Michael Ovitz built CAA by outworking rivals and using psychological warfare. For a decade, he sent torn Variety ads to competitors each time they signed a star, a tactic designed to intimidate. He believes competition is for losers: the real strategy is dominating your market so thoroughly that rivals can't compete.
He said to me, so good that you're starting this business. In a year, you'll be looking for a job. I said, really? And what makes you think that? He said, oh, you're gonna fail. I said, really? He said, yes, you can't make it. There's almost 200 agencies out there. You're not gonna compete with the big ones. I said, I'm not arrogant at all, actually. I just know I'm gonna outwork every one of them. Every time we signed a movie star, which was once a week, we took out a full red page ad in Variety, tore it, put it in an envelope to those 4 guys. And I did it for the next 10 years. Now, competition, love it. Monopoly, absolutely love it. There's no room for competition. I love Peter Thiel's monopoly lectures at Stanford. He's spot on. He says competition is for losers. It is for losers because you're competing with yourself, basically. That's how I view it. I'm not competing with anybody else. Let's get down to what we're doing. What are we doing? We're trying to build a business. We're trying to market that business, and we're trying to blow out the competition as fast, as cleanly, as simply, and as brutally as we can. Because the idea is, to keep it going until they can't see straight, and to do it any other way makes no sense to me.
How do I become the person I want to be? (with Emily McDonald aka emonthebrain)
