Jeffrey Seller

Jeffrey: Success feels good. Success is in its own way easy. It’s easy on my stomach and on my heart. It is also true that failure … The feelings that failure evokes are so much worst than the positive feelings that success evokes. I’ve heard of tennis players who say, “I never feel as good winning as badly I feel when I’m losing.”

Peter: Here’s the thing, given that, I would imagine that it might lead somebody to take fewer risks, not more, right?

Jeffrey: Oh, I think so.

Peter: We know this financially too of loss aversion is much stronger than the longing for gain. Yet you just described this huge risk you took with Hamilton which is the subject matter was dense, the language was difficult. There’s at least eight different song or music technologies in this. I don’t know if music technology is the right word, but you’re going from like jazz to rap to Broadway. You’ve taken huge risks and you’ve done it before. How do you keep yourself taking these risks when you know so deeply the pain of that kind of failure?

Jeffrey: I guess it’s because it’s the only thing I know how to do. Maybe that’s not fully true, but I consider myself a student of the American Musical Theater. No more, no less. I’m still learning. I am still curious about what makes a musical affecting, what makes a musical successful, what makes a musical fail. For those reasons I keep … I only know how to start making another musical. At the same time that I’m saying that, there was a moment maybe with regard to Hamilton where I said to myself, “Wow. I’m about to have my call it seventh through eighth opening night on Broadway where on the day of the opening I can’t eat. I can’t eat because I am so twisted up inside about what the reviews are going to be when they come out at 10:04 tonight.”

I say to myself, “How can I be doing this again?” It feels so awful waiting for those review, those reviews that will have a strong impact on the success or failure of my show. All I can say is the first one feels awful waiting and the eighth one feels awful waiting. It doesn’t get better and it doesn’t get worst. It’s just always difficult. Then I just realized well, this is my job.

Peter: I have two thoughts about that. One is the way you framed it which is that you’re a student and you’re curious about musical theater. It feels to me like you’re not after it in order to chase the success. You certainly want the success. You certainly don’t want the failure, but you’re in it for something deeper than the success or the failure. You can’t achieve that deeper thing without weathering successes and failures, but you’re not pursuing the success or the failure ultimately. Am I thinking about this correctly?

Jeffrey: You are thinking about this beautifully because the truth of it is is that there is no path to success. Maybe that’s the stupidest thing I could ever say, but what I’m saying is that there is no book that will tell me or you or anybody else who’s interested how to make a successful musical. It doesn’t exist. All I can try to do is please myself. I want to make a musical. I want to produce a musical that is satisfying to me. I want to produce a musical that will surprise me, that will affect me emotionally, that will evoke an emotional response from my insides that will make the hair on my arms stand up. All I’m in pursuit of is that.

Then I hope that if the musical is evoking those feelings from me, hopefully it will evoke those feelings from an audience.

Peter: I love it. I don’t think it’s silly to say. I actually think it’s profound and I think it’s something that the hundreds of millions of business books that are out there that are all saying the opposite which is “here is your path to success” and then people read them and you wonder: why aren’t all these businesses successful? Because if there were that really clear path … I’ve often thought about this. One of my clients was the CEO of a licensing company. What they do is they find licenses. They owned or had the license for Snoopy, for example. The game that they’re in, and what they’re experts in, is finding licenses that will make money. That’s their financial model.

I said to the CEO, “Can you tell me how you figure it out? How do you know if something’s going to be big or not big?” That’s when he introduced me to the book Fooled by Randomness. He said, “It is throwing spaghetti on a wall and seeing what sticks. We are in the business of doing this and I can tell you we don’t know how to do it any better than anybody else.” It’s exactly what you’re saying which is you follow your gut and your instinct and what you know to the best that you can.

Jeffrey: You’re also reminding me that 20 years ago shortly after I produced Rent, a lot of Broadway producers were using these focus groups to try to find out how to better advertise and market their shows. I didn’t believe in it, but my advertising agency persuaded me to try one. We went to Chicago. They got one of those groups of eight, nine, ten women because women buy the tickets to Broadway. What we’re going to try to find out is how much do they know about Rent. The show, by the way, it’s been on Broadway for a year. How much do they know about Rent? What do they feel about Rent? What is it going to take to get them to buy a ticket to Rent? Of course, I’m in the back room where you can watch through the windows these women go.

I proceeded to watch. First of all, few of the women even know what it was. Then they were asked like what shows were playing in Chicago and one of them could only come up with, “There’s a musical I think it’s called Colors.” What she was referring to was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. That’s all she could say. “There’s a musical I think it’s called Colors.” Then they’re going on about what would make them buy or not buy a ticket and I’m watching as one person talks the other people starts to echo what that first person said. I said, “I will never do this again. This is the stupidest exercise ever imagined,” because here’s the other truth.

Even those ladies, they don’t know what they want. To ask them what they hypothetically might buy a ticket to is total bullshit. Because the only truth is did they buy a ticket or didn’t they? People cannot be trusted to say, “I might buy a ticket.” That means nothing.

Peter: There’s also a tremendous amount of research that says if one person says something in a focus group, everybody else is going to start to echo that even if they disagree because that’s social contagion.

Jeffrey: I saw it play out. I don’t feel like a genius, but it was patently obvious to me.

Peter: What you’re saying which I think is important, for me as a writer, it’s really important too, which is to say it’s not that we’re not doing art for an audience, but we’re not asking the audience what kind of art we should do for them.

Jeffrey: 100%. They don’t know. I have to make art that pleases me. I have to believe that when Pollock and Rothko were making art, they were only making art that would please them.

Peter: You’re willing to weather either success or failure in order to explore and examine and play with art that excites you.

Jeffrey: All I can hope is that the art that excites me will line up with public taste at that period in time. I have been fortunate because the slightly offbeat musicals that I have liked, Rent, Avenue Q, Hamilton, have aligned with the public.

Peter: I want to explore that a little bit because you managed to walk an edge. The edge that you’re walking is you’re not doing what every one else is doing and yet you’re not so out there that people can’t absorb it. It’s like this knife edge of saying, “I’m going to push the envelope, but not so far that it gets rejected and at the same time far enough that it’s exciting.” Because you’re in the field, I imagine for you as a professional, your tolerance for what you’re willing to look at and experience and see goes far beyond the millions of people who want to see the show. You’re not going up to your edge necessarily, but you’re going up to an edge.

The three shows that you represented, that you produced, that you created, Avenue Q, Rent and Hamilton, really walk that edge. I mean they did something different than anybody else was doing on Broadway. How do you stay on that edge without falling off one side or the other?

Jeffrey: Well, the first answer is that that wasn’t my intention. I didn’t set out to say, “I want to be a Broadway producer and I’m going to look to live on the edge.” I’m going to look to produce shows that are unconventional, that are iconoclastic, that push the envelope and hope that the audience is there to receive them. I’m going to produce musicals that I like. That’s where we start. Now let’s go back to Rent because it all starts there which is that when I’m working on Rent, I’m 29-30 years old. What the genius creator of Rent, Jonathan Larson, was doing was writing a musical about his friends.

Young Bohemians, 20 somethings, living in the East Village in New York, pursuing their artistic dreams while not selling out, trying to find love and friendship and camaraderie in a world that feels like it’s ripping apart at the seams. We was writing my story. It wasn’t exactly my story, but certainly writing about people who often are on the fringe whether they’re lesbians, gay men, drug addicts, people living with HIV. Some of that apply to me. Some of it didn’t. What was absolutely essential was that he was writing in a musical vernacular that was not represented on Broadway at that time and that moved me.

The way in which the characters of Mimi and Roger meet each other and start to fall for each other with the song Light My Candle was a sound I never heard on Broadway before and it touched me. It made me feel in a whole different way. That’s what I realize is what I love, the value that I have for what kind of musical I want to see. It turns out that we were doing a musical that dealt with heroine addiction, HIV, gay guys, lesbian women, people who are Bohemians living on the fringe, homeless people were in it, all of which seems very un-Broadway material, but it was being wrapped in some of the most glorious melodies that were accessible to many, many people. The theme song of the show was a beautiful gospel song called Seasons Of Love, 525,600 minutes.

Peter: I’ve heard it sung as the theme song of a camp that my kids go to.

Jeffrey: Oh, it’s been a theme song of camps, weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals. It became an anthem. Jonathan was able to deliver something that was both radical and completely humanizing and embracing at the same time.

Peter: It brings me to this idea that I’m struggling with in the book that I’m writing right now that feels so true because you keep bringing the conversation back to feeling. I was in this conversation believe it or not with someone yesterday about the meaning of life.

Jeffrey: It’s a great conversation.

Peter: We were in this conversation about the meaning of life and we were reading this Jewish text Ecclesiastes. Kohelet is what it’s called. It’s very depressing in many ways. The person is saying, “You know, I try everything and nothing … Everything’s like spitting in the wind.”

Jeffrey: I’m sorry.

Peter: My friend who I was talking with said to me, “What do you think the meaning of life is?” I was drinking tea at the time. I was drinking a warm, rose hip tea and I said, “I don’t know what the meaning of life is, but this tea tastes really good.”

It brings me to that too. I don’t necessarily know what the meaning of life is, but it feels really great to hear that song and I would love to spread that song out to more people. It’s just bringing me back to this conversation because we could argue forever about what the meaning of life is, but that was a great show.

Jeffrey: I think what you’re saying is is that life is the sum of all of our feelings because the rose hip tea made you feel good. It touched your senses. Your sense of taste. Your sense of smell and your sense of touch.

Peter: Absolutely. That’s absolutely right. It brought me back to a place also. It brought me back to when I was in college and I would sit and sip tea.

Jeffrey: This also reminds me, Peter, of the fact that when we met at our children’s summer camp, you visiting your daughter, me and my partner visiting our son, and we had our first conversation. You posited a hypothesis that I have been talking about to this day. I’m going to paraphrase it and you’ll tell me if I got it right which is that if you’re willing to feel everything, you can do anything.

Peter: Exactly. That was exactly right.

Jeffrey: I love it and I believe it to be true. I do believe. How I perceive it is that if I’m willing to express my feelings, to say what’s on my mind, to deal with everybody in my world as honestly as is practicable, then I might be able to do what I want to … I can do anything. I think that to be true and I think that … I don’t know where are we going. I think that we’re going is that I am driven by feeling. I am an entrepreneur. I am a businessman. I am “CEO of Hamilton” and yet I am driven first and foremost by my feelings.

Peter: It has served you very well.

Jeffrey: It has served me well absolutely. Joyfully. Joyously.

Peter: You can’t lead in a way where you’re doing cutting edge work, where you’re doing something really worth bringing into the world without feeling a whole lot. If you’re not willing to feel, you’re not going to be able to lead in that way.

Jeffrey: Then go be an accountant.

Peter: Right. Not that there’s anything wrong with accountants, but that’s the right job.

Jeffrey: No, but for people that do not have the tolerance. It’s tolerance and the tolerance is for anxiety, fear, bewilderment and pain.

Peter: Right. Maybe even enjoying all of that. Meaning I think there’s something about pain of loss. If you are really willing to feel it, that’s part of the whole picture, right? It’s not something you want. Isabelle, my oldest daughter, she was our first child. Still our first child, but at the time she was our only child. It was three in the morning and she was sick and she vomited all over her bed. I was cleaning it up, and I distinctly remember thinking that, on the one level, this is disgusting and the smell is disgusting and it makes me want to vomit also. On another level, there’s something really special about this moment I’m never going to forget. This is what it feels like to be a parent and, however unpleasant, it felt good.

Jeffrey: Yes.

Peter: Even though I wouldn’t ask for it or plan it in my day or put my alarm to wake up at three to do it, I’m kind of happy I’m in it.

Jeffrey: It’s how we know we’re alive.

Peter: It’s how we know we’re alive.

You’re CEO of Hamilton. You’ve got a whole bunch of people who work with you, for you, who are putting on the show. I imagine sometimes they could be dramatic because this is the industry that they’ve chosen that they’re in. You managed not only to find really amazing talent, but to bring out that talent. That’s what your job – it’s what most leaders are trying to do – You don’t have to be the smartest or most capable person in the room for everything. You need someone who sings better than you. You need someone who dances better than you. You need someone who has a certain kind of charm or finesse or presence.

But you have to manage them to bring out their best. Anything you can share with us about how to do that or lessons that you’ve learned in doing that because every leader who has employees faces the same challenge. How do I find the people who are most talented around me and how do I bring out the best of who they are?

Jeffrey: This may sound like a pejorative, but I’ve had a Tom Sawyer quality of getting the kids together to paint the fence my whole life. If I could qualify it in one way I would say … It wasn’t so that they would paint the fence and I would go off and swim in the river. It was that I’m always assembling people so we can do something together, so that we can make something great together. For me it starts literally with being in the fifth grade. In this community I grew up in, Oak Park, Michigan which is a small suburb just north of Detroit, they instituted for the very first time when I was in fifth grade this notion of a February winter break where you get a week off in February.

I think the idea had something to do with families being able to go to Florida. No one in my neighborhood could afford to go to Florida. Like there wasn’t one family going to Florida. We were trying to raise money for a June trip to go to Ann Arbor visit the University of Michigan and I said to myself, “What if we created a winter camp?” I got my five best friends together. We made a flier to distribute to all of the kindergartners and first graders. Here was the deal, five days of winter camp, like four hours a day. We were going to use my best friend’s next door neighbor’s garage. They were the only family that had a garage. It was not heated. It was 25 cents a day, but if you bought all five days it was a buck. My memory which I remember distinctly was that we made 20 bucks.

We got 20 kids to participate in this winter camp. Here I was getting all of these people together toward this common mission which is we’re going to make 20 bucks and we’ll put that towards the 120 bucks we need to make by June to get a really nice bus to take us all from Oak Park to Ann Arbor, Michigan. This story starts there and then it goes all the way to me being a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Michigan and directly Grease for the soft show. Grease the Musical.

Peter: Those were the first tickets that you ever sold?

Jeffrey: Correct.

Peter: They didn’t end up on StubHub. They were full on direct tickets.

Jeffrey: They were full on 25 cents. I’m 10 years old and I’m getting parents to let me take care of their five and six year old children.

Peter: Right.

Jeffrey: I’ve always had an idea. Let’s do something and then I’m recruiting people to do it with. As I have progressed through my life, I have been blessed to find creative and genius people with whom to do it. I often give advice to young people who want to be in the theater and I say, “It’s all about who you team up with.” When I was in my mid-20s, I teamed up with Jonathan Larson, the artist who ultimately went on to write Rent because I believed in his work, because his work elicited so much feeling from me. I believed in Andrew Lippa, the composer of Big Fish and Harvey Milk, the oratorio, and The Wild Party and The Addams Family. He is a successful Broadway composer. These are the mates that I chose to work with in my 20s.

That’s what I got me to where I am. Part of it is like just the talent of who do you choose, who do you want to be in the room with. Then once we’re in the room, is it possible that the chemistry will create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts?

Peter: How did you know the role you wanted to play in that room was CEO, was producer, was the guy that pulled it together?

Jeffrey: I want to qualify the CEO phrase. We do not have a CEO of Hamilton.

Peter: I’m glad you’re clarifying that. I realized I’m using it a little loosely.

Jeffrey: Yeah. No, I want to qualify it by saying what we use is the term general partner. The CEO term actually has its own good quality because over the course of my career, people have often said, “Well, what does the producer do,” and sometimes I would say, “It’s kind of like being the CEO.” Sometimes I would make comparisons to it. For example, Danny Meyer, the owner of Union Square Café and all those great restaurants, in which Danny is an entrepreneur. He is a businessman. He is a restaurateur. He puts all these amazing restaurants together, but in fact, he’s not a chef and he has a chef in each one. Sometimes I would compare myself to him.

When The New York Times did this profile of my this past April, I don’t remember how they got that headline, but they said, “The CEO of Hamilton.” It stuck obviously because it was a great mirror of Alexander Hamilton the man and the idea of money and business and arts. It stuck for all of those reasons and it has great applicability. Having said that, I’m the general partner of Hamilton, but I’m not the CEO. Now I’ve completely forgotten the question.

Peter: How did you know that this is the role that you wanted to play in theater?

Jeffrey: I think I’m a born leader. No, I know I’m a born leader. I was the kid who was always taking over for better or for worst. It meant that I was freshman class president in ninth grade and then they threw me out because I was so dictatorial in tenth grade. Then it meant that I became the editor-in-chief of the yearbook because when I learned that the yearbook editor does not have to operate under the rules of democracy, but the editor gets to actually make unilateral decisions, I thought that is the job for me.

Peter: I think something important here is that you like to step into control and leadership and you’re also not bashful about it. You embrace the way in which you lead. Obviously you lead in a way that brings other people in because otherwise you wouldn’t have great talent around you. You’re also not bashful about having an opinion and saying, “I’m not going to do a focus group. Those are stupid. I know what I think. I know what I feel.”

Jeffrey: I’m all of 33 years old, telling them their focus groups are stupid. By the way, I’m now 52 and I think I was right.

Peter: I think you were right. And the research supports that you were right. The point is you’re not afraid at 33 to say what you think. Maybe we’re more afraid at 52 than we are at 33. There’s a lot of things I said at 20 that I might hedge a little bit now at 49.

Jeffrey: Now we know how much we don’t know.

Peter: There’s a great bumper sticker I saw once “hire a teenager while he still knows everything.”

Jeffrey: Correct. That’s great. I think that to get back to some of the qualities that you explore in your business and in these podcast on leadership, I think it’s a trait. I think it’s in our DNA. I think some people have it and express it and I think some people don’t have it and don’t have any need to express it. I think we could ask all kinds of forging questions about what was it about my early childhood that made me feel like I needed to be in control, but yes, I have to tell you I was basically at a very young age the leader of my house with two parents who were suddenly putting me in charge. Not that it was a good thing to do, but there was a quality of leadership with me that I was constantly taking charge of every environment I was in.

If I couldn’t take charge, I often would get rid of it. Just to give you one more example, sorry to interrupt. I was on the board, a board of a not for profit recently and I couldn’t bear it. I wanted to say, “Let the president be in charge. If they screw up, we’ll get rid of them.” I don’t have any desire to be in this room anymore and I had to get off. I was like because I’m not in charge so I don’t want to do it. If you want me to be in charge, I’ll do the job. If you don’t, goodbye. I’m going running.

Peter: I share that experience on boards and that frustration. You have to sort of sit on your hands a little bit if you’re going to bear with it. You also have a tremendous amount of confidence in your work. The way I’m thinking about this, this feels important to me and I saw it. I know it’s public so I could share it because it was in The New York Times article. You’re investing in your own shows. You’re putting your money in the work that you’re doing. There’s a level of risk to your commitment that you … A risk that pays off well, but it’s a risk to your commitment that says, “I’m committed. I’m not doing this just to succeed. I’m doing it because this makes me feel something and I absolutely want to succeed, but it may fail because I’m not just doing what everybody else is doing.

I’m personally at risk.” There’s something about that that feels important. Does it feel important to you? I mean is it just a financial decision for you or something else going on with that?

Jeffrey: I’m thinking back again to Rent, our first show, my first show. At the time that I was developing Rent with my then business partner Kevin. We owned a booking agency and we were vendors for Broadway producers. My job was to book the national tour of Crazy for You. I was the middleman between the producer in New York and the presenter in Cleveland. It was a good job. We would get a weekly fee and I made a pretty good living. I wasn’t even close to rich. I was just making a good living. Our agency was becoming profitable and had tens of thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars of free cash. When Kevin and I decided to do Rent, we knew we needed to get some investors, so we got one big investor who could take a big share.

We’re in 1995. Kevin and I … We need to put up … Between me and Kevin and then this one big financial investor we get who’s a finance guy, we have to put up basically $150,000. He’s going to put up half and then Kevin and I have to put 75, 37.5 each. We just took the money out of our booking agency. We didn’t get any more investors. We just did it. I don’t remember being overly … It was like, “Well, it was just booking money.” I didn’t have a relationship, I didn’t have children, I didn’t have any responsibilities and I knew I can pay for my rent. We just did it.

In our very first show against the absolute advice of our lawyer who said, “You should absolutely A, not put up this much money and B, you shouldn’t put up any of your own money,” we each put in the equivalent of 37.5 each. I’ve never looked back. Of course, part of that is because of the fortunate financial windfall that Rent caused that gave me the confidence to say, “I can keep doing musicals I want to do and I never have to do something I don’t want to do.” I’ve been burned deeply.

Peter: Burned because?

Jeffrey: I’ve lost a lot of money.

Peter: Because the shows didn’t do the way you were expecting it to.

Jeffrey: Because I put too much money in a show and it didn’t make money and I lost money. I lost a lot of money.

Peter: Right. Yet you continue to do it thankfully, right?

Jeffrey: Well, the other thing I also believe is that we must not cherry-pick because it will never get it right. If I lose money in one show and then say, “Oh, I better not do it in the next,” I’m going to be in big trouble if the next one’s the hit. I’ll give you an example. I did an Opera on Broadway in 2002. We did La bohème on Broadway in Italian. It was a beautiful production conceived and directed by the filmmaker Baz Luhrmann. I had persuaded this group of Korean investors who I’ve done some other business with to invest a whopping million dollars. They lose 900 of the million. I asked them to invest in this little show with puppets called Avenue Q. They passed.

Avenue Q goes on to make over $30 million of profit for all of its investors. They cherry-picked. They used the fear that losing money in La bohème generated to guide their next decision.

Peter: The answer is you find really good people who are talented, who are doing work they consider to be important, who’s heart and soul is in that work and you go for a ride with them.

Jeffrey: You got to bet on the people. We’ll never know what the show is going to be.

Peter: Jeffrey, thank you so much. Jeffrey Seller, is the general partner of Hamilton and a number of other really amazing shows. Jeffrey, you show true leadership in the work that you do. Thank you so much being on the Bregman Leadership Podcast.

Jeffrey: It’s a delight. Thank you Peter.

Peter: If you enjoyed this episode of the Bregman Leadership Podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes. For more information about the Bregman Leadership Intensive, as well as access to my articles, videos and podcasts, visit PeterBregman.com. Thank you to Clare Marshall for producing this episode and to Brian Wood who created our music. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next great conversation.