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something that Michael oit had in common with people like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos is the belief that you must find and work with extraordinary people even when Ovitz was a young man he starts his company he has no money he makes a list
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of people that he eventually wanted to work with and it was the best of the best and even though at the time it felt like a pipe dream he actually makes that list into a reality and the importance of working with the very best people uh there's actually a great observation
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about this from Steve Jobs and he says that the key observation was that I noticed that that that that dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 to1 or 100 to1 so given that you're well
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advised to build a team that pursues the A+ players that's exactly what Steve Jobs did it's exactly what Michael overz did and it is exactly what ramp did ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry becoming an engineer at
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ramp is nearly impossible in the last 12 months they hired only 23% of the people that applied so that means when your business is using you now have access to top tier technical talent and some of the best AI Engineers on the planet working on your
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behalf 247 to automate and improve all of your business's Financial operations ramp invests heavily in creating new Innovative products in fact I just uh sat down with the founder and a friend of mine who's the one of the co-founders
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and the CEO uh of ramp named Eric and he told me that 54% of their payroll is now dedicated to R&D so the longer they use ramp the more efficient your company becomes that's very important because as Sam Walton astutely pointed out in his
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autobiography he wrote you can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation or you can be brilliant and go out of business if you're too inefficient ramp helps you run an efficient organization Ovitz knows that
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ramp built a team of apost players because Ovitz invested in ramp so from a customer perspective what does a team of A+ players sounds like sounds like this customer review that I read which said ramp is like having a teammate who you
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never need to check in on because they have it handled so take the time set up a demo of the product and you'll see why many of the world's top Founders are running their company on ramp you can do that by going to ramp.com go to ramp.com
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to learn how they can help your business today that is ramp.com okay so last week I flew to New York to have dinner with Michael Ovitz we wind up having a very intense and entertaining three-hour conversation and I've made a list of things I learned from the dinner so I'm
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just going to run through some of these ideas I guess I should back up and tell you how I actually got connected uh to to Ovitz uh we wind up I didn't even know this but we wind up having a very close mutual friend I'm having breakfast
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with my friend Rick and his phone is on the table and it rings and it says Michael it's like oh wow and so he picks it up and he's like hey I'm actually here with my friend David senra he does this podcast you might have heard of it's called Founders and there's a
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there's a short break and then oit says I listened to four of them yesterday and so we wind up getting connected and I we were planning on having a meeting and having dinner anyways and I was like yeah as you might know I do these like I
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had dinner episodes I've done one with Charlie Munger and Sam zel and Brad Jacobs and John Mackey I think it'd be really interesting would you be up to doing it and he said yes so I flew up to see him conversation was really intense
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it flew by like I said it was 3 hours I was shocked when I got up from the table and I thought you know maybe we talked for an hour um so right after dinner I don't record any of this and I don't take notes while we're having a conversation so I just write down some
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of the things that really stood out to me and then I try to expound on them so I have a just a list of about 10 ideas I want to go over with you from this dinner and the number the first one that's very obvious if you read his autobiography which I'm also doing an
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episode on and I think I'll just release it at the same time and if you spend any time with them or hear him speak in any capacity uh there's this great line that I kind of use this like a guide to make sure that I'm on the the right path and
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it says mediocrity is always invisible I until passion shows up and exposes it and this is very obvious if you look at his career but he's still like this to this day and what I would say is like obitz does nothing in a casual Manner
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and I don't either I don't think any of the founders that you and I study or read biography uh about do either and like one of my favorite examples of this and he was like this when he was like a young kid he starts working in the mail
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room at William Morris and the extra length I think there was like I think in the book he says there was something like 20 other training you know he's one of 20 and out of those 20 people there's only one that did what he did and he noticed that hey uh
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there's this filing cabinet room he says the length of a basketball court and it's lined with steel cabinets and he calls it the hard drives of the era you know there's no computers back then uh no internet anything like that and what
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he realized like this this this these filing cabinets that are the length of a basketball court they actually hold 70 years of history on Hollywood and he says I viewed those files as an encyclopedia of entertainment while other trainees wanted to be told what to
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do and read and learn each morning at 7 and every evening after work for 10 weeks I made my way through every single file from A to Z how many other trainees did that zero he does this over and over again there's a bunch of different
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examples but one of my favorite stories from the book too was he's trying to sign this very important director and who the director at the time was being repped by this aging and really apathetic agent and so what Ovitz does keep in mind mediocrity is always
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invisible until passion shows up and exposes it maybe the director thought hey that I've been with this agent for a while seems to be going well seems to be fine and then you have somebody with passion that's showing up and exposing
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how mediocre your alternative is and he winds up working on this director for two hours a day for two years before the director signs with them and one of the the smartest things that that oit did he's like I made sure to get him every single script the best
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scripts before or his own agent got the scripts to him so essentially working on his behalf and showing him how important it was and showing him that I can actually like the difference between you know your your apathetic agent in me is
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vast so mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it the second thing that popped to my mind is don't put any ceiling on where you can push your profession so Kobe Bryan and Michael Jordan actually shared the
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same uh the same trainer this guy named Tim Grover and he wrote two books about what it was like working very closely with them you know basically spending every day with them and there's two lines that popped in my mind when after I was thinking about the conversation
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how with Ovitz and Tim Grover writes the greats figure out what works for them regardless of what everyone else does and number two everyone wanted to be like Mike Mike did not want to be like anyone else and so if you actually analyze how there were there were Talent
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agents before you know Michael Ovitz was born there's Talent agents to this day and yet one of the things that that is most fascinating about his story is like he just he figured out what worked for him he didn't really care what other
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agents were doing in fact he maybe looked at what other agents were doing as what not to do or what to like basically attack areas that they weren't doing so one of the Innovations he had was uh decid the decision that hey we're all going to service every single agent
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inside of CA is going to service the clients together we it's essentially like a giant swarm of of Agents where in the past you know you were you were assigned to one person you only worked with one person and that caused all kind
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of internal conflict and weren't it's just a lot better five people servicing you than one person you know wind up working out a lot better for for the talent that CA assigned and then he didn't just stay there it's like oh okay
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what are we supposed to do there's there's a great story where it's like most Talent agents what would they do they would field offers like okay there's 10 offers we have to choose between them maybe we negotiate a little higher salary case it's like no we're
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going to we're not going to field opportunities we're going to create them and then that led to the next thing where hey we're going to create entire packages for the studios which also helped him control prices and make more revenue for the agency and then from
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there he's like what else can I do I'm going to get into corporate m&a no other Talent like no other talent agency none of his other comp competitors were even thinking like this and the size and scope of his ambition again no don't put
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any ceiling where you can push your profession you know just pursue the opportunities and chase after them he winds up brokering like multiple billion dollar deals I think one I think one of them was like6 and5 billion dollar no
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again no none of his other competitors no other agent was doing this he doesn't stop there he says hey we're going to start being marketing and advertising consultants for giant companies like Cocola and one of the things that he said at dinner is like if you're going
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to do things like this when you do new things you will be criticized and in that case you'll be criticized by Outsiders by people outside of your company now number two no ceiling don't put any ceiling on where you can push your profession is also related to
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number three because for number two you're going to be criticized out by by people outside your company number three is I I grew up uh going to church uh Christian church every week uh for my entire childhood and I remember one of
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the one of the lessons that they would repeat over and over again is the importance of not being they said don't be unequally yolked and I think they meant just in in relationships in general but I specifically remember saying like you know make sure you're
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not Mar you don't marry people outside of the faith that have different you know beliefs in you and the advice from Ovitz is like you need to make sure that you're picking partners that have the same ambition as you and so when I think
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about that I think of don't be unequally yolked and when you're when you have no ceiling on where you're going to push your profession you're going to be criticized by Outsiders because you're doing new things but if you have picked partners that don't have the same
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ambition levels of you uh and you try to do new things like all the things I just listed you're actually also going to be criticized by insiders which are people inside your company your co-founders I mean it's going to lead to a lot of
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conflict and you know there's all kinds of stories in this autobiography which I'll go over in the episode I make on it it's a huge part of theory story and he says this will manifest he was saying at dinner like the way this is Manifest is
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like your partners will call it a distraction and you know if you believe in it like it's it's not it's probably not that it's a distraction it's just they're not thinking as big as you are and you might find yourself he didn't use this word but une unequally yolked
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is the way I think about it when we talked about you know the issues with co-founders and and how to maybe avoid all this and really like what he learned from this what I found that was remarkable because I know now he has new partners and scaling other companies and
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he's and I know his partner I asked like how are you able to trust because two of his partners that screwed him over uh were like two of his best friends too and so I asked him like how do you trust Partners after being over and I
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thought his answer was because you know I I keep people at arms length I have a hard time trusting other people that may be a detriment and he had a great perspective on this he's like you know three people screwed me over my life
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he's like but it's three out of a thousand and he's not going to let three out of a thousand people you know foreclose any future opportunity and and being able to partner with people that aren't going to screw them over uh I thought that was really interesting
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number four read biographies know everything about the history of your industry there's a line This is tied to a line that um that oit said to me where he says only Founders understand Founders so the first thing that popped to my mind is on page 179 of his
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autobiograph he talks about that uh Lou he modeled himself after Lou waserman there a biography on Lou I have I think it's called like the last Mogul or The Last Tycoon the last he was like the last Hollywood Mogul and I asked oit at
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dinner I like do you still like think Lou werman was the best and he said yes and uh one of the benefits of reading biographies is obviously like Oba start doing this you know he starts working when he's like nine years old by the
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time he's high school he's like re voraciously reading biographies of men that did great things and you know he read the Carnegie and the Rockefeller and all these people he read all the biographies of all the the the people in Hollywood that came before him and I
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think the important thing is what he's saying is like only Founders understand Founders and so as you understand these life stories as you listen to this podcast you read biography yourself like you'll just realize like oh that's just
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like another me and we're going through the exact same thing he actually gave me advice too he's like you should really lean into more the more unknown Founders because you know he had read about the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers and the
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carnegies and the Ford but he thought it was an edge to introduce people to other incredible Founders that very few people have heard of before so like Daniel lwig the invis billionaire chungju young which is the craziest autobiography I've
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ever in my life Sam Z Murray Estee Lauder another example like even if you know the company name very few people probably thought you know oh I should see if that person that has built this massive company I wonder if they have an autobiography or a biography WR about
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them and then even less people would actually go and read it um so again read biographies know everything about the history of your indry number five have a profound sense of belief and as you understand like the world is also malleable so there's a reason this is
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number five and read biographies is number four because you learn this if you read a bunch of biographies and this is the things one of the things I most admire about obitz there's a lot of things like I I love the fact that this
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guy never gives up and he's still pushing himself he's in his late 70s and he's got tons of energy and he's working really hard but he has got a great line in his autobiography where he says nothing in Hollywood is anything until
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it's something and the only way to make it something is with a profound display of belief if you keep insisting insisting that a shift shifting set of possibilities is a movie it eventually becomes one so Mark Andre who actually modeled his Venture firm andreon Horwitz
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on what Ovitz did at CA had a very similar line and this is the way he describes what I feel is the same exact phenomenon and Mark wrote the world is a very malleable place if you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion the world
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will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think and so Ovitz doesn't see things as they are now he sees what they could be and then he proceeds to make that idea into a real reality and then
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number six when you speak to him I you I got the feeling that he just thought that like there was unlimited opportunity in the world and surprisingly enough I think something he learned earlier and I think still applies to to day he like there's
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there's a lot of opportunity that's just hiding in plain sight and I think you have some level of like self-confidence when you're able to pick something up that off the ground like people kind of like threw away or didn't do anything
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with and you turn it into something that's in L valuable and I think that's related to number two which is you know just don't put a ceiling on there's really no ceiling on where you can push your profession so you know there's a
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ton of examples in the book but like he turned Shogun into this massive miniseries I think it's the second most watched miniseries of all time and that opportunity was sitting inside of another agency and the other agency wasn't doing any anything with it for
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years he finds another script for this movie called Tootsie again six years it was considered dead this is impossible this isn't an opportunity winds up making it makes a couple hundred million dollars in profit Rainman which is one
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of my favorite movies I watched it I don't even know how many times when I was a kid same thing other people couldn't get it done other people said no one's going to watch this movie about this autistic guy makes well over $400 million there's always opportunity
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hiding in plain sight and there's unlimited opportunity in the world and I feel like this has been coming up a lot if you look at the past few episodes like think about Leon hes right literally builds the the hes family just sold the business for $53 billion
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right what how does that business start that starts with Leon hes who realizes hey you're throwing out a bunch of this oil and because you think it's not valuable I'm going to start my Empire with the stuff that you're throwing away
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just like Sam zuray did the exact same thing with in his banana trade right you're throwing out the ripes I that's you're throwing in a trash I see that I don't see as trash I see as opportunity hiding in plain sight Jerry Jones Dallas
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Cowboys he paid 140 million for they're worth 10 billion today 75 people turn down the opportunity to buy the Cowboys before Jerry Jones did if you're capable of thinking for yourself if you have profound self-belief there's always opportunity hiding in plain sight number
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seven buy endurance we conquer one of my favorite it's probably my favorite line in the entire book and I don't remember what the the context of the discussion we were having at dinner but we did talk about this and we both look at this the
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exact same way but this line says he stopped because it was hard it required discipline dedication and hours and hours of time everyone stopped I didn't stop that's related to one of my all-time favorite observations and quotes by Steve Jobs where he says Steve
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said I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful ones is pure perseverance unless you have a lot of passion about this you're not going to survive you're going to give up
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and I actually think it's related he was talking about the difference between like his mentality and maybe some of the younger people that work in their company today where they don't understand like how they just have haven't gone through life enough so you
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know it's it's really hard to understand until you go through yourself like just how difficult and how much adversity you're going to have to constantly push through and like what Steve just said listen you're going to have to deal with
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all kinds of crap and most of you are just going to wash out I think in that traine program that o started as a young man I think 80% of the trainees that all start in the mail room that are trying to be Talent Agents from the time they
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start in the mail room to the time they actually become an agent like 80% wash out one of the things I think like he can uh that the young people that work with him today can benefit from is one they see how fast he wants to move and how fast he he wants to push and there
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was an example where you know he asked for something and maybe it was on like a Thursday night and it's still not there on Sunday and the person's like oh I'll get in a few days he's like when I said when I asked you on Thursday night I
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expect it to happen on Friday morning and this person was shocked at the pace that obitz wanted to move at in fact one of my favorite stories is in um herb kellerer his biography herb kellerer was the founder of Southwest Airlines it's
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the most success successful airline in history under Herb's leadership they wented being profitable for something like 40 straight years and so I want to read this excerpt from herb Keller her's biography which I think is absolutely excellent says herb kellerer illustrates
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the speed with which Southwest moves by telling a story about Don Valentine the former that's a funny that gives you an indication of where we're going here right the former VP of marketing Valentine had just joined Southwest from
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Dr Pepper when the Marketing Group met in January to discuss a new television campaign Valentine was ready with his timeline for producing the spots okay you just came over come over from Dr Pepper you're now Southwest you're going to give a presentation to the founder
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the founder of Southwest we have a great idea here okay this is what we're going to do this is the timeline it's in January okay so we're in January I'm going to have the script ready in March we're going to do the script approval in
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April we're going to cast the commercial in June and we're going to shoot it in September when Valentine finished Keller herd said Don I hate to tell you but we're talking about next Wednesday so we a lot of people just don't know how fast
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you can move and as the leader of your company you should really be pushing the pace and showing what's possible number eight this was very very interesting and I wrote very few things down I try to go into these conversations obviously I'm
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prepared because I've read about them and everything else but I don't have like a list of things I want to talk about but this was one of the things I wanted to talk about so there was this young guy who obitz admired I fact in fact I think he started a talent agency
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even like a younger age than ozd I think this guy was like TW 23 and Ovitz was like 27 they winded up building a relationship Ted his name's Ted head and in the book it talks about giving him advice and seeing how how you know how
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much obitz is pushing and he said I have a piece of advice and knowing you you're not going to take it but here it is I could have worked 10% less and it wouldn't have made a difference in my professional success but it would have been a lot happier Ted was absolutely
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right on both accounts it was great advice and I didn't take it I see now that it could have worked as much as 20% less and it wouldn't have cost me and it wouldn't have cost me if I worked even 10% less across 30 years that's three
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extra whole years of life that I would have enjoyed so this is one thing I did ask him at dinner I was like do you still believe that cuz you know he's he pushes the pace Ovitz is still working an un unbelievable amount of hours but what he told me was fascinating he's
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like yes but not on the rise you know I think uh I forgot the number he told me but I think within the first 10 years of CIA 10 years after the founding a company they had like something like 75% market share of you know his industry
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and so he's like then you could work you know 10% less and I should have worked 10% less you might not be able to do that especially as you know they they were completely under financed there's no Venture Capital they literally like they had no money they were taking
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second loans out on their houses for God's sake they had like no furniture um so he was under intense Financial pressure right from day one but he did this is the advice he would give now is you know work 10% less and really I
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think what what is stated there by Ted's advice and then over also agreeing with that advice is like really important to optimize for the long term you know most of the the profits in a business is very far out you know decade two decades in
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the future think about the money that Microsoft makes today compared to what they made in 198 1990 apple is the same way Oracle Walmart you know these things can compound for a long all if all the values out in the future your the advice
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is like make sure you're not uh optimizing for growth at the expense of durability you want to be you want your company to be around you want to still be doing what you're doing 20 years from now 30 years now 40 years from now some of the best entrepreneurs I told you
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before like uh that I meet are in their 70s and they've been running their business for 45 years and if you see it doesn't look like a company it looks like they have their own world it's incredible and all the profits are in the future so I think what the advice
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here is again you really need to optimize for the long term and if that means you push back you cut back 10% but you're still there you know two decades in the future then it's obviously a trade that you want to make number nine
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this is very fascinating because he repeats this over over again surround yourself with people who would tell you the truth he said I cannot stand yes men and it will happen because you know obitz was in a glamorous business and then he did not like the publicity it's
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mentioned over time over and over again in the book it causes problems with his Partners it caused problems with his clientele because his clientele you know they're obsessed with Fame and they want to be the ones getting the attention
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this happens with any kind of success whether it's in the the show business or even in just a regular Commercial Business you're going to have people because it's in their best interest they just they're going to say they're not
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going to tell you the truth the close friend that me and O share Rick O's told me that he's fiercely loyal to him because he says Rick tells him the truth that he is direct and truthful and he's not trying and he understands like he's not telling me bad things to be
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needlessly critical or to try to hurt my feelings or anything like that he's telling him because we're friends and your friends tell you the truth and Ovitz did this with me he actually told me a few things that he thinks I'm doing
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wrong or I could be doing better um and he could be right about that and definitely would think about it but I went and actually pulled up I talked about this at dinner but then after dinner I went and um was I asked sage like what did History's Greatest
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entrepreneurs say about the importance of getting unfiltered and truthful information uh about about your business from the people that work with you and how did they ensure that they got the best and most accurate information about
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the state of their business and there's a bunch of examples of this one of them was in the early days of Amazon Jeff insisted that customers could email him directly at Jeff amazon.com and then he received unfiltered customer feedback because again if you're just getting
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your information through your Executives right they want to tell you the good news this is what Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett were warn about over and over again and they would tell people it's like the good news takes care of
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itself I don't even need to hear about that tell me the bad news and tell me it fast because we don't let we don't let bad news Fester the founder of Kinkos PA Paul oralia same thing he had a voicemail system where any employee could leave him a message directly he
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could he was dyslexic so he's not reading emails say just call me tell me what the hell is going on on the front lines Sam Walton he did not want to spend time in his office right there hilarious stories in his autobiography and his biography where Sam uh would not
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adhere to a calendar and so you know his secretary would set up like you know some appointment at like 700 a.m. in his office and Sam's not showing up and like where is he they're like oh he left at 5:00 a.m. gotten his little Cessna and
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you flew to another Walmart door and he's like working and asking questions from the workers on the front line that is how he knows he's getting unfiltered truthful information about the state of his business Jim Casey same thing UPS
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founder what would he do he made his driver he instructed his driver every time we pass that these big brown trucks pull over and he goes and he talks introduced himself and he talks directly gets direct information directly from the people that are actually delivering
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the service to the customer and finally number 10 retirement is lame that's a quote from Jeff Bezos who gave this interview at the dealbook summit a few weeks ago and I made an episode on it he says retirement is lame Ovitz would say
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the same thing he is still he talks about he's still very driven he feels it's very important that you need to have something that you can push forward that you can wake up every day on he told me that he has a bunch of friends that you know it's sold out or retired
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decided they spend all their time playing golf or gardening and then you speak to them a year later and they just aren't as sharp they're just not as vibrant they're just not as alive there's a certain kind of personality type uh you know know if you're
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listening to this you're probably one of them that you just you need something no matter what until death you need something to push forward something to focus on and to improve every single day and I think Ovitz has that trait in
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common with the other people that I've done in this I had dinner with Siri so I'm thinking of Charlie merer he was still working until he died Sam zel told me to my face I'll be doing deals till I die he did that Brad Jacobs talk to him
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he's gonna be working till he dies John Mackey same thing retirement is lame retirement is fatal you need something to push forward forward and focus on and improve every single day so before I go I just want to review 1 through 10 number one mediocrity is always
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invisible until passion shows up and exposes it number two there is no ceiling on where you can push your profession number three don't be unequally yolked pick partners that have the same ambition as you number four read biographies know everything about
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the history of your industry number five have a profound sense of belief the world is malleable number six there's always opportunity hiding in plain sight number seven by endurance we conquer number eight work 10% less optimize for
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the long term number nine surround yourself with people who will tell you the truth and number 10 retirement is lame that's everything I got for you now hope you listen to the next episode I'll be going through Michael's excellent autobiography which I hope you obviously
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Buy and read as well and then as I go through that biography I'll also reference other things uh that relate to the dinner that Michael and I had and that are in the book that is 300 81 down 1,000 to go and I'll talk to you again soon