With his cowboy shirts, hipster facial hair and penchant for cursing, Chris Sacca isn't your typical billionaire. His distinctive look is part of the reason people love the recently retired venture capitalist. But, according to Sacca, it also made things tricky for the producers of ABC's "Shark Tank."
Speaking at the Collision Conference last week in New Orleans, Sacca recalled that, when he first agreed to do "Shark Tank," the producers of the show needed to film his "Shark reel," an intro segment making Sacca look powerful and rich, like a billionaire business shark. All the sharks have them.
But Sacca was problematic.
Producers told Sacca the first place they wanted to film was outside his mansion, recalled Sacca.
"You mean the three-bedroom we still live in Truckee?" Sacca asked the producers, referring to the town near Lake Tahoe in California. (In 2015 when he started filming "Shark Tank," Sacca was also building a 5,000 square foot home in Manhattan Beach, Calif. and owned other real estate.)
"That's not going to work," Sacca remembered the producers saying.
Instead, they wanted to shoot his private plane. "I'm lucky, I get to fly private, but I just borrow everybody else's planes," he said.
So producers tried to find alternatives. Sports cars? Sacca said his only impressive car is a Tesla. His boat? He doesn't own one, he rents. A shot from his company Lowercase Captial's fancy global headquarters? That didn't exist either: He managed billions of dollars from home to spend more time with the kids.
According to Sacca, producers were flustered: "They didn't know how to make me look rich to America," he said. "And you have to really overcompensate because of the shirt."
So how did they get that "Shark reel?"
Sacca says he borrowed a conference room from one of the companies in his portfolio and producers put "Lowercase Capital" up on a monitor behind him, while he and a bunch of friends pretended they were having a board meeting for the cameras.
The producers also shot Sacca and friends sitting on someone's patio having a mock "super-rich-guy wine celebration," he said (which is apparently something billionaires do). "It was really 8:30 in the morning and we were all catching buzzes."
To round out the footage, producers filmed the VC getting out of an Uber talking on a cell phone, presumably having a very high stakes conversation.
Sacca said he also threw in his best billionaire poses, inspired by Mark Cuban.
"I don't know," Sacca said. "You'll have to tell me if it worked."
Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to "Shark Tank."
See also:
False 'Flag': Here's why billionaire Chris Sacca eviscerated a pitch on 'Shark Tank'
Hot this sports start-up with $2 million in sales won over Mark Cuban on 'Shark Tank'
