By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, August 2011
In late August 2011, FishbowlLA picked up a Peter Lauria report — Lauria was then Thomson Reuters’s editor-in-charge of technology, media, and telecom — on the possibility that Creative Artists Agency was looking to open a small office in Silicon Valley. The original framing tracked the prospective Hollywood-talent-agency move into the tech world.
Then
CAA — one of the two or three dominant Hollywood talent agencies — eyeing a Silicon Valley presence was, in 2011, a substantive signal of the broader Hollywood-and-tech convergence that was accelerating. The logic was clear: the technology industry was producing both an enormous new class of wealthy, prominent figures (the kind of clients a talent agency represents) and an enormous new set of platforms and buyers for entertainment content.
The references in the original slug — Biz Stone (Twitter co-founder), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Joost (the video-streaming venture) — captured the Silicon Valley figures and ventures that represented the convergence. A Hollywood agency in Silicon Valley would be positioned to represent tech founders, to broker the deals between entertainment and technology, and to be present as the two industries increasingly overlapped.
Peter Lauria’s Thomson Reuters report was substantive technology-media-telecom journalism — the kind of cross-industry business reporting that tracked the Hollywood-tech convergence as it developed.
Now
The Hollywood-and-Silicon-Valley convergence that the 2011 report was an early signal of became one of the defining business stories of the subsequent decade. CAA itself expanded substantially across multiple directions — including sports, and including a substantial broader business footprint; the agency was acquired by the French holding company Artémis (the Pinault family’s vehicle) in 2023.
The deeper convergence the 2011 report anticipated — the technology platforms becoming the dominant force in entertainment — substantially arrived. Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and the broader streaming-platform economy became the central buyers of entertainment content; the talent agencies built out substantial operations to broker the entertainment-technology relationship.
Biz Stone’s Twitter went through the 2022 Musk acquisition; Mark Zuckerberg’s company became Meta; Joost — the streaming venture that seemed significant in 2011 — was one of the era’s failed experiments and is now a footnote.
The 2011 piece reads now as a small documented early signal of the Hollywood-tech convergence — a talent agency reportedly scouting Silicon Valley, captured before the technology platforms’ takeover of the entertainment economy had fully arrived.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.