Michael Ovitz co-founded CAA and helped reshape Hollywood, then took the same playbook into tech investing and advising founders.
Featured clips
How People Go Wrong
Meeting Marc Andreessen
Failure
The Genius of Patrick Collison
Available Now: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | X | Transcript
In this conversation, he breaks down the operating rules that kept CAA from losing clients, and the personal disciplines that kept him grounded when the stakes got massive.
You’ll learn how to build momentum, tell the truth without hesitation, read for context instead of noise, hire people who raise the standard, and package ideas into outcomes.
Tiny Lessons
- “Mediocrity to me is a disease that you have to get rid of at all costs.”
- “Momentum to me is the single most important thing in anything we do.”
- “Knowledge is power, and it works for you and against you.”
- “If you can’t tell me what your business is about in 20 seconds, you should not do your business.”
- “Power is fleeting and it doesn’t last. And if you don’t believe that, take a look at anyone that’s had it.”
- Learn from the mistakes of others.
- Don’t fight your job.
- “I didn’t go into business to win a popularity contest. I went into business to win.”
- Trust is the most important thing. Betrayal is indefensible under any condition.
- Excellence is about standing out, doing good things, and helping people.
- Be deeply read in your field and widely read outside it.
- “Mediocrity is invisible until passion shines a light on it.”
- “I have been viewed by a lot of my friends as the world’s best friend and the world’s worst enemy because I’m just black and white loyal.”
- Tell everyone the truth.
- “I don’t believe there’s any room for competition. They have to be eliminated.”
- If someone you respect tells you to meet someone, meet them.
- When people confront you, you have to respond. If you don’t, people will walk all over you.
- Don’t believe your press—good or bad. The same people who praise you will later bury you.
- People tend to deceive themselves. Never get high on your own supply.
- “All we have is our time, and you run out of time very fast.”
- People appreciate honesty more than you think.
- How you talk about people when they’re not around tells everyone what you’ll say about them when they’re not around.
- Arrogance is self-sabotaging.
- A good idea taken too far is a bad idea.
- “The most important people on the planet are journalists and editors.” They direct our attention.
- “I don’t agree with people that sit and read things cover to cover because you can’t equally weight everything between the covers.”
- “I think that momentum is about extraordinarily hard industrious work. It’s about deeply educating yourself in your field, deeply educating yourself in the peripheries of your field, knowing who your competitors are.”
