A 7 a.m. Meeting Helped a Hollywood Upstart Beat 90-Year-Old Agencies

In investor Marc Andreessen's favorite Hollywood story, the actor Paul Newman gets a call at 8 in the morning about a perfect new role. It is not from the longtime agent who represents him. It is from a rival firm that does not represent him at all.

Two or three hours later, Newman's own agent finally phones with the same news. Newman says he already heard it three hours earlier from the rival firm. When his agent objects that the callers do not represent him, Newman, in Andreessen's telling, calls it great and fantastic. The lesson is Andreessen's: the client sees who works faster.

That, Andreessen says, is how Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz took on older talent agencies in what Andreessen described as a business about 90 years old. The edge was a staff meeting moved by two hours.

The agency business had started decades earlier booking stage acts, and by the time Ovitz was building his firm, Creative Artists Agency, its habits were fixed. At every established agency, agents met at 9 a.m. to trade information about what studio chiefs wanted, which scripts were circulating, and which roles were open. The meeting ran until about 10, and only then did agents start calling their own clients.

Ovitz moved his meeting to 7 a.m. His team was done by 8. That left a full hour, from 8 to 9, to call before anyone else was even out of the conference room. And his agents did not just call their own clients. They called competitors' clients, too.

In Andreessen's telling, "you rinse and repeat that a thousand times" and the faster firm becomes the obvious choice for any actor.

Ovitz paired speed with force. Andreessen describes the CAA method as a phalanx: hire one of its agents and you got all of them. As many as 20 agents would arrive together in identical Armani suits and white shirts from a Beverly Hills shirtmaker, then climb out of a row of Jaguars. The legend, as Andreessen told it, was that a local dealer had done a bulk deal and the license plates read CA1, CA2, CA3. For a solo agent from an old firm, he says, the sight was helpless. For a client, the pitch was simple, as Andreessen put it: "do you want to work with a guy, or do you want to work with a firm?"

Ovitz, a dear friend of Andreessen's, became controversial, Andreessen says, largely because he beat his rivals so severely.

Andreessen studied the trick while planning his own venture firm with partner Ben Horowitz. His moral was about incumbency. After decades, he said, managers rather than founders run the business, and they rarely reconsider basic habits unless forced. Ovitz showed what rethinking one fixed habit and taking a two-hour head start could do.