21. CHAPTER 3 - Step Three: Create a Personal "Board of Advisors"
Sitting down with Tad Smith, a publishing executive and one of my best friends and advisors, I was told I had to get over the prestige of working for a Fortune 500 company.
If I wanted to be CEO, I had to find a company I could grow with. It was exactly the advice I needed to hear.
I had been too focused on big companies. While the dot-com crash had made entering the digital world a whole lot less palatable, there were still some very good companies in need of business fundamentals. Now I knew this was where I needed to look, and I began refining my action plan. From that day on, many of the calls I made, and the meetings and conferences I attended, were aimed at finding the right small company to call home.
Three months later, I had five job offers. One of the people I reached out to was Sandy Climan, a wellknown Hollywood player who once served as Michael Ovitz's right-hand man at Creative Artists Agency and who then ran an L.A.-based venture-capital firm called Entertainment Media Ventures.
I had gotten to know Sandy during my time with Deloitte, when I was exploring paths into the entertainment world. Sandy introduced me to the people at a company called YaYa, one of the investments in his firm's portfolio. YaYa was a marketing company pioneering the creation of online games as advertising vehicles.
They had a good concept and the strength of committed employees and founders. They needed a bigger vision to get the market's attention, some buzz for their then-unknown product, and someone who could use all that to sell, sell, sell. In November 2000, when the YaYa board offered me the CEO position, I knew it was the right fit.
The company was located in Los Angeles, and it offered the sort of unconventional route into the entertainment world I had been looking for and a chance to bring my experience as a marketer to the CEO job.
