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Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Michael Ovitz - Turning Potential into Prominence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.418]
01:42:13
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- [00:01]
Michael Ovitz
Something I speak about frequently on Invest like the Best is the idea of life's work. A more fun way to think about it is that I'm looking for Maniacs on a Mission. This is the basis for our investment firm Positive Sum, and it's the reason why I am so enthusiastic about our presenting sponsor, Ramp. Not only are the founders Karim and Eric Life's work level founders certainly maniacs on a mission, they have created a product that is effectively an unlock for founders and finance team to do more of their life's work. By streamlining financial operations, saving everyone their most precious resource time, Ramp has built a command and control system for corporate cards and expense management. You can issue cards, manage approvals, make vendor payments of all kinds, and even automate closing your books all in one place. Speaking from my own experience using Ramp for my business, the product is wildly intuitive, simplistic and makes life so much easier that you'll feel bad for any company who hasn't yet made the switch. The Ramp team is relentless and the product continues to evolve to save you time that you would never have dreamed of getting back. To me, there is nothing more interesting than technologies that reduce friction for other entrepreneurs to be able to build the thing that they want to so much attention has gone to cloud computing, APIs and other ways of making life easy for founders. What Ramp has done and is doing is build yet another set of tools in this category. To get started, go to ramp.com cards issued by Celtic bank and Sutton bank member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Ridgeline gets me so excited because every investment professional knows this core challenge. You love the core work of investing, but operational complexities eat up valuable time and energy. That's where Ridgeline comes in. Ridgeline is an all in one operating system designed specifically for investment managers, and their momentum has been Incredible. With about $350 billion now committed to the platform and a 60% increase in customers since October, firms are flocking to Ridgeline for good reason. They've been leading the investment management, tech industry and AI for over a year, with 100% of their users opting into their AI capabilities, putting them light years ahead of other vendors thanks to their single source of data. You don't have to put up with juggling multiple legacy systems and spending endless quarter ends compiling reports. Ridgeline has created a comprehensive cloud platform that handles everything in real time, from trading and portfolio management to compliance and client reporting. It's worth reaching out to Ridgeline to see what the experience can be like with a single platform. Visit ridgelineapps.com to schedule a demo. As an investor, staying ahead of the game means having the right tools and I want to share one that's become indispensable in my team's own research AlphaSense it's the market intelligence platform trusted by 75% of the world's top hedge funds and 85% of the S&P100 to make smarter, faster investment decisions. What sets AlphaSense apart is not just its AI driven access to over 400 million premium sources like company filings, broker research, news and trade journals, but but also its unmatched private market insights. With their recent acquisition of Teagus, AlphaSense now holds the world's premier library of over 150,000 proprietary expert transcripts from 24,000 public and private companies. Here's the kicker, 75% of all private market expert transcripts are on AlphaSense and 50% of VC firms on the MIDAS list conduct their expert calls through the platform. That's the kind of insight that helps you uncover opportunities, navigate complexity, and make high conviction decisions with speed and confidence, ready to see what they can do for your Investment Research. Visit AlphaSense.com invest to get started. Trust me, it's a tool you won't want to work without.
- [03:32]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest like the Best. This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing you. You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts@joincolasis.com Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast.
- [04:03]
Unknown
Guests are solely their own opinions and.
- [04:06]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as.
- [04:12]
Unknown
A basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
- [04:20]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
To learn more, visit Psum VC. 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. He's also become a master in creating institutional momentum, which you'll hear in his involvement with 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. I'm also excited to watch Ovitz as he helps build the asset management firm Trayville with multiple time guest Ali Hamed. Please enjoy my great conversation with Michael Ovitz. So, Michael, last time we did this, we covered so many interesting parts of your life and career and story, but we left a lot out, even in two hours. 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 enduring institutions very quickly. Like, I'm especially interested in, like 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. Like, 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 Paler, whether it's Steve Schwarzman 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, but for context, those are just some of the names.
- [06:54]
Unknown
Let's take moma, because it's a. It's right here in town, down the street, and it's a phenomenal Institution. I mean, it's a place. I've been on the board for 35 years. I have.
- [07:06]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
So cool.
- [07:06]
Unknown
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, 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, talked to three, four times a week, named Roy Lichtenstein. And I used to go to his studio, and it's where he lived, 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 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 gotta 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. But explains how European art was rejected in the United States and never made it here till the 40s. And remember in the 19 0, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, some of Picasso, rock, clay. Some of the greatest work being done was done in that timeframe. Completely rejected by the United States.
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Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Crazy.
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Unknown
And at MoMA, they started collecting it, oddly. 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. And they can buy posters, they can buy prints. There's a lot of ways to skin that cat. And moma basically was a commercial showplace for people that were tourists to come and look. And I remember I had a meeting years ago with the mayor of Rio de Janeiro. A friend of mine asked me to meet with him. And the purpose of the meeting, this 30 years ago, how do they make Rio a great city?
- [11:19]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
What a question.
- [11:20]
Unknown
Yeah. And that was what the lunch was. 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 the cultural aspects and the sporting aspects, the places where people gather so you could have a great city that's beautiful, the architecture is 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 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.
- [13:17]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
You need, like a founder in that role.
- [13:19]
Unknown
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. Well, that's true, but neither did I when I started and you learn and we chose Glenn. It was a 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.
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Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Crazy.
- [14:30]
Unknown
We have the greatest reservoir of modern art in the world. In the world. And we needed someone that knew how to display it, could raise money, understood who the new artists were, didn't lean on some of the older postulates of the museum, which was only take established artists into the collection. How do we start a fund for the 21st century taking young new artists? Glenn turned out to be that guy.
- [15:00]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
If I think about the competitive landscape. So this guy did a fantastic job for 30 plus years, you know, 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.
- [15:31]
Unknown
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 role of being a leader. First person out of the foxhole. 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 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.
- [16:49]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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?
- [16:57]
Unknown
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. You know, people say that, but man, he had it. He had this aura about him of calmness and determination, passionate about what he did, excited about his art, but no emotional swings. Just lived his life, enjoyed his life. We brought him to LA for six weeks to paint a 26 foot high mural in the lobby of our building that IM Pei design. He was the greatest six weeks of my life. I sat there and watched. I talked about this on the last podcast. Watched this guy create something off a white canvas out of his head. To me, that's the ultimate definition of being creative.
- [18:05]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
If you think about the ability to build your reference class in art or in founders or in anything, how have you done that most successfully? It intrigued me. Last time we were together, you said you're going to Brooklyn a lot just to do studio visits here in New York City and that you constantly are making time to meet, I think mostly young women artists in Brooklyn lately, of a, of a specific school or style.
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Unknown
Abstraction.
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Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Abstraction. And it just strikes me that this is something you've done over and over again, that whoever you're picking, it's not that you just met someone and like them, they're one of hundreds or thousands of people that you've met. Talk about like that benchmarking exercise.
- [18:40]
Unknown
Well, that benchmarking exercise applies not just to artists, but to everything.
- [18:44]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, right.
- [18:45]
Unknown
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 Karpi 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 Palantir. When Peter asked me to meet with him and I looked at his, 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.
- [20:02]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Forgot about that. Yeah, just ask about him.
- [20:05]
Unknown
I'm crazy about calls me up and says, you gotta 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. He 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 Karp. When I met Alex, we met at a conference and we spent, I think, at the Allen and 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 like 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 traits. 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. You could be doing something else with that time. So I started to make a set of parameters when I met people about why I want to continue the dialogue. And I have kind of like a pilot's checklist in my head of things that are important to me. And it doesn't really matter what the vocation of the person is. It doesn't matter whether it's Ted Forceman. When he called me to help him with Gulfstream, which was a dying company they were going under, and I thought it was a amazing turnaround opportunity and went on the board and we made a decision to recruit. Ted was. I was on five of Ted's 13 boards and spent a ton of time with me. He was a very close friend until he passed away. And he said, what can I do to make Gulfstream different? And Bombardier was killing them at the time because they had a bigger cabin. And I said, teddy, there's only one thing you can do. You need to recruit a board that becomes the greatest set of super salesmen in history, because you don't need our advice. You don't need our financial engineering. You don't need us to read balance sheets. You need us to sell airplanes. And what he did is he went out and he put a list together and he brought it back to me, and we went through it, and on the list was the who's who of certain areas. So on the list was Roger Penske. On the list was Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger, a guy who was the CFO of GE when they were the most important company in New York City, when Jack Welch was there, Dale Fry was his name. He had Charlotte De Beers, who was the most important female advertising executive in New York City. He had Bill Aquavella, the great art dealer. And all of us had assignments, and we all covered areas. So Bill covered art. Kissinger covered politics. Colin Powell covered the U.S. army and the DOD. Everybody had an assignment. And we met monthly, not quarterly. And the attendance at the meetings was 100% every time because everyone had. We had so much fun at the board meetings and board dinners that after we sold the company seven years later, we all continued the board meeting.
- [25:19]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
How did you convince those people at the peak of their powers, many of them, I'm sure, to take their time and do this.
- [25:26]
Michael Ovitz
Like, what?
- [25:26]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
What was the pitch? What was the incentive structure? Like, why did all those people agree to do that?
- [25:32]
Unknown
Well, we divided up the list and called people we had relationships with. So I call Cole and Powell.
- [25:38]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
There's relationships they did it for you?
- [25:40]
Unknown
Well, everything's relationships at the end of the day or the beginning of them. The whole idea is to make them and then keep them. And if you've made a mistake, that's why you don't want to make a mistake. So I call Cole and Powell, who I knew, and I said, before you say no, you want to have some laughs and do you want to make a little money? The answer was yes to both. And then when I told him what we were doing, he said, what a hoot. He said, okay. And I called Henry because I was friends with Kissinger, because he was on the board of mgm. I said the same thing to him, and he thought it was hysterical. He said, what? I can't do his accent, but it was hysterical. He said to me, what do I know about airplanes? In this thick, heavy accent. I said, you fly in them, don't you? And he said, yeah. I said, great, you'll find someone to sell them to. And we used to stand up at the beginning of each meeting and announce what we'd sold. So, like, at the board meetings. At the board meetings. So that was the first thing we did, Teddy, to prove the minutes. 100% attendance. Board meetings were always like 5:00. Then we all went to dinner and, you know, Colin would stand up and say, well, I've sold three G4s to the US Air Force. And Kistner was saying, I've sold five G4s to this Royal family. It was like, crazy. I got up, I said, I sold a G4 to two actors and I'd give their names. And everybody did that. And the sales went crazy on the company. And at the end of the day, you have two issues with a company like that. Great product, which they had in sales. There is nothing else, you know, and they had great product. And we provided the sales that he took the company from bankruptcy to a huge sale, you know, to General Dynamics.
- [27:32]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
If you think back to your checklist, your pilot's checklist, and appropriate follow up to a Gulfstream discussion.
- [27:36]
Unknown
What.
- [27:36]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
What's on that list? Like, especially when you're meeting someone for the first time, especially when there's. It's, you know, Alex Karp early on, when there's not a lot of information about him, what is that list that you're running through in your head?
- [27:46]
Unknown
Well, first of all, you have to see if there's a visceral connection. That's not anything that's on a list. You know, do you feel some kind of rapport with the person That's. That's a given and a critical. Okay. The list is amorphous. And, you know, I learned a longtime client and a good friend, Marty Scorsese, who's a genius, absolute genius at how he looks at life, the prism he looks at it through, and then how he regurgitates it back into a visual image. His frames, if you pull them out of his movies, could stand on their own as artwork. It's insane. His frames. And I said, when you're looking at actors, what are you looking at? He said, their eyes. And it spoke volumes to me. I also have a frame of reference because I've met so many people. I mean, I collect art and people. I love people. And I love having relationships. The more you meet, the more benchmark you have. When people ask me, how do I learn how to collect art, do I read all these books? I said, don't read anything. I told you this on the last podcast.
- [29:02]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Just don't meet a million artists.
- [29:05]
Unknown
Just look at pictures. When you asked me about going to museum to Brooklyn, we're going out Saturday, tomorrow night to look at a young artist. She's not in Brooklyn, she's in New Jersey, but same difference. And going to the studio to look around. Went out to Red Hook a couple weeks ago to look at a artist named Nicholas Pardain. Brilliant young guy. Brilliant. And got to go in his cave, see what he does, how he does it. I'm fascinated by process because I can't do it. So I'm fascinated by the bar I can't get over. It's probably why I was an artist representative for years. Watching Nicholas Pardy create in his environment is a treat beyond belief.
- [29:53]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
What kinds of questions do you ask him? Like, when you're digging into someone's process, how do you. What have you learned is the best way in?
- [29:59]
Unknown
Well, it's not questions. It's kind of observation. And it just bubbles out. And, you know, it's interesting. Like, he uses pastel, and I was fascinated by that because it comes off the paper. And he went over to one of his artworks and banged it on the floor, and dust started coming off. And I said to him, nicholas, that could be like an invisible painting. It. Some ways. No, it sticks. But fascinated me that he would do that because everything about artists was, you know, built for the ages. I mean, we're looking at art from the 18th, 17th, 16th century. Right. And it's 600 years old, right? 500 years old.
- [30:44]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Can you tell me about Larry Gagosian?
- [30:45]
Unknown
Larry was my assistant at The William Morris Agency in 1970. And he was really good, and he had a way with people. He was smart. He was tempered, aggressive, and he showed all the promise in the world. And we worked together for about a year, and he came in to see me and said, I hate this place. And I said, there's nothing to hate or love. This is a tool for you to learn. That's all it is. We're in graduate school, basically, and that's how I looked at it. I was getting a master's in entertainment there when I was 21. And he couldn't stand the people. He couldn't stand the backbiting. He couldn't stand the deceit, all the hallmarks of the entertainment business. He couldn't stand people not telling the truth. He didn't like the environment. And I spent a month trying to talk him out of quitting. And he finally quit, and he opened up a little poster shop in Westwood selling $20 posters of fine art. The rest is history. And he's a brilliant dealer. He's a very loyal guy. He's tough as nails. I mean tough. And he's a great negotiator. He has an amazing eye. His townhouse on the Upper east side is the epitome of good taste. It's if, you know, if you're into period furniture from the art deco period and great art, and it's all mixed. There's no period that stands out. He's mixed. Richard Prince and Picasso. Go figure.
- [32:32]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
If you think now about the post talent spotting. So you meet an Alex Karp and you want to work with him. Talk about what you've learned, helping and watching institutions that end up as big as Palantir has. You've been in part of lots of them in those first couple critical years. What are the common ingredients that you saw for really fast growth and success?
- [32:54]
Unknown
Well, he did something that I did at ca, which was, I thought, really smart to do. He didn't get the idea from me. One of his partners, Stefan Cohen, brilliant young engineer, would take one meeting every 10 minutes with an engineer. And they were. I had an office next to him. So I'd watch this parade of young men and women sitting lined up for 10 minutes with Stefan, and he'd interview 50 engineers and take one.
- [33:23]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Wow.
- [33:23]
Unknown
And he spent the time. So I asked him one day, we went to lunch, and I said, so what's the first thing he said? Well, before he said, the first thing is, I give him a question, a math question. I said, oh, give me that question. He Lost me after the word the. I had no clue what the question said. He said, if they don't get this question in 10 seconds, it's over. And he would throw them out. They do stuff in the engineering community that having come from entertainment. I remember when I first went up to the Valley, I went to see John Donahoe, who was running ebay. And I had two young engineers from MIT that had unbelievable technology. And I was fresh up there. This is 20 years ago. And I called John and I said, I want to bring these guys by. I think you guys should buy this tech before we do this startup. It's a waste of time. We're going to do the startup, it's going to be great, and then you're going to spend a fortune to buy it. And these guys are going to have money and no job. Let's buy them now, they'll make some money and you'll give them heads of the departments or something. He said, great. So we come into this meeting. We're in a conference room. John's sitting at the end. I'm at the end opposite John. Sitting next to me are my two young MIT geniuses. And John marches in. Four guys from his engineering department. Two of them were from India and two of them were from. One was from Stanford and one was from the University of Illinois at Champaign. So all pedigreed guys. And they started asking my guys questions, like rifle shots. And my guys are answering them. And finally I threw my chair back. I said, this meeting's over. Everyone's looking at me like I'm out of my mind, even my guys. And one of my guys turns, what's wrong? He said, I think this is disrespectful. And he said, what, are you crazy? He said, they're trying to dig into the technology. I turned red as a beat. We finished the meeting. John walks me out, puts my arm around me. He said, welcome to the Valley. I said, is this standard? He said, get used to it. I said, this is how people treat each other. He said, oh, this was nice. And I learned the hard way, and by the way, they bought the business. I learned the hard way that it's not off limits to ask tough questions. And I kind of ask those questions quietly. I don't ask them. I manipulate my way around it in a meeting. So to directly answer your question, my checklist is a series of things that fit into my cognitive frame of reference that is weighted, predicated on previous experiences, how the person behaves, what their interests are, what their social capacity Is it doesn't have to be great in the traditional way. What their quest for knowledge is, are they motivated? Do they want to work hard? Do they enjoy working? Why are they working? What's the goal and what's their raw processing power? In 1999, I got a cold call from Marc Andreessen and he asked to meet me. And I met him for lunch. I budgeted an hour. I'm not a long lunch guy and I'm not a long zoom guy.
- [36:54]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
He's not long on anything guy.
- [36:55]
Unknown
I'm not long on anything because I think it's a complete waste of time.
- [36:58]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
It's a podcast.
- [36:59]
Unknown
Yeah, it's a podcast, but I'm not in control here, Patrick, you are. So I went and met with Mark at some place called Hugo's in West Hollywood. Mark comes rolling in in a pair of shorts, a plaid shirt, and mismatching socks and horrible shoes. And we sat down and I'm saying to myself, oh my God, what have I gotten myself into here? 15 minutes into the conversation, I'm in a state of shock. I'm sitting with one of the smartest human beings I've ever talked to. Now, bear in mind my best friend at the time was a guy named Michael Crichton. You can't get any smarter than that or more curious or more interesting to sit around. I'm sitting with his match, maybe better. And three and a half hours went by in five minutes. And he said at the end, he said, would you like to join my board? And I said, why? I'm a raving idiot compared to you and I don't know anything about technology. He said, that's exactly what I want on my board. I want someone who's not afraid to stand up to all these tech geeks that are on my board.
- [38:04]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
I love the answer around the 50 engineers. 10, 10 minute segments. And a common theme you see today, Elon Musk being like the prime exemplar of it, is that any ways that you can increase your clock speed, just save time, basically get through cycles faster, seems to be defining kind of who wins. Can you just say a little bit more about time and the respect for time that you have?
- [38:27]
Unknown
For me, time's the foundation of everything. Then relationship, because I can't get the relationship without the time if I make a mistake. When I met you, I didn't know if I wanted to do your podcast. I didn't know you. We have a mutual friend who raves about you, but that's not enough for me because I may not agree with his perspective. And that happens to me a lot. People will call me and say, can you meet with so and so? And it's not that I don't respect their perspective. It's just I have a different one. For me, time's my enemy. And it's been that way since I was a kid. It's got nothing to do with my age chronologically. I remember being in high school and I was running for student body president of a 4,000 kid high school. And there weren't enough hours in the day for me to do what I felt I needed to do. I had to pander to so many constituencies that no one else. I had to develop constituencies from groups that everyone had ignored. No one ever went and spoke to the chess club at my high school because I was in high school in the 60s. And if you weren't an athlete, you were nothing. Your brain worked against you. If you were an intellect, they thought you were an idiot. It was the 60s in the San Fernando Valley. If you didn't have athletic prowess or some kind of unbelievable skill set in something, like you were a great auto mechanic and you could fix a 57 Chevy up, something that demonstrated to a working class community that you had something special. So I went to all the clubs that were kind of Persona non grata to build a constituency outside of what everyone called the normal people, who frankly turned out to be abnormal. They all peaked when they graduated high school. All of them. We had three teams, all city number one. We had nine of 11 players on our football team make all city first string. One made it for five years in the pros and then got injured. The rest disappeared. Disappeared. They peaked. So for me it was about careful with the time, careful on acceleration, careful on deceleration, meeting people that would enrich my life intellectually, emotionally and financially. And it's important to add all three. I'm a capitalist and I get into these huge arguments with people that are more social leaning because it doesn't work. And we've seen that over and over again. And it's the capitalists that drive the foundation of giving. They make jobs. Look, they don't do everything right. They do a lot of stuff wrong. Believe me, everybody does, me included. But by and large it's a better system than Marxism or just being a pure, you know, socialists. I think our system's better than the Chinese system. You know, you got 50 million communists controlling a billion 400 million people. That doesn't smell right to me. I had lunch yesterday with a guy who's very smart, named Steve Radner. And I was commenting about what an amazingly great Mayor Mike Bloomberg was, even though he got in by accident because he was a business guy and he thought about everything in terms of getting it done and how do you do it? What's the path of least resistance, what's best for everybody. You're not going to get it right for everybody, but if you can get it right for most of the people, but how do you do that? You have to have a business background. So I said to him at lunch yesterday, I think that in order to run for governor or mayor of any city or state or president of the United States or vice president, United States, you have to have had five years of business experience. You have to show on your LinkedIn that you ran a business period, and that you had employees and you had healthcare problems and people had deaths in the family and they needed days off and somebody was getting a divorce and you had to balance budgets and you had to find where to raise money. These are all things that are critical to running a business which is a city or a state or a country.
- [43:19]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
It makes me think the last two answers, combining the ideas of time and just executive ability of Steve Schwarzman. And I'd love to hear about the early days of Blackstone. He has this very famous mantra which is like, what's next? He writes about this in his book, and he seems to be one of the, like you, sort of always dissatisfied with stasis. Like always wanting to know what the next thing that we can do is that we've earned the right to do.
- [43:41]
Unknown
Yeah, I must say, he's one of my heroes. Steve. I met Steve in the 80s and he was at Lehman Brothers. Very smart guy, very motivated, wanted to do something special. He and his mentor, Pete Peterson. And Pete was on the board a moment with me. We got involved very early together because Pete was on the board of Sony and I was Akio Morita, the founder of Sony's personal Media Advisor. And I got that position because he made a decision that he had better technology with the Betamax videotape than Matsushita, also known as Panasonic, had with vhs. And he did. His tech was better, but they beat him. They killed him. They killed him for two reasons. One, he had a max running time of two hours. There's no movie that automatically stops at two hours. Sometimes they're 150, but most of the time they're 210. So people couldn't record movies, which is all they use those machines for. Oddly, they were all invented by an American company called Ampex. And they were invented for a reason that you'll never guess. They were invented by a bunch of engineers at Ampex in the United States to record pornography.
- [45:12]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
It always, always comes back to that in pizza technology.
- [45:16]
Unknown
Technology is all about porn and pizza and Diet Coke. But they sold the rights, and Sony bought them. And he said, we sat for hours in Tokyo. How do I avoid this? I said, you have one shot. You can control the content. And I said, it's a tough shot because it's not profitable, but no one's going to beat you in technology if you combine the two. So Pete was his board member, and they revered Pete. Revered him. So I came to. I put Morita together in my home with Kirk Kerkorian, who owned mgm. And the three of us met for three hours discussing Sony buying mgm. And at the meeting, Morita did something genius. He brought a box about 6 inches square, and he put it on the coffee table, and he let it sit there. And you could see Kirk just staring over at this box. It was so Japanese. And finally, Kirk says. He says, I can't take anywhere what's in that box. Morita said, the future. He opens the box, and it's a handheld videotape recorder, this big, like 4 inches big, with a little mini tape in it. And Kirk played with it, used it. It was simple to use. Videoed the whole meeting. And at the end, Morita takes the camera away from Kirk, puts it in the box and seals it and thanks him for the meeting and said. Kirk said, can I have the camera? He said, no, if you sell me the studio. So we left. We couldn't make a deal. Tried to make a deal, we couldn't make a deal. And then I started getting involved with a guy named Walter Yednikov, who was a client of mine who ran CBS Records. And there was an opportunity to take CBS Records away from the Tisch family, who really didn't want to keep it. And Sony became the candidate. And Pete was on the board of Sony, and I was working for Mr. Morita. And we got to be friends, aside from. We knew each other from MoMA. So it made a great common denominator. And Steve was the banker. And you'll die when I tell you who was the number cruncher was Roger Altman. He was at Blackstone at the beginning, and there was a tiny little office that they had. But Steve had something that Pete didn't have, that nobody else had. Steve had my template, the common denominator. Amongst all these guys that I'm crazy about. A drive that had no end. A desire to do something different. A desire to break all the rules illegally, but to not stand on ceremony and to create a financial institution out of thin air. Easy to look at it now. They have $450 billion credit fund. I was having dinner with the heads of one of the banks in New York, and we were talking about Blackstone and Steve in particular. And I said, would you have ever have thought that someone from scratch would create a competitor to you in the credit markets? Because they get the first call, you don't. And they're the biggest bank in the center. And Steve had a drive and a brain that. And I related to him so much because in 1974, when I wanted to start CAA, I will never forget this as long as I live. An agent at William Morris. We were friends, and he said to me, why are you doing this? You're going to fail. And I said, what do you mean I'm going to fail? And he said to me, no one could build an independent agency. There are 200 agencies. You're going to get killed. You're not going to get any clients. You won't be able to represent movie stars. You're not going to get writers. You're going to be looking for a job in it. Why not just stay at William Morris? It'd be easier and you'll make more money. And I kept sitting there saying, what's wrong with this guy? I'm saying that to myself, what's wrong with this guy? And Steve was the same way. I know people said to him, and they talk behind his back, yeah, yeah, Blackstone, sure. It'd be a boutique bank. Great. Maybe someone will buy it. Well, look who's got the last laugh now. CA is 50 years old. Blackstone's an institution. It's all about the founder. And Steve had a vision. I'm going to be an institution. And never did he stop. So when we started, we started representing people on television only then we went to movies, then to music.
- [50:13]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
What's next?
- [50:14]
Unknown
We just kept going. Investment banking, advertising, consulting. Steve did the same thing, one business line after the other. But the genius move is the people. Same as Stephen Cohen at Palantir, got the best people, picked up the best men and women in the financial universe, paid them more money, gave him more freedom, creativity, and let them run. And now you go into the Blackstone building and it's like, you know, it's crazy. It's like it feels like it's been there 100 years. And this is what Andreessen and Horowitzer and Ben and Mark are building an institution that's going to outlive them, and that's their goal. They don't want to be a boutique. They don't want to be small. And one has to admire that vision because it's the driving factor to success. And success spawns philanthropy, jobs, social movements, and basic running the wheels of the economy. It's much different than a couple people being in charge of everybody. I said to someone the other day, I wouldn't want to be a startup guy in Beijing if my life depended on it. I don't want to see what happened to Jack Ma and say, oh, my God, I want to kill myself to do this, but I got to walk around quaking in my boots. We live in the greatest country in the world. I don't care what anybody says about anything or any elected official. It's not going to happen here. We run our own lives and we're creative. I'll put our tech scene up against anyone's in the world, hands down. We'll kill them. We'll kill them. We're just motivated, free thinkers.
- [52:05]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
It seems like momentum is such a critical ingredient in all these stories. Again, this is like time cut a different way, I suppose, but the what's next mentality of Schwarzman, the platform building, institution building of Andreessen Horowitz, the way you built caa, the race to scale, even what you're doing now with Ali at Treyville, it just seems like you have these ways of installing systems which create momentum. Like, I think at one point you were running a daily fundraising meeting when you're raising a new fund, like, every single day. Still doing it.
- [52:33]
Unknown
Still doing it.
- [52:34]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
So, like, what. What are those?
- [52:35]
Unknown
I haven't asked you for money.
- [52:37]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Yes, you have. I would love to hear, like, yeah, just some riffs on momentum. Like, it seems like one of the things you're exceptional at is systems for creating it and maintaining it. And I know you believe deeply in it. As an.
- [52:51]
Unknown
Oh, no, I. It's a postulate for me, and it's a great question because it's highly overlooked. They don't teach it in business school. As a matter of fact, in the curriculum in most business schools. They're impractical. They don't teach the things that I needed to know. No one taught me how to be an investment banker. Yeah, sure, I can.
- [53:11]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
I don't ask about that.
- [53:12]
Unknown
I can look at a balance sheet and read it, but so What? So can everybody else. There's only four or five numbers that mean anything anyways. But they don't teach you about momentum. Steve Schwarzman understands momentum. Alex Karp understands momentum. Marc Andreessen understands momentum. Josh Kushner understands momentum. Bill Ackman understands momentum. Teddy Forsman understood momentum. Glenn Lowry understood creative momentum. All these executives in their varying silos, never took no for an answer. If they were shut down in one silo, they went right to the next. They hired people that could take their jobs. I remember when some of these executives hired people that there was all this back channeling. Are they crazy? They're going to take their job? I remember Steve hiring a guy to run Blackstone who we all know who's fantastic. Tony James. And everyone was saying, steve leaving. And my answer was, he just got an amazing guy. Makes him 10x stronger than he was. He had confidence. I had a meeting yesterday with a young guy that Ali and I are recruiting, and I called Ali after the meeting, and I said, we've got to shore this guy's confidence up. He's much better than he thinks he is. Which is odd for me to say, because as an employer, you want them to think they're not. So they're weak. I want him to realize what his strengths are, to make a decision from a positive place, not a negative one. And all these people that I've mentioned are all about momentum. In other words, they remind me of this toy I bought my grandson. That's a remote control truck that when it hits a wall, it bounces off and turns in the other direction. That's kind of these people. There's no stopping them, and there's no idea that isn't worth considering. You know, at CA, we had a. Every 90 days, a gong Show. And we lined everyone up in a circle. 250 people that were working executives, and they were all seated within an inch of each other, tight in an oval. They had 90 seconds to present a new idea. I didn't care what the idea was. We got some amazing stuff out of that. Just when you think there's no new ideas. That's what I love about technology.
- [55:55]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
What are the top enemies of momentum?
- [55:58]
Unknown
Oh, that's easy. Loss of confidence, fear of failure. Fear of failure is the greatest problem outside the United States. So I was in London a couple months ago in a business meeting with five or six business people, and one of them looked at me and said, how do we do this? And these are prominent people. And I said, what do you do? What? He said, you've been up, down and sideways, but you never stop and you don't take no for an answer. And you just keep building. But you know how to build off success and off failure. He said, if we fail in Europe, Denver, it's over. We run away, we're embarrassed, we're never allowed to come back. I said, if we fail in America, we take it as a badge of honor. I can't tell you the number of pivots my young companies have made. I mean, Kevin Systrom, fourth pivot was Instagram fourth. I have a young kid I love. I've mentioned him last time. James Proud. That deal failed the first one. Second one huge hit. You can't stop. I think if some of these great entrepreneurs, I mean, when Mark and Ben wanted to start, everyone told them they were crazy. There were 190 VCs on Sandale Road. They were going to be another one. It didn't matter what their background was, that Ben was a brilliant operator and Mark invented the browser. It didn't make any difference. What do they know about investing?
- [57:34]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Speaking of one of your not pivots, but evolutions, how did you teach yourself investment banking? Like, what, what was the story of getting into it? Why did you do it? And I'm especially interested in like if you compare the first deal or two that you did to the last deal or two of that chapter, how you most changed, how you did that job was strategic.
- [57:52]
Unknown
We had conquered all areas of entertainment. We had a 76% market share of talent. We had 46 of the top 50 grossing directors in the world. We controlled almost everyone except Disney's motion picture offerings. That was 10 different studios. We packaged everything. We made the biggest hit movies of anyone of all of them. Added together the biggest hits came out of caa, from Jurassic park, dawn of Africa to Ghostbusters to Stripes, Meatballs, Casino, Goodfellows. I can go right down the list. It just was endless. And we had great commercial taste. Great commercial taste. We all loved movies. So we basically picked movies we wanted to see. Which always amazes me today when I look at the offerings and I say to myself, who's picking this stuff? Who's picking this stuff? Who'd they pick it for? Because I'm not like really interested in this and I'm just view myself as a normal moviegoer. But we had hit top in every area. And I was sitting back one day and I'm saying to myself, there's a transition going on in the business. The businesses are between the seats, the distributors, the studios. They're too big to be independent and too little to grow. Because they had no capital. They relied on what their content did. So if they had a 30 movie slate, which was about average 35, they were thrilled if two were hits, two were zeros and the rest floated in between. But that's not a money making business. Believe it or not, people didn't get rich in the studio business. So I realized that what was going to happen is that these companies were going to need sponsors. They were going to need money. It was pretty clear. It was not like some genius observation. They were dying for cash flow. I could tell because we were having trouble collecting. They'd put us off. We get paid for our clients because they had guild rules, but man, they waited till the last possible second to send the check. We used to have to send messengers to Paramount to get paid to pick up the check. Do you remember checks?
- [60:22]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Vaguely.
- [60:22]
Unknown
They were on paper. And I said, wouldn't it be great if CA not only had all the clients, but we had all the owners? We were the ones that they had to talk to. And Japan was on fire. On fire. They were producing everything we weren't. That we stopped producing. It's fascinating to me to this day because I am such a zealot American right now, at the end of the day, and I agree with Alex Karp. We better be strong. We better just be. Andreessen says the same thing. Peter says the same thing. Anyone I know who's smart says the same thing. We better be strong. You don't keep the world peace by being weak. You just don't. No one understands weakness. They just don't. And I surely don't. I don't understand it in people because there's no reason for it. It's better to come out ahead of yourself and be confident in what you're. We all have individual skill sets. Be confident in those skill sets. So I started to cultivate companies in Japan. And the first company I cultivated, oddly, was Nomura. And they, oddly in those days in the 80s, controlled about 3 to 4% of the stock in the top 20 Koretsu companies, which no one knew. They hadn't invested in them. So they opened a lot of doors for me. I was their media consultant. And when I met Mr. Morita, it became very clear that their money would be very good for American assets. I was highly criticized. The COVID of Newsweek bashed me, had a picture of the Statue of Liberty wrapped in the Japanese flag and wrote a nasty article that I was selling all of our assets. To Japan. And I'll never forget this. My friend Bill Bradley, who ran for president at the time, who was senator of New Jersey, gave a quote to them that shut it all down. He said, did you ever think that he's using this for financing? Because they can't take the studios over to Tokyo. They can't and they don't understand how to make the product. So it was like a no brainer. They were just good money with technology. It was a great fit. The fact that they didn't all use it right is a different story. That's because they had no interest in growth. They think in a very organized fashion. I booked Michael Jackson at Tokyo, one of the Tokyo stadiums. They had 60,000 people there. And we had him at Soldiers field in Chicago, 100,000 people. When he finished at Soldiers Field, there was pandemonium from the Chicagoans. They went wild and ran for the exits in the field and they went crazy. When I was in Tokyo and Michael Jackson finished, everyone applauded. And then some guy in a yellow blazer comes out to the diamond with a microphone and starts dismissing Rose one at a time. And I said to myself, I learned.
- [63:39]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
So much in that moment.
- [63:40]
Unknown
In that moment, it was unbelievable. We are not brought up in an organized fashion. We rebel against authority. We don't like people telling us what to do. We like original thinking. Failure is an option. Let's just get on with it. That's America. And the great thing about America is we create movies, we create television shows, we create books. We are the masters of fine art now. Used to be until the 50s, it was all Europe. Then came Abstract Expressionism, then Pop Art, then Op Art. It just kept going. We have the number one artists in the world here in New York City, all over the United States. So when it comes to tech, wide open. For me it was about getting to a point where no one could talk to the owners of anything without going through us. So if you wanted to talk to the owner of CBS Records or Columbia Pictures, they spoke fluent Japanese. And if you didn't have a long relationship with them, you had less than zero chance of having a definitive conversation. So it all funneled through us. So we had the owners of mgm, which were credit lie in a bank, which I was a consultant to the chairman. We had the owners of Universal Studios, which was Matushito Electric, and we had the owners of CBS Records and Columbia, which was Sony, and we had the owners of Bertelsmon. I was a consultant to BMJ and that was pretty much 3/5 of the business. We didn't have Disney, but they're always on their own. And at the end of the day, you needed a favor. And that's all that business is. It's one favor after another. You had to call us. You couldn't call anybody else. Who are you going to call, Ghostbusters? Who are you going to call? There's no one to call. Try getting Jean Perlavade, the chairman of accredited bank, on the phone. Good luck. Just doesn't happen. It's not simple. And remember, in the 40s, 50s and 60s, up until the mid 70s, you could get any owner of any studio on the phone. You could see them in a restaurant. That changed fast, and we saw it coming.
- [66:12]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
It's so interesting to think about the evolving business model where the underlying thing is the same, that you just are the nexus point for coordination in this entire world. What was the most fun part of that chapter of doing those very big deals? Like, I remember the story in your book that I can't remember which deal it was, but when you netted the fee to UNCA, it was something like 60 or $70 million at the time, after you paid everyone else off. And that was just like a massive dollar amount.
- [66:38]
Unknown
Well, that was 40 years ago. Yeah.
- [66:39]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
So it's probably 200 million equivalent now or something. What did that teach you? Like that. That seems like a really important moment in.
- [66:47]
Unknown
Well, it's what we've talked about. It's. You asked me how I learned how to be an investment banker. And to answer your question, which I've avoided skillfully, my son, my oldest son, Chris, asked me the same question when I was doing it. He said, dad, how the hell did you figure this out? He said, this is complicated stuff. I said, chris, I learn on the job every day. I watched Steve Schwarzenegger, I watched Pete Peterson. I used to go to lunch with Roger Altman and pick his brain. I am an insatiable sponge. If I can get 30 minutes with Marc Andreessen or a meal with Peter Thiel just to listen to me, that's a quadruple net positive. Because I learned so much. And I have to tell you that I didn't know what I was doing, but I didn't need to. I learned it as I did it because it's pretty much common sense. I could read a balance sheet. I knew what the SEC checklist was to make that had to be met. I had Herb Allen II as my mentor, telling me what to do, what not to do, if I was going to do something. Incredibly stupid. He had the nicest way of telling me how stupid I was. And we were on the phone. Herb and I were on the phone ten times a day.
- [68:08]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
What did he teach you? He seems just like such a fascinating, incredible man.
- [68:11]
Unknown
Herb is the most extraordinary man on the planet. And by the way, so is his son. He raised in him. I could tell a lot about a guy by their kids. That's the most I learn about a human being, is by meeting their kids.
- [68:24]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
I have more notes from my first meeting with Herb iii, maybe on my iPhone, than maybe any other meeting in recent memory.
- [68:31]
Unknown
He doesn't talk much, doesn't do pressure. You Google them, there's nothing. The family's amazing. Herb the second, was my mentor in banking. I went to him with these ideas, and instead of saying no or trying to steal them, so let's do it. He didn't push me away. He didn't think I was nuts. He thought it was a great idea that he and I do it together. Every other bank tried to push me out. When I signed Matsushita as a client, they took me into a room, like a cubby room, and there were stacks of engagement letters from every investment bank in the world. In the world, laying out all their fees and everything else. And Herb said to me, don't ask anybody for anything. So I went in, and when I closed the deal with Matsusha, a man named Hirata, who was the senior vice president, number two guy in the company, that's how they work. It said to me, what would you like? And I said, nothing. He said, what do you mean, nothing? I said, if we're successful. I said, if we're successful, I want you to get a Brinks Armor truck and load it up with gold bars and send it to Beverly Hills to my office. If we're not successful, cover our expenses, we get nothing. He bowed so deep, his head hit the table. Because it was trust. We never had a written document. In 25 years at CA, I didn't have written documents with employees or clients. We never lost a client the whole time I was there.
- [70:15]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
You never had a written document with a client?
- [70:17]
Unknown
No, we had. Sometimes we had what's called Guild authorization papers, but they didn't mean anything because under the Screen Actors Guild within, if a client didn't work for 91 days, they had the right to fire you. Why have a contract? Because it just gives them something to look forward to. I had people stay with us 25, 30 years, never signed a document.
- [70:40]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Wow, that's so cool.
- [70:41]
Unknown
But you know Herb said, do it. I did it. He was right. I did it with everybody. I never asked Sony for anything. I never asked MGM for anything. I never asked Credit Lyonne for anything. Bertl's one. I never asked anybody for anything. I just got paid and I got paid obscene sums of money. But we gave them really good advice and we gave them advice they couldn't get from anybody else. So when we were diligencing the Columbia Pictures library I had six of our guys in the library looking at the names of the films and had seen them. They weren't just bankers, they were hyphenates. They had seen the movies so they could say, yeah, this has value. No, this doesn't have value. They couldn't get that anywhere else. And we were spot on with what we said the libraries were worth because we didn't inflate it. We told the other thing we did, which is quite out of the ordinary as we told the truth. And that drove people crazy. In the entertainment business to tell people the truth was unheard of because the untruths is what drove the business.
- [71:55]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Why did you tell me one time that one of the worst things that happened to you was being the number one on that power list for eight straight years?
- [72:01]
Unknown
Oh, I hated it.
- [72:02]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
I can't remember which magazine.
- [72:03]
Unknown
No one understands how much I hated it. I don't even remember the name of the magazine. But it was a very nice woman who was the editor. And when I saw that, I panicked because that was the beginning of shots to be taken. That there's just too big a chance that one of them's gonna hit you.
- [72:26]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Like, why does it matter?
- [72:28]
Unknown
Because someone said to me, why did I start this business with Ollie, who's 40 years younger than me and I've got all these under 30 people working around our office? And I said, well, one, it's stimulating. Two, I'm learning a lot from them. Three, they know things I don't because of their age. Four, they're all really smart. So for me, that's like a feeding zone of a big Dracula devotee. And five, the build is the most fun. The best time of my life was the first 10 years of CAA. The worst time was when we came.
- [73:11]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Out number one on the power.
- [73:12]
Unknown
On the power list. Because then everyone wants to kill you. And they don't just want to kill you. They want to hack your limbs off and just drag them around the courtyard. Because either you can't do what they want you to do. You can't make their dream come True. You can't help them or you don't help them enough. It's a never ending litany of problems. Human beings are basically unsatisfied at every level of their life, except for moments. And the goal is to have as many of those moments as you can of the moments.
- [73:52]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Just to hearken back to the name all fundamentally creative in your experience.
- [73:56]
Unknown
No, look, some of my greatest moments are with my grandkids. I love having grandkids because I get all the fun and none of the responsibility to raise them, but I get to see my kids in them and a little bit of me. And it's really fun. Doing things that are creative are fun. For me, business is creative because I'm not a painter or a director or a sculptor or an actor. I have no talent, so I can't do any of the things that I just so admire. That's why I could sit and watch Roy paint. I love the concept. I used to tell Michael Crichton, we were on a vacation together on a boat in the Mediterranean, and he was sitting at his computer. I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm making notes about this town we just went to in Italy. I said, what about? He said, well, things I saw that were weird. To what end? I'm going to put it in the file and I'll use it. And what I realized is like a quilt. He'd patch all this stuff together into a yarn and it was either true, false fiction, nonfiction, but it was a yarn and it came out of nothing. It came out of his head from life experience.
- [75:31]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Reminds me of Danny Meyer's Always Be Collecting Dots. A, B, C, D. Kind of a beautiful idea.
- [75:35]
Unknown
Danny Meyer cracks me up. I sat next to him at a MoMA trustee lunch. He's not on the board, but he's very close to the museum and he was catering it. He fits my description to you of the kind of people I like to be around. He sat there and he didn't sit still. He's looking at everything. He's jumping into the kitchen, he's talking to the captain, he's talking to the waiters. He wanted perfection. And to me, that's what it's all about. It's about excellence. If you can't live your life and achieve some excellence in some silo, then you should move to another planet, because that's what it's like. And it doesn't matter what the silo is. You can be an auto mechanic and be the great. I had a guy in LA who was the Greatest auto mechanic I ever met in my life. I used to take my cars to him when I was younger because I love cars, and I had all these old cars. I don't know how he did it. He could make them run. I thought the guy was a genius. He was a guy who lived in Little Japan, in la, and he was brilliant at his field.
- [76:43]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Why is excellence so important to you? Or why do you get frustrated by people that don't live up to their potential? Kind of same question.
- [76:49]
Unknown
Because I think it's a waste, I guess, as an agent and I've mentored so many young people, and I so enjoy it. But the best part of it is seeing them succeed. I said to Ali, look, I said, you're 40 years younger than me. I want to leave this. So you. And now my son who's joining us. I said, I want you guys to have some foundation that you can quadruple. It's my job to give you that foundation. It's not for me. I already have my career.
- [77:24]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
There's three things you've said to me that always stand out, and they're sort of in concert, and I'd love you to reflect on them. One is that you're the world's best friend and the worst enemy. The second is that nothing that you do is by accident. And then the third was from your book, which is something to the effect of you grew up being bullied and then spent your career bullying others in support of your clients.
- [77:43]
Unknown
Well, I'll take the third one first, because I told this story to someone yesterday, years ago, when I was. Bob De Niro was a close friend and a great client, and he and Marty are best friends. And we did, like, five movies together. And occasionally, competitive agents, even though we really didn't have any competition, would somehow kind of eke their way into our clients good graces of a meal or a meeting. It was highly unusual. So some agent, who I don't want to mention his name because he's still functioning, gets Bob De Niro in a room here. And two things happened in the same week. One with Bobby De Niro and one with Bill Murray. So with Bob De Niro, he says to him, you know, Bob Ovitz is too busy, too many clients, too tough, too much in control. You're losing all your creative judgment. And he's impossible to deal with. And then he called me all kinds of names that I took as a compliment, that I was too tough and that I was a bulldog. And he said, even to Whit, he has Bulldogs on his desk in his office. Which is true. And Bob looked at him for a second and was having coffee. And Bob told me this story. And he said to me, he said to him, yeah, you're right about everything you said. But he said, you know what? And the guy said, well, I said, he's my bulldog. And he left. And Bill Murray that week. This is hysterical. A guy, a different agent, got Bill Murray to have a meeting with him. And they were supposed to meet at the Mark Hotel, but Bill was late and he said, come up to my apartment. Bill didn't know what the meeting was about. He didn't even know the guy was an agent. Bill, to this day, is one of my close friends. He's one of the smartest, most gifted human beings on the planet. He is a gift to all of us because he's all about making people feel good, unless he thinks you're a jerk. He is meeting with this guy in his own apartment, and the guy starts pitching him why he should leave me. And Bill's shaking his head and said, could you excuse me for a minute? And I've got to go to the bathroom. And the guy said, yeah, sure. So Bill leaves the room and this guy's sitting there, and 5 minutes go by, and 10 minutes go by, and 15 minutes go by and 30 minutes go by and he goes looking for Bill. Bill walked out the fire escape and left him in his apartment.
- [80:21]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
I love it.
- [80:21]
Unknown
Yeah, true, all true. You can't make this stuff up.
- [80:25]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
So best friend, worst enemy. Nothing's by accident. Everything is incredibly deliberate.
- [80:31]
Unknown
Look, I'm a zealot and a passionate human being about everything I do. When I started collecting art, I started collecting prints. Now I have a very deep and strong art collection. Not an accident. I've worked really hard at it because I enjoy it. So it's fun, it's rewarding. I envy what these people do. Tamar and I will sit around sometimes at night after dinner and look at the art on our walls and say, how did they do it? Why did they do it? Why'd they use that color? What drove them? It's so interesting. I don't know how anyone could not think that. It's just so interesting. Take yourself to that moment. What was Picasso thinking when he decided to deconstruct a figure and make it a cubist look, where it's like a puzzle pre computer 100 years ago.
- [81:23]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
One of the coolest things I've seen of yours was the Picassos with the.
- [81:26]
Unknown
Statues, the African mass. That's what influenced me to go to MoMA? One of our directors, Bill Rubin, did a show I saw probably 25 times. He came up with the thesis that Picasso and all of those artists were influenced. Gauguin, rock, all of them by Modigliani, by African statuary from the mid-1800s. Because in the 1850 to 1900, the Nigerians threw the Catholic missionaries out. So they went back to Paris and Brussels were the greatest primitive art museums. Yeah. And they brought all these relinquish figures with them. And in the early 1900s, they ran out of money and they put those masks in those Left Bank.
- [82:17]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Oh, wow.
- [82:18]
Unknown
Shopping, you know, on the weekends.
- [82:20]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah.
- [82:20]
Unknown
And Picasso bought 50 of them. Probably spent 2, 3 francs for each one. There's a picture of his studio in Mougon in black and white that has 50 masks on the wall. And you look at these masks and you look at the faces and you go, good God, it's right here. And Ruben proved that with these two volumes that are amazing. I saw that show so many times. Started collecting African art the same day. And then I started looking at Picasso very seriously before anyone. This is before Picasso took off. As a matter of fact, there was a period in New York in the early 70s where the new York Times had written a vile review of the late Picasso show at the Guggenheim. And all the dealers had stocked up on it because he had painted 10,000 pictures. Wasn't hard to get. And it all just sat there. No one would buy it. And not for me to disagree with the New York Times, but I went in and bought three paintings for nothing. They were thrilled to sell them to me. Crazy. Because I thought, he's a genius. And they re reviewed the show three months later and said they made a mistake. But those are all things that are important. And for me, it's about when you talk about excellence. And it's about being the best friend I want to be the best friend I can be to my friends. I want there to be no question of my loyalty to them. It was the same with my clients. I did not work for the movie studios. I didn't care what they thought of me. I didn't work for the networks. I worked for the clientele of caa. That was my job. And I worked for my associates. I wanted them protected. I wanted us to function in unison, client and agent. We had a young agent who. We all had assignments. Everybody, including me. Her assignment was Warner Brothers. And the guy running the studio wouldn't return our calls, which was weird because we had everybody he needed. But he wouldn't talk to her. He would only talk to more senior people. And we forbade that. We insisted that. That if you, Patrick, wanted to package someone in your. The O'Shaughnessy production, you dealt with the agent that represented CAA and all our clients. That was our conceit. You didn't go to the agent that handled the client, and the guy shut her down. And in a staff meeting, much to everyone's chagrin, I told everyone not to return this guy's call, period. No emails, no calls, no communication until further notice. This went on. And about three days in, he called me. I didn't return his call. Five days in, his wife called me. I did return her call. And she said, why are you doing this to Bob? And I said, why is Bob being disrespectful to Lori? And she said, what are you talking about? I said, ask him. So she calls me back. She said, he's taking her to lunch. Then we started calling him again because that kind of movement. Now, he hated me for that, and I don't blame him.
- [85:46]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
But team probably loved you.
- [85:48]
Unknown
Team loved it because they felt supported. Clients loved it because we taught them a lesson, and we became even more powerful. And at the end of the day, power was synonymous with success in getting things done. As an agent, I'm only talking about as an agent because we were there to protect the clients and to protect the constituency. So was I a good friend of that guy? I was until that moment. And then I decided I wasn't going to be because he shouldn't have done that. He embarrassed her to death in a staff meeting. She was turned red as a bead. She couldn't give a report. So. World's worst enemy. One of my close friends in Los Angeles called me up, said he needed to see me. Said he had been sued by a woman who worked for him 30 years ago because he thwarted her career. This was not sexual harassment. Never touched her, thwarted her career. I said, give me every fact he did. And I went on a campaign on his behalf because it wasn't right 30 years ago. She did just fine, but the judge wouldn't throw it out. I'm his friend, and I did some things that probably other people would question. Nothing illegal. But I called the lawyer for the plaintiff, who I know, and gave him my point of view, which was not particularly friendly. I thought that it was shaming his firm and told him that and told him I was going to tell everybody else that, too, because I thought what he was doing, what his Associate was doing to this man was not only inappropriate, there was no legal ground for it, and it was 30 years ago. So. Yeah. Am I world's worst enemy, best friend? Yeah, I think so and I'm proud of it.
- [87:47]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
We just finished the NFL season. Tell me about Roger Goodell. Someone I know that you think very highly of.
- [87:52]
Unknown
Been friends with him, Just had dinner with him. We were laughing about how long we've known each other. Met him in the early 90s. I don't know what happened. He's one of those guys. He was number four at the NFL when Paul Tagliabu was there. He had something very special. He fits in that list. Yeah, he had something very special. He was really smart. He was. Had the best bedside manner of anyone I ever met in sports, anyone I met anywhere. He was fun to be around, knew the game cold, knew his stuff. It's kind of like Andreessen or Horowitz. Knows their stuff. I remember sitting with Mark and Ben at a Y Combinator day, and every presentation Mark would go, yep, 19 so and so. Saw that, been there, done that. And Ben would say, yep, that didn't work. And the frame of reference is. And the memory is frightening. And Roger just knew the game, knew everything. Couldn't have been more accommodating to the things we were trying to. I was trying to buy a team for LA at the time and just we got to be good friends and it never stopped. It's now, I don't know, 40 years later. And I think I got into a mega, mega argument with his wife at dinner last week, which he's going to kill me for saying this, but I can't help myself. I said, you know, you actually should be President of the United States. I said, you've run a business that's humongous. You've grown it 20x. All the owners have made a fortune. There's nobody losing money. I said, you should run for some public. You should do some good for somebody. Aside from the 32 owners. I said, run for senator. Do something. I thought Jane Skinner, his wife, was going to leap the table and throttle me. But you never met a guy with so much integrity, so much creativity, so much ability to communicate, so much the blind lady of justice between players and owners. Absolutely fearless, taking an odor to task. Fearless. Been this way since I met him. He didn't grow into that. If he doesn't agree with them, he just says it. They respect it. And on top of it, his dad was a senator. Was a senator who took a position against his party. And Roger has something to prove and has proven it 100 times over. And you want to talk about a loyal friend? He's up there. He makes me look like an amateur.
- [90:39]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Pretty cool.
- [90:39]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [90:40]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
If you think about your arc from agent to banker, to all these other things you did now to investor and working with so many investors, is there anything between those sort of three categories that is most distinctive? Like things in the investing world that just require something different or your approach is very different than it was in the press?
- [90:58]
Unknown
No, it's a great question. I got asked this a couple weeks ago at a dinner I was speaking speaking at, and Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz said to me in the early 2000s, you know, you're wasting your time doing all the stuff you're doing, because what you do is exactly what we do. There's no difference. You find an idea or a young person, so that could be a director or an actor or an idea from Michael Crichton, and then you develop it and then you finance it, you get it money, then you help them shape the business or the package, then you cast it, and then you get a distribution and you market it. So that's the definition of a startup. And there's not one thing in my day today that I'm doing different than I did in 1974. There's not one thing different. It's just the numbers are a little different, but it's the same blocking and tackling, same fundamentals. At the end of the day, for me, I have a very cultural bias on how I invest. I invest very different than everyone else. It's the same fundamentals. But I invest in human beings. I may not like their idea, but if I like them, I want to be around them. And I've put my money into companies that have gone through the roof, and I put my money into companies that have failed. But the founders have never failed me. They've always come back.
- [92:31]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
What do you think's going to happen in the future of media? It's changing so fast. AI is introducing unlimited content, basically.
- [92:38]
Unknown
So, first of all, I'm not as worried about AI as everybody else is in the content creation side. I happen to feel it's going to be a big benefit in production, especially in production planning with respect to creativity. I remember looking at Pac Man. Do you remember that game? Of course. How many years ago you think that was?
- [92:58]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
40, 50.
- [92:59]
Unknown
Great. So today you got full motion video with emotional looks on gamer the game characters. That was unheard of in those days, right? You're going to get the same thing with AI there's no emotion now will they get there? Maybe it's still a handmade craft. I don't think content's the issue. I think the issue's ideas, where we've kind of run the gambit on it.
- [93:26]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Everything's a sequel.
- [93:27]
Unknown
Everything's a sequel. When I started as an agent, I bought a 20 volume set of the synopses of the greatest literature in the world. And I would go through it to see if I could find ideas for movies and some of my favorite authors of all time, like Alexandre Dumas. How many times can you make the Three Musketeers or Count Amani Cristo. Right. The French just made it for the fifth time. We've kind of bled the well dry on source material and then the fiction that's coming out not at the rate it used to because we don't encourage young people. We've got a humongous problem in the arts. Not in the fine arts, oddly, but in the media arts of teaching people and giving them an opportunity. When I signed Tom Cruise when he was 19, I gave him a list of 10 directors that he needed to work with to build his career. And all 10 were clients. And he worked with all 10 over 10 years. That's a career builder. Couldn't do that today. Someone said, could you start CA today? I said, no, there's no marketplace for it. If someone said to me that Netflix or a company out of San francisco that mailed DVDs was going to change worldwide viewing patterns, worldwide viewing patterns, and that everything would be put up, accessible in multiple places on the Internet in perfect quality when you want it. Who would have thought you were smoking crack? They changed the viewing patterns. No one watches TV the same way anymore. In the. I Remember in the 80s and 90s you watched Thursday night on NBC because you wanted to see Seinfeld and you wanted to see Kelsey Grammer, you wanted see all these shows. And on Tuesday nights in the 70s you watched Mod Squad and then Marcus Welby, MD. And the Tuesday night movie. It was just that's the way it is. And you talk about it the next day at the Office. Well, first of all, no one's going to the Office. And second of all, there's nothing that's ever at the same moment. So no one's talking about anything. It's very hard to build word of mouth. And it cracks me up when these releases are made, that such and such streaming show had 3.4 million viewers. And I crack up because in my day, late night, which was the lowest viewing center on television, but very profitable, Letterman drew 5 million viewers every night. The day it's over and the theaters are tough to go to. And until someone puts capital into the theaters, people don't want to go. You can now get a hundred inch flat screen for around 2,500 bucks max. You can get a surround sound kit from any of the big Japanese manufacturers for 499 at Costco or any place. You get your own little theater and you put in your bedroom, your living room, put in your bathroom, it doesn't make any difference. I just bought a projector that's 4K, that's about 6 inches wide that projects a picture on the wall in my bedroom. It's unbelievable. And technology has just swamped the content possibilities. And we're not growing creative people. Who's the next Steven Spielberg? Who's the next Morty?
- [97:16]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Why is that? How do we do that?
- [97:18]
Unknown
You need a fertile marketplace. And as I always said when I was at the agency, we're in a business, folks. It's fun to make movies that no one wants to see except the person that makes it because it's some personal statement. And that's fine. But we had a rule one and three. You didn't make two commercial movies. You were not making an art movie. Today, go look at the things nominated for Academy Awards and show me the breakout movie. We used to have movies that had an aesthetic value and a commercial value. And when you push them together right at that line, they were the tootsies and they were the all the President's Men and the Jurassic Parks and the Rain Man. Rain man was a humongous hit. That movie was turned down by everybody.
- [98:15]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
What do you think the key is to raising money?
- [98:18]
Unknown
Confidence on the other side, the people you sit with have to have confidence in you that you're going to be diligent about it. Fortunately for me, I don't go into a meeting where people think that I'm not going to take it very seriously. I view other people's money as my own because it's all intermixed. And I also. They also know I hate failure. I just have a thing about it. From the time I was a kid. When I grew up, failing was not an option for me because it was. Failure was death, frankly. Because I grew up in a very low end neighborhood and my dad worked his ass off but never could make anything of himself. And I didn't want that life and failure was not an option. So it was kind of a life or death decision. And I approach everything. I approach my relationships with people. Like I told you about my friend, he's my friend and he was being wronged. And I'm not a judge, but I'm a judge in that situation for him. I'm his advocate. Am I right or wrong? I think I'm right. But if I'm wrong, frankly, I don't really care. Unless he did something egregious, I'm right.
- [99:34]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
If you sum all this up and I think about all the lessons I've learned from you, kind of in closing here, I bet a lot of people would want to sign up for the sheer amount of experience that you've had, the ability to enjoy. So many people, so many works of art to help create things, just like the prolific nature of how you've worked and lived. What's the North Star behind all that? Is it happiness? Are you seeking happiness? Do you care about that word? Is it something else? For those that say, okay, great, if I'm optimizing for this, I can maybe live something like you have.
- [100:14]
Unknown
Let me give you the foundation for that answer. Every Sunday for 50 years, I do the same exercise. Hell or high water. I've never not done it. I look at my calendar the week before, and it's funny because in my early days I had a paper calendar, a thing called a Daytimer. It was a little book with 30 pages, 31 pages, and you carried it in your suit pocket. And we all wore suits in those days, by the way. And it had everything you did every day. That's how I wrote my book, by the way. I had all those.
- [100:47]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Oh, wow. Yeah, cool.
- [100:49]
Unknown
I look at that every Sunday. I sit down at my desk, I open my calendar, now it's on Outlook. And I have my Outlook calendar on the left screen and my Outlook calendar on a right screen. The one on the left screen has the week before, the one on the right screen has the coming week. And I go through every single meeting I had, every transaction, every human I met could be social. And I decide if they go on what's called the Sunday list, which is on Sundays. Since I don't do anything, I put names of people I want to get to know better, and then I parse through the week. The names from the week before that I want to re engage with. They're either people I found wildly intelligent, people I thought were doing really interesting things outside the scope of my expertise, people I made money with and people I lost money with, and people that I thought bored me to death. And then I have some people I meet that it's just. I could tell in five minutes. It's a giant mistake. They don't go on the list and then the list gets carried forward. And I've done that my whole life. I want to basically achieve a state where I'm happy doing what I'm doing. I have no interest in retirement. I hate golf. I do my art and it's more stimulating. I don't know how to say this. When you have less time, things are more interesting because you got to get it done and it's more fun. I don't want too much time on my hands. I want to be stimulated. I want to meet interesting people. I want to have interesting dialogue. For me, it's about achievement, learning. I want to learn something every day. I'm a voracious reader. I want to do interesting things. I don't want to sit idle and I don't want to not work. Work for me is therapeutic because I'm helping at this stage of my life. I'm not building a career. It was a different phase for me. I am helping people and I want to do that. I help young people with companies and I really like it. I help the people that work with me. I'm very excited because my son just joined us in the venture side and he's really proven to be. In two weeks, he's taken a load off me. That's unbelievable. But the reason it's unbelievable is it gives me more time and time is my most precious commodity.
- [103:25]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
I think that's a beautiful place to close. Michael, thank you for the ideas, for the stories, for everything.
- [103:29]
Unknown
Patrick, it's a pleasure. I always love talking to you.
- [103:32]
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
If you enjoyed this episode, visit joincolas.com where you'll find every episode of this podcast, complete with hand edited transcripts. You can also subscribe to Colossus Review, our quarterly print, digital and private audio publication featuring in depth profiles of the founders, investors and companies that we admire most. Learn more@joincolasis.com subscribe.
- [103:57]
Unknown
SA.