Michael Ovitz, Creative Artists Agency (CAA)

**David Senra** (0:02)
Michael, thank you very much for doing this. Always a pleasure to spend more time with you. It's been some of my favorite past few dinners have been with you. I want to actually start with something that you just said before we were recording, that made me laugh out loud, that you said that Marc Andreessen scares the crap out of you. Why did you say that?

**Michael Ovitz** (0:18)
Talking to him is like taking a test. It's like being in high school and taking an exam or a final in college every conversation.
He's got the most extraordinary ability to analyze, to recall information, to organize it as he's thinking and speaking. There's probably three different processes going on in his brain simultaneously while he's talking. His recalls, I've never seen anything like it. Everything he reads. In the old days when I was going to meet with him over board issues, I always had to study up very carefully on what we were going to talk about. I say this in the most loving way, he's the most terrific guy and he's grown and he's prospered and he's one of the smartest human beings I've ever met in my entire life.

**David Senra** (1:16)
So you think his recall comes naturally? I thought you have great recalls. I've watched all your interviews, the conversations we've had. You do have this encyclopedic knowledge, especially about the work you were doing at CAA, but I feel like the way you would describe it is that you have to work a lot harder.

**Michael Ovitz** (1:31)
I think there are certain human beings that are gifted with some raw innate processing power that is just greater than others.
I think we all have processing power, but it's a question of degrees. Then within the processing power, are there specific silos that each of us either excel at or average at or not as good as? With Marc and Michael Crichton and Peter Thiel and quite a few of the top people in creative and top people in tech, have this ability to process information at a very ultra rapid speed and it's foundationally set in the ability to recall information that they have inventoried and it's very hard to do, especially in the world of technology where you're touching constantly new ideas. So everything's different. And yes, there's some through line, but each business that's being started has a different conceit. And then on top of it, these guys, I find them fascinating for another reason. They're really nice people. Even though they have an intellectual superiority, they don't lauded over you and they're chameleon. They kind of adjust to the level that they're talking to.

**David Senra** (3:03)
Say more about that.

**Michael Ovitz** (3:04)
As an agent, I had to ratchet my discussions up or down based on whether it was a creative discussion, a self-help discussion for a client, or for a buyer. Because we did a lot of counseling for buyers because it was a good way to build a bridge to them and be able to have access.
Ratcheting up or down based on mood, based on what you read at the moment and what your frame of reference about the person is. But you can't talk to everybody the same way. One has to make a quick, well, let me rephrase, at least for me, I can't speak for anybody else. And I know Marc does this to you. You kind of look at who you're talking to and then decide just how deep are you going to go and go how far. I mean, when I was on the board of Marc's first company, Loud Cloud, they were dealing in an area that frankly, I really at the beginning in 1999 didn't understand it because they were talking about the cloud. I don't think anybody we were selling to understood what the cloud really was. It was this amorphous idea of storing data off-site, not in a machine, but in a machine, but not a machine that's with you. It's a machine that's in the ether, but there is no real machine in the ether. So you're thinking about all this and we're building a business around it. And I watched Marc Handel and Ben Horowitz. Ben is the most practical brilliant guy I've ever met. Ben Horowitz is not only really, really smart, when you talk to him, you get the sense you're talking to the guy next door who's smart, but he doesn't make it ultra clear that he's smarter than you are. So it's very, very gracious, warm and accommodating. Or if he wants to make a point, or if he's being a disciplinary and he can change his level. I've watched him get angry at someone and turn into an absolute person of strength and movement and aggressive that you wouldn't know normally because he's very, very even tempered. But all these guys sitting in meetings with Ben and Marc, for example, is fantastic because they play off each other. They've been together, they're friends, I guess, 35 years.