Chris Ovitz is the Co-Founder and President of OK Play. We discuss growing up in a Hollywood family, building technology-enabled media companies, life revelations during an Alabama roadtrip, "humble magnetism", launching a venture fund with the co-founder of Twitter, YouTube as a babysitter, and why the future of play is putting kids at the center of story and creation.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Chris Erwin:

Hi, I'm Chris Erwin. Welcome to The Come Up, a podcast that interviews entrepreneurs and leaders. 

Chris Ovitz:

There's so much guilt in general for parents, and then there's all this judgment around screen time. And I think that we forget in our little bubbles, the whole no screens thing is a privilege, that YouTube is a babysitter is real, and it's a problem.

Chris Erwin:

This week's episode features Chris Ovitz, the co-founder and President of OK Play. Chris grew up in LA. And like so many others, his first love was film. So he went to a Hollywood studio, but soon after, Chris became enamored with the intersection of entertainment and technology. Over the past decade, Chris has founded a handful of different companies. And most recently, him and his team are building OK Play where they're reimagining screen time for kids, and putting kids at the center of story and creation. We get into a lot of things in this episode, but a few highlights include what it's like growing up in a deeply connected Hollywood family, some life revelations during an Alabama road trip, his humble approach to building teams, and most recently, helping to launch a venture fund with Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. All right, this episode was a lot of fun. And Chris weaves in some pretty wild stories from his early career. Let's get into it.

Chris Erwin:

Let's dive back in time a little bit. Why don't you tell me about where you grew up and your childhood a little bit?

Chris Ovitz:

I grew up in LA. My mom and dad are both from LA. They went to UCLA. They met there. Pretty normal childhood in LA, as normal as it can be growing up in LA, lots of after school sports and just hanging out with friends, skateboarding and roller hockey and football and all sorts of stuff like that, lots of video games and film in my family. And it was a pretty traditional childhood.

Chris Erwin:

Okay, you are a skater as well. I was a skater growing up, I played some soccer and tennis. And then when I started hurting my ankle skateboarding, my coaches were like, "All right, that's it. Enough for you."

Chris Ovitz:

You were probably a much better skater than I was. I never actually got good at it. But I loved it. Yeah, I definitely spent a lot more time playing, baseball was my sport. So I played a lot of baseball growing up.

Chris Erwin:

Okay, cool. You mentioned that you were passionate for gaming and for film. Were there any games that you liked the most?

Chris Ovitz:

So I was about 15 when PlayStation 1 came out so I think that was probably the core part of my childhood gaming love and I would say Final Fantasy VII, Resident Evil. Earlier than that, I played really Super Bomberman and Mario Kart on the SNES, lots of Street Fighter, things like that.

Chris Erwin:

Yeah, I remember Street Fighter 2 with like Ken and Ryu and Hadouken and all that. I was like, that was a real favorite for me. Yeah, I also like being Zangief, the Russian wrestler, whatever.

Chris Ovitz:

Funny story, I always played as Ken Masters. And that was the name on my fake ID in high school, so yeah.

Chris Erwin:

Your father was in the entertainment industry. I don't know if your mother was in the entertainment industry as well. But was there any kind of like inspiration for you of the path that you want to go down as you were thinking about going to school, before you went to Brown and UCLA?

Chris Ovitz:

So yeah, my father was in entertainment. He started a company called Creative Artists Agency, which was one of the biggest agencies around and so it was amazing to watch and to be around. And I always thought that that was kind of the path for me. But as I got older in high school, and he had left CAA to do other stuff, he kind of left me with this big question mark on what I wanted to do. And I was like, I didn't really know what my passions were.

Chris Ovitz:

And so it started me on my journey. And my journey from about 18 through my late 20s was kind of a bit all over the place, but I wouldn't be who I am today without it. And my father was incredibly talented pioneer and many things in entertainment. And had I been a little more mature at 18, I think I would have realized that he was probably right, and it was best for me. So I ended up, I was fortunate enough to be accepted to Brown University. That's where he wanted me to go. I always wanted to go to UCLA because it was what I knew. Brown was amazing. I have incredible friends there. I learned a lot there. But I ended up transferring back to UCLA. I told myself that was where I wanted to go, but if I'm being honest, it was probably because I wanted to see about a girl.

Chris Erwin:

Okay, did you transfer like your sophomore junior year? When did you go over?

Chris Ovitz:

I transferred my sophomore year. So I did a year, Brown my freshman year, and then started at UCLA my sophomore year.

Chris Erwin:

And was UCLA what you had hoped it was going to be? Were you pumped to be there?

Chris Ovitz:

Yeah, it was amazing. UCLA is a great school. I had a blast. I was a history major. I just loved learning about different cultures and I studied a lot of Roman, ancient Rome and medieval history that I found that fascinating.

Chris Erwin:

When we were talking earlier, you said that there was some poor decisions were a pattern of your youth. So, I mean, do you bucket in like going to Brown and then going to UCLA as part of that or are you referencing something else? I'm very curious there.

Chris Ovitz:

For decisions, I say that a bit jokingly. But I think what I mean by that is Brown is an incredible school, and everyone would kill to be able to go there. And had I stayed there, I think it would have been amazing. But look, I was motivated by girls at that age, instead of being motivated by a passion for what I wanted to do with my life. So I think that's kind of what I did, whether it was transferring to UCLA because I had a girlfriend there at the time that I had met on winter break from Brown. I would make decisions like that, without thinking too far ahead. And I think as I got older, that's not happening. You start to think through each decision with a little more thought for the future.

Chris Erwin:

Well look, if there's any point in your life when you're going to be a little bit impulsive, doing that in your teens and early 20s, that's a good thing. Get that out of your system, and I would also say that having a little bit of impulse ability, or whatever the right word is, as you get older, versus not having to be so calculated all the time based on societal pressures, that's okay. Okay, so you transfer to UCLA, you graduate, and then how do you kick off your career? What type of work do you start getting into?

Chris Ovitz:

So again, it comes back to this really not knowing what my path was yet, not knowing what I wanted to do. I knew I loved film. The entertainment industry was in my DNA. And I knew that I wanted to be a part of it in some way, at least at that point in my life. And so I actually applied to film school. I didn't tell anyone in my family. I applied to the theater, film and television program at UCLA. I decided I was only going to tell them if I got in. I ended up getting in and had an idea that I thought I wanted to be a director. And after about a year in film school, I realized I didn't want to be a struggling artist. So I dropped out and I wanted the income. I wanted to get to work. Unfortunately, at the time, I also had suffered a really bad herniated disc and had to take some time to get a pretty significant back surgery to correct that and rehab it. And at that point, I decided to take a job. It was pretty awesome. I got the opportunity to be one of the first employees as an assistant at Paramount Vantage working for a guy named John Lesher, and that was my first real job out of college. It was an incredible experience.

Chris Erwin:

Awesome. And what was Paramount Vantage?

Chris Ovitz:

Backing up a second, John Lesher was an agent at Endeavor at the time before it was WME, and he represented clients like Scorsese and Judd Apatow and Alejandro Inarritu and all these amazing filmmakers. And he was asked to go over and run Paramount Classics, which was Paramount's independent film arm, and he was asked to rebrand it and basically start their new art house film division. I got to see him build it from the ground up. And I got to s