Michael Ovitz: Fast Company Article

Michael Ovitz is featured in this 1999 article appearing in Fast Company Magazine regarding the formation of AMG as well as his tenure at Creative Artists Agency. An excerpt is below:

"Ever the forward thinker, Ovitz chose the braver route. He realized that he should return to the business he knew best, but he conceded that he had learned all he could from his 20-year career at the I.M. Pei building on Wilshire Boulevard. Ovitz decided to move on to a new big, and perhaps even better, project.

During his tenure at CAA, Ovitz had reinvented the talent agent world by charging the lowest commission in the industry and beating out all the competition. He had shaken up the studios by demanding previously unheard of salaries for his actors. When word got around about the new game in town, everyone followed suit, and Ovitz succeeded in effectively changing the center of power in Hollywood from studios to agents."

Read the full article here.

Businessweek: Marc Andreessen and Michael Ovitz

A strong recommend for Businessweek's recent (11/3/10) article, "The New New Andreessen", detailing the state of venture capital in the digital world as well as the relationship between Michael Ovitz and Marc Andreessen:

"As Silicon Valley events go, it was an irresistible draw: Marc Andreessen, Web wunderkind turned venture capitalist, interviewing Michael Ovitz, former superagent and co-founder of the Creative Artists Agency.

The conversation between the pair of icons, staged last month in a packed conference room in the offices of Andreessen Horowitz—Silicon Valley's newest, hottest venture capital firm—turned out to be a lovefest. Ovitz, the most powerful man in Hollywood before his career imploded in the mid-1990s after a disastrous stint at Disney (DIS), called his friendship with Andreessen "one of the single most important relationships in my life." Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, the Web browser company whose 1995 initial public offering kicked off the Internet era, said he modeled his VC firm on CAA. "A lot of what we're trying to do with Andreessen Horowitz is based on what Michael was doing at CAA and his theories about how to build a high-quality service firm," Andreessen said."

Read the full article here.