The Death Star in Century City — Chris Kantrowitz 1/6

Chris Kantrowitz and I start with the strange advantage of operating before deal flow: the people who spot talent before anyone else, whether they are venture investors, music lawyers, or agents.

Then we head into Hollywood. I tell Chris about advising hacker stories from an abandoned WarGames remake to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Here Comes the Flood, and we unpack how CAA built a machine that Andreessen Horowitz later adapted for founders.

Transcript

Pablos: Yeah, welcome to the Escalade of sofas.

Yeah, if you want, I've got seat heaters, dual cup holders, wireless charging, massage, and a built-in butt kicker.

Chris: And the dumb speakers.

Pablos: Yeah, when you're watching Vin Diesel movies, it gives you surround sound and vibrates your ass.

Chris: America! Are these cup holders heated and cooled?

Pablos: No, but they have ground effects. I'm going to get rid of this sofa because I need one that has cooling built in.

Chris: I'm sure the technology has gone way past this. You can't just have your drink getting warm. I'm sure there's an AI bot in one.

Pablos: I'm going to move to San Francisco.

Chris: You want to go dive?

Pablos: Pretty much, yeah.

Chris: You don't talk like them, though. Are you going to change your cadence?

Pablos: I don't think that's the goal. I never fully assimilate to anything. I think that's one of the things that's sort of working out for me. Being from Alaska, there's some aspect of that has been preserved in me. But I've been in San Francisco more than I've been here this year. I haven't wanted to live there. I left after the '90s, and in 2001 everything went shit, and so that's when I left. I haven't really wanted to live there since then, but now it's pretty awesome because everybody's descending on the Bay Area, and so you just get this aliveness.

Chris: That you don't think is in New York?

Pablos: New York is doing well in its way, but I have to weed through a lot of people who see banking as a legitimate career choice.

Chris: Said the VC.

Pablos: People don't start with illiteracy about tech. I just feel like a court jester to them. And so it's not that useful to me. I can be entertaining, but it's not going to help what we do and our companies that much. Whereas in the Bay Area, you just kind of get that literacy for free. Everybody comes with some sensibility about it. They might be pissed off about one thing or another, but they at least have something to work with.

Chris: I guess there's probably more deep tech out there anyway.

Pablos: It's not that it's a center of gravity for deep tech so much. It is definitely for startups and for venture. But yeah, it's as good as anywhere as far as D-Tech goes, I would say. We do things all over the place.

Chris: You don't really compete with anyone because you actually take risks and write checks before anyone else would.

Pablos: Yeah, it's not a competitive thing.

Chris: Trying to be in the deal flow.

Pablos: Yeah, I'm pre-deal flow. There's no deal unless I make one.

The disheartening thing is that there's a lack of nuance in the term venture capital. It covers a lot of people who are just trying to get an allocation to a secondary philanthropic from their old frat buddy.

Chris: Your parallel in the music industry: people don't realize this, but the people that actually really wield more power than anybody in the industry are actually the music lawyers. Even before that, because if you're an artist before you're signed, what do you need? A lawyer.

The lawyers are really the ones. They're the equivalent of you. They're like, before this person is anything, the lawyers are going, okay, I'm going to be this person's lawyer, try to get them a contract. They're the ones pulling them out of the garage, basically. You almost think it's kind of funny because people don't consider lawyers creative, right? But in a way they're kind of doing their own A and R, picking the clients that they want to pick up.

Pablos: Now you can be creative, but if you want to make a business out of being creative, you're going to need somebody to invest in you. Lawyers who can make that happen—that's one thing I think is very interesting. The more you spend time in business, you realize how much lawyers matter, and it's not because they're writing contracts. It's just they're in a unique position to help people connect and make deals and do the things they need to do.

Chris: They see patterns.

Pablos: They're in a spot where they could see patterns because they're in the flow of seeing a lot of different deals. One of the things we sort of say: specialist and generalist. But I think people just don't realize there are certain positions where you can see so much, and the trade-off is that you don't get to focus on one thing. And those people are just totally different. They're good for something totally different. I don't think they, in some sense—I think that these people don't relate to each other very well.

I'm sort of like a former specialist who then defected to being a generalist. And now I see so much. I don't know how you could see more than me. I see everything. Not everything, but I see a lot. And if you were heads down building something, you don't have time to do that.

Chris: I didn't even know there was a Spider-Man movie out until last week.

Pablos: Is there? I didn't know that.

Chris: It was apparently the highest grossing movie ever in the U.S.

Pablos: Really? How can that be? Aren't people sick and tired of Spider-Man by now?

Chris: Actually, I took my son. I used to read comic books when I was a kid, but I wouldn't call myself a superhero fanboy. It is such a good movie. I actually teared up at the end.

Pablos: Stone cold Chris Kantrowitz.

Chris: No. I was like, oh, it still works.

Pablos: Wow, good. All right. Yeah, I'm going to try that.

I think there's a weird dynamic I noticed. I had this weird role in Hollywood where I would get called whenever they were putting, like, hackers or science in the movies.

Chris: You were the hacker advisor?

Pablos: I'm literally the hacker advisor.

Chris: What's the biggest movie you hacker advised on? Hackers?

Pablos: No, I wasn't on Hackers. That was ancient history. I was at one point the hacker advisor for the remake of War Games, which is the only good hacker movie ever. It was greenlit, funded, everything.

It was my favorite movie. I love War Games, so I hung out with the writer and the director.

Chris: Was it the original team?

Pablos: I've also hung out with the original team, so with Ali Sheedy. Actually, the first War Games went through, like, three directors.

Chris: I didn't know that.

Pablos: At the time I didn't know that. It was 1982.

That was probably the coolest one. But somehow it got shit-canned. I don't know what happened.

Chris: It didn't come out.

What studio was it?

Pablos: It was going to be, MGM was doing it.

Chris: I feel like Amazon, now that they own them, would love that.

Pablos: For sure. Yeah, Amazon, call me. Jeff Bezos. I know what to do for the reboot.

Then I sold a hacker movie to Paramount, to the head of Paramount. A buddy of mine and I came up with this concept. The head doesn't usually buy movies. This was a special thing, and we got some help. I had this idea, but the studio said, ‘What's popular now is submarine movies,’ which contorted it into a submarine movie. I'm like, if this ever comes out, it'll be an animated kids' cartoon. It's G-rated. There was one called Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I think it's Marvel related.

Chris: My two good friends were the showrunners on that TV show.

Pablos: Oh, really? Yeah, I'm the hacker advisor for that.

Chris: Did you know Jed and Marissa? Do you want to hear a funny story about them?

When I graduated from college, I started a company and it was in my parents' basement. Jed and I went to college together. Jed's a third generation television writer.

Pablos: What's his last name?

Chris: Whedon. His brother's Joss Whedon. But his dad and his grandfather were both television writers. Incredibly talented musician.

3D Groove, which we created a 3D engine for Shockwave that could run so you could run 3D games. This is in 1998.

Jed was working with me, making music for our games. And one day we were sitting on the back porch of my parents' house, and we were just, like, golf-driving Wiffle balls. And I was like, alright, Jed, if you hit that Wiffle ball over the back wall, I will buy you lunch at this sushi place called Sushi Mizawa. First shot hits over the wall—not surprised—so we go to lunch there, and he meets Marissa.

The reason why that had happened is that Marissa and I went to high school together. They met, and obviously the only thing I could do with it was buying Jed lunch.

Pablos: They were trying to put plausible science fiction in there. A new movie coming called Here Comes the Flood—it's a heist movie. Every movie I worked on, I'm basically a complete failure, because I tell them, here's how you make the hacking legit, and then when it comes out it's just totally fake, right? I'm a disaster as advisor if you're making a movie, because all my efforts failed. They ignore everything I tell them, so it's pointless. But anyway, the new one, I'm hoping I put some really cool shit in there. It's actually legit hacking, so we'll see. Here Comes the Flood, with Denzel Washington.

When I would go to Hollywood—you probably have had this experience—if you go to CAA, which is the big talent agency, they have a big building in the middle of Hollywood.

Chris: It's in Century City.

Pablos: Century City. I call it the Death Star because that hole in the middle. Yeah, and every single agent has a window office.

Outside their door they have, like, at least two assistants with headsets on who are just scheduling and rescheduling meetings.

Rolling calls. I'm coming to LA. I'll come by the office. They're like, cool, you can meet with this one, this one, this one, this one. They'd have six meetings lined up. I'm like, okay, great.

About a week or two before you go, they're emailing you to change the time and who you're meeting with and all this stuff. By the time I get there, I'm not scheduled to meet with any of the same people. Everything has been moved around six times. And I eventually figured out, you just got to grab any random headset, because you'll be in a meeting and they're sending updates that you don't have time to respond.

Chris: All of those assistants are going through the training program to become agents. They're very eager to help.

Pablos: You just get one to help and they can handle it. But yeah, I don't have like an assistant myself. Maybe I could have Claude do it now. Just acknowledge all CAA meetings.

Chris: My brother-in-law runs a movie studio, and I've been around him when he's rolling calls. Your assistant gets on the phone with you, and they have a call sheet, and all the calls of the day are listed, like, green, yellow, red. And then he never hangs up his phone: I'm gonna try so-and-so, then roll to the next one or the next one, and they just get through the entire call sheet.

Pablos: What a machine.

I wish I had somebody doing that for LPs.

Chris: Michael Ovitz started CAA, and I don't know the whole story, but I remember that the Andreessen Horowitz folks talked about how they embraced a lot of his approaches for building their company.

Pablos: The whole machinery works because they represent these prima donna artists who can't be relied on to do anything. The entire movie is basically cooked right up until the moment that Tom Cruise is supposed to show up. And then the agent makes sure Tom Cruise shows up, has his teeth brushed, ends up at the spot. And those people can't fuck anything up because they're not responsible for anything except being their weird self.

I think what Andreessen Horowitz was trying to do was say, okay, these founders are imbalanced humans. We're just going to wrap everything they need around them so they can just do the one weird part that they're good at. And I think that era was, in a lot of ways, successful for them.

Now I'm pretty sure that the only thing that matters is we just wrap money around them. But good on them. Go Andreessen Horowitz. Pick up our companies and wrap them with whatever you want.

But I think that what I learned from it was, when I was there, I could see that this was a machinery that could make unreliable puzzle pieces work, because they could just take care of everything behind the scenes: schedule meetings, work everything out, work out the contract, work out the deal, so that Tom Cruise can just show up and be Tom Cruise.

Chris: The lawyer, obviously. The agent's really more the deal negotiator person, and the manager's the one who's more in the, like, are you—are you there yet?—right thing, right?

There's even some laws in California that separate out that agents can't be managers and the managers can't be agents.

Pablos: Oh, I didn't know that.

Chris: Usually managers have fewer clients and are more hands on.

They're the ones that if the person's drunk in the bedroom and they're kicking the door down.

Pablos: Yeah, what a ride. I would like a manager to do that for me. You can come kick doors down.

Chris: As long as you get me there on time.

Pablos: Wait, I have to get you there? Am I the manager?

Chris: I'll manage you as long as you just get me there.

Once I'm there, I'm fine.

Pablos: Once you're there, you're fine.

I need a manager for the manager.

Chris: Three assistants.

Transcript

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