Ron Howard: Evolve your vision

0:00Does it ever feel like you're paying for 20 platforms to do the job of what really should be just one? That's not software as a service or SaaS. It's SAD, software as a disservice. Replacing your stitched together tech stack with one platform for all your departments? Well, that's Rippling. Rippling eliminates the bottlenecks and busy work of legacy tools and point solutions by uniting your global HR, IT, and spend teams on just one platform. And right now, you can get six months of Rippling free when you sign up at rippling.com slash scale. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G dot com slash scale. Don't get sad, get Rippling.

0:44Terms and conditions apply. AI agents can make your teams more productive, but if they aren't connected to other agents or your data or your existing workflows, they can only take you so far. Any business can add AI agents, but IBM connects your agents across your company to change how you do business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. If you're focused on scaling your business, you know that complexity kills efficiency, which is why Freshworks is here to give you uncomplicated service software. Freshworks builds intuitive tools that make work easier and deliver real ROI today, not someday. Their AI doesn't replace your people, it unlocks their potential.

1:30If you want to increase your team's efficiency and uncomplicate your business, try Fresh Service for IT and Fresh Desk for customer support. Learn more at FreshWorks.com. I was out there hustling and not getting a lot of parts. I was no longer being hired because I was now a pimply-faced kid at age 16. they could hire an 18-year-old to play my part and they wouldn't have the limitations of working hours and so forth. That was the way the business worked. That struggling young actor is Ron Howard. Through his childhood, he'd become known for his roles as a wholesome, all-American boy. But as an awkward adolescent, he'd take any role he could get.

2:23So when he landed an audition for an ad for the Ford Pinto, he jumped at the chance. I went into this audition, but there was no Pinto there. It's just an empty room. And a row of producers, brand people, and casting directors. As it was only the audition and not the actual shoot, Ron took the lack of a car in stride. But then he discovered another glaring omission. I noticed there wasn't really any dialogue. And they said, well, no, there's no dialogue. This is going to be nonverbal. It's just about a young guy who's just gotten a pinto, and he's really excited about this pinto. In fact, he's washing the pinto.

3:09I said, oh, okay, great. Then Ron received his first piece of direction. Could you wash the pinto? And I said, well, do you have one outside or something? I said, no, no, no, just could you mime it? And I said, do you have a rag or anything like that? No, no, no, could you just mime it for us? Let's just see what it might be like when you're moving around. Well, that's embarrassing when you're a pimply-faced 16-year-old in a room full of people. Ron pushed through the embarrassment and conjured up a pinto, a rag, and a tub of turtle wax in his mind's eye and got down to some serious buffing. So, okay, I'm doing it.

3:49And then they're saying, wow, you know, this kid, this boy really likes this car. Oh, okay, I'll smile. And oh, now you got to get the hubcaps. Get to, oh, the grill. So now I'm down on my freaking hands and knees, faking like I'm grinning and washing the hubcaps to my Pinto. The casting directors were sold on the performance. Ron, not so much. I went home and I said, by God, I got to become a director. I got to be a producer. I got to find my own jobs. I can't rely on these people. It was embarrassing as hell. Yes. It's probably on YouTube somewhere. Spoiler alert, I couldn't find it on YouTube.

4:35Ron could have kept banking checks for washing invisible cars, but instead he kept his focus on his vision to be a filmmaker. I may not quite know how it's going to work or what an audience is going to expect of the stories that I tell, but I trust my own curiosity and desire to figure it out and to roll with those punches. It certainly keeps you on your toes, and I think on your toes is a good place to be. So Ron started looking for ways to make his vision a reality, even though it meant navigating his way through an ever-changing film industry in which yesterday's child star can easily find themselves as tomorrow's squeegee slinger.

5:23That's why I believe your unique selling point is your vision, and you need to realize and refine that vision amid constant change. You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it.

5:58We haven't made it just how you do it.

6:04This is Masters of Scale.

6:12I'm Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host. And I believe your unique selling point is your vision, and you need to realize and refine that vision amid constant change. Imagine you're sitting at a table in an intimate, after-hours jazz club. You're about halfway through your first cocktail, and the sextet is halfway through a swinging performance. After setting out the beat and the melody of the tune, the musicians take it in turns to solo. The clarinetist steps forward and the cool sinewy sound of their instrument glides above the rest of the band.

6:53Next, the guitarist steps up and slings out smooth licks that tastefully complement the chord changes.

7:04Then the trumpeter strides to the middle of a stage, shakes off his horn, and blasts out a single, discordant note that gratingly clashes stubbornly with the rest of the band. He stops, glares around the small club, and then blasts the same jarring note again, this time defiantly holding it longer as patrons cover their ears. Check, please. Each of those musicians had a vision for the music they wanted to create together. Where they differed is how they realized their vision. The trumpeter wasn't reading the room, nor the changes. And rather than refining their vision in light of those changes, plowed ahead.

7:46As a leader, your ultimate expertise is how you rally people, resources, and opportunities to make your vision a reality. The real challenge lies in how you make that vision come true amid constant changes in the business environment, in tech, and in society as a whole.

8:06I wanted to speak to Ron Howard about this because he's continued to bring his vision to life in film and TV through a range of monumental changes. Since starting out as a child actor in 1955, Ron has seen new technology, audience tastes, and styles of filmmaking come and go. As a director and producer, he has a remarkable ability to maintain his vision of creating captivating and deeply human stories. He's delivered this vision through a range of genres, from heartfelt comedies like the breakout hit Splash, to the stunning visual effects of Apollo 13 and the biographical drama of A Beautiful mind.

8:46Ron has also scaled his ability to deliver his vision through Imagine Entertainment, the production company he co-founded with Brian Grazer. For an early example of Ron's ability to deliver his vision, we need to go back to his high school days and a bold proposal he put to his history teacher. I said we're supposed to do a term paper about the Depression, but you know, my parents grew up through the Depression. I know a lot of people who lived through it. I'd like to make a documentary. I'd like to interview them. Can I do that as my project? With his project greenlit, Ron got to work. For a couple of weeks there, that's about all I did was focus on this documentary.

9:27I interviewed seven different people about living through the Depression. I got picture books out of the New York City Library. I would zoom in on these faces. Kim Burns made this style famous.

9:42Ron was in high school in the late 60s and early 70s. And of course, digital cameras were the stuff of sci-fi. Ron shot his project on a small film camera. When it came time to show his class, he ran the film through a bulky projector, while his narration came from a separate tape recorder. The projector and the tape recorder didn't necessarily run in perfect sync. So I got very good at speeding up or slowing down the projector to try to stay in sync with the narration. During each viewing of the film, Ron had to constantly adjust the projector's dials as he intently focused on matching the sound with the picture.

10:24I was always just sweating, you know, when each showing was over, but I got a lot of satisfaction out of it. Despite the technical challenges, Ron realized his vision for that project, which was to bring to life for his classmates the very real, very human, yet very distant, story of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The project was also part of Ron's more long-term vision to be a filmmaker. Even though I was a child of Hollywood, I was always interested in independent film production. I had this fire in the belly and a real passion for the medium. him. You'd think growing up in Hollywood would be a perfect launchpad for Ron to achieve that long-held vision.

11:08And while Ron continued his acting success into adulthood with his starring role as Ritchie Cunningham in the sitcom Happy Days, his progress as a filmmaker was stalling.

11:25I was behind schedule at age 22 in my mind. I'd wanted to direct my first feature when I was a teen. At that time, for a sitcom actor to shift around and be taking charge of any movie was very unusual. And I felt like at that point I was going to have doors to kick down to convince people and earn my place. One of the scariest scenarios for any leader is looking back and realizing you missed the opportunity to realize your vision. This is why waiting too long to start making your vision a reality is dangerous. It actually increases your chances of failure. The really successful leaders jump at the right moment to bring their vision to life.

12:07They don't see constraints as things that limit their vision. Rather, they see constraints as handles to pull themselves closer to making their vision a reality. At the time, it was beyond most people's imagination that a 20-something sitcom actor could direct a movie. So, Ron got creative. Roger Corman wanted me to act in a movie called Eat My Dust. That's legendary producer and director Roger Corman, known as the king of cult cinema and maker of low-budget cult classics of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Ron read the script for Eat My Dust. I didn't like this script at all, but I had an independent script that I had written with my father.

12:55The movie that Ron and his dad, Rance Howard, had penned was a light-hearted comedy called Tis the Season.

13:04So I went to Roger and I said, would you do this movie? I'm passionate about it. I have half the money. Will you put up the other half and distribute? He read it and he said, this is a well-written script, but it's not the kind of movie I do.

13:24It's unsurprising Corman turned down Tis the Season when you consider some of the titles of his movies. It conquered the world. A bucket of blood are two of my favorites. But although Corman didn't think Tis the Season fit with his stable of B-movie genre flicks, he was impressed with Ron's vision. So he asked Ron to write another script, this time more in line with the King of Cults brand. He said, if the script you write is good enough and you're willing to star, I'll give you a chance to make a movie. Ron saw that helping Corman adhere to his vision of moviemaking would, in the long run, help Ron realize his own.

14:08For Ron, this was the only thing that was important. When I went in for the final meeting, I had to actually tell my agent not to come up with me because I knew he was going to barter from money. I didn't care about the money. I cared about the director's chair. Ron sealed the deal with Corman and agreed to star in Eat My Dust. Ron and his father then co-wrote a script called Grand Theft Auto. It centered around a madcap car journey across the desert. This was more Corman's kind of movie, so he agreed to make it with Ron as lead actor and director. Grand Theft Auto came out in 1977, and it was a commercial success.

14:49More importantly, it established Ron's filmmaker credentials and set him on the path to making his vision of becoming a respected, independently-minded director a reality. I then launched into a series of television movies and TV pilots that I actually produced as well as directed. We had a company. My father helped. My wife, Cheryl, was an accountant. So it was a very entrepreneurial move, but I felt like if I was in control, okay. Soon, Ron crossed paths with another young filmmaker, the producer, Brian Grazer. Here's Brian on when they first met. I had an office on the Paramount lot, and he had an office on the Paramount lot.

15:31My office was perched up on the top floor of the director's building. It was an office with a view, and one day, Brian saw Ron Howard passing below his window. I ripped it open, and I yelled out the window just impulsively, Ron, Ron Howard! And he glanced at me and then kind of took off. So he eluded me, but I thought, you know, no, I really want to talk to him. It's usually a bit harder to forge a trusted professional connection than simply yelling out your window at a passerby. It's one of the reasons I built LinkedIn. But this was 1979, some time before the rise of online social networks. So Brian took a more conventional approach to making a connection with Ron.

16:18I called his assistant, Louisa, said, I really want to have a conversation with Ron Howard. And I was quite persuasive. And I had the meeting with Ron. He came to my office. And we had this magical one-hour conversation. He just had this aura of goodness about him that was very attractive to me. We shared movie ideas back and forth. And I had several movie ideas that he really was impressed with. The two shared a vision for making movies that put human stories at their heart. We shared the same dream. That's where Ron and I intersected. Dreams are really, really important. And the only way they come true is through execution.

17:06When I talked to Brian, his side of the story was so compelling that we're dedicating an entire Master's Scale episode to him coming soon. Both Brian and Ron had the will to push forward with their vision. In 1982, they brought to life the comedy set in a morgue titled Night Shift, starring Michael Keaton and Henry Winkler. The film was a low-key success. Ron and Brian then set their sights on a project Brian had been trying to get made for years, the story of a man and a mermaid who fell in love, titled Splash. Splash lived up to its name and was a massive hit. After our night shift and splash experiences, I was so impressed with Brian.

17:46We had bonded. And he had a similar kind of output. But we were driving all over town all the time, trying to sell to every studio and network. And between us, we had probably 30 development projects going, which meant a lot of meetings. And we actually said, if we just pooled all of this, we'd have some leverage, and maybe we could just work out of one office and not have to drive around quite so much. And we'd, you know, we'd have each other. Ron and Brian saw each other as force multipliers, helping each other bring their visions into being. So in 1985, shortly after Splash was released, they decided to officially pool the resources by co-founding Imagine Entertainment.

18:30There was no sort of secret formula to Imagine other than our personal taste and this sort of belief that we could, between us, tell stories that would reach an audience. Ron's a master of moviemaking, and here he's also being a master of modesty, because I would argue that personal taste plus self-belief was his secret formula. In fact, it is the formula that can make a vision into a reality. In order to achieve your own unique vision, It needs to be guided by your own personal taste and values and driven by your belief that you can make it a reality.

19:14Thanks to the huge success of Splash, Imagine was one of the hottest production studios in Hollywood. So within a year, Ron and Brian raised funds with an IPO so they could rapidly scale their vision for creating modern, human-centered stories that spoke to their generation of moviegoers. We immediately had a pool of money to work with to control our own development to invest in the films with the idea that we would maintain the rights to syndication, burgeoning video cassettes and so forth. It was really thrilling. On paper, it looked like we'd really done something on paper. Ron and Brian felt like they'd built a future-proof model for scaling their vision.

19:59But then they were broadsided by an unexpected upset, the kind that crawls barefoot through air ducts and yells, Yippee-ki-yay! Bruce Willis was given$6 million to star in Die Hard. He was a TV star. When this TV guy leapt to that number, every A-list actor in Hollywood jumped to that number or more. and our model no longer held up because we were supposed to make movies for a certain number, yet the studio wanted us to get the best actors of our generation, the best stars, to be in these movies. Before moving on, I want to assure you that Ron Howard, the nicest man in Hollywood, is in no way bitter at Bruce's casting.

20:44He was the right guy for the movie. By the way, they made a good call. It was a huge hit, but that priced us out of our model. As a creative leader, you'll always have to face unexpected outside forces that may undercut your ability for delivering your vision. They might be as bland as a change in interest rates, or as unexpected as a disgruntled New York cop in your ventilation system. And that's where your expertise as a visionary will be most needed, especially when the challenges keep mounting up as they did for Ron and Brian. The next challenge to Imagine's business model came from their distribution partner.

21:20These were the people responsible for getting Imagine's films into the cinemas. They wanted certain creative controls. They also wanted us to do something that was very smart for them. They wanted us to go into radio stations. Expanding from movies into radio, leaping their vision off the silver screen and soaring across the airwaves into millions more homes across America, even the world. Surely, this was an exciting opportunity to scale their vision. Well, that's not what either of us wanted. We were not distribution. We were the storytellers. And that's the way we wanted it. This is another skill visionary leaders need.

22:06The ability to say no to request from powerful partners if they take you away from your vision. It was obvious to Ron and Brian that their distribution partner's demands would detract from their vision of making character-driven, impactful stories. Without a distribution partner, Ron and Brian may be free to make films that reflected their vision of the art form. The only downside would be no one else could see those films.

22:37We'll find out what Ron and Brian did after the break. This is Mike Nicholas, Capital One business customer and co-founder of Ansett Uncles, a plant-based restaurant and community space in Brooklyn, New York. And he's telling us how they started a product line. We already had a space in the community. The food was an extension of our lifestyle and our values. So we know we wanted to create something that was an offshoot to that. Our pepper sauce. That's my grandmother's recipe. That's like a liquid gold, right? If someone wants to approach us and ask us, what do we do? We provide flavor. Growing a product line is no small investment, but Mike and his wife and co-founder Nicole were able to manage with the help of their Capital One Business Card.

23:22Working with Capital One Business, we're able to leverage our limits and utilize those points, making sure we can continue the scale at the speed that we need it to go. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards. Most single-function AI tools just gum up your workflow. Project management becomes a tedious relay race of copying, pasting, and switching tabs until you forget what you were even doing. Say hello to Superhuman, the AI productivity suite that gives you superpowers everywhere you work. With the intelligence of Grammarly, Mail, and Coda built right in, you get things done faster and collaborate seamlessly.

24:02Superhuman lets you handle multiple tasks wherever you're working. No more copy-pasting, no more jumping between AI tools, and there's no learning curve. Superhuman gets what you really need from day one. It understands your writing style, helps you focus on what matters, and proactively offers the next best step. Unleash your superhuman potential with AI that meets you where you work. Learn more at superhuman.com slash podcast. That's superhuman.com slash podcast. We all remember the choices that shaped the course of our lives. In business, world-renowned venture capital firm Sequoia Capital calls them Crucible Moments.