcast is going to be about his early life, then his early first few jobs and then starting the company. And then, once that gets up to be successful, I skip over a bunch of that because in general, I'm just more interested in how things are started, not how they're run once they are successful. And then, we're going to get, spend a lot of time in the end of the book where he's

• 5:28David Senra?

  going to deal with a lot of regrets and like I just read in the prologue, a lot of betrayals. And there's just a lot of lessons. Mike's going to teach us a lot of lessons, I don't know about business, but I think about, he's in his 70s when he's writing this book and I'm always fascinated by what people value and what they regret when they're near the end of their life. So we're going to learn a lot about that today. But first, I found this, this few sentences in the prologue that I found, I just want to remember. So I want to share this with you real quick. And this is the importance of having a profound sense of belief and how you basically start, create something from nothing. And so, he's going to use Hollywood because that's the industry that he was in, but I think this applies to nearly everything, business or otherwise.

• 6:11David Senra?

  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 incoherent incoherent possibilities is a movie, it eventually becomes one.

• 6:33David Senra?

  Okay, so I'm gonna skip ahead and I wanna just jump. I'm gonna, I'm gonna jump right into his early life, his first jobs, and then finding his first love. And this just, this takes place over a few pages. And I think it's kind of a way to lay the foundation to kind of understand Mike and why he is the way he is. And don't get mistaken, he's a very, very controversial figure. Okay, so it says, "My dad's dream was to open his own liquor store. You need to be in charge of your destiny," he drummed into me. "It's no good working for somebody else. While I love my father, I hated his boxed-in life.

• 7:16David Senra?

  Like many who had grown up in hard times, he feared risk. My mother's mother," this is interesting, he calls her Sarah. This is his grandmother, but he never refers to her as that. He just calls her Sarah. I don't know if there's, if we should read into that or not. "My mother's mother, Sarah, was a blunt, blunt-spoken widow who lived with us for years. She paid attention to me and seemed to think I was special. She was my second mother, and I felt horribly conflicted when she'd tell me, 'You can be better than your father.'" "Sarah kept dosing me with this poison until I was 14, when my father finally kicked her out of the house. By then, her incantations, a dark version of the immigrant's creed

• 8:00David Senra?

  that in America you could be anything you want, had cast their spell. Instead of trying to emulate my father, a kind and loving man, I would be what Sarah expected of me. I would succeed at all costs." She was depressed, of course, sunk in her own miseries. So I'd save her by taking extraordinarily, extraordinary measures to reward her faith in me." So first of all, there's a few things going on here.

• 8:29David Senra?

  I like how he diagnosed, he's like, "Well, she's obviously miserable because she spends her entire time," and I'm skipping over a bunch of this. She just basically talks crap about everybody. She's a perpetually unhappy person, which is really weird when you factor into this is who was paying the most attention to Mike when he was younger. But also this thing, what he talks about, he's like, "I'm gonna, instead of being a nice and loving man, I'm going to succeed at all costs." I'll tell you right now, which was something I didn't know when I was reading these words to begin with, I'm pretty sure he almost comes out and admits as much, but he definitely infers that this was not the right route

• 9:09David Senra?

  for his life. There's a lot of darkness in this book. Not only between like the way these people treat each other in the industry, which is pathetic, but like, he says, and I'm gonna read a bunch of these sections to you, but he talks about losing his humanity over and over again. And I've read a lot of autobiographies of entrepreneurs for this podcast. A lot of them are written around the same age he is, somewhere around the 60s and 70s. You have people like Sam Walton or Phil Knight reflecting back in their lives. There's never been as much darkness as in this book. So make of that what you will. Alright, so he says, "Now we're gonna jump into some of his first jobs, and one

• 9:53David Senra?

  thing I admire about Mike is, you know, he had a fantastic, fantastic work ethic that you even see from a young age." He says, "At nine, I got a paper route and raced my Schwinn bike through the neighborhood. Then I asked for a second route, cutting my free time to the bone." So it's funny, he mentions when he meets his wife later on that she liked, she described the way his lifestyle as squeezing the very last drop out of a tooth of toothpaste. That he would, he never liked to waste any time. And I'll share with you his schedule later on, which is, which is pretty extreme. So he says, "I was a head shorter than my classmates and annoyingly curious, so I was bullied in elementary school.

• 10:35David Senra?

  My father had saved me from older bullies once in the stairway of our building back in Chicago. But he wasn't around at recess or in the deadly hours right after school let out, when it was open season on outliers. I absolutely hated that feeling of powerlessness, of cowering and being craven and hoping just to pass unnoticed. I couldn't bear it." And we're gonna see a little bit of, which is interesting here is, you kind of become what you hate. And he even makes that statement later on. Because he becomes somewhat of a bully, somewhat of a person that's comfortable

• 11:13David Senra?

  with violence, which is again, something that is left out of a lot of the books that we read, but we know is kind of a part of life. And again, I think is a regret of his now. Okay, so he says, "I always stood out academically, even if none of my teachers took particular notice or encouraged me. I read everything I could, but my favorites were biographies of successful men. Andrew Carnegie, Winston Churchill, Nathan Rothschild." If anybody has a way to get in touch with Mike, you should send him the link to Founder's Podcast. "I also did a lot of drawing and model making. I wasn't a gifted draftsman or builder, but I'd construct model boats and planes in my room

• 11:57David Senra?

  and entertain dreams of commanding flotillas and squadrons." So that's something that he puts into real life and we'll get into like how he used history and other influences to build a culture of CA, which I found particularly fascinating. Now we're gonna get into how he finds his first love. "At nine, I discovered motion pictures. Four blocks from my house, behind a chain link fence and a security shack, sat a place of mystery. The back lot of RKO Pictures, the studio owned by Howard Hughes. The first time I eluded the watchman and snuck through a hole in the fence, I came upon another world. Mounds of lighting equipment, cameras, microphones, cables, and rows and rows upon

• 12:39David Senra?

  of false-fronted buildings, from old western towns to gritty urban streets. Hundreds of actors in makeup, cowboys, Indians, policemen, spacemen, and hundreds more people in the street clothes who peered through lenses, strung lights, hammered and hauled, and ran about until director yelled, 'Action.'"

• 12:58David Senra?

  I was hooked. My parents desperately wanted me to become a doctor, but movies became my obsession. I loved Fort Apache, I guess that's the name of a movie. An RKO western about the cavalry and a great leader who overrules an incompetent one. I became obsessed with building forts and with the Spartan idea of the phalanx, the battle formation in which you're only as strong as the guy on your left. I was also impressed by an Errol Flynn western. There's a lot of names in the book. I'll tell you when the names are important to remember, most of them are not. And a lot of them I just straight up omit. I mean, this guy had, there's probably 500 different names in this book.

• 13:41David Senra?

  Okay, so it's an Errol Flynn western where he drew a line in the dirt during a mutiny and said, "You're either with me or against me." That formulation, "You're totally in or totally out," became my mantra. It helped me enormously later, and it hurt me in equal measure because it didn't allow for shades of gray. Most of life turns out to be shades of gray. Okay, so now you're starting to see what I mean. We're still in the first chapter of the book. And you're gonna see, he's gonna tell us like these ideas that he thinks are valuable, but you're gonna hear this, a lot of this, where it's like, "Damn, I messed up here. This is a mistake I made. I wish I didn't do that."

• 14:24David Senra?

  And you know, that's something, it's not really something you want to see in a human life. Like, I think you should look up to people in the sense that you can learn from them, but you gotta apply these lessons like in your own way. And I just can't help but feel, well, right before I got to the last like two chapters of the book, I'm like, "Oh my God, I can't turn this into a podcast." It's like, gets a little depressing here. I wonder if this guy is even happy. There is a better ending towards the end. He does actually find an industry that seems to be more...

• 14:59David Senra?

  Like in line with, with being a human and not just being a ruthless cutthroat like the Hollywood agent industry was in the seventies and eighties. Okay, and it probably still is today. Um, okay, so we're still back into, uh, he's still working during high school. He says, "By then I was working eight hour shifts as a box boy at a neighborhood Piggly Wiggly. I was working 4pm until midnight, saving toward a car and college and thinking about my future." Um, I'm skipping over this part, but he got, he figured out a way to become student body president and he fit, after initially failing, he, he learned some tricks that were, basically he, he, he learned by how to network and how to expand his circle and how to get people to like him. Which is also something I found a little unbecoming because he describes himself multiple times as like a chameleon.

• 15:45David Senra?

  And, um, maybe that's what you had to do in, in his business. I just find that people that don't have any sense of self are people I try to avoid. "Being student body president made it, made me a member of the Encino Rotary Club. So I met months, uh, once a month with the Rotarians, which I guess are members of this club. They were car dealers and insurance agents who made something of themselves. They were no smarter or more hardworking than my dad, but they had something he lacked: a college degree. That had given them options and now they compose the local power structure. But I didn't want to just be part of a local power structure. Eight miles from where I grew up stood the mansions of Beverly Hills. I'd stare at them as we drove to family dinners.

• 16:30David Senra?

  That was when I began to hate the valley." The valley is where, uh, where he grew up in, that, the section of Los Angeles that he grew up in. Okay, so he's saying, "I hate the valley which lacked museums, institutions and a cultural center. Any real stimulus for my brain. In the valley, people grew up carrying a football under their arms. I wish I had grown up in New York where people grew up carrying a newspaper. This grudge against my surroundings, the sense that I had been raised in the wrong nest, like a cuckoo's egg, fueled me when I began my working life." And this is, I think, really important when you talk about like the motivations, like what, what, um, what is the fuel that, that caused you to be such a driven person to, to want to start a company or to want to succeed in whatever endeavor? And he says,

• 17:15David Senra?

  I always felt one step inferior to the people around me and one step superior. I wasn't as creative or cultured as they were, but I was a lot smarter and more hardworking than most of them. Insecurity and ambition make a powerful cocktail. So after finding that studio by his house, he develops a way to get a job as one of the tour guides. Like if you go to a Hollywood set, they give tours of all the shows being produced and the soundstage and etc. So this is what he was doing back in, I think this is in the early 70s now.

• 17:58David Senra?

  He says, he's gonna make some important points here that I agree with wholeheartedly. "The other guides worked from 9 to 6, but I came at 7 each morning and stayed until 9 at night. Universal owned the last full-fledged working lot," that's the company he's working for, "and I walked its 400 acres end to end," which, interesting, he almost becomes the CEO of Universal about 20 years later. "I read and reread and underlined my studio guide as if I were cramming for a final, writing out lists of questions for executives and technicians and keeping a notebook full of the answers. At the end of each interview, I arranged to come back to observe. I had carte blanche at the busiest film and television studio in the world and I was

• 18:41David Senra?

  getting paid for it. What I learned at Universal, the way glorious films blossom out of an intricate mesh of mundane practicalities, enthrawls me still." So what he's talking about there is, from an outsider's perspective, like, the end product of what these studios are making are exciting, people all over the world want to pay money to go see them, but yet if you look at a day-to-day, what he calls an intricate mesh of mundane practicalities, it doesn't look like anything special is happening. But with the magic of coordinated effort and enough time, you can actually produce something magical from something that's mundane. And this is the part that... That I wholeheartedly agree with. And he makes, I've never heard it put this way, and I love how he discusses it.

• 19:26David Senra?

  He says, "I was a great guide because I believed in the product. By eighteen," which is his age at the time, "I'd absorbed a basic rule for success. Love what you do," and this is especially a great point. "Too many people fight their job, a battle they cannot win."

• 19:48David Senra?

  Okay, so during this time, he gets to observe in real life what we're kind of trying to do

• 19:56David Senra?

  with the podcast. And so, this, the note I left myself is the foul-mouthed magnates. And there's a lot of these guys I've heard of before, the people that started studios way back in the day. And I'll eventually get around to reading some of their biographies. But he's, he's interacting with them, with them up close. And there's one in particular that he's trying to learn from. So he says, "Some of us valley kids followed the studios like boys in New York tracked the Yankees. I wasn't interested in the stars, but in the process of making pictures and in the people who were truly responsible. All the foul-mouthed magnates who founded the modern film business were fascinating. Harry Cone, Louis B. Meyer, Jack Warner, William Fox.

• 20:39David Senra?

  But the one who interested me the most, in part because I worked at his studio and in part because he had the most far-reaching ideas, was Lew Wasserman." Okay, so this is a name you're gonna have to remember. He's a really important part of this story. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about him now, but

• 20:58David Senra?

  he winds up hating, Lew Wasserman winds up hating Mike later on in life. "Lew built the town's paramount talent agency. His rules were simple. Tend to the client, dress appropriately, divulge no information about MCA. MCA is the company that he founded. Do your homework and never leave the office without returning every phone call."

• 21:22David Senra?

  Cornering the market on movie stars, Lou swung decisive leverage to the talent and their representatives and helped finish off the old studio system. Now, that's an important sentence because Mike literally does the same exact thing 20 years later. He talks about being the difference between the buyers, basically being a pain in the ass for the buyers. So, the buyers are the studios and he winds up representing the sellers and increasing the prices that the sellers make and as a consequence of that, the buyers have to pay. So, this is going to make him a lot of enemies. Later, he brought the Paramount library of old films when no one thought it was worth a dime. MCA was everywhere, packaging a huge number of TV shows and taking up to 75% of their production costs.

• 22:06David Senra?

  The company's reach was so vast, it became known as the octopus. It's funny, interesting throughout, there's something about human nature that people that didn't know each other are separated by vast distances and time comes up with this, can come up with the same ideas. This idea of calling a company the octopus, do you remember when I did the podcast on the Banana King? Sam Zemurray? Remember, the company he started to fight? The company he was fighting, I think it was called United Fruit. I don't have it in front of me, hopefully I'm remembering it correctly. They, that's how the United Fruit was described. They were described as the octopus. Same situation for Lou's company.

• 22:47David Senra?

  And Lou stays in power for a very, very long time, up until, I think he's in his 70s and he actually gets bought out through a deal that Mike is actually going to broker. So, their paths are going to cross again. And at the time, but what's fascinating and inspiring to me is, at the time, Mike is working for Lou at the bottom rung. He's just somebody on Lou's lot, giving guides. And he actually gives a guide to Lou and a guest one day.

• 23:17David Senra?

  Okay. So, something I love about Mike and a lot of these stories that we cover is they, a lot of them, they have traits that are very common. And so, one, a lot of them start from the bottom, meaning bottom of organization, or maybe not with a lot of resources, and yet, and they're all really, really hungry for knowledge. And so, I'm gonna skip to when he has already graduated school, and he's like, "Okay, I need an in to the movie industry." So, he decides to go work for a company that is still in existence today, it's relatively well-known, it's the agency William Morris. And what's fascinating to me about, having finished this book now, is he starts at the bottom of William Morris, eventually works his way up to the point where he's gonna gain enough confidence to go on his own.

• 24:01David Senra?

  The exact same thing happens in his company. He finds himself at the top of the industry, and then there's young, aggressive people at the bottom that are eventually, tales of oldest time, that are eventually gonna want the power that Mike possesses, and they basically take it from him. Okay. But, we're not there yet, so let's start when he's just at the beginning of his career. So, one thing I must say, he was extremely successful at, he was in charge, eventually worked his way up and was in charge of the touring, the studio tours, and he was making $600 a week. And this was in 19, I'm sorry, I said 1970s, it was in 1960s. So, um, which is a lot of money. His dad made $400 a week, and he was making this much money at like, I think 19-years-old,

• 24:45David Senra?

  20-years-old, something around there. And what he's gonna do is rather drastic, when you factor in how much money he was making. He's gonna get, agree to get a job at $75 a week. Okay. So, it says, "Almost everyone at William Morris started in the company's mailroom. After a year or two, trainees were sent to secretary of school for shorthand or speed writing. They came back," so now he's gonna describe for us, like, the basic hierarchy, the path that you're supposed to follow if you wanna succeed at this company, and the path that he deliberately circumvents. "They came back as agent secretary, and if they did well at that, they became an assistant, then a junior agent, and then finally a senior agent." It could take three years to become a junior agent and four more to start signing your own clients as a senior agent.

• 25:29David Senra?

  And more than 80% of the trainees washed out along the way. The way you got ahead at WMA was nepotism. Everybody was somebody's nephew. It was an old, soft, corrupt place. I didn't know anybody, so I needed another way to stand out. I told the head of personnel, "I have a proposition for you. I think I can learn all I need to know to become an agent in 120 days." Okay, so instead of waiting three to four years, he says, "I can do that in four months. If I can't, I'll give you back everything you paid me." I was aging, aging to, okay, so this word's in the book. So, "agenting him."

• 26:12David Senra?

  So, it's the, it's basically being an agent before he's an agent. I was agent, agenting, oh my goodness. Okay, you know what I'm trying to say. And he knew it. He broke out laughing. "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard," he said. "But I'm going to hire you. You start Monday." Oh, I was wrong about the salary. It's actually, he said, "My salary would be $55 a week." So, even less. Okay. I said, "I'd like to start tomorrow." I showed up at 7:00, two hours early, to learn my way around the building. So, there's more of that drive and initiative. People came to rely on me. So, he talks about ingratiating himself into the structure and start to, just going around doing favors to everybody. And as a result, he did this because then eventually what started out as something that he was doing voluntarily, they, he kind of understood human nature very, very young,

• 26:57David Senra?

  too. They would eventually come to rely on that and then he could use that as leverage. So, they came to rely on me and raised my salary to $75 a week. I was embarrassed by the low pay. Embarrassed that I could take Judy, this is his wife, out only to cheaper, to cheap restaurants. But Judy gave me the line I would use later when I recruited people to entry-level jobs at CAA. "You're investing in your life." I despised the mailroom, but I fell in love with the world it served. Working for William Morris was a means to an end. To get close to our creative clients, the people who did things I could not do myself.

• 27:37David Senra?

  And we're gonna see, you know, he had this early ambition. He says, "I aspired to build my own company someday, but that was in the distant future." And on the very next page, he does something that's really, really smart. Remember, he has this unquenchable thirst for knowledge and understanding the industry, the industries, I should say, that he's operating in. So he said, remember, this is way before computers, like, personal computers. "We had a file room the length of a basketball court. It was lined with steel cabinets, the hard drives of the era, all packed with 70 years' worth of vanilla folders. I viewed those files as an encyclopedia of entertainment." And then, this is how, again, he starts doing favors for people so he can get access, something he does his entire career.

• 28:21David Senra?

  So he says, "I helped the woman who ran the file room," her name's Mary, "and I brought her little gifts, a box of candy or a scarf. One day, I said, 'You know, I'd love to read some of those files.' She told me to make myself at home. Within a week, she was letting me stay on after she left. Then, she gave me the key." "While other trainees waited to be told what to do and read..."

• 28:45David Senra?

  Excuse me, "While other trainees waited to be told what to do and read and learn, I entered Mary's domain each morning at 7:00 a.m. and every evening after work. For 10 weeks, I made my way from A to Z through the client files and the network and studio deals. I jotted down questions for Sam Sacks, who was the head of Television Legal Affairs, who was charmed by my interest and lent me a tape of a talk he'd given at USC on contract law and entertainment." So this is a precursor to a podcast, huh? "I played it at home and came back with more questions. He gave me nine more tapes." So that's just a fascinating thing.

• 29:24David Senra?

  This talks, I think this demonstrates something that I've come to know very well, is like, the value of compression. He basically learned the key ideas of 70 years of entertainment history in two and a half months. And then, didn't stop there. Okay, so... This guy Sam kind of takes him under his wing. He has this idea where he's like, okay, Sam, I know Sam's schedule because Sam is real tight with the guy running the agency and he has the same schedule every day where he works till 6:30 and the guy that's running the agency, I forgot his name, that's not important, comes and asks him to go to dinner. So he goes to dinner and he comes back and finishes up a little work. So Mike would hang out, he'd be the only one in the office.

• 30:08David Senra?

  He'd set himself up in a cubicle so Sam would see that he's there. Then when Sam would inevitably come out of his office and be like, oh, I need help. Oh, no one's here. Can you do me a favor? And Mike's like, yeah, okay, cool. And he does this for a long time. So now he's jumped up. He surpassed everybody else he started with and now he's basically the right-hand person of the right-hand of the person running the company, if that makes sense. And this greatly accelerates how fast he's able to accomplish what he wants. And there's actually a, I just worked on another podcast that I'm doing for the Misfit feed, for the people that are supporting this podcast on a monthly basis, and it's titled, "There Is No Speed Limit."

• 30:53David Senra?

  It has nothing to do with Mike. It's somebody else that was hugely influential on me, but it's funny that like I see the same traits in Mike that you do in a lot of these entrepreneurs. He says, "After I started working for Sam, I conceived a new long-term goal. I wanted to run William Morris." So think about that. This guy has ambitions like the size of the moon. It's crazy. After seven, the reason I say that is not because that he couldn't accomplish it, but he's really young when he's doing this. He's only been in, first of all, he's what, 21, 22 years old and thinking, I'm going to run this place one day, which says a little bit about his personality. But two, he's only been there for a few months and you're going to see that now because he says, "After seven months at William Morris, when I was 22," okay, there's age, "I was

• 31:36David Senra?

  promoted to junior agent, a title so demeaning we'd do away with it at CAA. My pay doubled to $150 a week. Though my promotion came in record time, I'd missed my own deadline by three months." And this sentence is, I think, important to understand Mike because it feels like he's like running a race against an invisible clock. He says, "I felt like I had to catch up before the world got away from me."

• 32:04David Senra?

  He is not very satisfied. Somebody is going to be placated easily. He does it in record time, years before most people do, and yet he's still kinda mad about it. Um, okay, so I'm gonna skip over a lot of the stuff, because it's just like BS politics at William Morris. But I want to get to the part where he makes, he makes some good ideas about branding, um, not being standard in any way, and then we get the genesis of the thought of like, hey, I could, I could do this myself. What if I just start my own company? So, he's an agent right now for William Morris. He says, "You need a persona as an agent, something that made you unique. I had heard that Sam Cone, the famously rumpled New York agent, cut holes in his sweater to make them look moth eaten.

• 32:50David Senra?

  Sam's persona was the absent-minded genius. Ron," now Ron's a very important, um, name to remember. I referenced him at the intro. He's, I mean, he's gonna call him his best friend here. He's his best friend and the person he starts the company with, and also somebody that he feels betrayed him and they didn't talk for 20 years. Okay. "Sam's persona was the absent-minded genius. Ron was the best friend and confident, and confidant, the 'I'll fix all your problems' guy. I had given a lot of thought to my persona. There were three options. Number one was a standard agent, the smoocher, the glad-hander. But I didn't want to be standard in any way.

• 33:34David Senra?

  Number two, uh, was Leland Hayward, an absolute gent. Um, if a client wanted to leave, Leland would let her go without a word of protest or a hint of rancor. Everyone loved him. That was incredibly appealing, but I sensed that Leland's persona wasn't the right fit for me."

• 33:54David Senra?

  Believe it or not, in those days, I was affable and considerate, with never a bad word about anyone. But you need to pick a persona you can inhabit without strain. This kind of echoes what the quote that I always talk about that Ray Dalio talks about in his book, Principles, like you have to be who you are. But you need to pick a persona you can inhabit without strain. And I knew I would do better as the opposite of Ron, as the all-business tough guy who would protect you. I could see that that's what the biggest stars and directors wanted. So my persona became the all-make-your-dreams-come-true guy, mixed with the all-fix-your-problems guy. Ron was the good cop and I was the bad.

• 34:37David Senra?

  And then we're gonna, so we already see he's kind of going, gravitating towards the dark side, right? And then this, these sentences, which again, like, a lot of this stuff is obvious in retrospect, but I didn't understand it while I was reading the book, and I feel that that's common for a lot. Like, we talked about last week in the Republic of Tea, how they kept hinting, dropping little hints that, hey, I don't, like, you can't make an entrepreneur, you can't do the entrepreneur's job for them, he's gotta pick the business. Basically, Mel's advice to Bill, where there's all these hints that Mel was kind of like, hey, why are you taking so long? But now, in retrospect, like, you see it, he's developing the seeds of a narrative. Well, Mike is doing the same thing here. So he says, "Underneath the rules, though,

• 35:20David Senra?

  Ron and I were always more alike than even our colleagues realized." And this is the sentence I mean. "Ron's easygoing demeanor hit a personality as calculating and determined and tightly wound as mine." And I'm gonna share a lot of more details about that, which is kind of scary when you think about how, like, how Machiavellian human beings can be. "I'd played by the ru-, I had played by the rules of William Morris, and so far, it had worked. But I began to ask, what if? What if guys like Ron and me had more of a say? And then, what if we could run a company of our own?"

• 36:02David Senra?

  So now we're going to get into the revolt. It's a group of guys all at William Morris that are perpetually dissatisfied with the leadership, the decisions they're making. They feel that the new generation, all the older generations has the power and they're want to usurp that kingdom. And again, this is, what do we always talk about on this podcast? The reason that I feel history is so valuable in studying and understanding is because human, history doesn't repeat, human nature does. This exact same thing is going to happen by a group of young agents in Mike's own company to him. And it's going to happen next year and 10 years from now and 100 years from now. Okay, so one of their guys gets fired.

• 36:46David Senra?

  So they thought, this guy Phil, who I'm going to skip over it because it doesn't really pertain to our story, but I just want to tell you some background real quick. He got fired. They didn't think it was right. And they're like, hey, if they're going to fire, they could fire this guy. Basically, we're swimming naked out here. They could do that to us too. So said that lit the fuse. At dinner one night, Ron said, "Why don't we go into business for ourselves? We'll make more money and they'll never be able to do to us what they did to Phil." Ron was persuasive, but I felt conflicted. "I had more to gain by staying than Ron and more to lose by leaving." Seeing me hesitate, Ron said, "You have no gamble in you. Sometimes you have to step up and roll the dice." That got me thinking. I was 27.

• 37:31David Senra?

  If we busted in three years, I could land a new job and start over." So what he's saying is like, I have a limited downside and unlimited upside here. So I waited on three points. It seemed to me that we should take advantage of the fact that we were young and aggressive. We could try out new ideas that could reshape the ways the talented business. And so now they're generating, they're having these like secret meetings and they're coming, they're kind of outlining what the business would look like. First, the equity had to be split evenly. Second, we had to try to get as big as we could. Third, we'd share our clients and serve them as a group. No more turf wars, no silos. At William Morris, we had many an agent who excelled at signing artists, but stumbled in finding work for them. Wouldn't it be better, I said, if clients could rotate freely within our firm?

• 38:16David Senra?

  We would be five Musketeers, one for all and all for one. Everyone would handle everyone and everyone would tell our clients the truth. It was standard procedure in the agency business when a client called with unpleasant news or a dangerous rumor. I hear him getting fired off the film, for example. The agent would then say, "Don't worry, I know all about it and it's fine." Even if this is the first they'd heard of it. We would pioneer the calm, no bullshit approach, saying instead, "Let me look into it and I'll get right back to you." We'd be better agents because we wouldn't agent you. The other thing that would differentiate us, and it was a big one,

• 38:58David Senra?

  was that we would create work for our clients, not just field offers. Everyone agreed and suddenly their revolt felt real. This is a genius idea they have, actually. I don't know how they actually start drumming up and creating their own work. And then they package like the raw materials needed for a film or a TV show with the talent needed, with the directors, and then sell the entire package to the movie studios. It's actually a really, really good idea.

• 39:27David Senra?

  Um, let's see. Okay, so they jump, I'm just gonna read this, this, this, um, this sentence so you understand what's happening here. And even though CAA is still around today and it winds up being a giant, giant company, uh, you know, I always reference that, that famous quote that all, like, all things that are large start from small, the Jeff Bezos quote about, you know, an oak tree was at once an acorn. So it says, "CAA was a prototypical startup. We brought in folding chairs and card tables for desks, and our wives each came in one day a week to answer the phones. We had one paid assistant, a bookkeeper, and two cars among the five of us."

• 40:11David Senra?

  So they're young and lean and hungry.

• 40:19David Senra?

  Oh, you know what, I almost left this part out. I need to... Okay, this is actually a good idea. I didn't even... That would have been a mistake. Okay, so let me read this part to you.

• 40:30David Senra?

  Um, this is... So what happens is, uh, WMA is... William Morris is really, really mad because they took not only some of their agents, but they took some of the agents then convinced some of their clients to leave WMA for CAA. And so they said, um, they get a cease and desist letter shortly after. There's... This is when you start to see like a highlight of the kind of business, the industry they're in where they try to like hide who did it, but it was from a law firm that was really close to WMA. And they're saying, "Hey, you can't be called CAA because this other random company owns the trademark for something called artist agency." And so they were called Creative Artist Agency. And, um, they were talking about, like, this is serious trouble.

• 41:15David Senra?

  Like, if WMA has a lot of money, CAA has no money. If they shrugged it out in court, the fees would basically make CAA go bankrupt. They would basically die right as they were being born. So, um, this is when you start to see Mike is super, super aggressive. So he comes up with this idea and he's gonna bluff them. He said, "I drained... I drink... I drank a glass of water and cleared my throat. I needed to believe in what I was about to say, and my voice absolutely could not crack. I rang Leon Kaplan," and this is the lawyer that wrote them the letter. "He sounded arrogant, and why not?

• 41:59David Senra?

  He pegged CAA as weak and broke and defenseless." So it's funny, they were talking about Reddit... Give you some context before we jump into this. Some of the old studios and talent agencies were being probed by the Department of Justice for monopolistic practices at the time. Specifically, like, their contracts for TV.

• 42:20David Senra?

  So he says, "Mr. Kaplan," I said, "we haven't met, but I know who you represent. I think you're trying to put us out of business. I think it's inappropriate and unfair, and it could be really interesting if this went to the Justice Department in the middle of their antitrust investigation." My tone was firm, but matter of fact, I went on. "You can rip up this letter, and we can all be friends and forget about it. Or you can pursue it, and I will call a pal of mine who happens to work at the Justice Department, and I'll ask him to throw this into the hopper, and we'll see how it all sorts out." Dead silence. Then Kaplan said, "What are you suggesting?" It sounds like he just told you what he's suggesting. "I'm suggesting you send me a handwritten letter within the next two hours withdrawing the first letter, or tomorrow morning, I'll call my friend."

• 43:05David Senra?

  Then I thanked him and hung up. I gave no thought to the repercussions, or to the fact that I was bluffing, because we'd be out of business before the feds could get around to dealing with the call I'd never make anyway to a friend I didn't have. So it's all a lie. I played my hand as calmly as I could and waited for the outcome. Only after I'd hung up did I realize my hands were shaking. Time crawled by. Fifteen minutes before the deadline, a messenger arrived with a new letter from Kaplan. In the space of an afternoon, he'd moved from cease and desist to cease fire. That day forged our siege mentality. To defend our tiny position, we unleashed hell on anyone who crossed us.

• 43:49David Senra?

  For the rest of my time at CAA, I was a great friend and ally, but an implacable foe. When you're 28 years old, and you've quit your job, and there's no going back, and the industry leader tries to smother your baby in its cradle, you steel up pretty fast. Kaplan's letter taught us to play hardball, and hardball, we would play for the next 20 years. And this is just a random sentence that I thought was good advice on dealing with people. "I believe that nobody wants to be treated just as what they are. Everyone wants to feel encouraged to become even more than they are, to become the best version of themselves."

• 44:31David Senra?

  And this is a example of some great guerrilla marketing that CAA did when they basically had no money. So they need to get attention of actors and directors and writers. And this is part of their strategy about, instead of waiting for business to come along, let's make the raw goods of the business. And so it's soon we had 80 agents sending us novels and manuscript to be optioned by our producers and then to our screenwriters for adaptation. And this is the guerrilla marketing part. "After copying the scripts in bulk, we slapped on bright red covers with the white CAA logo and planted hundreds of them with scrawled notes and scuff marks for a used look in beauty parlors, restaurants, and doctors' offices.

• 45:16David Senra?

  Most had no chance of selling, and we didn't leave any really important screenplays lying around, but they generated free publicity. They helped establish our brand in our race against larger but less agile firms like William Morris and International Creative Management, referred to as ICM." And then the result is, in 1997, after two and a half years in which we'd netted nothing at all, each partner was able to make $80,000 out of our now profits. There's still five of them at this point. So slowly but surely, they're building their business and now they're generating a profit

• 45:59David Senra?

  so at least they know they're not going to go out of business in the immediate future. I'm going to skip ahead. I think this is extremely important. This is the value of knowing the history of the industry that you're operating in. So he says, "When we launched CAA, I had started a private project, one that took me nearly 10 years to complete. And the private project was watching every film that had won one of the five big category Oscars. I discovered why Gone with the Wind had passed the test of time and how Green Was My Valley hadn't. I learned the relationship between vision and craft. At the same time, I was boning up on the deal structure of movies and on which actors

• 46:44David Senra?

  and directors had currency. Film had its own language, and I needed to be bilingual."

• 46:56David Senra?

  And, okay, so this is a really good point about how can he turn a weakness into a strength. Remember, they're still, they're profitable, but they're still a tiny, tiny industry compared to some of the giants. So, um, this is how he tried to, well, he successfully poached Dustin Hoffman.

• 47:14David Senra?

  Dustin had just shot Kramer vs Kramer, which would win him his first Oscar. But prior to that, he had a string of bombs and his career was in a precarious place. He was extremely picky about roles. But my pitch was much the same. "We'll make sure you see everything", I said. "I tried to turn a weakness," which was my experience and my small list of film clients, "into a strength. He'd have my complete attention." But Dustin was harder to read. On impulse, I said, "Try us out and I won't charge you anything until you think I've earned it." It was the only time I ever offered to take less than 10%, much less work for free. If word of the arrangement got out, the haggling

• 47:56David Senra?

  with other clients would never end. But we desperately needed a top 10 film star like Dustin Hoffman. I deluged him with material and signed him six months later. So that's actually another smart, um, tactic that he'd use. He would just, while he was trying to court potential, uh, signees, whether it be actors, directors, whatever the cases, he would just act like he's their agent already. And he'd find opportunities and he'd keep selling, sending it to them to the point they're like, "Well, this guy's already working for me. I might as well just make this arrangement official." Which again, I thought was another one of his really good ideas. Um, and then around this time, this is the vision that he's gonna have for CAA that he actually successfully achieves too. And then this is

• 48:38David Senra?

  also a, a story of when he just becomes kind of like a ruthless dictator.

• 48:46David Senra?

  Okay, so he says, "This is the vision. I'm going to have all these people someday," meaning the entire chain, "in an agency that will represent the whole food chain and flip the power from the studios to the artists. Realizing that vision took years." And so this is one of the ways he starts to implement this vision. He has, um, he's like, "I need directors. I don't have any directors." So he goes right after some of the best directors. And in particular, this guy named Sidney Pollack. And he thought this guy was ripe to being picked off because he was represented by a dying breed. This, this old sloppy, um, you know, not, this agent is just not as hungry as CIA is at the time.

• 49:30David Senra?

  So it says, and this is a crazy thing about car phones that I didn't know, so we'll get there. Sidney's longtime agent was Evart Ziegler. His firm represented A-list writers and top-tier directors. I wanted them all. Um, but I was, but he's like, "I would, how do I learn, but I don't know how to lure them away." "The unexpected answer came through my car telephone, a novelty at the time. The radio-based phone, slightly larger than a shoebox, had 11 channels. You kept pushing buttons until you found a dial tone. Busy channels were like party lines. Any subscriber could listen in. On my way to the office one morning, I heard a voic--" Isn't that crazy, though? You could just hack into, like, it's, the product was made so you could listen in on other people's conversations.

• 50:15David Senra?

  "On my way to the office one morning, I heard a voice that sounded like Evart Ziegler's. I pulled off the road to take notes because Zig was discussing his star-studded list with his assistant. I clocked in at the same time the next morning, and there was Zig again, doing business while commuting. I decided to try to buy him out. To make him more receptive, to soften him up, I escalated my campaign to Sidney Pollack, or to sign Sidney Pollack. 'I will kill for you,' I told Sidney. All I had to sell was my passion and energy and the fact that I was 30 years younger than Evart Ziegler. As Sidney wavered, we got screenplay after screenplay after screenplay into his hands before Zig did.

• 50:59David Senra?

  Each day, I spent up to two hours on Sidney, far more than anyone would spend on his biggest signed client." So this is even before he's getting him. "And in 1981, with our courtship in its second year," so he's doing this for two years, "he signed with me at last." Having dealt Zig a body blow, we offered him $750,000 for his agency, plus a lifetime royalty on his client's work. He'd keep a piece of his business in perpetuity even if he never came to the office. After we negotiated for six months, Zig passed. But during our discussion, we discovered that Steve Roth serviced the cream of their young, the younger clientele. So Steve is working for Zig. Steve was eager to leave.

• 51:45David Senra?

  We promptly cut a deal for him to come to CAA. And that got us most of what we wanted at the price of Steve's compensation. $250,000 a year. So we got, basically, instead of giving Zig $750, plus points on the backend in perpetuity, he's like, "Well, I'll just find another way. I'll just grab the guy that actually has all the value and I'll pay him $250,000 a year." We had to build a critical mass of our clients so we could reverse the power. This is actually important to his entire thesis of behind CAA. "We had to build a critical mass of clients so we could reverse the power curve from the buyers, which are the studios, to the sellers, which is us and the talent. And anyone in our way was going to get rolled over." Now you're going to see why so many people are going to wind up hating Mike.

• 52:29David Senra?

  "With his core business gone, Zig sold what remained to ICM and he was done. The truth is that I didn't give a thought to Zig after he turned us down. You never heard that somebody was unhappy afterward. They just lost. Ron sometimes had to remind me not to roll over everyone. There are 200 of these small agencies, Ron would say, and you can't put them all out of business. They made sense to me even then. But flattening Evart Ziegler was the beginning of my Sherman-esque march to the sea."

• 53:05David Senra?

  Okay, so I'm skipping ahead and this is a gigantic warning for entrepreneurs. This is extremely important, I think.

• 53:14David Senra?

  So he's describing what his day-to-day life is at the time. He's already somewhat more successful than he was in the last few years and he gets some advice. And most of this advice, you know, he says, he ignored at his own peril. "There wasn't a day when I didn't walk in the door and get hit by a rush of anxiety. What idea can I come up with today to pay the overhead? There'd be the adrenaline rush when we sent out the internal memo. Robert Redford is now a client. Fifteen minutes later, it was, what's next? In 1979, I was 33. Ted Ashley at Warner Brothers took me aside and said, I'm going to give you some great advice.

• 53:59David Senra?

  He grinned, and knowing you, you're not going to take it, but here it is. I could have worked 10% less and it wouldn't have made a difference in my professional success, but I would have been a lot happier." Let me repeat that. "I could have worked 10% less and it wouldn't have made a difference in my professional success, but I would have been a lot happier." Ted was absolutely right on both counts. It was great advice and I didn't take it. "I could see now that it could have worked as much as 20% less and it wouldn't have cost me. If I'd worked even 10% less across 30 years, that's three whole extra years of life I would have enjoyed.

• 54:43David Senra?

  Your clients burn through your energy, your expertise, and your joy." So remember, there's a lot of darkness in here. And we're starting to see a little bit about that.

• 54:57David Senra?

  So I need to lay some foundations so you understand why all of his co-founders turned against him. Eventually, at the beginning, there was just, there was five kind of equal partners. Over time, they clearly see that this guy had more drive and was a natural leader. And so he's like, okay, well, I'm doing all the work. I'm bringing a lot more money than you guys. I work nights and weekends when you guys don't, etc., etc. So I need to renegotiate the equity. And even if all that information is true...

• 55:26David Senra?

  We've seen this before. I've talked about this like. These are not usually books with the exception of who who the people we've covered is the exception. Maybe David Packard and Bill Hewlett like they just don't. There's not a lot of equality and I think just setting it up at the beginning. Like the problem here that I learned from Mike is. At the beginning, it's all equal and then over time.

• 55:53David Senra?

  You're doing more work. Yes. So you should hypothetically get compensated logically. We understand that, but humans are not logical. We're we're emotional. So. You're just going to sow seeds of like distrust and like unhappiness that. If you want to work with these people for a long time, a sense of your entire life, like you can't do that. So um, he just said, hey, I'm soft affirm the ownership structure of our company was way off. Um, he's just laying out. What he's doing. I'm not going to read that part of what he's doing, what other people aren't. And so he said, I said, and then this is the problem like he says, I said that if I didn't get more than the 16.67% that each of the six partners owned, I'd have to consider other options. Six partners, the person they recruited from the other firm. So he's like basically giving them an ultimatum.

• 56:39David Senra?

  Um, they took the obvious point that I'd become clearly the firm's leader. Um, and I got larger allocation of shares professionally, mission accomplished. Emotionally, though, I had just hit the self destruct button. Only would take 16 years to go off.

• 56:57David Senra?

  I wasn't emotionally aware enough to realize that Ron had felt slighted and that I had moved up and he didn't. So this is remember his best friend. He calls him a blood brother, the person that they were the first two guys that want to start the company together. Um, so it says. Oh, so then this is so there's all this beef between Bill and Ron. Ron wants to fire Bill, who's a partner. Uh, Mike covers Bill's saying, no, we shouldn't. And so it says, um. Like, you know, I didn't, the reason he's saying, basically, I didn't want to do this because we're succeeding right now. I don't want to kick a partner out like we're successful. Let's just not do this. So he says, "I didn't want to mess with our success. I wanted everything to stay the same, except that I'd get more.

• 57:41David Senra?

  What I should have done for Ron was give him some of my own allocation of shares and then figure out how to handle Bill. To be, to really be his blood brother, I should have behaved as his agent." And then this is another, he's, he's setting us up for the payoff at the end. Uh, with another one of these sentences, he says, "Bill never had an inkling of Ron's animus. I was amazed at how well Ron hid his true feelings from someone he saw every day." So what Ron is doing to Bill, Ron also does to Mike.

• 58:19David Senra?

  And that's what I mean about people just being Machiavellian. I can see why it's usually just one founder at the top and then it, because it's just relationships, it's just very hard. And this is kind of, Ron winds up being the, for his entire life. He says he's the world's best number two. So he knows he couldn't be a number one in the sense of like, leading the company, like he needed somebody like Mike and then he, I think to this day, he's still uh, running the second in command at Universal. He's done that job for like 20 something years. But it's, and by his own admission, this is how tricky human behavior is. Do you see what I'm saying here? Like, his own admission is, "I'm the world's greatest, best number two. So I'm the Scottie Pippen to other people's Michael Jordans." But that number two still secretly wants to be number one.

• 59:01David Senra?

  And he's just very Machiavellian with this. I'm not like, trying to trash the guy. I don't know who he is. Like, I, I, um, and in the end, like, uh, towards the end of this podcast, and the end of the book, we'll get to, you know, there's a happier ending somewhere in there, but it's just, uh,

• 59:16David Senra?

  hu- human behavior's tricky, man. It's just tricky. I guess is my point. Alright, let's move on. I don't need to keep hammering that point. Oh, I found this interesting. Um, this is just something that's kind of like, whoa, something I tried to internalize for myself. It's just like, you gotta be careful what you expose yourself to because inevitably, the things that you expose yourself, the ideas, what you pay attention to, the people you're around, they're just gonna influence you. So, um, and they can influence you positively or negatively. So this is what influenced, some of the influences, uh, that Mike adapted and used to build the culture of CAA. So he says, "Our corporate culture was American team sports boosterism," I don't know what that is, "mixed with Spartan military tactics, mixed with Asian philosophy, "all overlaid by the community spirit of the Three Musketeers.

• 1:00:01David Senra?

  "That culture was a collective endeavor and one that hundreds of people shaped and defined over the years. "But out of all the partners, I gave the most thought to what it should be. "I scraped from an eclectic variety of sources, "a businessman's version of Picasso's method. "From law firms, I took our phraseology." That's interesting. I don't even know if that's a real word. "Ron was a partner, and so were the people in the mailroom, "and also the paramount importance of confidentiality." So that's from law. "Our collaborative approach came from the way Magic Johnson ran his fast break with the Lakers. "He'd drive it up the middle, have an open shot, and pass it up to feed an unguarded teammate.

• 1:00:44David Senra?

  "Who wouldn't kill to play with that point guard? "At staff meetings and retreats, "I began to talk about the philosophy of the Chinese general and military strategist Sun Tzu, "whose Art of War I'd read in college. "We took his ideas on loyalty, on teamwork, and on how having complete information was the key to decision-making. "The book also resonated with me because it prioritized strength and toughness. "Ron and Bill thought my emphasis on Sun Tzu was crazy until they realized that it worked. "In truth, though, the Chinese general was always a bit of a prop." This is an interesting perspective. I've never heard this before. I never thought about it in this way, I guess I should say. "It wasn't so much that what he'd said that inspired CAA "as the idea that we, a five-year-old company, was adhering to a philosophy

• 1:01:28David Senra?

  "from 2,500 years ago. "It gave us instant roots. "I was obsessed with the Spartan failings, "the idea that you were only as strong as the colleague on your left. "We'd go to meetings as a group. We'd go to screenings as a group, "walking down the aisles together half an hour early, 10 or 15 strong. "A show of power."

• 1:01:53David Senra?

  Okay, so that's the end of the beginning of the company. And they're gonna use these strategies and these tactics and Mike's super, super aggressive behavior to kind of dominate the industry. So I'm gonna jump way ahead and now I want to talk about what happens after you become the thing you hate. And now we're gonna get into more about Mike's own psychology of how he runs his business and like the human elements to dealing with people.

• 1:02:25David Senra?

  So this is how he realized, oh crap, I became the thing I hate. And he basically, he's trying to do a favor for somebody else and he has to roll over somebody that was nice to him. And he didn't have to roll over, or he didn't have to do that, but he did it anyways. And then he talks about, the weird thing is realizing, why was she, why was she so easy to roll over? It's not like, she's a very strong, successful person. And so this is his thoughts after. "It was her very agreeableness about the whole extortion process that stays with me. She was too nice. That meant that people had to be nice to us now, that we had the power to compel. No part of the transaction I muscled through was about helping talented people pursue or find their vision."

• 1:03:10David Senra?

  That was his original mission statement or goal for creative, for CAA, right? "It was zero creative artists and 100% agency. I had become everything I detested in the 60s when I was a bleeding heart liberal at UCLA." The very, so he's basically becoming the very symbol of the establishment. "I had become the man." This was weirdly refreshing about this book is he's just kind of honest about his faults. And he talks about, he's like, "I hid all this during my time, like I couldn't show weakness." And for him to show it to us in the, um... In this book is fascinating because it's not, it's kind of like an emotional roller coaster

• 1:03:52David Senra?

  reading this thing like, especially when you get towards the end where we're at now, where like, there's a good chunk of it, I was like, oh my god, this guy, like, I feel bad for him. And then, you know, luckily, he kind of saves it at the end. So, um, this is just one sentence, but again, I just want to bring it to our attention because I feel we're doing something wrong. We're doing something wrong when you see, I wrote the note, I left on my margin, on the post-it note, it says, "There is that feeling again." And let me just read this, and then I'll tell you what I think we're doing wrong. "The first 10 years at CAA were the best 10 years of my life." And the reason I say, "There is that feeling again," that like, taking notes on all these podcasts for entrepreneurs,

• 1:04:35David Senra?

  while they're building their businesses, or after they built a business, reading these books, you're not going to write a book about your business till it's already built, right? You see this thing over and over and over again. They look back longingly at the beginning, when they were small, when it was just a group, they were, they were not, they don't look back at, oh, now we're at the pinnacle of industry, this, the, I have the most power I ever had, uh, the most success I ever had, and now it's just kind of expanding out and continuing to dominate. It's this. Humans, for some reason, they, they, they miss this part. The first, listen what he's saying, "The first 10 years of CAA were the

• 1:05:16David Senra?

  best 10 years of his life." 10, he's 70 something years old now, like, that's a tiny, like, you know, no, I shouldn't say it's tiny, 10 years out of 70s, it's just like, he's not saying, "When I was a parent, this is the best time," like, I shouldn't say that, that's not, obviously, like, he loves his kids, it's, as almost every parent does. Um, I guess what I'm saying is, like, we feel the need to grow out of this, when maybe staying in that for as long as possible would be better served. And maybe that's just not possible, because why are so many smart, successful people, they grow out of that, and then they look back and realize with a little bit of tinge of regret that, you know, constantly, like, growth for growth's sake, and expansion for expansion's sake,

• 1:05:59David Senra?

  which is what, exactly what he does for CAA, did not lead Michael to be happier. That, after reading that book, that much is very clear. So I just want to, um, I don't know, when I see that in these books, I want to share it with you because I don't know the answer here. Um, I'm learning this stuff at the same time you are. It's just, uh, it's weird. It, there's something, and maybe it's just a hu- like our, our natural tendency to be nostalgic about times past, but they do tend to, um, hone in on the beginnings. Like, oh, the best time was, was it was just a little group of us in a room and like we, we had, you know, just a handful of clients and we were doing everything together. And then, you know, inevitably grows so large, you can't do that anymore and they, they don't seem to like it as much.

• 1:06:43David Senra?

  And, um, and we're going to talk about like a lot. So now I'm going to go into his typical day's schedule and remember the schedule because eventually we're going to get to the point where he just, he's sick of it. He's sick of himself and he's sick of what he's done. Alright, so he says, um, this is a typical day's schedule. Treat, and he, uh, he says, treating my clients like family was hard on me and my actual family. I woke up at 5:45 a.m. 15 minutes later, I'd be riding the bike in my gym and making calls to Europe and skimming five newspapers, marking articles for my assistant to strip out and distribute to the firm. After 40 minutes on the bike, I'd do 30 or 40 minutes of martial arts and I'd work myself to exhaustion. By 8 a.m., after showering, eating a fast breakfast, I'd be on the car phone en route to the office.

• 1:07:28David Senra?

  After our morning meeting, I'd take meetings, have lunch, have a drink with a colleague and a working dinner, and all in betree running calls up to 300 phone conversations a day. After being a chameleon all day at work, it took me an hour or so to figure out who the fuck I was when I got home. And all the, and all the time the phone would keep ringing, which drove Judy crazy, his wife. She would want to discuss my day to feel closer to me, but I was exhausted by my day and didn't want to talk about work in front of the kids. I wanted them to feel normal and safe. After the kids went to sleep, I worked every night, skimming through a couple of the three or four VHS cassettes I'd brought home and chipping away at the stack of screen pa- screenplays.

• 1:08:12David Senra?

  Then I'd fall asleep to Johnny Carson at midnight. And then he'd get up and do the exact same thing the night, very next day. So that's kind of an untenable, um, position to stay in for a very long time, especially as he, as he gets aged, uh, as he gets, um, older. Okay.

• 1:08:37David Senra?

  So this is his feelings. Remember, I'm in towards the end of the book. Like, I mean, there's a, I'm way past the point where CAA is a startup. And this reminded me something I took notes on with the founder of Stripe, Patrick Collison, who's a fascinating, he's got a, every time I'm able to like, read his writing or hear him on a podcast, I try to, because he's just got a really interesting mind to me. And he said something that was, uh, let me, let me pull it up real quick. Okay, I grabbed my notes real quick. Alright, so he said something that was interesting, and he was asked a question like, "What's one thing that you wish you knew?" Or that no, like, you wish you knew before you started? He says, "What no one told him before he started.

• 1:09:18David Senra?

  Even if the company is succeeding, things will still often not feel great. I thought if the company was succeeding, it would feel good day to day. You're always operating at the edge, but you're always operating at the edge of what you can handle, and inevitably, always on the cusp of feeling you're going to fall over." Which is very strange, because I think a lot of people would look at the company he's built, and be like, "Wow, this is one massively successful internet company. It underpins so much of the internet economy. He must be like, just waking up feeling fantastic every day." And he's saying, "No, it's the opposite. Like, I'm always pushing myself to the limit, so I'm always uncomfortable." This is Mike saying, expressing basically the same exact thought. "Each time I walked through our front door, I felt a physical chill, like the chill you felt in high school before a final exam.

• 1:10:03David Senra?

  How much did we have to earn today to cover our costs? What if the business shifted and the money dried up? The feeling would recede for a time, once I sat down at my desk and began to work. But I carried those fears to my last day there." And again, I think that's so fascinating, the difference between our interpretation, or like, what we're inferring from the outside, to what it actually feels like. He built CAA and was widely successful after a few years. He did that job for over 20 years, and he still felt like that 20 years later.

• 1:10:36David Senra?

  Okay, and I wanna, so now we're, later on, this is more of like the human element. The problems he's having with his co-founder. So he said, "One morning in 1987, Ron came into my office, shut the door and said, 'I've got a problem.' I said, 'Shoot, we've had a thousand conversations that started like that.' 'I lost a lot of money in a poker game and I can't pay up.' I was shocked, but I said, 'Okay, well, take care of it.' I figured it was a hundred thousand dollars or so. 'How much?' 'I'm not sure you'll be able to take care of it.' 'Well, how much is it?' 'Over five million dollars.'" And this is the important part, not the fact that he lost that much money. But what does that mean, is the implications of their relationship? "As I strove to underreact, Ron told me he'd been going to Vegas several times a week.

• 1:11:18David Senra?

  He'd make the flight after work, play deep into the night, and grab a few hours of sleep before flying back to LA in the morning, and working his ass off as usual, never missing a meeting." I was unable to process this. "He must be a phenomenal poker player," I thought. "He has no tells." "Then again, he must be a shitty poker player because he just lost over five million dollars." "My partner, my best friend, the guy I was tied to for life, clearly had an unconscious need to throw everything away we had worked for." "For the next year and a half, Ron and I worked harder and harder, and more closely than ever." "Then one morning, he closed my door, took a seat," I skipped over the part where they obviously help him out and they pay off his,

• 1:12:01David Senra?

  they find a way to pay off his money, his debt. "Then one morning, he closed," so this is a year and a half later, "then one morning, he closed my door, took a seat, and looked at me with a funeral expression." "You're not gonna believe this," he said. But, another poker game, an even bigger loss this time, 6.5 million dollars. "I felt that he had smashed me with a baseball bat." "Who was this man?" "I was deeply, deeply shaken." "Despite my 360-degree paranoia, I hadn't seen any of this coming, which scared the crap out of me." "I prided myself on reading people and forecasting from subtle clues, and here, I hadn't been reading Ron Wright for 10 years."

• 1:12:44David Senra?

  "The fact was so shocking to me, that I instantly tried to forget it."

• 1:12:54David Senra?

  Skipping another couple pages, this is just real quick and something that happens throughout the book, this entire book is littered with regrets, which I think is important for us to learn from, so hopefully we avoid that same fate. So he's looking back, this is before he even leaves CAA. He says, "I would have had a much happier life if I hadn't been so determined to appear all-knowing and invulnerable." Remember that statement he said at the beginning where most of life is shades of gray? And he treated it like it was black and white?

• 1:13:29David Senra?

  Oh, this is a great quote about, so he hires, he has a lot of like personal trainers and martial art instructors, and he noticed something about people. He'd invite people he worked for, worked with, partners, clients, employees, etc. over to his house every Saturday because he would go through these workouts. And something that I think is a great quote and something for us to try to adhere to our life, and you don't have to apply it to working out, apply it to whatever it is that you do, but it's very rare in humans. And he says, he talked about this guy, you know, "Come over a few times and inevitably everybody would quit." So he says, "But he stopped because it was hard.

• 1:14:10David Senra?

  It required discipline, dedication, and hours and hours of time. Everyone stopped. I didn't stop."

• 1:14:25David Senra?

  Okay, so I'm gonna skip, now I'm skipping over a huge chunk of the book again because he starts, he's perpetually dissatisfied, and I didn't know that he was kind of embarrassed to be an agent, which we'll get to in a minute. But he starts doing these things where, he's like, "Well, we don't, like, if we're packaging up deals and bringing all, all the talent and the raw materials for the studios to make their product," he starts like, "Why don't I learn investment banking?" And starting to do, like, he had a, you know, an entire network of people. So, he starts brokering deals for other companies to buy movie studios and just kind of spreading out everything that CAA does. This actually causes a rift between him and Ron because he's having to travel, like, in

• 1:15:09David Senra?

  this case, he does a deal with, with, the one I'm about to tell you, he does a deal with Sony buying MCA, which is the company that...

• 1:15:19David Senra?

  Did I get that right? Yeah, Sony bought, uh, which is the one that Lou Wasserman, that the name I said you should remember earlier in the podcast. And so he's, he's having to travel and it takes a lot of time. I'm going to tell you, I'm going to start this section off with how much money they make because it's rather impressive that he expanded out from a talent agency to do this. But it also caused a lot of rift and eventual breaking up of his partner, which we're going to get into in a minute. But I thought, um, this is a insight into the psychology. And I don't think it's just the psychology of Mike. I think it's the psychology of a lot of entrepreneurs. And I don't think it has to, it's a universal trait, but I've seen it pop up a lot and it's the fastest animal on the field.

• 1:16:00David Senra?

  So, once he, Sony closes, they buy the, they buy the company for $6.5 billion, which is the largest deal Mike had done up until the point in his life.

• 1:16:12David Senra?

  And, um, the guy that he, Harata is the guy, um, is now paying Mike for his services. He gave me a colossal check to distribute as I saw fit, $135 million. After paying the bankers and all the consultants, I was left with $60 million for CAA, which is equivalent of $110 million in today's money. It changed everything for us. In Hollywood, where people didn't know Goldman Sachs from Saks Fifth Avenue, everyone was dumbstruck that a talent agency could earn that kind of fee, let alone arrange and execute a deal of that magnitude. Of course, my elevated profile pissed off my partners and I began to feel that I was a hamster on a wheel.

• 1:16:53David Senra?

  Part of me felt I was running on the wrong wheel, that I should be going into business for myself. And part of me believed that I really wasn't, that I wasn't really a hamster, but a cheetah, the fastest animal on the field. Even as everyone was telling me to slow down, I wanted to speed up.

• 1:17:12David Senra?

  So this is something I don't, I've never run into before in reading these books where he actually spent 20 years building a company he didn't even really want to do. And so we're, I'm going to share some of this, uh, some of these insights, but he's talking about this here. He's like, maybe I should just be in business for myself. Maybe I'm not a hamster. Maybe I'm a cheater. Maybe I'm a cheetah, rather. Maybe I'm better than everybody else that I'm playing against. They don't know what they're talking about. Okay, so before I get there, just a little bit more darkness. Because now, you know, he's been in business, close to what, what is this, 17, 15 to 17 years? He's going to a funeral, remember, I'm skipping over this entire part about his fallout with Mike Eisner. He leaves CIA.

• 1:17:58David Senra?

  And, uh, deal falls through that Ron winds up taking, and then, uh, the backup deal is to become Michael Eisner's number two at Disney, which only lasts like 14 months, but,

• 1:18:09David Senra?

  Mike Eisner's right-hand man dies, so he's at the funeral. He says, "When Frank Wells, Eisner's beloved right-hand man, died in a helicopter crash in 1994, the memorial service held at a soundstage at Warner Brothers was packed with more than a thousand devastated mourners." So I need you to understand the time. This is one year before, uh, Mike is leaving CIA. So this is towards the end of his agent career. And you're gonna see what the result of that is. So Frank Wells, he had a funeral packed with more than a thousand devastated people. "I tried to cheer up Frank's widow, Luanne, by saying, 'If I died tomorrow, there'd be 25,000 people here to make sure I was dead.' She laughed, which was my intent, but it was true."

• 1:18:53David Senra?

  So he's keenly aware that he's kind of burned bridges and it's, you know, a lot of people despise him. Which again, I think, I don't think, is it, if you're hu, there is an element of humanity that like, you could be super successful, but if you do it so in a way where everybody hates you, I don't think you're gonna be happy. Okay, so,

• 1:19:14David Senra?

  this is him realizing that he's done, he's done with CIA. "I never stopped loving artists and the creative process. I never lost my fascination for the magic of making something from nothing. But agenting was a young person's game. And you could ru, you could run ju, you could run just so long and so far." At forty-eight, having run since my first day at William Morris, I was tired. I was tired of getting up at 6:00 a.m. and squeezing in a workout while on the phone with your app. I was tired of rolling through three hundred calls a day, talking till my throat was raw. I was tired of having lunches and dinners scheduled three months out. I was tired of flying six hundred hours a year, the equivalent of one work week a month. I was tired of owning six tuxedos for the thirty obligatory events between November first and Christmas.

• 1:19:58David Senra?

  I was tired of returning calls from 7:00 p.m., going to dinner till 10:00 p.m., coming home to a mountain of pink message slips, calling Japan till midnight, and starting all over again six hours later. I was tired of submerging myself, drowning myself in the lives of my clients and their families and significant others. Our clients' worries about the size of their trailers and how big their billing would be had come to seem increasingly petty. The truth is, I had always disliked having to see to people's creature comforts, making sure our actors and our directors had fresh guava and the perfect nanny. You're an adult. Run your own life. And so, in the midst of being tired,

• 1:20:40David Senra?

  he also talks about the fact that he's embarrassed to be an agent. He was looking for a lot of external validation, which I think is probably a path for unhappiness for all of us because I don't think that many people actually achieve that calling. So, he's basically saying, hey, I'm gonna go from the sell side to the buy side. And he wants to run his own studio. And he wants, he basically wants, he doesn't want to run the company he built, although it's successful, you know, a couple hundred million dollars in revenue, which should be fantastic for most people. But Mike, he has this like, this, well, he's gonna say, I'm looking for respect and validation, which I don't think is a good idea.

• 1:21:25David Senra?

  So, he says, I was about to become a very wealthy man. He's in negotiations to run a couple of studios. And this is fun. It's not funny. This is interesting because it falls through. When I was younger, cash was my ticket out. I'd made lots of it since. But I yearned to accumulate money, to build equity, which felt different from merely making it. Once an agent stopped working, there was no accrued equity to fall back on. I watched the runaway growth at Microsoft, where Bill Gates had built one of the world's largest companies. Fortunes were beginning to be made off the internet. Executives I considered my peers, Michael Eisner, Barry Diller, were raking in hundreds of millions in stock options. So this is before he leaves CAA to go to Disney. My appetite for corporate bucketering grew as I worked with Herb Allen and mingled with

• 1:22:09David Senra?

  Fortune 50 CEOs in Sun Valley. It grew further whenever I lost an auction to an art collector with deeper resources. I wanted to play in that league, too. And in truth, I had always been faintly embarrassed to be an agent. As much as CAA had professionalized our field, it would never be a noble calling. I wanted to be one of the six people who could say yes to a movie. I felt I needed the credential of a public company job. I was still looking for respect and validation. The reason I think, say, that's not a good idea, because I don't believe that you could ever be, that you could ever fulfill that desire, the need for constant validation

• 1:22:52David Senra?

  or respect from other people, I think, is, you shouldn't play games you can't win. And that's a game you can't win. Like, you should be doing things for internally. Like, he's, he's, and there's nothing wrong, I mean, I just have a different perspective. I'm not, like, it's, I, there's nothing really wrong if you want to play in that, you want to be a Fortune 50 CEO. For me, like, I'm not, I don't think size of a company is as important as, like, the product you make. So what I mean by that, like, let's say you're a Fortune 50 CEO at the time, this is in, what, the 80s, so there's probably Philip Morris might be in there. Well, what, what's the product you make? You sell product that is addicting, unhealthy, and kills people. Like, I don't, that's not, I don't admire that.

• 1:23:36David Senra?

  Meanwhile, like, you can have a hugely, a massive company that builds great products, and I think that's the, like, what you should shoot for. Like, I, Apple's a massive company. I love their products. Like, I don't, this whole fascination with businesses is weird to me, where it's just all about size.

• 1:23:55David Senra?

  Where there's nothing, the size in and of itself is not a bad thing. I'm not saying that by any means. I'm just saying that it just depends on what your, like, company's made to do. You could have a giant company that has a shitty product. That's not, you know, I don't think that's appealing. Okay, so in between all this, he's thinking he's gonna take over MCA, which again, uh, he brokered the deal, so MCA bought, or excuse me, Sony bought MCA. Uh, and then eventually they needed somebody, this is a few years later, so they need somebody to run the company. He's tapping, uh, he's doing negotiations with the family. And the family that buys it is a liquor company called Seagram's,

• 1:24:38David Senra?

  which I think is the same, is the same company that his dad worked for, which is kind of like a small world thing. Um, and he's, he's trying to, he basically negotiated for him to go over there and then for a CEO, and then Ron, his blood brother, to go as COO, so he's like second in command. The deal falls through and he's like, "Okay, this isn't gonna work." Ron's like, Ron was acting as his agent during this time. And he's like, "Okay, well, let me give it another crack to see if we can do this, 'cause I, you know, me and you both wanna get out of the agent business, let's try something new." And this is, you're gonna start to see where Ron, you know, was kinda Machiavellian. He said, "Early in July, Ron called from New York one afternoon. 'Guess what,' he said.

• 1:25:23David Senra?

  'I've met with Edgar,' that's one of the guys that's in charge of, uh, that owns the company that owns MCA, 'and there's been a change in plans. He wants me to run MCA, and I think I'm going to do it. I felt completely numb, frozen with disbelief. The job on the table, Chief Operating Officer, was one I had negotiated for Ron in my last go-round with Edgar, with one big difference: I was out of the picture." They bring in somebody else as CEO for Ron to report to. "After a long silence, when I felt that I could speak without my voice breaking, I told Ron how much I needed him, what it meant to have him by my side. I'm great at pitching even when I'm not sincere, and I was 1,000% sincere,

• 1:26:08David Senra?

  so it was my greatest pitch ever. I'm sure he'd be won over." "What came back in a burst of rage were all of Ron's pent-up grievances." Remember how the entire book is sprinkled through, hey, it's kinda weird that Bill worked with Ron every day and didn't know how he really felt about him, or talking about how is this guy losing millions of dollars and taking trips to Vegas I don't know about, and etc., etc. "So what came back in a burst of rage were all of Ron's pent-up grievances? How I'd under-negotiated for him with Edgar and over-negotiated for Bill, that same guy, because I'd valued them equally in my ask? How I'd made a big mistake by walking away from MCA, and how it had always been all about me, never about him?

• 1:26:50David Senra?

  How it was time to strike out on his own, to be recognized as something more than my consigliere? I tried to sell him for two more hours as the knot in my stomach swelled into my throat. Finally, my voice faltered and I gave way. His mind was made up. I felt absolutely crushed. Ron was leaving and taking the best, most human part of me with him. I felt like I was getting divorced."

• 1:27:25David Senra?

  So that's where, that's basically the end of, so they had a 20-year partnership. Let's say they're from the time these guys were in their late twenties to their late forties. They don't reconcile, and I'm gonna get to that part, there's a 20-year gap. So you're friends for 20 years, and then you're basically, I mean, enemies for 20 years. And they do a lot of immature stuff to each other, like plant, rumors about each other in the press. Ron tells Mike that he's interested in buying this house. Mike buys it first, and like, they wind up, he winds up giving, letting Mike, or letting Ron buy the house. But it's just like a lot of immature stuff to do when you're in your 50s, right?

• 1:28:07David Senra?

  And there's all, so he gets up, I'm now I'm skipping over, so I need to be clear with you. I skipped over the whole Disney mess. So he leaves CAA, the people at CAA that take over hate him. So he's basically has no part of his own company. He loses his best friend. He goes to work for his second best friend, Mike Eisner. Mike Eisner winds up being a deceitful person and basically publicly humiliating him, firing him. So after 14 months, he gets fired. He went to collecting like 130 million dollars from Disney, but still like he basically has no job at this point. And now that he's out, he has no power.

• 1:28:49David Senra?

  He starts another company, AMG, that's going to be like management and other stuff. It doesn't work out. He went to losing tens of millions of dollars on that deal. So basically what I'm saying is remember going back a few minutes ago where I was like, this whole like striving for the for the validation from other people is kind of dead end. Well, he did that and he never got to run the public company, never got any of that. And he lost almost everything. I mean, he's still very, very rich, but he's still not happy about this. And then now Ron and a bunch of other people in the industry like David Geffen and all these other people are like, you know, Mike doesn't have any power, he's weak now, so they start attacking him. They start spreading rumors about him, they trash his name.

• 1:29:31David Senra?

  And he just does some really, really, really, he even says like, I basically, every problem I tried to solve and now ended up making it worse, which is the exact opposite of what he did to his whole career. And so we're going to see more darkness and more regrets. So now he got sick of David trying to sabotage, David, this is David Geffen, who he got sick of him trying to sabotage his company even after, after AMG closes, like he sells off the assets and just takes the loss. And so he says, I'd even gone to see David in his offices at Amblin Entertainment and warned him that if he didn't stay out of my affairs, I'll beat the living shit out of you. He didn't stay out, so I vented to Vanity Fair. And this is one of his biggest mistakes.

• 1:30:16David Senra?

  If you Google his name now, this comes up actually, where he vents to Vanity Fair and he says that, Geffen and Ron and Michael Eisner and all these other people are part of a gay mafia. And he's just ranting and he's saying it to a reporter who then reports his words. And he says, "This idea was absurd and poisonous because most of the people I named were not even gay." So he's just making a bad mistake. He's in a bad emotional spot. So he's just compounding his mistakes here. And then more regrets. And he says, "I always thought it was vital to mix business and friendship. I was learning painfully that it was better to keep those realms far apart. Business always gets personal.

• 1:31:00David Senra?

  I thought back on the career path I'd taken and realized that I would have been much happier as an artist or as an architect. Happier in an arena where you don't make five new enemies every time you create something."

• 1:31:13David Senra?

  And that's something I didn't know anything about, like the entertainment industry before this book. I can't recall anything that is. And it just sounds like a terrible, like it sounds like a terrible place to spend your time. So that's the negative part. I'm not going to end this on a negative part because I get to the point in the book. Now there's only a few pages left and I was like, "Wow, man, this is, this is not, I just feel sad for this guy. This is terrible." Because I really do think like most people, they want to be liked, right? Well, thank God he meets somebody that I personally admire, although I'd never met, but I did a podcast on. Mark Andreessen. And Mark Andreessen and Ben Hoover, it's both talk about the influence that Mike Ovitz had on them.

• 1:31:55David Senra?

  So we're kind of coming full circle. And so now he has a new beginning and it's based on having dinner with Mark Andreessen. And then he winds up, you know, finding a purpose in life where he can actually succeed. He becomes a philanthropist, an investor, an advisor to entrepreneurs. So we're going to see a little bit about that here.

• 1:32:13David Senra?

  So he has dinner and he says, "Partnering with Ben Horowitz, Mark imagined how startups might use business software on the network, what people now call the cloud, instead of sinking capital into costly servers. Way ahead of the herd, he saw that everyone would soon become connected to the digital network." So he's meeting Mark after Netscape. And when him and Ben start LoudCloud, which turns into Opsware, or is it the reverse? I don't know if it's LoudCloud turns into Opsware or Opsware turns to LoudCloud, but I should know that because I did a podcast on it. Oh, LoudCloud turns to Opsware. Okay. So he said, "When we met at an LA restaurant, I expected a geek from Central Casting. What

• 1:32:53David Senra?

  I got was someone six foot five, an athletic-looking guy with a winning smile. He was hyper-articulate, insatiably curious, and voraciously well-read. He was Michael Crichton on steroids. Mark invited me north to meet with Ben Horowitz. Ben is a brilliant manager and entrepreneur in his own right, and together he and Mark were a formidable team. They asked me to join the LoudCloud board, and so began a new chapter on my life. As Mark and Ben led me into their world, I felt like a privileged student in a graduate school of one." That may be my favorite sentence in the entire book, because I think about like, if you

• 1:33:37David Senra?

  could take, like, the idea of being a privileged student in a graduate school of one, I really feel that when you're reading a book, like the one I have in my hand, and some of the other books that have been covered on the podcast, you are, like, you're taking their entire experience, and in this case, we have 70 years of experience that Mike has in life and in business, and you're compressing it down into a few hours. And as I'm talking, I'm trying to pull up this tweet that I saw, that I absolutely love, and I want to remind myself, and it says, A great book takes years to write, but only hours to read. The reader nets the difference.

• 1:34:20David Senra?

  And I think what's happening with Mike here is even though he's had tons of experience in his own life, he's now being able to benefit and start to work in an industry where Mark and Ben had been working for a long time and they understood. And I just love that description. I felt like a privileged student in the graduate school of one. And then a little bit, I just want to include this part because it speaks about the influence that people around you have and something I discussed on the podcast, at least with Ben Horowitz, I know. So it says, "In other words," they talk about, they come after, they sell Opsware for 1.65 billion, they're like, Mike's like, "Hey, I want to start investing, angel investing with you guys." And they're like, "Oh, funny, you should mention that. We're actually going to do something more formal."

• 1:35:04David Senra?

  So it says, "In other words, Mark and Ben set out to be the CAA of Silicon Valley. They borrowed our roots to give themselves gravitas, the same way I had borrowed from Lew Wasserman and Sun Tzu. In essence, the firm linked all the partners' networks and added specialists to strengthen the whole organism. No individual owns an account at Andreessen Horowitz. Investments are chosen by joint approval of the general partners, with the entire staff having a say. Then the team provides in-house experts to assist its startups with recruitment, budgeting, operations, sales, publicities, IPOs, whatever an entrepreneur might need." Excuse me. This is exactly what, exactly what Mike did to the entertainment industry 20 years prior,

• 1:35:48David Senra?

  which was new at the time. So a few years later, about a year later, I should say, they hold an intervention from Mike at a New York restaurant. And they're like, "Hey, stop messing around in L.A. Come to Silicon Valley." And he said, "This," Mark said gravely, "is an intervention. I tense, knowing what was coming. Lately, I'd been spending two days a week at Andreessen Horowitz. Now I'm about to be triple teamed into picking up stakes and making Northern California my base of operations." And I'm skipping over this part, but this just made me laugh when I read it. "As we rose from the table," Mark, and he was still a little unsure, but he's like, "It's tough to resist heartfelt counsel from three people you trust, especially when they're three awfully smart people." And this department made me laugh.

• 1:36:32David Senra?

  As we rose from the table, Mark said, Cortez dude. His reference to the Spanish conquistador who burned his ships to prevent his crew from returning to Europe. And it made me laugh. It made me laugh too, Mike. Okay. And then, this is actually funny because I'm going to skip over a bunch of, he describes, you know, his time since then. He's now been working in it for years, investing in all kinds of companies and helping all kinds of entrepreneurs. So he's an investor and advisor to entrepreneurs and he talks about like what his value is. He says, founders are much more interested in my mistakes, which can often be generalized to their situation than in my successes, which were often particular to the agency business.

• 1:37:14David Senra?

  I feel, I highlighted that because I feel there's a lot of useful things to learn about starting your own company and handling people and running businesses in this book. But I do feel like that's the feeling I had. Like there's, he's telling us in an honest way that he didn't have to do the mistakes he made so we can avoid them, which I think is extremely valuable. And, almost done guys, don't worry. I know it's a long podcast, but this is a really interesting book. It's a, it's an emotional roller coaster. If you read this book, it's, there's going to be times where you're happy and then you're going to be sad. But I think like you can't have the yin without the yang. So it's, that's why it's taken me so long to get through it. Okay.

• 1:37:56David Senra?

  So here comes a reconciliation and I actually love this idea. He said, over the years, I kept hearing that Ron was still furious at me. Someone who was on Universal's plane, that's the company that Ron works for, with him recently told me, he ripped you for 30 minutes. It sounded like you and he had just, just had a fight yesterday. I finally had enough. A couple of years ago, I called Ron and said, look, everywhere I go, I keep hearing from people, they're saying terrible things about me. Now think about that, they were best friends for 20 years. This is really sad. I'm sure some of your complaints are completely justified, but they can't all be because we had 25 good years together. Oh, it's the 25, I was wrong about that. We were getting up there in age and I'd like not to leave the planet with this breach between us. Somewhat to my surprise, he instantly said, I'd like that too.

• 1:38:43David Senra?

  So they agreed to meet. After shaking hands and sizing each other up, we made some small talk as we looked over the menus. It felt both uncomfortable and strangely warmly familiar. We left a second meeting up in the air. After pondering the problem, I called Ron and said, this is what I think is a good idea. "I think it'd be best if we each had a mediator who can listen to both of us and help us interpret each other and referee if necessary."

• 1:39:11David Senra?

  So I found a UCLA professor to mediate. Ron and I met at a coffee shop in the basement of her office, the mediator, and then went up to her office for a two-hour session, our first of three. Ron started talking and didn't stop for a half hour. He immediately acknowledged that he spent 20 years denigrating me to anyone who would listen. He said, "I was the guy taking care of the agency while you were running all around the world. You had the big profile, but I was doing all the hard work." So he's admitting that he was resentful, right? He responded that without him, the business would have fallen apart. When I started to explain, he talked over me. He wasn't going to let me express my feelings. He was still

• 1:39:53David Senra?

  the keeper of our collective emotions. So the first session didn't end particularly well.

• 1:40:00David Senra?

  The second one went better. With the mediator's help, I got a chance to apologize, and Ron accepted my apology. Then he owned up to all his rancor and sabotage, which was a form of an apology, or at least of candor. Yet even as he worked to get the feelings out, I felt destroyed because Ron kept confirming my worst fears. Every time anyone in the town had struck a match of accusation against me, Ron had dumped on a truckload of gas.

• 1:40:28David Senra?

  "No one was better equipped to put you away than me," he said. I told him, "Ron, you were unhappy at CAA, so you kind of shoved it to me. I apologize for missing the signs that you were unhappy, but you could have just told me." He smiled a little and said, "Yeah, but you didn't want to hear it." After the sessions, we began meeting for lunch. He talked about his job. I talked about how I didn't have a job. Ron followed up, he checked in, he was courteous and thoughtful. He made me feel like it was the only thing on his mind. It was seductive, particularly as more and more time passed without strife. But a voice in my head kept saying, "You were wrong about his feelings for at least ten, for the last 10 years at CAA.

• 1:41:10David Senra?

  He handled you beautifully then, so it makes you certain you're right now." Part of me wanted to believe in his sincerity and the promise of our old friendship. Part of me was still angry. Part of me felt sorry for him. Part of me felt sorry for both of us. Still, we began talking three times a week, easing toward a renewal of our intimacy. I had missed it so.

• 1:41:36David Senra?

  And now, he's gonna extend this, he says to somebody else, he says, "That same reconciling impulse made me reach out to David Geffen." Remember, that's the guy that he said he threatened to beat him up, and accused of being part of a gay mafia. "We met at Moraya in New York, shook hands, and had a civil lunch. He told me, 'My biggest problem with you is that I tried to be your friend, and you wouldn't be friends with me.'" The old me would have argued, would have objected that that wasn't the whole story. "But I just said, 'You're right. I was there to make peace, and David said he wanted the same.'" "We were two guys in our 70s, looking to fix what we had broken." Ronnie later told me that David didn't have anything bad to say about me afterward. That made me smile a little.

• 1:42:21David Senra?

  "The win nowadays is breaking even, but I'll take it."

• 1:42:27David Senra?

  So, you're seeing a lot of personal growth from him. And this is where I'll close. And at the end of the day, it is all about the people, even for tough people like Mike that don't want to outwardly show it.

• 1:42:43David Senra?

  In private moments of reflection, and in his case, at the end of his autobiography, he admits as much.

• 1:42:50David Senra?

  So he talks about the fact that he still owns the building the CIA was in, and that he went by there the other day. Now he's over 70, hadn't been in the company for 30, almost 25 years, whatever the timeframe is. And he's reflecting here. And I think this is an important lesson for us to understand and kind of internalize, so we don't miss out on this. "The building felt drained, empty not just of the old bustle, but of the magic, the power. It felt small. It felt like your childhood house does when you go back as an adult. When we first inhabited the building, the whole mighty team of us, we were giants. I was hit by the magnitude of what I'd done in that building, and it seemed kind of amazing.

• 1:43:35David Senra?

  This kid from the valley, with no stature, no tenure, no network to rely on, reshaped the entertainment business. In my empty fortress, I realized that I wasn't out of the valley yet. I'm free of it in my daily life, but I'll never be free of it in my brain. You carry your origins with you. Still, those origins drove me here and built this place and attracted so many bright, funny, creative colleagues. In the silence, I discovered that the only thing I really missed about the agency business

• 1:44:14David Senra?

  was the camaraderie, my comrades and friends, and the passionate way we spent our lives together. I miss the people."

• 1:44:29David Senra?

  And that is where I will leave this story. If you want the full story, I'd recommend reading the book. There's a ton of interesting anecdotes, all about, I mean, people you would know, famous celebrities and stuff that I left out. So, before we go, I just want to remind you that I just presented this entire podcast ad-free. As a podcast fan myself, I feel that's the best experience for the listener, and then if I do the best experience for the listener, it'd be the best thing for the podcast. So, this podcast is ad-free and independent, which means I rely on the support of the people who get value from this podcast. Recently, I had somebody, actually, two people email me, I think it was good ideas.

• 1:45:11David Senra?

  They want a way to be able to support on a per podcast basis. So in other words, if you listen to this whole podcast and you thought you got value out of it, please consider, I hate using the word donate, but sending me $2. $2 is my suggested amount, but you can send whatever you want. The link is in the show notes that's available on your podcast player where you can donate right there. It's also available at founderspodcast.com by tapping on the dollar sign in the header. So that's for people that have expressed interest to basically pay for whichever podcast they really like. And so that's the option.

• 1:45:49David Senra?

  If you want to support podcasts on a monthly basis, you can become a misfit and you can get access to my private podcast feed, which you'll immediately unlock 17 podcasts that I've done and you'll get an extra podcast for me for every week. So it's up to you how you want to choose to support the podcast. All I ask is that if you're getting value from my work and you want to see more stuff like this, more independent podcasts that are not littered with ads, that are not disrupting our time together by trying to sell you a bunch of stuff that you don't need, frankly, please consider supporting. It's the best way to explicitly state that, hey, I like what you're doing and I want to see more of this. And it's up to you. Do it on a one-time basis for per each podcast that you listen to or on a monthly basis

• 1:46:32David Senra?

  if you just want to set it up one time and forget it. Other than that, I've talked an unbelievably long time today. So I thank you very much for your support. Please tell a friend about it, about this podcast. Share it on social media if you want to and I will be back next week with another biography of an entrepreneur. Thank you very much. Bye.