Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Michael Ovitz - Turning Potential into Prominence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.418]
Tue, 08 Apr 2025
My guest today is Michael Ovitz. Michael is the legendary talent agent and Co-Founder of CAA or Creative Artists Agency and he is joining me on Invest Like the Best for a second time. Michael started CAA in 1975 and over the next 20 years, he built it into the world's most formidable talent agency, changing Hollywood forever. He shares insights into how he identifies exceptional people across diverse fields - from Hollywood directors like Steven Spielberg to tech founders like Alex Karp of Palantir and venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen. Michael is a force whose expertise extends beyond just people, as he has also become a master in creating institutional momentum, which you’ll hear in his involvement with the MoMA, Gulfstream, and more. We discuss his "pilot's checklist" for evaluating talent, the importance of time as his most valuable resource, and why he believes maintaining excellence is critical in any field. Please enjoy my conversation with Michael Ovitz. Subscribe to Colossus Review. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Ramp. Ramp’s mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Ramp is the fastest-growing FinTech company in history, and it’s backed by more of my favorite past guests (at least 16 of them!) than probably any other company I’m aware of. Go to Ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. – This episode is brought to you by Ridgeline. Ridgeline has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. I think this platform will become the standard for investment managers, and if you run an investing firm, I highly recommend you find time to speak with them. Head to ridgelineapps.com to learn more about the platform. – This episode is brought to you by AlphaSense. AlphaSense has completely transformed the research process with cutting-edge AI technology and a vast collection of top-tier, reliable business content. Imagine completing your research five to ten times faster with search that delivers the most relevant results, helping you make high-conviction decisions with confidence. Invest Like the Best listeners can get a free trial now at Alpha-Sense.com/Invest and experience firsthand how AlphaSense and Tegus help you make smarter decisions faster. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com). Show Notes: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best (00:06:56) Spotting Talent and Building Institutions (00:08:01) The MoMA Story: Transforming an Art Institution (00:19:35) The Importance of Relationships and Time (00:24:32) Building Successful Boards and Teams (00:34:02) Insights on Leadership and Momentum (00:44:49) Building Blackstone and CAA (00:56:32) The Power of Momentum (00:57:25) Overcoming Fear of Failure (01:01:52) Strategic Partnerships and Global Influence (01:17:32) The Importance of Excellence (01:18:22) Mentorship and Legacy (01:34:00) The Future of Media and Technology (01:41:36) Pursuit of Happiness and Lifelong Learning
Chapter 1: What is Michael Ovitz's background?
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Chapter 2: How does Michael Ovitz spot exceptional talent?
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Chapter 3: What role did Michael Ovitz play in transforming MoMA?
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My guest today is Michael Ovitz. Michael is the legendary talent agent and co-founder of CAA, or Creative Artists Agency, and he is joining me on Invest Like the Best for the second time. Michael started CAA in 1975 and over the next 20 years built it into the world's most formidable talent agency, changing Hollywood forever.
He shares his insights into how he identifies exceptional people across diverse fields, from Hollywood directors like Steven Spielberg to tech founders like Alex Karp of Palantir and venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen. Michael is a force whose expertise extends beyond just people.
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Chapter 4: Why is time considered the most valuable resource?
And I thought that a common theme for today that would make it really fun is this joint notion of you spotting talent extremely early and what the talent that you did select had that the hundreds of others that you met with didn't. And then helping and watching those people build relationships. enduring institutions very quickly.
I'm especially interested in the first 10 years of institution building around some of these people that you've been intimately involved with. Maybe start with that talent piece. What is it that all these different people, who are very different from each other, shared in common when you first saw them, especially the ones that were very young when you saw them.
Some of them were in business school, hadn't proven themselves. Certainly the ones from my world, sort of business and investing is one batch. So whether it's Alex and Joe at Palantir, whether it's Steve Schwartzman at Blackstone, Josh at Thrive, Mark and Ben at Andreessen Horowitz. I mean, the list kind of goes on and on.
There's also people in other fields that aren't that I'm not familiar with that you can tell us about companies that you were involved in. Like just take MoMA as an example. Everyone knows MoMA as this preeminent art institution. It wasn't always. MoMA wasn't always MoMA. There's plenty of museums.
I'm very interested in like the people component of how MoMA became MoMA and what you saw and what you did and who you recruited and how. So these are all examples of kind of the same question over and over again with each of these people. But for context, those are just some of the names.
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Chapter 5: How did Michael Ovitz build effective boards and teams?
Let's take MoMA because it's right here in town, down the street. And it's... phenomenal institution. I mean, it's a place I've been on the board for 35 years. I go there sometimes to just unwind, believe it or not. There were two places I went to in the last 40 years in New York City to unwind. One was MoMA.
When I had an hour between meetings or even a half hour, I'd fly in there and just sit in one of the galleries and take in the just extraordinary stimuli of creativity and say to myself, you know, what were these people thinking? When did they do this? What influenced them? How did they come up with this idea? Why is it different?
Better than anything else in its genre, which when you look at MoMA, they have the best of the best, which is as an art collector, almost impossible to do. The second place I went was I had a very close friend in New York who I saw talk to three, four times a week named Roy Lichtenstein. And I used to go to his studio, which is where he lived, in Washington in the village.
And I'd walk in, his wife Dorothy would take my cell phone, and Roy would let me sit there and watch him paint. And we'd talk. And I wasn't allowed to do business. And it gave me a great sense of grounding, frankly. At MoMA, I was very lucky enough to be asked by David Rockefeller at a very young age to get involved in the museum.
If you ask me why David did this, my guess is he wanted someone from the West Coast. He wanted someone that was involved in the media business, and he wanted to bring the mean age of the trustees down a bit and have someone with a culturally contemporary background
point of view that wasn't necessarily just fine art, but I was in a rather unique position in that I not only represented most of the major working directors in the business, filmmakers who made art, but a different kind, but I was an avid, rabid art collector. So it was a twofer, I think, for David. It was the best thing I ever did. And I was fortunate enough
to be asked to be on the recruit committee for the new director. And this has got to be, this is over 30 years ago. And MoMA was always amazing, back to the days of Blanchette Rockefeller and all the wonderful women in New York that put the early collection together. As a matter of fact, there's a phenomenal book out right now that tells not just the history of MoMA, but explains—
how European art was rejected in the United States and never made it here till the 40s. And remember, in the 1906, 7, 8, 9, 10, some of Picasso, Braque, Clay, some of the greatest work being done was done in that time frame, completely rejected by the United States. Crazy. And at MoMA, they started collecting at Adelaide. So MoMA always has been on the cutting edge.
But at the time when we were doing the recruit, we needed someone that could make a dynamic turn in the museum. Because the one thing about an art museum is at the end of the day, It's entertainment for different stratas of social culture. It's not just the elite that look at art or can afford art. There are many people that aren't in that financial category that love art.
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Chapter 6: What insights on leadership and momentum does Ovitz share?
What a question.
Yeah. And that was what the lunch was by. I hosted him at my house. He brought like five different associates of his. And I said, look, the thing that defines great cities at the end of the day is is the cultural aspects and the sporting aspects, the places where people gather. So you could have a great city that's beautiful, the architecture's amazing, but there's no cultural ethos in it.
So if you look at the best cities in the world from New York to London to Paris, they are loaded with cultural ethos. initiatives and people can get lost in them. I mean, I don't go to any, to Paris or London without making time to see a half a dozen museums, even if it's just for a short touch and go. So my answer to him was build an art collection and promote a couple of your sports teams.
You have amazing sports stars. And I think that The museum is critical. And in New York, MoMA needed to move to the next level. So we needed a director, and it was a tough assignment because the director has to be intellectually sufficient, a leader, a thought provider, as well as someone who has the ability to see around corners. And it's very tough to do that.
Plus a sense of what the constituency wants to see. And that constituency is not just native New Yorkers, but it's visitors. I mean, the amount of tourists we get is staggering. We take 20,000 people a day through the museum seven days a week. You need like a founder in that role. Exactly right. You need someone with a founder's mentality. We were...
lucky enough to stumble on a man named Glenn Lowry, who had absolutely no contemporary art background. He had a PhD in Islamic art, knew nothing about contemporary art, but was smart, articulate, well-spoken, handled people brilliantly, and had this extraordinary burning desire to learn. And everyone that was debating it was saying, well, he doesn't know anything about art.
You know, well, that's true. But neither did I when I started. And you learn. And we chose Glenn. It was an extraordinary long shot compared to all the other candidates that all had mega museum backgrounds. Turned out to be the greatest thing we ever did. Glenn came in and didn't do anything at the beginning except study. You know, there's a lot of employees there. There's a lot of art there.
We have 35,000 pieces of art just in storage.
Crazy.
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Chapter 7: How did Michael Ovitz contribute to the growth of Blackstone?
Glenn turned out to be that guy.
If I think about the competitive landscape, so this guy did a fantastic job for 30 plus years, updated, remade the institution, had that founder energy. Surely other amazing museums were competing for some of the same things that MoMA won and MoMA won, whether that's, you know, the works specifically, the brand, the cultural resonance, the building, like all these different things.
What were the things that you saw him do or helped the institution do yourself to sort of win over time in a competitive landscape?
He did so many things that were fantastic. First of all, he led by example. There was nothing he asked anyone to do that he wouldn't do himself. Yeah. That's the cardinal rule of being a leader. First person out of the Fox. You want someone to do that? You better be able to do it yourself. And if they don't do it, just go do it.
Secondly, he populated the board with the most diverse, amazing group of men and women, but they had one common denominator. They were all art collectors of something. They collected something. So they had a passion for the arts. There's a huge difference between
between an institution with trustees that are financially responsible or socially responsible, but don't have the passion to collect something. And there is an understanding of The mission of the museum from a collecting standpoint, balanced by a financial standpoint, and also how to show it off. The shows are the best. The trustees are incredibly supportive.
You don't have to ask anybody for anything. It's like a club and everyone gets along, which is really crazy. and supports each other. So it just all works like a Swiss watch.
In the time that you would be in studio with Roy, what was that like? What was his affect? What was his style? What did you learn from him?
I love that guy. He is the opposite of me. He is at the same speed 99% of his life. He doesn't let anything bother him. He knows what he's doing. He enjoys his work. There's a zen-like quality around him. And when people say that, you kind of go, oh, nonsense. People say that. But man, he had it.
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Chapter 8: What is the importance of maintaining excellence in any field?
Talk about like that benchmarking exercise.
Well, that benchmarking exercise applies not just to artists, but to everything in my life. All the people you mentioned, I identified early as people I wanted to be involved with. When I met Alex Karp 20 years ago, who Peter Thiel introduced me to, he wasn't the Alex Karp he is today. He was highly profiled, incredibly well-spoken, and dogmatically passionate about his point of view.
wasn't that guy. He was just a brilliant guy who had a PhD in philosophy from Germany and frankly looked ill-equipped to run Palander. When Peter asked me to meet with him and I looked at his credits, I called Peter and I said, give me a little color here. You know, now they both spoke German. Peter's from Germany. So they had a common denominator.
But man, Alex sure didn't look like the guy that was going to lead this highly technical, cutting-edge company 20 years ahead of the AI infatuation. But sitting with the guy, it was the same thing as sitting with a young artist. So 30... I'm guessing 30 years ago. I'm not even sure. Larry Gagosian, who, as you know, was my assistant at the William Morris Agency 50 years ago. Forgot about that.
I'm crazy about. Calls me and says, you got to go see this young artist that I'm looking at. And I said, sure. So I go to this young artist, her name's Cecily Brown. And I look at the work and I just was mesmerized by the work. She hadn't had a show yet. And I called Larry and I said, she's amazing. He said, yeah. I said, she's really good. I just had lunch with her last week.
She's about as important an artist as there is right now working. I just saw something I liked. And it was the same with Carp. When I met Alex... We met at a conference and we spent, I think at the Allen & Company conference, and we spent three and a half hours talking about everything, not about his business, just about life, about tech, where it's going, what's happening politically.
trends of the past, things that point to the future. And man, I really liked this guy. I said, we can build a business around this guy. He had something very special. And you could tell that he could be a leader. Glenn had that too. All these people that I've been fortunate enough to come in contact with all have very similar experiences. They're interesting.
They're aggressive to certain degrees in their own way, some blatantly, some not so. They're wicked intelligent. They are perceptive. And they all have this extraordinary burning desire to learn. They want to learn something every minute of the day. and they don't want to waste time. Time is a valuable commodity. So that's pretty much my philosophy.
When I started as an agent, I was 21 years old, and I knew right off the bat that time was my enemy, even at that age. Because if I went and met with someone to judge if I could do something for them, if I made a mistake, that mistake was irreparable and a time sink that can't be recovered. And it's not a hiatus. It's a loss. There's a big difference. It's a loss.
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