#382 Who Is Michael Ovitz?: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Most Powerful Man in Hollywood

**David Senra** (0:00)
I've done a few of these, I had dinner with episodes, Michael Ovitz being the latest one. And I did one with John Mackey, who was the founder of Whole Foods a couple months ago. And John Mackey told me one of the craziest things that anyone has ever said about the podcast. By that time, I had spoken to him, he had already listened to over 100 episodes of Founders. And he said that if Founders podcast existed, when he was a young man, Whole Foods would still be an independent company. That since the podcast and all of History's Greatest Entrepreneurs are constantly emphasizing the importance of controlling expenses, he would have put more of a priority on it, especially during boom times, during good times, because it's very natural for a company and really for human nature to just not watch your costs as closely because everything's going so well. And that is something that History's Greatest Founders all warn against. In fact, Andrew Carnegie has this great mantra that he would repeat over and over again. He says, profits and prices were cyclical subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs however could be strictly controlled and any savings achieved in the costs were permanent. This is something I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is now a presenting sponsor of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the co-founders of Ramp and have spent a ton of time with them over the last year or two. They all listen to the podcast and they picked up on the fact that the main theme from History's Greatest Entrepreneurs is the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend and how doing so will give you a massive competitive advantage. That is a main theme for Ramp. The reason that Ramp exists is to give you everything you need to control your spend. Ramp gives you everything you need to control your costs. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting and cost control. Matt Paulson, who is the founder of MarketBeat, recently switched to Ramp and this is what he said about it. Ramp is the best. The amount of money you will save from unwanted renewals and employees who think company credit card equals buy whatever you want will far exceed the best credit card rewards program. Matt is talking about the importance of cost control. There's a line in Andrew Carnegie's biography that said cost control became nearly an obsession. Ramp helps you make an obsession in your business. If Carnegie was alive today, he'd be running his business on Ramp. Take the time to set up a demo to see this product and you will see why many of the world's top founders are running their company on Ramp. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. One more tool that I want to tell you about is Vesto. A lot of my friends are using Vesto. I got to tell you what happened at breakfast a couple of days ago, and even more friends are going to be using it now. So what Vesto does, it helps you connect and control all of your business bank accounts from one dashboard. So I know the founder, Ben, we spent a bunch of time together and I've offered to help him by introducing some of my friends that I thought could benefit from Vesto. So I call one of my friends and he said, David, I'll meet with anybody you want me to, but I have to warn you, me and my team or my team rather, we say no to over 90 percent of the software that were pitched. And yet a week later, I hear back from him and he says, Ben and Vesto are great and that they signed up. So I asked my friend to ask his team to explain the benefit they get from Vesto in their own words. This is happening over text message. I'm going to read this text message exchange to you. Okay. So it's okay. Can you please ask your team in your own words, what's the benefit? Like why did they sign up for this? You say no to 90% of the things and then use this tool. What's going on? He says this is in their own words. It provides us the ability to view all of our bank accounts and loan accounts on one platform with a single sign on. It makes it much easier to grant access to users in one place as opposed to 20 different banks. So I text back, what did they do before Vesto? We have 20 plus different bank logins across five accountants. We literally use 21 banks. So every bank has an account and a loan that multiple people need access and views to. Just to log in and see everything would take hours and be in all different tabs. So I'm having breakfast with a friend of mine. He owns a huge company and we're talking about this. And I show him this text message. And he owns like well over a hundred different companies. It's like 200 now or whatever. And he's just like, oh no. He was worried that his team was doing exactly what my other friend was doing. He's like, wait, wait, there's no way that we're just logging in every day, right? And putting everything in tabs and spreadsheets. It's not possible that we're doing that. And so he winds up texting the person responsible to some company. You know, a few minutes later, he's like, oh no, how can I be so stupid? And so I think he's going to start using Vesto now. And so if you have multiple accounts, multiple businesses, make sure you go to Vesto, that's Vesto with a V, and schedule a demo with the founder Ben. Tell him that David sent you Vesto with a V. So vesto.com, the link will also be down in the show notes. I hope you enjoy this episode. I just listened to the entire thing back. I think, I'm really proud of how it turned out, and I think it's just a remarkable story. And it's one of, I believe, to be one of the most important autobiographies because of how much you see of the pain and struggle of building a company. I hope you enjoy it. I felt you could never be too paranoid. I always told our agents, make your clients think that they're your friends, but remember that they're not. It would be my clients who would stay loyal, and my friends who would betray me. Jay Maluni, the agent that I thought of as a son, and my eventual successor, would join the agency's posse of young Turks who disavowed 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 Mayer, the blood brother that I started CAA with, would leave to take a big job at Universal after I'd negotiated for us to both go, and then disparage me all over town for 20 years.