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

JEFFREY KATZENBERG: Steve Jobs one of the great storytellers 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, and understand something that we didn’t really understand and it was in our hands.

RANA EL KALIOUBY: That’s Jeffrey Katzenberg, the legendary movie producer, co-founder and former CEO of Dreamworks, and – today – founding partner of WndrCo. 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.

KATZENBERG: Storytelling is an essential, fundamental ingredient every step of the way, from the smallest little company to Nvidia or Apple or Walmart, or the biggest companies in the world. Storytelling is part of their everyday business, and the better storytellers are the bigger winners.

EL KALIOUBY: On this episode, we’ll learn about how AI shows up in Jeffrey’s work today. And we’re also joined by his partner at WndrCo, ChenLi 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 el Kaliouby and this is Pioneers of AI.

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Jeffrey and ChenLi, thank you for joining us today on Pioneers of AI.

KATZENBERG: Thanks for having us. Appreciate being with you.

CHENLI WANG: Glad to be here.

Copy LinkHow drone storytelling could become a new entertainment medium

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. So first of all, you have some exciting news to share. You announced an investment in Kimball Musk’s Nova Sky drone light show company. Tell us more. Jeffrey, I’ll let you start.

KATZENBERG: Yeah. So Kimball bought this company from Intel about three years ago. It really was very extraneous to their core business, and Kimball saw a real opportunity there and bought the company.

I saw a sort of amazing art exhibit of this at Burning Man. Yes.

I go to Burning Man. I know it’s hard to picture this person as a burner, but there I was on the playa and, at one o’clock or two o’clock in the morning, this drone art.

‘Cause it was more than just fireworks or any of that — it just blew me away. It was so beautiful and so creative and artistic. And so I sought out and met Kimball for the first time, then lost track. And then, earlier this year, we reconnected on a new piece that he did actually for something I had been working on. I had just seen how far it had evolved in just this short period of time and what a great entrepreneur he had been and how he had very methodically and organically built this into a very creative enterprise, but also a very smartly built business. It was a cash positive business. Bootstrapped, had never taken outside capital. And the more we talked about his ambition and his vision — he understands technology deep in AI for many years. The software itself, which AI is essential to in terms of how to create imaging and programming, moving thousands of drones around simultaneously to create these visual experiences. And then the big idea of what could this be over the next couple of years. It was just very, very exciting to me.

EL KALIOUBY: ChenLi, is there an AI play in these AI powered drone stories?

WANG: Well, certainly in the technical execution of how he pulls off the storytelling. These drones use AI to autonomously fly to create this. I think it takes three or four engineers to control and manage these thousands of drones. And you couldn’t have done this if it was all individually human controlled.

EL KALIOUBY: Is the idea to make this platform available to creators and marketers and event organizers, or do you have to go to Nova Sky directly?

KATZENBERG: It’s meant to be proprietary. Here’s the analogy I would make. In 1990 or so, I saw this short film called Luxo Jr. — the lamp — that was made by John Lasseter and Steve Jobs. And I was mesmerized and blown away, frankly, in much the same way.

And it really showed me the extraordinary innovation and new opportunity for a different type of film and storytelling — very, very different from anything that had come before, certainly anything I had been involved with. That led to Toy Story, which led to what was a revolution. Today, 10 of the top films globally are CG animated movies, 30 years later. I believe what Kimball has created and shown us is the equivalent of that short film.

And the promise is as grand, in my opinion. People keep thinking of this as a movie, but it’s not really a movie because a movie is a flat screen.

Whereas drones are multidimensional, and so the opportunity to have Tinkerbell literally fly out and down to the audience and touch a kid, or for Toothless the Dragon to actually fly around the audience and over their heads — there are so many innovative things that could be done with this that are unlike any experience that has come before.

I think Kimball has done something brilliant and much bigger than he even recognizes yet.

Copy LinkWhy Jeffrey Katzenberg left Hollywood to build in tech

EL KALIOUBY: So I’d love to hear the origin story behind WndrCo. Jeffrey, you’ve had a 40-plus-year career in Hollywood and then decided to transition to Silicon Valley and explore tech a little bit more. Why make that transition?

KATZENBERG: I had 45 years in the movie TV business and they were great years. I’m blessed to have been involved with hundreds and hundreds of movies, 41 animated films, more than a hundred TV shows, five Broadway plays. It was fantastic. But I had done that. There was a moment that came a decade ago when Ryan Roberts showed up at my doorstep, unanticipated.

It was a moment where it was very clear that the media industry — the movie and TV industry — was going to go through major changes. I can’t say I had a crystal ball and saw all of this coming. I 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. And that obviously changed things — I think it took a timeline that may have taken 20 years and collapsed it into three or four.

But for me, every step along the way in my movie career, I always saw technology as a competitive advantage and used technology. I wanted the people working for me at the studios I was running to have the latest and greatest.

And so I would go on these migrations to Northern California pretty regularly, looking for the greatest hardware and software to make great movies. Pixar is a perfect example of that. Dreamworks had a studio at Redwood Shores with 800 employees, and the first Shrek movie was made up here, not in Burbank.

So my connection to here, although not very obvious from the outside, has been pretty deep over a very, very long period of time. And I very much admired — even though I’m not a technologist and I don’t read code — I used to say that I don’t write code, but actually anybody can write code now.

I don’t get to say that anymore, but I certainly understand the power of it and the application of it. So the idea was that I wanted to start over. I wanted a new career.

I wasn’t scared of a blank slate. I’ve done this other times. And I have a mission statement — I have sort of two of them — that have framed my life, my career, both in work and in play, in life and in family. The first, which is the most personal to me, is: never let your memories be greater than your dreams.

EL KALIOUBY: God. I’m gonna write that down.

KATZENBERG: And what that means is that every day I get up and look for what’s in front of me. I’m excited by the challenges, by the opportunities, by the things that go right, the things that go wrong — the rollercoaster of it all. 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.

And then the second one — which is a different conversation we don’t have to have or we can have — is something I’ve always tried in everything I do. This is as much personal life as it is professional life, as it is friends, as it is family. Two very simple words: 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, 10 years ago I set out to find people who know what I don’t know, who had many of the same ambitions — 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 ChenLi, who had been together for many, many, many years.

So they had sort of been Batman and Robin, and I joined up and we became the Three Musketeers.

Copy LinkHow product thinking and storytelling came together at WndrCo

EL KALIOUBY: I love it. So ChenLi, how did you cross paths with Jeffrey? You have a very different background — more technology focused. I picked up coding and programming when I was 13 and have loved it ever since. Those were ancient days in terms of how hard it was to get going compared to what we have now. So I’m very jealous of what AI has accelerated. But that’s really carried me through coming out here to the valley in 2000.

WANG: Being fortunate to be at a school like Stanford, which really encouraged both the technology and pushing forward on the technical side, but also how do you build products and companies that have an impact on the world. Through that I ended up at Dropbox with Sujay. We were both actually in venture at NEA before joining Dropbox, and that was just a wonderful platform and a journey to be on — to see how a piece of software could create magic to move files around, to then keep individuals, families, and later companies in sync across organizations, across geographies. It takes intuition and vision and craft to turn pieces of technology into products that are accessible to the rest of the world. Much of the value is created in that second part as much as in pushing the technology forward.

We are just at the beginnings of this next wave of AI and there’s going to be a million wonderful products to be created, and we have the privilege to be building and partnering with founders on that journey.

EL KALIOUBY: When we come back we’ll get a peek behind the curtain at WndrCo, diving into the philosophy behind the company’s strategy. Stay with us.

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Copy LinkWhat WndrCo looks for before incubating or investing

So let’s talk about WndrCo for a second.

So let’s talk about WndrCo for a second.

You both incubate companies and also invest directly in companies like Kimball Musk’s Nova Sky. I wanna dig into the incubation part first — what criteria do you use to decide? 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?

WANG: There’s usually a couple things that come to mind. By the time we started WndrCo, all of us in our individual journeys had been part of prior scaling and building experiences. It takes just as much work to build a million dollar business as a $10 million business or a hundred million dollar business — building is just hard. And so there’s a lot of deliberateness in identifying the markets that can be massive and have an impact. And secondly, having some sense of our core competencies and our right to win. That doesn’t mean you should never exceed expectations and push the frontiers.

There’s a big difference between jumping into a space you have no clue about versus one that’s adjacent to areas where you already have experience building and scaling. So those two things — go after giant markets, and focus where your core competencies are — those kind of come part and parcel in that initial process. The second element is we do come across opportunities both in terms of just our ordinary day. One of the things we say is that at the end of the day, every company is a consumer company, in the sense of being able to articulate what is the end user pain point or problem. If we can’t explain that to a lay person — and this is one of the reasons why I think Jeffrey and Sujay and I have really clicked — some of the underlying technology is so esoteric, but at the end of the day, what it’s delivering just has to be easy to understand and get. If you can’t achieve that, it’s probably not for us. So one is understanding that kind of final basis. And two, we will do a market map. We will talk to people in our network, our ecosystem, and people will introduce us to other people.

And 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. It’s way more exciting and less work to be the rocket fuel when somebody else has already built the rocket and it’s already in flight than to get something off the ground.

But there are times we don’t come across anything. We have canvassed a market and have a pretty well-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 build a company, incubate a company.

Copy LinkWhere AI is creating the biggest shifts in work and relationships

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Great. Many of WndrCo’s investments are AI driven, and we’ll get to that in a second. But before that, I just wanna zoom out — what are the industries where you see the most disruption happening because of AI?

KATZENBERG: Well, it’s probably easier to ask what’s not.

EL KALIOUBY: True. Right.

KATZENBERG: I think for all of us today, we are aware of the implications of this. When you look at things that are revolutionary, not evolutionary, particularly in the early phases there are going to be believers and doubters. If there weren’t, it wouldn’t be truly revolutionary. And so the fact that we’re coming up on year three of the introduction of ChatGPT — it’s a baby. Just so we’re clear: AI has been around for 10 or 15 years. Machine learning has been around and we’ve been involved in things that they didn’t call AI, but that is in fact what it was. But there’s no question that this has really fueled things — these LLMs and the investment that these companies are pouring in, just the sheer scale of compute and the application of that.

I’m an optimist. I have a bottomless well of optimism, and so I’m attracted to those things that I think can add to the quality of life. We focus on the consumerization of software: how can software be deployed to make people smarter, better, faster, healthier? How can we do good while doing good?

And so that becomes our mandate here. 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 in better, smarter, more rewarding ways. There’s this company we just recently invested in called Granola.

EL KALIOUBY: It’s magical. I don’t understand how this thing does what it does — it’s just so cool.

KATZENBERG: Smart.

EL KALIOUBY: 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.

KATZENBERG: I have found that for me, my ability to go off and engage and take meetings solo without a wingman or wingwoman along with me — Granola has just empowered me to be much more effective and to come back and share with the team something that I was otherwise not able to do before.

WANG: The essence of what you were saying — what’s being changed by AI and what’s not — what we’re finding is that professions and 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 are getting done without an in-person meeting.

No venture financing is being done without a handshake. It’s all being done in person. You build authentic relationships in person, not over Zoom. As much as Granola is a productivity tool, what it’s doing is freeing us as humans to focus on that human connection.

Because you don’t have to worry about whether you got all the to-dos after the meeting and all that — you’re like, that’s taken care of, I can just focus 150% of my energy on the person that I’m speaking with. Which is one of the best parts of our job, those conversations with founders.

So I think there are many categories of technology where it’s going to take away the overhead and maximize that.

EL KALIOUBY: The humanness. Mm-hmm.

WANG: The humanness, and that’s going to be amazing.

Copy LinkWhy great founders need storytelling not just great technology

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. So I wanna switch focus to storytelling because I really like drawing from my personal story. My personal journey was very intertwined with the company I started. 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 and a startup’s story is so important.

Jeffrey, what role does storytelling play in what you do today? Obviously you’ve spent many, many years in the storytelling space, but what does it mean for you today?

KATZENBERG: It’s everything. I don’t think 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 Jensen Huang started Nvidia, it was a little graphics chip for gaming, and he was an amazing salesman then. When you think about what he had to do, he had to convince people to come work with him. He had to convince people to invest with him.

EL KALIOUBY: You could just go through every step, and then ultimately he has to go sell his product. In his case it 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.

KATZENBERG: He’s a phenomenal storyteller. Steve Jobs — one of the great storytellers 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, and understand something that we didn’t really understand and it was in our hands. And so storytelling is an essential, fundamental ingredient every step of the way, from the smallest little company to Nvidia or Apple or Walmart, or the biggest companies in the world. Storytelling is part of their everyday business, and the better storytellers are the bigger winners.

EL KALIOUBY: I meet a lot of startup founders, especially in AI, and I find that a lot of them are stuck at the technology level or at the feature level of whatever they’re building. 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 founder story or company story?

KATZENBERG: Well, always, in my opinion, it’s something personal, something you can connect to. I mean, you just asked me about how did I get involved with Kimball?

Okay, well. I started out by grabbing your attention. Why? Because I told you I went to Burning Man, and you went: what? I don’t imagine you, Jeffrey Katzenberg, at Burning Man.

And already it’s like, okay.

EL KALIOUBY: Picture that. Yeah.

KATZENBERG: Yeah, you’re trying to figure out what I was dressed up in, what outfit I was wearing, where I was sleeping and who I was sleeping with. All of those things.

EL KALIOUBY: All the things.

KATZENBERG: Right. So your mind goes — wait, I don’t want the answers. Right.

Of course you don’t. But my point is: how did I get your attention? How did I get you to think about and imagine what Kimball was doing? I was able to give you a journey.

EL KALIOUBY: Coming up, I ask Jeffrey and ChenLi about two areas where WndrCo is investing that may seem far apart from each other: creativity and cybersecurity. Stick around, we’ll be right back.

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Copy LinkHow AI tools are reshaping creative work and video advertising

So WndrCo is invested in a company called Creatify, which the way I think about it is it’s trying to democratize access to storytelling with AI. Tell us more about that.

So WndrCo is invested in a company called Creatify, which the way I think about it is it’s trying to democratize access to storytelling with AI. Tell us more about that.

WANG: Well, it’s really about democratizing video storytelling. There have obviously been platforms that help you — ChatGPT is pretty good at writing for you — but the next frontier is, for many emerging brands, how do you tell the story on social platforms? That’s where the audience is now. But to me it’s still a creator tool. That core spark and idea and authenticity still has to come from a company or a person. What Creatify does — as Steve Jobs would say — it’s the bicycle that lets you go from zero to 60, or at least zero to 20, much faster than if you had to hire a crew or contractors on Upwork and manually create this content.

EL KALIOUBY: My company Affectiva — I 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: are they laughing? Are they confused?

Are they bored to death? A lot of ads are boring, of course. And one of our key insights was that what resulted most in virality and sharing and purchase intent was the emotional arc of the story — could you take people on this emotional journey, even in a 30-second ad?

How does Creatify encapsulate that kind of emotionality in the content?

WANG: This is what’s also really amazing about large language and large vision models. There have been many incredible ads created through the generations, both from brands who spent millions of dollars, but also more grassroots — the Dollar Shave Club ad that kicked things off.

And what you can do now is — there are public directories of ads that have done well or that are shown a lot. A lot of these are the transparency efforts that Meta and others have done. You can basically train a model to learn from what makes a good ad, what’s the core story arc. And then when you can use that as almost like a conceptual framework or outline under the hood, what a particular company using Creatify can do is extract the narrative points and map them against this outline, to give you a better shot at making something that almost gives you a structure out of the gate — one that makes for a stronger emerging story arc in the ad.

When I look at that at its core essence — and you might have to squint to see it — the magic of Granola is actually the same thing. It’s not just a raw transcription of your call notes, but it uses an outline — for a VC pitch, a portfolio update, a catchup call — to ask what are the key things you’d usually want to get out of that. There’s an underlying distillation of a template. And when you run the notes through that, it comes out as something that’s much smarter. I think you’ll see this pattern emerge across many other companies and products.

EL KALIOUBY: Jeffrey, I know Creatify 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?

KATZENBERG: These are very different worlds, so I think what’s happening in one doesn’t necessarily translate to the other. But Hollywood is going to be aided and advantaged by these remarkable tool sets. I know there’s a lot of anxiety about replacing everybody — whether it’s a writer or an actor. Movies were around for 30 years and then TV happened and everybody thought that was the end of movies. It was not. Movies continued to become hugely popular globally.

And then YouTube comes along and, with all the great stuff that’s on YouTube and TikTok today, there’s never been more television watched than there is right now. Ever.

More of it, more being made, more being consumed, certainly finding the connection and the price and the value and the convenience of what the customer wants.

These are customer-first businesses, and I think that’s where most of the disruption is going on.

And we’ve seen time and time again — make a great movie, put it in a movie theater, and people will go see it. Whether it’s Oppenheimer or Barbie, there’s an appetite for that out-of-home experience.

And to me, the question 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?

That’s an opportunity right now. It’s a problem, it’s a challenge for the movie industry, but if you apply the same level of innovation and creativity—

EL KALIOUBY: Totally.

KATZENBERG: —to a movie experience that has not changed in 50 years — the box hasn’t changed, the seating is a little plusher, the concession stands have the same candy that’s been there for 50 years — okay, well look at what sports has done in terms of building these phenomenal new arenas and stadiums, the convenience of getting in and out.

The quality of the environment itself, the seating, the sight lines, the sounds, the wifi, the food — they’ve invested a lot of money in making the experience great and they’ve been rewarded for it.

Copy LinkWhy cybersecurity and digital safety are urgent AI battlegrounds

EL KALIOUBY: I wanted to ask Jeffrey and ChenLi about WndrCo’s investments in Aura, a cybersecurity company offering tools that protect your data and block scams before they even reach your phone.

So I wanna switch to cybersecurity. I think a lot of us have experienced online scams or know somebody who has, and it’s gotten a lot worse with AI. 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 it?

KATZENBERG: Well, I’ll start and then I’ll let ChenLi add to it. The problem is massive and it’s literally out of control. There are two things around consumer cybersecurity and safety. Those are two very distinctive buckets. Security is around protecting your assets — whether they’re digital assets or financial assets, your credit card or your social security number. How do you protect your stuff?

EL KALIOUBY: 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!

KATZENBERG: Everybody is getting scammed every day. You went through this toll booth and didn’t pay your fine and you need to do something — the amount of stuff that is thrown at all of us has become overwhelming.

What Aura set out to do was bring together one solution that would give you security for your stuff — all the features and functions. These things didn’t all not exist, but they existed in many, many different silos. Unless you were a rocket scientist or ChenLi, you didn’t know which ones you needed and why. And when you did figure out which ones you needed, it was like 10 of them costing $150 a month. That was the big idea — that was the white space that our partner Sujay looked at in 2018 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.

EL KALIOUBY: I’m an investor at a company called Silver Shield AI, and they’re looking at the same kind of problem. How are you using AI to implement cybersecurity and cyber safety?

KATZENBERG: Let’s just stick with security first, then you can pivot over to safety, because safety’s a completely different lane. But all in one from us — Aura is meant to cover everything that you need for you, for your kids, for your teenagers, for your parents.

WANG: We’ve expanded beyond Aura to also invest in many enterprise cybersecurity companies. The same concept of security — defending your assets — obviously applies both to individuals and to companies. The big catalyst for the stats from Jeffrey earlier — the reason why digital crime has risen much faster than burglaries — is that the internet is frictionless and cheap.

It’s easier to commit crime online and more lucrative now. That’s going to get accelerated with AI. Currently the companies — whether it’s a bank or a crypto company — are where there are more assets to attack. And so they’re really at the frontiers of getting attacked with these next-generation techniques, whether it’s AI-driven network pen testing and other things, which are frankly terrifying.

What I see and engage with founders on really gives me a glimpse into the horrifying future of what could be. But thankfully there are many founders building tools, often in sandboxes, to see what’s the worst that LLMs can do — so they can understand how to mitigate that. And then we will take those defenses to consumers.

Frankly, the cutting edge of AI attacks has been more after companies than after consumers.

EL KALIOUBY: How are these platforms using AI?

WANG: A lot of these are much more rudimentary characteristics. If a number comes from someone in your address book, we’ll let it through. If it’s a number that’s not, you can now have a very simple voice agent talk to it and say: what are you calling about? Is it package delivery? Something else? Most of these robocallers are not smart enough to get through that — and yet, this is obviously an arms race. Everyone around us has installed it and we’ve stopped getting robocalls, which was such a bane of our existence five, six years ago.

Copy LinkHow data and science could turn longevity into a real product category

EL KALIOUBY: I wanna talk about health real quick, because it’s an area I’m very passionate about. This trifecta of sensors, data and AI. Say a little bit about your company Wonder Health.

KATZENBERG: Wonder Health is our newest build, particularly young. But the big idea is that longevity is a black box. It’s a giant category. It’s something everybody has on their mind. As ChenLi said, the first thing we did was 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.

Many different programs, many different books and podcasts and solutions, and so many different ways to come at longevity — how do you live longer, better? It’s not about lifespan, it’s about health span. When we went and looked at the universe out there, I would say 95% of what we saw was snake oil.

EL KALIOUBY: Mm.

KATZENBERG: It’s just not science-based. And then there’s 5% that is actually some really super smart people, very talented people. Some of which we admire, and a couple of which we actually made some investments in to support them in their business. But the idea we looked at and saw is that there really wasn’t an enterprise driven singularly by state-of-the-art research and scientific rigor, and outcome-based science. And if you’re dealing in this area and you have some issue — whether it’s about 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 looked across the landscape of who are the leading scientists in each of 34 categories.

We found 70 of them who we invited to join up and be associated with this Wonder Health Lab. The first thing we said to them was: what is the state-of-the-art testing and equipment used in your domain? They would tell us, and in some cases some of it exists out there, but in most cases it’s unique to that research program and that research scientist. And so we either bought it or built it. So in one place in New York City is this facility that has the state-of-the-art diagnostics and testing around these 34 categories. Then the idea was that we would get a hundred guinea pigs and share their data with this entire research and scientific community. They never got to see one another, so they only had their lane. The idea is that they could actually get insights because whatever you do with your sleep actually—

EL KALIOUBY: impacts everything.

KATZENBERG: Impacts everything else. But they were in their little silos and they didn’t get to see all the metrics. That was the appeal 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 a business.

The business is — and we can see it coming already, we don’t have it nailed yet — that by making this a laboratory, there are things we are starting to see, patterns that are happening, state-of-the-art research that is coming out that we can productize and make available to millions, if not tens of millions of people.

That’s the ultimate goal here — it’s a discovery platform for what we hope can be real breakthrough innovation around longevity.

Copy LinkWhat remains deeply human in the age of AI

EL KALIOUBY: I’ll ask you my final question and it’s a question I ask of all my guests. ChenLi, I’m gonna start with you. What do you think it means to be human in the age of AI?

WANG: I think every person goes through life with a personal story arc — the highs, the lows, the memories and the experiences and the people that shape who they are and very much shape who they want to be. You can have a derivative of that, but you cannot replace that with AI.

So ultimately, I think storytelling is what is still very authentic and personal about humans.

EL KALIOUBY: I love it. Jeffrey?

KATZENBERG: It’s to not forget what humanity is and means. Humanity is about empathy. 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 is a creative soul.

And I don’t think AI is going to replace or subjugate those qualities.

EL KALIOUBY: Amazing. Thank you both for joining us today. This was really awesome.

KATZENBERG: Thank you so much for hosting us today and for having such a great conversation. I hope we exceeded your expectations.

WANG: Rana, thank you very much for having us.

EL KALIOUBY: I keep going back to one of Jeffrey’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. It’s a philosophy that I will take with me.

My conversation with Jeffrey and ChenLi also reminded me that great companies start with great stories. The best builders are the best storytellers; and 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.