Sublime

Even though your skills are creative, you’re capable of generating multimillions of dollars, so you have to think of yourself as a business.

Ovitz’s breakthrough idea was to build an integrated network that would allow any of the firm’s agents to connect their clients to a firm-wide grid of new opportunities. As a result, the firm would be a hundred times more powerful than any one agent at any other agency. To implement the idea, Ovitz and his founding partners agreed to defer their sa

Bruce Dunlevie remained Adam’s champion, expressing his belief in Adam’s expansive vision and comparing him to a new-age Jeff Bezos.

Lynch’s most important tool was his telephone, not his computer. He’d regularly call, or sometimes visit, a network of well-placed executives, asking for updates on their businesses, competitors, suppliers, customers, and more. These were legal tactics at the time, even though smaller investors couldn’t access the same information.

TO NEUMANN’S POTENTIAL PARTNERS, this seemed less like an invitation than a warning.

we were a group that worked together, that we weren’t just one agent with one client. That was our pitch.

From the moment the two met, the power balance shifted, just as it had with Donald Durant in 1922. Ivar charmed Marcosson like no foreign leader or movie star ever had. Marcosson found Ivar soft and persuasive in speech, modest and unostentatious in manner. He was utterly without vanity, almost self-effacing. He seldom spoke of himself, and Marcoss