The Connection Newsletter 29 - Manager, Maker, CEO

The Connection Newsletter 29 - Wants to get to heaven, doesn’t want to die

October 15, 2018

Hello!

This is edition #29 of

The Connection

, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hello!)

It took me a few days, but

. Taylor’s wins helped (more on Tay Tay below). And I’m in SF this week -- excited to meet this season’s

.

(Want less email? No problem, you can unsub at the bottom. We'll still be friends.)

Make sure to hit "Display Images" above to see puppy pics. 

First a new article called

. Someone recently asked me, “How’s your work-life balance?” The truth is, I don’t think much about balance, which forced me to ask: “how do I allocate my time?” I’m still developing my thoughts around this, but if I had to put a name to it, I’d call it the Manager, Maker, & CEO framework.

(if you find it difficult to subscribe to a 9-6 work/lifestyle, you might relate.)

Now, onto the articles:

…

. Michael Ovitz is the founder of Creative Artists Agency, and in the late-80s early-90s, the kind of Hollywood.

He represented top talent (Hanks, Cruise, Roberts) and negotiated the sale of two studios. Like Teddy KGB, “he’s the one guy you don’t want to f- with.” By the time I arrived in Hollywood, Mr. Ovitz’s heyday had passed, but I was fascinated by him (

.) In this article, he looks back at what he built, the mistakes he made, and talks about his new book.

“Nathan Myhrvold was employee number three at Microsoft. One of the smartest men I've met. He said to me, ‘Michael, whatever comes out of a speaker is going to end up in the ether someplace and be able to be pulled down by people for free.’ I was an apostle of his point of view. I told it to the head of every music company that I was an adviser to. And like anything else in life, they focused on what was immediate, which was quarterly sales of CDs and DVDs.”

…

For what it’s worth, James Andrew Miller isn’t impressed with Michael Ovitz’s memoir.

Mr. Miller wrote the fantastic book 

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency,

a complete oral history of CAA, from its formation, rise to power, and aftermath of Ovitz’s departure. (He had 70 conversations with Ovitz in the writing of his book.)

“Ovitz begins his book by likening himself to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in The Terminator, being “relentless” and “inhuman” and later acknowledging how much disdain some others had for him. It’s good, candid stuff, but unfortunately for the reader, Ovitz’s goal with the book to emerge as respected and liked gets in the way of him being totally transparent about how he acted to get there. He rarely showcases the raw, unforgiving and, yes, brutal way he sometimes thought about and acted toward others.”

…

. After CAA and a botched job at Disney, Mr. Ovitz tried remaking himself by founding a new company called Artist’s Management Group, or AMG, in 2002. He wanted to build a world where during a television show, you had access to:

“...among other things, sports scores, chat rooms, and links to e-commerce Web sites. When a raft appears on Baywatch, Darren grabs a remote, moves a cursor onto the raft, and clicks. The raft freezes. At this point, the viewer could be directly linked to a local

sporting-goods store that sells rafts

.”

(

)

He never succeeded. The execution flops. AMG folds.

In this post by the folks at Union Square Ventures, we see why:

“Platforms evolve from an iterative cycle of apps=>infrastructure=>apps=>infrastructure and are rarely built in an outside vacuum.First, apps inspire infrastructure. Then that infrastructure enables new apps.”

In essence, Mr. Ovitz was trying to build YouTube before the infrastructure (broadband internet) was mainstream enough to support it.

…

. Here was my favorite type of smart the article discussed:

“Accepting that your field is no more important or influential to other people’s decisions than dozens of other fields, pushing you to spend your time connecting the dots between your expertise and other disciplines.Being an expert in economics would help you understand the world if the world were governed purely by economics. But it’s not. It’s governed by economics, psychology, sociology, biology, physics, politics, physiology, ecology, and on and on.”

…

. In a world where we constantly share ourselves and “our brand,” it becomes more difficult to pursue hobbies or interests for fun. As Professor Wu aptly says:

“To permit yourself to do only that which you are good at is to be trapped in a cage whose bars are not steel but self-judgment.”

...

. She’s a master at the game. For more evidence,

.

Thanks for reading!

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