Tag: Founder Insights

Who is Michael Ovitz?

Source: Variety

Have been reading “Who is Michael Ovitz” over last few weeks. He was the founder of CAA and one of the most influential & powerful people in Hollywood for many decades, shaping & reviving umpteen celebrity careers.

The most eye-opening thing for me in the book has been how the careers of almost all Hollywood legends, from Dustin Hoffman & Paul Newman to Bill Murray & Martin Scorsese, have been riddled with the following:

  1. Extreme highs & lows
  2. Frequently getting typecast in a tough-to-break image
  3. Being considered only as good as your last movie box office performance
  4. Making critical choices just based on “who” they wanted to support/work with
  5. Finally, being written-off many times

Remember seeing lot of these elements also play out in Andre Agassi’s outstanding autobiography “Open”, which btw is a must-read. Just goes to show the frequent mistake we all make in seeing lives of legends in a “post-facto” way, rather than understanding what went on behind the scenes. These post-facto perceptions get even more played up by the media, which loves binary narratives to generate eyeballs (someone is either a straight-line genius, or a complete loser who lacks any ability whatsoever).

Personally, I now consciously strive to peel the onion on such narratives (had written a post earlier on how Silicon Valley narratives fool us). Helps me maintain my sanity, as I build Workomo and Operators Studio :).

How Silicon Valley startup narratives fool us

One big realization I have had as a founder over last year or so — all Silicon Valley startup narrative is post-facto. Both founders and media conveniently don’t include the real “initial phases” of the company. These include things like the 2nd co-founder getting “recruited” much later, an old services biz revamped to appear like a fresh startup, an advisor/ angel joining & getting co-founder status, taking on a product that was in reality, built by other devs who didn’t see value in it etc. These inconvenient and scrappy realities are glossed over, to paint the narrative of a smooth curve — 2 co-founders, one engg. and one biz, met in Ivy league or top tech co., fell in love with same idea, launched, raised, scaled…done deal.

Till very recently, I had no idea that 1) Travis isn’t the original founder of Uber, but was an advisor to the original devs who created it and then later, saw the potential and hopped on, or 2) Elon Musk isn’t the original founder of Tesla, but had led the Series A round.

A bad side-effect of this managed PR is that new founders take all these narratives as playbooks. So, either they try and forcibly recreate it, or give up altogether once they don’t see a similar narrative coming together. Established founders & investors also don’t call this out.

Going forward, we should always try and peel the onion on startup PR narratives. Actively look for bias by asking critical questions like who is writing the story or Medium post, and what incentives are at play. Talk to operating people to get the real execution insights on these companies.

In today’s age of rapid news cycles, planted news, overzealous investors and internal PR teams, it’s foolish for founders to base our strategies and critical biz/ life decisions on what the media is telling us. In most cases (based on what I see), startup media stories are biased to tell the “curated truth”, with a specific end-objective in mind. As founders, let’s be smarter in digesting & acting on them.