#53 Who Is Michael Ovitz?

**David Senra** (0:00)
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, 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.
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 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 we get towards the 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 if you want to see any of the, I think I've worked at like 50 books now that we've covered so far through the podcast, a great way to do that is go to amazon.com forward slash SOP forward slash founders podcast. Not only will you see all the books I've done in the past, but you'll also see that book next week, 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. Best, best way to get in touch with me is just use, you can find me on Twitter. It's at David Senra one. And I'll leave obviously the links and everything I talk about in the show notes and at founders podcast.com. And oh, the show also has its own Twitter feed.
And this Twitter feed, I just published quotes from past podcasts that I like or that I want to remember. And that's at founders podcast. 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 is going to be a little 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 to spend a lot of time in the end of the book where he's 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 seventies 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.