Michael Ovitz – Reinventing Talent and Building Momentum at Treville (EP.455)

28:35It wasn't that complicated. It really worked. When I was in New York, I decided that I personally wanted to expand my cultural thesis. So I started collecting art and I got to know art dealers. I was invited by David Rockefeller to join the board of the Museum of Modern Art. And I started meeting investment bankers. That was a complete accident. I didn't know this, but in New York, it's not a one -horse town. Everybody's in a different vocation. So if I was at a dinner with someone from the modern, and one of the other trustees was giving a dinner party. There'd be a film director there, a theater director, an investment banker, a hedge fund guy.

29:23And all of a sudden I'm meeting all these people and I'm like a kid in a candy store because they don't do what I do. And if there's anything I love, it's learning new things. I'm a voracious reader. I love technical things. And I love to learn about other people's businesses because I want to see how they think. And all of a sudden, I find myself meeting Herb Allen, Felix Roiton, and Michelle David Vey from Lazard. And I met the guys that ran Goldman Sachs. And all of a sudden, I'm having lunch with these guys. And they're talking with a different vocabulary than I am. I go, wow, this is something that's interesting.

30:04And all of a sudden, I get a call from a guy named John Thornton, who was the co -president of Goldman Sachs. We hit it off. John Thornton calls me up one day and says, I've got a cable deal. And our guys are crunching it. Can you look at it? Because it's your field. Man, I was in his office in a nanosecond. And we invested in it together. And that was in the 80s. I said, I like this. I met Steve Schwartzman when he started Blackstone because Pete Peterson was on the board of MoMA. So we did the first deal together for Sony buying CBS Records because Pete was on the board of Sony and I was Mr.

30:44Morita's media advisor and Steve was partners with Pete. They had Blackstone had a tiny little office. They had very few people. This is the late 80s. And what Steve's done today, I was over there last week. It's like a mega institution right now. And that's how I got into investing. I'm now going to New York and I'm seeing Bob De Niro for dinner. And the next day I'm seeing John Thornton for lunch or Ted Forsman. He was a premier private equity guy who pioneered the concept of debt and equity when he was doing deals. And I ended up sitting on five boards for him. The only problem I ever had, Ted, was time.

31:30I just never had enough time. So I'm going to add a silo, which is technology. Mark Andreessen had me move to San Francisco. I had 400 meetings in a year that Mark condoned with the ecosystem of the Bay Area to get myself ensconced into that ecosystem. When I'm looking at startups, which I look at five a day, I am interested in the founder. Frankly, I hate to say this, but I am very open about it. I'm less interested in the idea. I want to see a passionate, smart founder who has thought through his idea, but it's all about the person. It's all about the creative person. It was no different when I started signing directors.

32:15It was no different when I saw the first episode of Saturday Night Live and I said, I've got to represent every one of those people. And we did. We represented every single person on that show. And everyone thought we were nuts because in those days, if you did TV, you couldn't get a movie. Early 80s, when that show came out, and Lorne Michael, who's brilliant, was a variety television show producer. And he went 180 coming up with that show. And the problem with the media business was they put everything in these buckets. When I was at William Morris, one of the reasons we left is they wouldn't let television agents talk to movie agents or vice versa.

32:58There had to be a Chinese wall between them. Everyone at our place did everything. We had agents that did music, movies, and television. It just didn't matter. You had to go for the place where the talent was. So it's a simple, addressable issue in every silo. It's all about the talent. What are the different lenses of what makes a successful talent as a creative than what you've seen, say, as a founder in tech? Nothing. I had founders start with an idea and usually nothing else. Let's put off to the side a technical founder who may have come up with a fabulous algorithm that no one else has, but he still has to have an idea for it.

33:42What's he going to do with it? What's the application? Who's he going to sell it to? They don't do these things for charity. And it's the same with a writer. Michael Crichton sitting across from me saying, two years he couldn't work. He just was blocked. He just, all of a sudden, out of the blue, he said, I have an old idea, but I don't think it works. What about three people? One's older, two are younger. And they're caught in an amusement park off the coast of South America someplace. The amusement park breeds dinosaurs. And it's like anything else, Michael, they get loose somehow and it's havoc.

34:22He said, what do you think? I didn't skip a beat. I said, look, my son loves dinosaurs. I love dinosaurs. Michael went and in five months wrote the book. We're going to take a quick break in the action to tell you about SRS Aquium. Want to make sure your M &A processes aren't stuck in the past? Partner with a company that's been defining the future of dealmaking for nearly two decades instead. When it comes to M &A innovation, SRS Aquium has reshaped the way that deals get done, streamlining processes for maximum efficiency and minimum headaches. professional shareholder representation, online M &A payments, digital stockholder solicitation.

35:07SRS Aquium pioneered each and continues to set the bar for game -changing innovation. So leave the days of disjointed deal management behind and define your future with SRS Aquium, the smartest way to run a deal. Learn more at srsaquium .com. That's S -R -S -A -C -U -M. E -Q -U -I -O -M dot com. And now, back to the show. I'd love to turn to what you've been doing recently. How did you come across Ali Hamid? So, I collect art and people, and mostly young people. I love young people. And I said on a podcast six months ago, which caused havoc in my social life, that I didn't like hanging out with anyone my age.

35:56and all my friends that I've known forever wrote me vile emails. I did handle it very well by saying to each of them, you're the exception. But I just love the stimulation of young, smart people. And the good news about where I'm working now is they're all over the place. There's so much brain power and they're so full of energy and they want to succeed. And I can offer something that's helpful that comes with experience. I tell this story to young people that I got a call. I was living in San Francisco and I got a call from Patrick Collinson, who's one of the founders of Stripe. He and his brother, John, are two of the smartest guys I've ever met and a lot smarter than me.

36:39And my book had just come out. He asked if I could come to Stripe for lunch. I didn't know why. And I said, of course. So I drove over and I see my book sitting on the table with tons of post -its in it. And Patrick and I get trays in the commissary place and we sit down. He said, are you ready? I said, yeah, I'm hungry. And he goes, no, are you ready? I said, ready for what? He said, I'm going to ask you questions. And I got quite a few. And I said, okay. I said, what kind? He said, well, I'm going to, there's a whole series of places in your book where you were very open about mistakes you made.

37:15He said, I'm really interested in why you made them, how you made them, and what you might have done differently. And we spent two and a half hours or so. He didn't care about anything in the book that I did that was successful. He was not interested. I thought this was so intelligent. He wanted to analyze mistakes so that he didn't make them. And I said, wow, that really hit me. To get back to Ollie, I have a very close friend named Eric Lane who ran GSAM for a long time. Now he runs Tiger. And we were having lunch about a year ago, and he knows I collect people. And he said, I met a young guy.

37:57He's 31. He's really smart, and you ought to meet him. He said, I think it would be good for you guys to meet. I trust Eric. He's always introduced me to amazing people in finance. For 20 years, I've met some of the best people through Eric. And I went and I met Ollie, and I was duly impressed. And then Ollie took a chapter out of my book, and he called me every day for three months. Every single day. I must say, it kind of worked. Because each day, the conversations got longer and deeper. I called up one of the guys at Andreessen Horwitz, and I said, could you send me, and they do great diligence, the two toughest companies you ever diligenceed with all the backup.

38:45And they said, of course, I get the stuff and I tear the top sheet off, which is the company. And I keep the diligence and I send the top sheet to Ali. I said, what do you think of this company? Within 48 hours, I got back the most unbelievable, thought out, both deductively and inductively, diligence that I'd seen in a long time. So I started talking to him. He had built a really nice little credit business. But when I started Googling him, he had very few hits and no one knew who he was. And he had a terrible website. And I thought he was imminently smarter than the position he was in. he stood out to me as a great piece of talent.

39:30He was intelligent. He was personable. He was relentlessly aggressive, but yet he was crazy conservative because he comes from credit on his lens on investing. I said, wow, this guy's got all the ingredients for the secret sauce. So I call Ollie and I said, like to try to see if I can work with you and help you out. I said, but I want to warn you, I'm wildly opinionated. I'm a lot older than you are. I don't suffer fools well. I need the truth and I need to know everything. And I'm going to say stuff to you that is going to be borderline offensive. And I'm not going to couch it in sweet terms.

40:10He said, I can take it. I said, good. Go to a place. And I gave him three names. I said, get some clothes. I said, you look like crap. And he did it. He didn't flinch, Ted. He didn't get upset. He just went and did it because he looked terrible. I said, you can't go in and ask people for money looking like a guy who's on the Bowery someplace, you know, looking for some gin. You can't do that. And I started working with him. And I have done something for 50 years, which is every Sunday, I review my calendar from the prior week, and I carry forward those that I enjoyed and want to meet again. I carry forward people that I made money with.

40:54I carry forward people I learned something with. And I delete people that I found irritating, stupid users, transactional people that were using me for something. And I always have done this. I've done it my whole life. One night, I'm sitting there on a Sunday night at my desk. It's about 9 .30. And I look at my calendar, and then I go backwards. And I keep going backwards. 80 % of what I'm doing is for Ollie. And I'm not getting paid very much. I'm saying, man, this guy has sucked you into the vortex of his business. I asked myself the most important question at this stage, Am I having fun? And the answer was yes.

41:37So I called him the next morning at six in the morning. I said, I got good news and bad news. Which do you want first? He said, I want the good news. I said, great. Good news is I'm going to take all of my venture work, all my investing, everything I do, and I'm going to toss it in with you and we're going to make a company and we're going to be partners. And it's going to be really hard for you. I said, you're going to have trouble keeping up with me, which I thought was pretty funny at the time, but it turned out to be true. And he said, God, that's amazing. That's what I want. I need to be introduced to people.

42:12You know everybody. I said, yeah, I do. And I'm proud to introduce you, which is one of the reasons I felt I could do it. So he said, what's the bad news? I said, this is going to be very expensive for you. And he couldn't stop laughing. And that was a year ago. I will say it's more fun each week. I literally ran here. I was in six different meetings this morning. Two were pitches on companies, two were fundraising, and two were recruitment. And those are all things I enjoy doing. I like business building, and I like creating momentum around businesses, and I like the challenge every day. I have had several friends say to me, have you lost your mind?

42:53What are you doing? Why are you working? I hate golf. I do. I quit the country club I belong to. I've never played more than nine holes of golf. It bores me to death. I love art, but I do that anyways. I like having no time. I like my time filled. And I want to be challenged and more important than anything, I want to learn because that stimulates me. So Ollie became a means to an end for me. Couldn't be happier with what we're doing. We've got almost 40 people working for us now. My son just came in to work in venture, which took me a year to talk him into it. He's great at it. And he brought his partner with him and chucked his fund and is running that for us now.

43:40We've got fabulous young people. I think at the company, there's three people over 32 and I'm one of them. I love it. But when you look at that last year, from where travel was when you got there to now, this concept of building momentum, what did you see and what did you do when you say Ali was going to have to keep up with you to get from where you were a year ago to today and forwards? It's not a science. It's kind of an art form. And I'm not the only person that does this. I have so many friends that are extraordinary CEOs and they create inertia around them. They do it with simple rules. It's the same common denominator for all of us.

44:26If you asked each of us how we do it, we'd all give you the same story, but with different descriptions. For example, I don't know any great executive that isn't the first person that'll jump out of the foxhole when there's a problem. So leading has got to be done by example, not by talk. People that talk and pontificate are worthless. When we built CAA, one of the things we did, all of us that started it, is if we asked someone to do something, it was nothing that we wouldn't do ourselves. And at the beginning, when they didn't do it, because that's most people, they put it off. We just went in and did it.

45:07And let me tell you, that had a humongous effect on the culture. We had a system that if you and I were partners and you were an agent with me, and we had a book slip system, there are cards with your name on it. And the system was, if I wrote you a note and it was hand delivered by someone in the mailroom on your desk, it had to be answered by the end of the day. Even if it said, I don't have an answer yet, but you had to write on it, cross out what I wrote and write me back, Michael, I've got it. You're right. You're wrong. You're this, you're that. But I had to have it back by the end of the day.

45:40And everyone had these cards in rows on their desks. So we had an infallible follow -up system. And if somebody didn't do it, I just went in and did it. And I did it quickly and seamlessly and successfully. And let me tell you, it never happened a second time. Secondly, communication can be a game of arrogance if you're not careful. It's what I said to you earlier. You call someone and you get upset they don't call you back. doesn't bother me the slightest. I just keep calling them until they call me back. Or I go see them. I did this as a young agent. When I was in my 20s and I couldn't get big directors on the phone, I would just go sit out in front of their office and wait.

46:24They all had to go pee. So I would just wait and be sitting there. And then third, I have no clock, which really irritates some people, I have to say. I like to work late after dinner, I like to get organized for the next day. I go out to dinner almost every night. I go out to lunch every day. And my kids are grown. My youngest is 22, about to be 23. My others are adults with their own kids. And my only hobby is art, and it's not a hobby. It's part of my lifestyle. I'm so deep in it. It's part of my everyday thought process. But it's not a full -time job. I'm not a dealer. I'm a collector. So I have plenty of time.

47:07And it could be Sunday night at 11 o 'clock. If we're working together, you might hear from me. And I don't say ever, you have to hit me right back. I always say, if it's Sunday night or Sunday, for Monday. But I always like to see who hits me back. And everyone does. And that's changed in our own business now in six months. The change is astronomical. There's no synaptic delay. Everything is of the moment, unless it needs to be analyzed, thought out, and discussed. It's still of the moment because it goes on a follow -up agenda. And systems are critical. I'm big on systems. There was no systems in our business when I got into it.

47:56And now everything is systemized on follow -up. And everyone's copied on everything. So for example, we see hundreds of tech deals to get into and we don't do, but maybe a fraction of them. So for every hundred, we'll probably do five. And we've done 23 deals in the last five months. And we've probably seen 10 times that many, but we have a system for it. And everyone sees everything and everyone has an opinion. I am really interested and always have been in everybody's opinion, because I'm not always right. I will change my point of view at the moment that someone convinces me I'm wrong. And I'll do it in front of people.

48:43I'm not bashful about it. When we were at the agency, if they had a logical argument that was substantiated by facts, they could change my mind. What are some of the most important ways you've used systems to manage people? The key to good management is accountability. Our systems are such that everyone gets follow -up notes on what they have to do and they keep their own. But at CAA, for example, our follow -up was impeccable. When we were in the investment banking business, we brought that attitude to investment banking. And our follow -up, it was flawless. We never made a mistake because it's wrote.

49:25It's not rocket science. Anyone can be taught to follow up, yet very few people do it. Anyone can be taught to make outgoing calls and generate momentum, but very few people do it. When I started with Ollie, I did exactly what I did when Mark Andreessen had me move to San Francisco. I have put Ollie into over 200 meetings in the last nine months with smart people, and I've not gotten one negative back. And I'm very proud of him. He listens great. He's smart as hell. He has this extraordinary ability because he learned the credit business from the ground up. Credit guys look at things through a different lens.

50:14And they're very risk averse. He's really risk averse. Yet our venture business is like being in the Wild West because it's mostly risk. Because you never know. Who knows? But Ollie's taken that credit lens and put it on top of our venture business. And it's been incredibly helpful. And he wants to learn. And he works like I do. He's 24 -7. I can get him on the phone Sunday at 11 o 'clock at night. And I often do, by the way. All the things that I'm stating, Ted, are part of building momentum. It's kind of like a Seurat painting, a pointilless painting. When you look at Ceyrard, he's one of my all -time favorite artists.

50:55It's a bunch of dots. So if you look at an inch of it, you don't understand what you're looking at. If you look at two inches, three, four, five, and then at about a foot of it, there's a figure in there someplace. And then it starts to open up. All the things I'm saying are points on a pointillist painting. Not one of them works on their own. They have to all be integrated. So meetings are critical. When I started with Ali, I refreshed several hundred of my financial contacts that I stayed in touch with, but I didn't go have a lot of meals with them. I now do meetings every day. I have three time slots for meetings for just refreshing relationships.

51:43And then I'll do stuff for people, almost anything when asked, to help them with things. One of the things we pioneered at CA was we literally serviced the clients on everything. They wanted to buy a house, we helped them. They wanted to buy a car, we knew all the dealers. They wanted to get their kids into private schools. We had contributed to the five big private schools at each level in Los Angeles. And happily so, by the way, because it was a double good thing. And if you had a problem and needed a good doctor, I was involved with the UCLA hospital for 20 years. I kept a list of who I thought the best specialists were.

52:24By the way, I still do. Maybe because I'm a hypochondriac. I don't know. But I'm fascinated by medicine too. So I'm fascinated by what's going on in the investment world in bioscience and spend a lot of time in it. And it's a Syrah painting. All the things I'm spitting out here randomly aren't really random. They're all interconnected. I'm curious in the whole process of capital formation. I knew Ali when he was 25 billion. I think he last came on the podcast. He was 2 billion and growing from there. You mentioned earlier that the CA days, there was an element that it was all transactional. And then there's this concept of refreshing relationships.

53:04I'm really curious what those conversations are like so that you can turn something that maybe felt transactional at some point in time into a relationship that you can refresh on a moment's notice. You know, it's funny. I have this conversation with Tamara who I live with almost every night. She taught me there are two kinds of relationships and I never knew this. I always thought there was only one and that was a transactional relationship. And she said, you know, I come from London. We don't have transactional relationships because we don't do a lot of transactions. We have friends, and they're there for you forever.

53:40And she has friends that I'm now friends with because we've been together 15 years. I'm as close to her friends as she is now. They've been friends of hers for 30 years. And they don't do anything for each other. And her thesis on this is the best friend you can have is someone who's useless. And I think she's right. L .A. is all transactional friendship. They're all based on helping someone with something. And that's all I did with my life is help people. That's all I was. I was one of the great concierge, doctors, concierge, connectors, because I'm an insanely intense researcher. And my friends call me to do their homework for them.

54:20And I actually enjoy it. But New York's different. It's more like London. It's still a bit transactional. But people you get friendly with here are actually your friends. mainly because they're not all in the same business. Our friend group here, everyone does something different. It's so fantastic when we go out here because everyone at the table has a different story to tell. We did that in LA and still do. We mix and match people. But it's harder because there's not as many silos of activity. So the answer to your question is it's hard because if you lose touch with somebody, it's hard unless you have some history.

55:03I'm lucky in that I've got history with these people. And I probably in my old incarnation had done something for some of them at some point. They've also been incredibly gracious and lenient, but I think I never really lost touch because I'm involved with MoMA. I'm here looking at art. 50 % of my life was in New York. Now it's more since I partnered up with Ollie, but I didn't really lose touch. So I didn't have to start from the ground floor. So I had to start on a 20 story building from the 12th floor, but I had some foundational relationship. When you now are meeting with people, let's say it's a pool of capital that might look at what you're doing as a potential investor.

55:48What do you think you do differently than maybe what Ali might have done before other people in the industry when they're trying to approach raising capital? I tell the people I'm meeting with that I think I don't like the meetings to go more than 20 minutes. I tell them up front. I don't book an hour. I like to give people back what I call bonus time. And I say that at the end of every Zoom. I don't do long phone calls, which I had to teach Ali about because he couldn't understand why he had no time and he had no time because he was too long on each call. People want to get stuff done and they want you to get stuff done.

56:25If I'm pitching to a pool of capital, they hear this every day and I'm very open about it. I said this to someone on the phone, one, I know you want to see a deck. I think they're stupid. I'm happy to send it to you. I will send it to you. But you better investigate me and Ollie and our partners because we're the ones going to be doing the work. Number two, every person in my position tells you they're the greatest thing since the wheel. It's all baloney. We're not. We're good at certain things and not so good at others, just like everybody else. I said to someone at a big foundation yesterday, we were in a giant meeting and I think they were in a state of shock.

57:02I said, I can't believe you're sitting through this. And the guy looked at me, he said, what are you talking about? You asked for the meeting. I said, but you take these meetings every day and everyone's doing what we're about to do, which is tell you we're unbelievably good. And it's just nonsense. You got to make a decision about us as people. And he said, that's really interesting. No one's ever said that to me before. I said, well, they've thought it. They just didn't say it. And I said, it's probably because they're all half my age. I've been around too long. And then secondly, for me, it's easier, frankly.

57:35Ted, there's only one good thing about getting older, which is you've just been around a long time. In 1992, I was lucky enough to meet a guy named Andy Grove, who was the co -founder of Intel. And we created the CA Intel Media Lab in Beverly Hills to educate the secular head in the sand entertainment business about what was coming around the corner. I think when I tell investors that we had early deals with Microsoft and Intel in the mid nineties, and I went on Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz's board in 98 or 9. I think that resonates because part of being a great investor is to be around these people that made that business great in the foundational time and then keep it going with the young people.

58:26And I think that is a different story. In your many meetings with people gathering intelligence, as you look around corners, what do you see coming? I love that question because I just addressed that at dinner last night. I said to a table of people, I wish I was younger. And everyone said, yeah, sure you do. I said, but not for the reason you think. I just want to see how it all turns out. The stuff going on right now. Oh my God. I haven't been this excited since I started CAA, where I got to meet all these brilliant creative people and put their ideas together and help them form them. And I meet these young men and women.

59:09They're like 26, seven, eight, nine. They're wicked smart. They're perceptive. They're personable. And they want to change the world. I remember living through all the format changes in entertainment. They changed constantly. I remember having a reel -to -reel tape recorder. Then I remember having a giant cassette player with those big giant cassettes long before your time. And then I remember getting a smaller cassette and then a mini cassette. And then Sony came out with a video camera and then Matsushita came out with one Panasonic. And then I saw floppy disks. And then I saw CD -ROMs. Then I saw CDs.

59:56Then I saw DVDs. And then I told three of the five record companies I consulted for that all their package goods were going to disappear. because Nathan Mirvold, who is the smartest guy, was employee number three at Microsoft, was CTO, said to me in a meeting one day in the 90s, Michael, see those speakers there? I said, yeah. He said, music's not going to come through those wires. And I sat there. I said, come on. And he told me why. So I went and told the three CEOs of the three record companies that I was consulting for. One fired me, one threw me out, and one thought I was smoking crack. And sure enough, look what happened.

1:00:35It all comes out of the ether. I want to see the future in medicine, in science, in technology, in AI. I want to see how it turns out. Because you could see now that the amount of creativity and technology is at an all -time high. Have you harkened back to your conversation with Patrick Collison and reflect on the mistakes you've made. As you look out, let's just focus it on what you're doing with Ali at Treble. What are the most important mistakes that you want to make sure you don't make again? It's a fascinating subject to discuss because I am the world's greatest cheerleader for talent, any kind of talent.

1:01:20I want them to succeed. It makes me feel good. I'm probably the world's largest critic of myself. I've had the same writer put me on the cover of a magazine calling me brilliant and then four years later write an article that I'm an idiot. But I'm my own worst critic. The writer said nothing compared to what I say to myself. And one of the things I realized early on when Mark Andreessen and Ben Horwitz invited me to be on their board in the late 90s, I never had a mentor. I didn't have me who'd been through it and was older. I had no one to say to me, don't do this, do that. And I've made a lot of mistakes and some of them were obvious, but not to me.

1:02:07And I'm a horrific advisor for myself because I have this thing from the time I was a kid that I can do anything and I can fix anything and I can do good. If somebody's got something that needs to be done, I can do it. And I'd say by and large, I probably do that for friends particularly. I'm in the middle of helping friends settle their divorce because I don't want them to go spend a zillion dollars on lawyers. And I came up with a thesis and I Henry Kissinger'd it between both of them. I enjoy doing that. I'm great at giving advice to other people, but when it comes to me, I sometimes miss it by a mile.

1:02:46So I'm not afraid of failure. I think if I had to live all over again, I would love to have a mentor that was three times my age and had been through it all before and made the mistakes and could see around corners. I've had founders say to me they can't believe some of the advice I give them turns out to be things that they didn't think were meaningful. I had a meeting in San Francisco with two young founders, brilliant engineers, brilliant. They were like 26 or 27. They started this company and it started to take off. And I said, look, here's some things I see around the corner for you, X, Y, and Z.

1:03:27I was doing work for Palantir, which I still do. And I had heard from one of the senior Palantir engineers that the The Nigerians were hacking American consumer companies and getting into their payment systems. This was like 12, 13 years ago. I told them about this. And I said, also, you need to have relationships with people. You've got to stop just only doing email. They weren't even doing text. They were just doing email. They'd stay up all night, but they'd never talk to anybody. One day, I was in my office at Andreessen Horowitz in Palo Alto, and I'm driving back to San Francisco. And the phone rings.

1:04:01It's one of these founders. He'd never called me ever. I said to him in this meeting, I said, you know, when you least expect it and you think everything's amazing, you're going to walk down the stairs of this office, walk out on the street. You're going to make a left. You're going to go around the corner and a midget's going to hit you in the shins with a two by four. And you're going to bend over and go, how did this happen? It's going to happen to you. It's Saad's law. He calls me up. He said, you remember when you told me so -and -so was going to happen and we thought you were nuts. And I said, yeah, I remember.

1:04:33And he said, we just got shut down. He said, we got hacked Sunday night at two in the morning when no one was paying attention. They swept all of our accounts out and we have no money from customers. We're fulfilling orders. We're paying for it ourselves. Braintree shut us down. And he said, we don't know what to do. And I said, I'll take care of it. By sheer luck, I had had dinner the night before with David Marcus, and he thought I was calling him to thank him for dinner. I said, I got a problem. He was running PayPal at the time, and I told him what it was. Guess what? You're in luck. I said, why?

1:05:11He said, I'm sitting in Chicago next to the founder of the company, and I'm going to put you on the phone with him, and you tell him, and we'll take care of it. He was all about relationship. I got on the phone with a guy who couldn't have been more gracious. They put my guys back up. And to this day, those guys say to me, what else is going to happen to us? Michael, I want to make sure I get a chance to ask you a couple of closing questions. What's your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family? It's art. I'm obsessed and I love mentoring young collectors. I have a young VC in San Francisco named Rompton Naimi, who you may know, who has abstract ventures.

1:05:50He started it about six years ago. I was an early supporter of his. I think he's an amazing investor, but he came to my house and he got interested in art and he's passionate about it and he wants to learn. And we must talk four times a day about it. I couldn't be happier to see him on my phone because it's always a good feed for a business and I get to talk about art. So I love art. It literally is one of the pillars of my life along with my family. I'm a big family guy, always have been. What's your biggest pet peeve? I'm almost afraid to say I like to learn. So it's very hard for me to be in random situations and make small talk with people.

1:06:33I'm not big on cocktail parties. I don't like when I have to go to an event to go to the hour before. I loved it when I was an agent because I got so much done, but I never stayed for the event. So it was easy. We had a system, by the way, where there's two, three screenings a week of your clients' movies. And the screenings always started at 730. And we pioneered this concept. Everyone's milling around for 45 minutes in the lobby of the theaters before. We'd send teams of agents like 10 or 12. And they'd fan out. And then when the screening was ready to start, people would all file in and sit down.

1:07:11and we waited till everyone was seated and then would go down both aisles to make a spectacle of ourselves. And then I would go take a seat in the back. And the minute the lights went out, I left and I could then go do a dinner. So I got a twofer in that, but I don't like doing that anymore. And I don't like small talk. I just can't stand it. I like to learn things. I want people to share things with me that they're doing, that they're passionate about. How's your life turned out differently from how you expected it to? I had a plan and it didn't work, is what it boils down to. Left CAA to go to Disney with the hopes of spending five to six years running a public company.

1:07:55And then I wanted to get involved in the State Department because I love negotiating and I wanted to have a job working in the State Department. I had spent a lot of time raising money for the Democratic Party, and I thought by running a public company, it would give me a foundation. I had been enough as an agent. I wanted to be on the buy side, and I wanted to run a profiled business. And then I wanted to go to the State Department. And I'd say within 48 hours of joining Disney, I knew I had made one of the great mistakes of my life. So when you talk about mistakes, I missed every cue when I went over there.

1:08:33It was the worst, most horrific experience imaginable. I mean, they wrote a book about it called Disney Wars, and it's quite accurate. Jim Stewart is not a guy that writes things that aren't true in anything he does. And it just didn't turn out the way I thought it was going to turn out. Now, I can't complain because if I did that plan, I wouldn't be partners with Ollie right now having the time of my life. So I got lucky in a strange way. But it was a rough road for part of it. How'd you recover from that? It's what I said to the guys in London. I made a mistake. Next case. One of the great lines of all time that has always stayed with me was Barry Diller's line when he went after CBS and Sumner Redstone got it, and he got interviewed by everybody.

1:09:18And Barry's incredibly smart and witty. That's why reporters love to talk to him. Instead of giving this long, windy, ridiculous, stupid excuse, he looked at these reporters and they all printed it. he said, we lost, he won next case. And he was right. He lost next case. And that's how I look at my life. I've made a lot of mistakes. What am I going to do? I'm not moving to Switzerland. So I'm going to do the best I can do to start something that makes me happy and challenges me. And I get to learn something. I find myself a perpetual student. And that is where I am right now. I'm learning a lot and I'm taking a lot of information from friends of mine that are in the investment world.

1:10:04I'm on the phone with them constantly asking them questions. I think I've made Eric Lane crazy. He's trying to run Chase Coleman's company. And I think every time he sees my name pop up on his cell phone, he must go absolutely crazy because I'm just always asking him crazy questions. What's a mystery you wonder about? I think something that is always fascinating to me is why I ended up being an agent is I find the whole concept of creating things out of thin air almost impossible to explain and articulate. I'll never forget, I flew to Osaka to meet with the number two guy in Matsushita. And I was so jet lagged, Ted, it was unbelievable.

1:10:46And they threw a dinner for me. And in those days when the Japanese threw a dinner, they'd rent out the whole restaurant. So there was no one in the room. So there was no distraction. It was just us. And I'm like nodding off. And the guy turns to me and said, Michael Hassan, in broken English, can you please explain creativity to me? And I've never forgotten that line. I think about it all the time. I was on the phone with a very brilliant young artist today. I went to see one of her paintings and I said, just how did you do that? I mean, it's like, how did you get the idea? How did your brain tell your hand what to do?

1:11:23How did you know what color to use? It just mesmerizes me. I just think that it's a process I'll never understand, frankly, and I'm trying to. But it keeps me getting me up in the morning. All right, Michael, last one. What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in your life? I wish I would have met the woman I'm with right now earlier because she taught me about relationships. She's English, and it's very different over there. I wish I would have learned the difference between business and personal. I melded them all together. And the weird thing is, Ted, to show you how I'm not my own best advisor, I used to preach to all of our people to not think their clients were their friends and to treat them appropriately at arm's length and don't confide in your personal life.

1:12:17They don't want to hear it. They may tell you they do, but they're not interested. Plus, they're paying you a lot of money. So you got to have a business relationship. I didn't follow my own advice, and I got involved in all these relationships over the years that turned out to be unfulfilling. I'm not talking about creative people. Those are great. I'm just talking about with other executives and things like that. They're transactional. transactional. And people you're on the other side of the fence from, people that run companies, they're not real. They're usury. And I kind of swept that under the rug.

1:12:50And it was really short -sighted. But no one said to me, just should look at the other side of this. I had no idea. And I've changed that in my life, like geometrically. In the last, I would say, 20 years, it's a different lifestyle for me. Well, Michael, thanks so much for sharing such incredible stories and insights this path. Thanks, Tim. Thanks for listening to the show. To learn more, hop on our website at CapitalAllocators .com, where you can join our mailing list, access past shows, learn about our gatherings, and sign up for premium content, including podcast transcripts, my investment portfolio, and a lot more.

1:13:32Have a good one, and see you next time.