Pioneers of AI: The power of storytelling in VCs, with Jeffrey Katzenberg and ChenLi Wang

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/751060b104b3f073

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Yeah.

Стів сторі тлерс I've ever come across.
He was a storyteller and a marketer.
And
could share his dream with all of us in a way that we could.
Connect to, relate to the
and understand something that we didn't really understand and
Till it was in our hands.
Mm.
It's Jeffrey Katzenberg, the legendary movie producer, co-founder, and former CEO of DreamWorks. And today,
Founding partner of Wonderco.
It's an investment firm on a mission to build world changing businesses in the tech and AI space.
He believes a good story is at the core of any successful business.
You know, storytelling is an essential fundamental ingredient.
every step of the way from the smallest little company
Uh
NVIDIA or Apple or Walmart or you know the biggest company is in the world. Storytelling is part of their everyday business and the better storytellers are the bigger winners.
On this episode
We'll learn about how AI shows up in Jeffree's work today.
And we're also joined by his partner at Wonder Co, Chen Li Wang.
He's one of Silicon Valley's leading product thinkers and was previously the second business hire at Dropbox and led the creation of the Dropbox app.
They're applying their combined experience in storytelling and tech in surprising and unique ways.
I'm Rana L Calyuvi.
And this
As pioneers of AI.
A podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.
Jeffrey and Chen Lee, thank you for joining us today on Pioneers of AI.
Thanks for having us. Appreciate being with you. Glad to be here.
So first of all, you have some exciting news to share. You announced an investment in Kimbusk's Nova Sky Drones light show company. Tell us more.
Jeffrey, I'll start with you.
Kimball.
Bought this company
From Intel about three years ago.
It really was very extraneous to their core business.
Um
And Kimball saw a real opportunity there.
bought the company.
А найшо
you know, sort of amazing art exhibit.
Of this at uh Burning Man.
Yes, I go to Bernie, man. Uh, so I know it's hard to see this person, you know, as a burner.
Um, but there I was on the on the playa and you know, at one o'clock or two o'clock in the morning this
You know
Drone art because it was more than just uh
you know, fireworks or any of that.
It just blew me away. I mean, it was so beautiful, so creative and artistic.
And so I sort out an uh
Kimball for the first time.
Um
Lost track and then uh earlier this year
Uh we reconnected um on a
New piece that
Uh he did actually
For
And it's something I had been working on.
And I just seen how far it had evolved.
uh in just a short period of time.
And what a great entrepreneur he had been and how he had very
Uh methodically and organically.
Bill.
Uh this into
A very
creative enterprise but also a
Very smartly.
No business. It was a cash positive business, bootstrapped.
Um
Never taken outside capital.
Um
And the more we talked about
His ambition and his vision.
He understands uh technology.
Deep in AI for many years.
The software itself, which AI is essential to in terms of
How to create.
uh imaging and programming, moving thousands of drones around.
uh you know simultaneously to create these uh visual experiences.
And then
You know, the big idea, what could this be?
uh over the next couple of years. And it just it was just very, very exciting to me.
Chen Li, you um is there an AI play in these AI powered drone stories?
Well, certainly in the tenical execution of how he pulls off the storytelling, these drones uh use AI to autonomously
Why to create this thing.
I think the
It takes three or four engineers.
to control and manage these thousands
Uh of drones and
You couldn't have done this if it was obviously all
Individually human controlled.
Is the idea to make this platform available to creators and marketers and event kind of event organizers, or it's gonna you have to go to Nova Scott?
No.
It's meant to be proprietary. Now
Here's the analogy I would
I would make, you know, in nineteen ninety ish I saw the short film.
Um call.
Uh Luxor.
The lamp that was made.
Um
by John Lassiner and Steve Jobs.
And I was
mesmerized and blown away.
Frankly, in much the same way.
And
Uh
It it really to me
Showed.
Just the extraordinary
innovation and new opportunity for different type of
film and storytelling very, very different from anything that
uh had come before certainly anything I had been involved with. And that led to Toy Story, which led to what was a revolution.
Today four of ten top films globally.
or CG animated movies thirty years later.
Today.
I believe what Kimball
Has created and showing us
Is the equivalent
of that short film.
And the promise is as grand
In my opinion, as what he has done.
You know, people keep thinking of this as a movie, but it's not really a movie because a movie is
Is a you know, is a is a sort of flat screen.
Whereas drones are multi dimensional.
And so the opportunity to
Have Tinkerbell come literally fly out and down to the audience and touch a kid or
Toothless the dragon.
To actually fly into
You know, around the audience and over the heads of them is up there there's so many innovative things that could be done with this that are unlike any experience.
I think Kimball is
Done something.
Brilliant. And much bigger than he even
recognizes
Yeah.
So I'd love to hear the origin story behind Wonder Co. And Jeffrey, you've had a 40 plus year career in Hollywood and then decided to transition to Silicon Valley and explore kind of tech a little bit more. Why make that transition?
Well
You know, I had
Again, forty five years in the
movie me T V business. And you know, they were great years and I I was
You know.
Blessed to be involved with hundreds and hundreds of movies.
Forty one animated
Films
More than a hundred T V shows, five Broadway plays. I mean
It was
Fantastic. But I had done that.
I I you know
There's a this moment came a decade ago, um
When
Uh
You know.
Briberts showed up at my doorstep on the unanticipated.
It was a moment where it was very clear that the media industry, movie TV industry was gonna go through major, major changes.
I can't I don't wanna say I had a crystal ball and saw all of this coming. Saw a bunch of it coming for sure.
The idea that an independent animation studio, even if we were the biggest animation studio in the world
wasn't going to be able to be competitive.
In the long run. That was clear.
COVID came along and obviously changed, you know, sort of I think took the timeline, which may have taken twenty years and collapsed it into three or four.
Um but
For me
Every step along the way in my movie career.
Um
I was uh I always saw technology as a competitive advantage.
And it
Use technology. I wanted my the people that were working for me at the studios that I was running.
to have the latest and greatest. And so I would go on these
migrations to Northern California pretty regularly.
Looking for
What would be the greatest
Uh
you know, hardware and software to make great movies and
Um and so there were many, uh you know, Pixar being a perfect example of that. But you know, DreamWorks uh had a studio in Redwood.
Shores with eight hundred employees and the first Shrek movie was made up here, not in Burbank.
So
My connection to here
Um, although not very
Obvious
Uh from the outside.
has been pretty deep over a very, very long period of time.
And I
Very much.
Admired
Um, even though I'm not a technologist, I I don't
Read uh code.
Yeah.
I used to say that I don't
Right code, but actually
Anybody can write code now, so I don't get to say I don't get to say that anymore, uh in this, but
I certainly understand
The power of it and the application of it. So that was the idea is that I went, I wanted to start over, wanted a new career.
Wasn't scared of a blank.
Slate.
I've done this uh other times and uh
You know, I have a a mission statement that I have uh sort of two of them that have framed my life, my career.
Mild.
you know, both in work and in play and in life and in family.
Uh and so there are two of them. The first, which is the most
Personal uh to me is never.
Let your memories be greater than your dreams.
And what that
And what that means, uh
Right, it is it.
Uh
Every day I get up and look
for what's in front of me. And I I am
I'm excited by
The challenges, by the opportunities, by the
Uh
Things that go right, the things that go wrong.
You know, the roller coaster of it all.
But
You know
Uh metaphorically, I'm in a car driving 120 miles an hour and I cannot look in my rear view or side mirrors because it would be fatal.
Right.
And then the the second one, which is a
different conversation which we don't have to have or we can have, which is
You know
I've always tried it everything I do.
Everything. This is as much personal life as it is professional life, as it is friends, as it is family.
Two very simple words, which is exceed expectations.
My
hope and ambition in everything that I do is
Can I just do a little bit better than what is expected of me, whatever the circumstances, whoever I'm with.
So
Anyway.
Ten years ago.
I
Uh set out to find
Uh people who know what I don't know.
uh who had many of the same ambitions, which is to both
build companies and also invest in
the best of them in the tech world.
And I would say one of the greatest and most fortuitous things that has happened to me in my life is that I met
Sujay Jaswa and Shen Lee, who had been together for many, many, many years. So they had sort of been, you know, Batman and Robin. And you know, I I I joined up and we became the three musketeers.
I love it. So Chen Lee, how did you cross path with Jeffrey and you have a very different background. I think your background is more technology.
Yeah, I d the on the opposite in the spectrum picked up
coding and programming when I was thirteen.
uh and have lived it ever since. Uh those were ancient days in terms of how hard it was to get going compared to what we have now. So very jealous uh of of
uh what AI has accelerated. Uh but that's really carried me through coming out here to the valley uh in two thousand and
to I and uh been fortunate to
Yeah, uh school like Stanford, which really encouraged both the technology and pushing forward uh on on the technical side, but also how do you build
Products uh and companies that have an impact on the world.
Uh and
through that ended up at uh Dropbox with uh Sujay. We were both actually in venture at NEA before joining Dropbox. And that was really just a wonderful platform to be and a journey to be on to see how a piece of
Software could
Create magic, uh to move files around to then keep
individuals, families, and later companies.
Uh in sync.
across uh organizations, across geographies.
It takes
Intuition and vision and
craft to turn pieces of technology.
into products that are accessible.
by the rest of the world.
Uh and meant much of the value is created.
In that second part, as much as in
Technology forward.
We're just at the beginnings of this next AI and there's going to be a thousand, a million wonderful products.
to be created and we have the privilege to be building and partnering with founders in that journey.
When we come back.
get a peek behind the curtain at Wonderco.
Diving into the philosophy behind the company's strategy.
Stay with us.
Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.
There's gonna be two types of companies.
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So let's talk about Wonder Co for a second, because you both incubate companies and also you invest directly in companies like, say, Kimball Musk's Nova Sky.
I wanna dig into the incub first. What criteria do you use to decide on whether I I imagine you come up with hundreds of ideas. So what does it take to actually incubate an idea and form a company around it?
There's usually a couple of things that come to mind. One is
By the time we started Wonder Co, all of us uh in our individual journeys uh have been part of prior
Scaling and building experiences.
It takes just as much work.
To build a million dollar business, a ten million dollar business, a hundred million dollar business.
Building is just hard.
And so there's a lot of deliberate
delibereness in
Identifying the markets.
That can be massive.
It having an impact?
And secondly
Having some sense of our court competencies.
And our right to win.
And it doesn't mean that we'll never you know, you should also be exceeding expectations and pushing the frontiers.
There's a big difference between jumping into a
a circle that you have no clue about versus it's adjacent to areas that you already uh have had experiences building and scaling.
So that
Those two things of go after giant markets.
And
where your core competencies are, those kinda come part and parcel in that initial
Process.
The second element is we do come across both in terms of just our ordinary day. We we one of the things we say is uh we we think at the end of the day, every company is a consumer company. Uh
In in the sense of uh being able to articulate
What is the end user pain point or problem? If we can't explain that to a lay person, uh it can't
Yeah, this is one of the w reasons why I think Jeffrey and and Sujai and I really have clicked us some of the underlying technology is so esoteric, but
At the end of the day, what it's delivering, it's just gotta
Be easy to understand and
If you can't.
Achieve that. Um I it it's probably not for us.
So
One is uh understanding that kind of uh final basis. And two
We will do a market map. We will talk to uh people in our network or ecosystem and people will introduce us to other people. Uh
And then
Sometimes we'll find.
An exceptional company that's actually already been created.
tackling this vision. In that case, those are the times we invest.
Uh it's way uh more exciting uh and less work to be the rock of fuel when somebody else is has already built the rocket and it's already in flight uh than to get something off the ground.
But there are times we don't come across anything. Uh we have canvas to market and have a pretty prepared good prepared mind about the size of the opportunity, the pain points facing customers or consumers at the end of the day.
And in those cases we'll seek to to
to build a company. Incubate a company.
Jeffrey, many of your uh of Wonder Co's investments are AI driven, and we'll get to that in a second, but before that, I just want to zoom out like, what are the industries where you see the most disruption happening because of AI?
It's probably easier to ask what's not. True, right.
I think for all of us.
Today we are aware.
Uh the
Implications of this
When you look at things that are revolutionary, not evolutionary.
Particularly in the early phases of it.
There's for sure going to be good and bad.
Believers and doubters.
If there weren't.
It wouldn't be that
really actually revolutionary. And so the fact that we're
You know, uh coming up on year three of the introduction of Chat GPT, it's a baby.
Just so we're clear.
Ten or fifteen years machine learning's been around and we've been involved in things. They didn't call it AI, but that is in fact what it was.
Is
Um but there's no question
This is really fuel things, these LLMs and the, you know, investment that these companies are pouring into just the sheer scale of compute and and the application of that.
Um
I I'm an optimist. Um, you know, I have a bottomless well of optimism and so
Uh I'm attracted to those things that I think
Um
And
And
to the quality of life.
You know, we we we focus on the consumerization of software.
How can software be
deployed to make people
Smarter.
Better, faster.
Healthier.
Just anything at all. Like how can we do
Good.
While doing good.
And so that becomes our sort of mandate here in this. We're not trying to figure out how to put people out of work. We're actually trying to figure out how to put them to work and better, smarter.
More rewarding ways.
This company we just recently invested in called granola.
It's magical. Like I don't understand how this d thing does what it does because it's just so cool. It's so smart.
Granola is an AI-powered note taker that listens in on your meetings, provides real-time transcription, and combines that with your manually typed notes.
It's pretty cool.
I'm a compulsive note taker and it saves me so much time.
Mm.
I have found for me
My
ability to go off and engage and take meetings sort of solo.
Without a wing wingman, woman along with me.
Granola has just in
powered me to be able to be much, much more effective and be able to come back and to share with the team.
Something that
You know
I I was otherwise not able to do before.
You know, the essence of when you sort of said what what's being changed by AI and what's not, well, we're finding
Is that
Professions, jobs, where
The human
relationship and trust building exercise.
is critical to whatever needs to get done.
That's not being changed.
In fact, it's radically overcorrected post COVID, where no big enterprise deals not
gets getting done without an in person meeting. No
Venture f financing is being done without a handshake. Like it's all being radically done in person. You build authentic relationships.
In person, not over Zoom.
And
As much as Grenola is a productivity software, what it's doing is it it frees
Us as humans to focus.
On that human connection. Cause you don't have to worry about oh, did I get all the take you know the two do's after the meeting and all that? And you're like, Yeah, that's that's taken care of. I could just focus
150% of my energy on writing with the person that I'm uh speaking with, which is one of the best parts of our job is uh in those conversations with with founders. Uh so I think there's many categories of technology where it's going to
Take away the judgery or the
other parts of it and maximise
That
Magic.
The humanus.
And that's gonna be amazing.
So I wanna switch focus to storytelling, because I really uh like drawing from my personal story, my personal kind of journey was very intertwined with the company I started Affectiva out of MIT. And I actually wrote my memoir on this juxtaposition of the two journeys. So I think the founder journey, a startups.
Story is so important.
Jeffrey.
What role does storytelling play in in kind of what you do today? Obviously you've spent many, many years in the storytelling space, but what does that mean for you today?
Everything.
I mean, I don't think you can succeed.
In business.
I don't think you can succeed.
As uh
You know
A company can succeed, I don't think.
An entrepreneur can succeed without storytelling.
And the greatest
And most successful ones.
It's not an accident.
When Chen Chun Wong started NVIDIA
You know, it's a little graphics for
You know.
Game in.
And he
With
An amazing salesman then.
You know, when you think about what you have to do, yeah to like
Convinced people to come work with him?
You had to convince people to invest with him?
You could just go through every step and then ultimately he has to go sell his product. And in his case
You know, he was a direct to consumer.
product as well as a B2B.
product and every step along the way.
He had to be a great salesman. He's a phenomenal story. Steve Jobs, one of the great storytellers I've ever come across. You know, he was a storyteller and a marketer.
And
You know, could
Good.
could share his dream with all of us in a way that we could
Connect to, relate to.
and understand something that we didn't really understand and
Till it was in our hands. And so
You know, storytelling is an essential fundamental ingredient.
You know, every step of the way from the smallest little company
You know, to
Nvidia or Apple or Walmart or you know, the biggest company is in the world, storytelling is part of their everyday business. And the better storytellers are the bigger winners.
I meet a lot of startup founders, especially in AI.
And I I find that a lot of them are stuck at the technology level or at the feature level of whatever they're building and they're not they're they're they're not bringing that story to life. So I wanna make it actionable to any of our entrepreneurs who are listening.
What are the elements of a great either founder story or company story?
Well, always in my opinion is something personal, something you can connect to. Some
I mean
You just asked me about
You know, how did I get involved with
Uh Kimball.
I started out by
Grabbing your attention. Why?
Cause I told you I went to Burning Man and you went, what?
I don't imagine you, Jeffrey Katcherberg, at Burning Man already. It's like okay. And what outfit were you wearing and you know you know, where were you sleeping and who were you sleeping with and all of those things and
Right. So it's just like your mind goes I don't want the answers.
I don't want the answer, but
But my point is
How did I get your attention?
How do I get your attention?
To
Think about and imagine what Kimball
What doing?
So
I'm able to give you
Up the journey.
Coming up.
I asked Jeffrey and Chen Lee about two areas where WonderCo is investing that may seem far apart from each other.
Creativity and cybersecurity.
Stick around, we'll be right back.
So Shunley, you are invested in a company called Creative I, which is basically the way I think about it, is it's trying to democratize access.
to storytelling with AI. So tell us more about that.
Well, it's really about democratizing video storytelling. Uh
The
Before there's obviously been platforms that help you uh well, ChatGBT is pretty good at writing uh for you. Uh but really the
The next frontier is uh for many
Emerging brands. Uh how do you tell the story on social platforms where
That's where the audience uh is now at.
To me, it's still a creator tool.
That core
spark an idea and authenticity.
It's still gonna have to come from
A company, a person.
Hi.
And what creative I is is it's
As Steve Jobs would say, it's the bicycle that lets you go from zero to sixty, zero to twenty, much faster than if you would have to go hire a crew, hire contractors on upwork, and manually have to create this content.
You know, my company Affectiva, we sold the company, but we still do this. We basically use computer vision to analyze people's facial expression responses when they're watching video ads, and we could see moment by moment, like are they laughing, are they confused, are they bored to death? A lot of ads are boring, of course.
One of our key insights was the things that resulted most in like virality and sharing the content and like
Purchase intent and whatnot.
Was the emotional arc of the story? Like could you take people on this emotional journey, even if it's a thirty second ad.
How does Cratafy
Kind of.
encapsulate that kind of like emotionality in the content.
So this is what's also really amazing about
Uh.
large language and large vision models is uh
There has been many
Incredible ads has been created through the generations. Uh, both brands who spend millions of dollars.
But also uh more
grassroots, you know, the Dollar Shave Club ad that kicked off that, right?
And what you're what you can do is actually you can uh there's public uh directories of the ads that uh have done well or that are
shown a lot. So I this these are the transparency efforts that men and other have done. You could basically
Train a model to learn.
From what
All these ads
What makes a good ad. What's the core
story arc. And then when you can use that is almost like the conceptual
framework or outline under the hood.
And for a particular
company using Creative F what they can do is they can extract out what are the narrative points, but then map it against this outline.
So
give you a better shot at making something that almost gives you a little of a structure out of the gate that makes for a more emerging story arc uh ad.
And
When I look at that and its core essence, uh you you might just you know um squint to see it, but
The magic of granola is actually the same thing. Uh, is it's not just a raw transcription of your call notes, but it's some outline for.
A VC pitch or a portfolio update or a catch up call. What are the key things usually you would want to get out of that? There's an underlying
distillation of a template. Uh and when you run the notes through that, it comes out as something that's much more
smart. And I think that a lot of this is uh you you'll see this pattern, I'm sure, emerge across other companies and products.
So Jeffrey, I know Creative Fi today is very focused on short form AI generated content.
What are the implications of this kind of platform and technology for video and of course Hollywood?
These are very different worlds, so I I think what's happening one doesn't necessarily translate to the other.
Um but
You know.
Hollywood.
uh is going to be uh I think
Uh
aided and advantaged in what are these remarkable
Tool set. I know there's a lot of anxiety.
Down.
You know, replacing everybody.
Whether it's a
A writer or an actor.
Movies were around.
For thirty years and then T V happened and everybody thought, Well, that's the end of movies.
It was not.
Uh movies.
Continue to become
you know, uh hugely popular.
globally.
Um and then
YouTube comes along and
You know, with all the great stuff that's on YouTube and TikTok today.
T V There's never been more television watch than there is right now today. Ever.
More of it, more being made, more being consumed.
Um
Certainly finding
the connection and the price and the value and the convenience of what the customer
Wants, you know, these are customer first businesses.
I think is where most of the disruption is going on.
Um
And
You know we've seen time and time again, make a great movie, put it in a movie theater, people will go see it.
And whether it's you know
Oppenheimer or Barbie.
There's an appetite for
That
out of home experience. Um
And
To me.
I look at again

Yeah.
Last full version of that, which is
How do you evolve that experience of going to a movie to make it compelling again to a generation that's not as interested in it?
And that's an opportunity. Right now, it's a problem. It's a challenge for
the movie industry, but
You know, if you apply the same level of
Innovation and creativity.
to a movie experience that has not changed in fifty years.
Right. The box hasn't changed. The you know the seatings are a little plusher, the
You know the
Concession stands are the same candy that's been there for fifty years. It's like okay, well
Look at sports, what sports has done.
Um
You know, in terms of building these
Phenomenal new
Arenas and stadiums and
You know.
Convenience of getting in and out, quality of the environment itself, the seatings, the sight lines, the sounds, the
Wi Fi, the food, it's
You know, they've invested
a lot of money in making the experience great and they've been rewarded for it.
I wanted to ask Jeffrey and Chen Lee about Wonder Co's investments in aura.
A cybersecurity company offering tools that protect your data and block scams before they even reach your phone.
So I want to switch to cybersecurity and you kind of teed that up a little bit. I think a lot of us have experienced online scams or know somebody who's experienced online scams and it's gotten a lot worse with AI. So first can you give us a sense of how bad this problem is and I'd love to learn more about your company, Aura, and how they're solving this problem.
Well I'll start and then I'll let uh Shen Lee
Okay. So the problem is massive and it's literally out of control.
There's two things around
Consumer. We we look at it as consumer
Cyber
Security and safety.
Those are those are two very distinctive buckets.
Security is around protecting your assets.
Whether they're digital assets or financial assets or your credit card or your social security number like
How do you protect your stuff?
The Internet Crime Report found that Internet crime and scams caused a loss of over 16 billion dollars in 2024.
That's a 33% increase from the previous year.
Everybody.
is getting every day. We're all getting scammed here and you know you know, you went through this toll booth and didn't pay your fine and you need to do you know, thank I the the n amount of
Stoff that is thrown at all of us.

And what Aura set out to do.
Was to
Sort of bring together
One solution.
That would
Give you security for your stuff.
All the features and functions. It's not that these things didn't exist.
In many, many, many different silos.
But unless you were a rocket scientist or Shen Lee, um you didn't know like which ones do I need and why do I need that one. And then when you did figure out which ones you needed, it was like
Ten of them and they cost you a hundred fifty dollars a month and you went, Oh my God.
That was the big idea. That was the white space that
You know, our partner Shuje looked at
You know, in twenty eighteen and said
This is
A big problem and it is only going to get exponentially worse.
Let's go figure it out. And that was the birth of Aura.
I'm an investor at a company called Silver Shield AI, and they're looking at the same kind of in the same problem. How are you using AI?
to implement
kind of cyber security and cyber safety for your customers.
Okay, well two different things. So let's just stick with security, then you can pivot over to safety'cause safety's a completely different lane.
But
By the way
All in one for Moss.
Aura is meant to
The aura.
everything that you need for you, for your kids, for your teenagers, for your parents.
So we've expanded from beyond Aura to we're also investors in many enterprise uh cybersecurity companies, I would say.
That same concept of
Security is about securing or defending your assets. That obviously applies both to individuals and to to companies.
Obviously the the the the big catalyst for
The stats from Jeffrey earlier for why digital crime has risen much faster than
Burglaries is
The internet is
Richardless and cheap. It's easier to commit crime.
online and more lucrative now.
All right.
This is gonna get accelerated.
With
AI.
Initially currently the
companies especially though whether it's you're a bank or where you're a crypto company.
that's where there's more assets, if you will, to attack. And so they're really at the frontiers of getting uh attacked with these next generation tech, whether it's AI uh driven network pen testing and other things, which are
Frankly terrifying.
Hi.
What I see in
Engage with there with founders really gives me a glimpse into the
glorifying future of what could be, but thankfully there are many founders building tools. Uh
Austin in sandboxes.
seeing what's the worst that LMs can do to then understand what are the ways you would mitigate.
that. Uh and then we will take those defenses to consumer. But uh frankly, the targets currently on the cutting edge of AI has been more after companies than after consumers.
How are these platforms using AI?
A lot of these are much more rudimentary. Uh, you know that if uh in
We have a or a call assistant product.
that by default if it's a number that comes from a number in your address book, they'll let it throw.
Uh if it's a number that is not, you can now have a very simple
voice agent talk to it and say, What are you calling about? Is it package delivery? Is it
Uh
you know, something else. And most of these robocallers are not smart enough. And yet uh this is obviously an arms race uh to to get through that. Um and so everybody around us, we've installed it and we've stopped getting rebo calls, which was such a bane of our existence, uh, you know, five, six years ago.
I wanna talk about health, uh, real quick, because it's an area that I'm very passionate about, this trifecta of sensors, data, and AI. Just say a little bit about your company uh Wonder Health.
Wonder health is
It's our newest.
Uh Bill?
Uh so
Particularly young, but
The big idea is is that um
Longevity is a
A a a a black box, it's a giant category.
Um
It's something
Everybody has on their mind.
As
Uh, Shen Lee said, you know, the first thing we did is we went and we did a sort of market mapping of what's out there in the world and who's doing what to really understand.
And there's a lot, a lot, a lot of things going on.
Um many different programs uh
Many different
books and podcasts and
Um
solutions and so many different ways to sort of combat longevity.
How do you live
Longer
Better.
Right. How do you extend that?
Healthiness.
So
It's not about life span, it's about health span.
So
When we went and looked at the universe out there.
Um
I would say ninety five.
Ninety five percent of what we saw.
Was
Snake oil salesman.
Yeah.
It's not science based.
And then there's five percent that is actually, you know, some really super smart people, very talented people.
Um
Uh some of which we admire, a couple which we actually made some investments in to support them in their business.
Um
But
Uh the idea that
We
looked at and saw is is that there there really wasn't a enterprise that was driven
singularly by
State of the art research.
And scientific.
Deep scientific.
research and uh outcome out of it. And if you're dealing in this area.
And you have some issue.
You know, whether it is about
you know, bone density or joints or memory loss or sleep or
nutrition or anything.
These things are all interrelated.
And you can't just deal with one without looking at the others.
And so we decided to actually start a longevity lab.
And
Went out and
sort of looked across the
landscape of who are the leading scientists in each of thirty four categories.
So we went out and we've actually found seventy of them.
Who we invited to
Join up and be associated with this
Wonder Health Lab.
And the first the first thing we said to them is
What is the state of the art
testing an equipment that is used in your domain.
And they would
Tell us and in some cases
Some of it exists out there, but in most cases
That's unique to that research.
program and that research scientist.
And so we we we either bought it or built it.
So in one place in New York City.
Is this
Place that has sort of the state of the art
diagnostics and testings around these 34 categories.
And then the idea was is that we would get a hundred guinea pigs.
And
We would then share
The data.
Of these hundred guinea pigs.
with this entire research scientific community.
And they they never got to see one another. So they only had their lane. And so the idea that they actually could act get

Whatever you do with your sleep actually
Disconnect.
Impact everything else, right? And so it's but they were never they were in their little silos there and they didn't get to see all the metrics. So that was the appeal
To to to all of them.
Why are we doing this?
It's not because we want to take a
hundred rich people and make them healthy.
That's not that's not a business.
The business is is that and we can see it coming already. We don't have it nailed yet.
But
What we realized is is by making this a laboratory.
There are things that we are starting to see patterns that are happening.
state of the art research that is coming out.
That we can productise.
and make available to millions, if not tens of millions of people.
And that's the the ultimate goal here is it's a discovery platform for
What we hope can be
Uh real breakthrough innovation.
around uh longevity.
I'll ask you my final question, and it's a question I ask of all my guests. Shenli, I'm gonna start with you. What do you think it means to be human in the age of AI?
I think every person
goes through life with
A personal
Story arc.
the highs, the lows, the memories and the experiences and people.
That shape who they are.
And very much
Shape.
Who they want to be.
And
I think
It's you can have a
derivative of that but you cannot
Replace that.
With
AI.
So ultimately I think that's storytelling.
It's what is
Eventually still very authentic.
In personal.
About humans.
It's too
Not forget
What humanity
Is and means.
And so
Humanity is about empathy.
And it is about
Compassion.
It's about
Giving.
Not.
Getting
And I think it is about
Creative expression, I think, inside every single human being.
Yeah.
A creative.
So
And I don't think AI is going to
replace or subjugate those qualities.
Amazing.
Thank you both for joining us today. This was
Really awesome.
Thank you so much for
Hosting us today and uh having a great
conversation with you, so I hope we exceeded your expectations.
Thank you, Rana. Thank you very much for having us.
I keep going back to one of Jeffree's mantras.
Never let your memories be greater than your dreams.
It's a mantra that inspired him to take the leap from Hollywood.
to launching and investing in world changing companies.
And it's a philosophy that I will take with me.
My conversation with Jeffrey and Chen Lee also reminded me that great companies start with great stories.
The best builders are the best storytellers.
A narrative is a core business function.
Not a nice to have.
I will definitely keep that in mind as I continue to invest and support human-centric AI companies.
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