#381 I Had Dinner With Michael Ovitz

**David Senra** (0:00)
Something that Michael Ovitz had in common with people like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos is the belief that you must find and work with extraordinary people. Even when Ovitz was a young man, he starts his company, he has no money. He makes a list of people that he eventually wanted to work with, and it was the best of the best. And even though at the time, it felt like a pipe dream, he actually makes that list into a reality. And the importance of working with the very best people, there's actually a great observation about this from Steve Jobs, and he says that the key observation was that I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 to 1 or 100 to 1 So given that, you're well advised to build a team that pursues the A-plus players. That's exactly what Steve Jobs did, that's exactly what Michael Ovitz did, and it is exactly what Ramp did. Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. In the last 12 months, they hired only 0.23% of the people that applied. So that means when your business is using Ramp, you now have access to top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers on the planet working on your behalf 24-7 to automate and improve all of your business' financial operations. Ramp invests heavily in creating new innovative products. In fact, I just sat down with the founder and a friend of mine who's one of the co-founders and the CEO of Ramp named Eric, and he told me that 54% of their payroll is now dedicated to R&D. So the longer they use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. That's very important because as Sam Walton astutely pointed out in his autobiography, he wrote, you can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. Ovitz knows that Ramp built a team of A-plus players because Ovitz invested in Ramp. So from a customer's perspective, what does a team of A-plus players sounds like? It sounds like this customer review that I read, which said, Ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check in on because they have it handled. So take the time, set up a demo of the product, and you'll see why many of the world's top founders are running their company on Ramp. You can do that by going to ramp.com. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. Okay, so last week, I flew to New York to have dinner with Michael Ovitz. We wound up having a very intense and entertaining three-hour conversation.
And I've made a list of things I learned from the dinner, so I'm just going to run through some of these ideas. I guess I should back up and tell you how I actually got connected to Ovitz. We wind up, I didn't even know this, but we wind up having a very close mutual friend. I'm having breakfast with my friend Rick, and his phone is on the table and it rings, and it says Michael Ovitz. It's like, oh wow. And so he picks it up and he's like, hey, I'm actually here with my friend David Senra. He does this podcast you might have heard of, it's called Founders. And there's a short break, and then Ovitz says, I listened to four of them yesterday. And so we wound up getting connected, and we were planning on having a meeting and having dinner anyways. And I was like, yeah, as you might know, I do these like, I had dinner episodes. I've done one with Charlie Munger and Sam Zell and Brad Jacobs and John Mackey. I think it'd be really interesting. Would you be up to doing it? And he said, yes. So I flew up to see him. Conversation was really intense. It flew by. Like I said, it was three hours. I was shocked when I got up from the table. And I thought, you know, maybe we talked for an hour. So right after dinner, I don't record any of this and I don't take notes while we're having a conversation. So I just write down some of the things that really stood out to me. And then I try to expound on them. So I have just a list of about 10 ideas. I want to go over with you from this dinner. And the number, the first one, that's very obvious if you read his autobiography, which I'm also doing an episode on, and I think I'll just release it at the same time.