Scaling a business in the U.S. can feel like a maze.
Each state has its own payroll benefits and compliance rules, pulling your focus away from growth, which is why founders use Deal.
Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500-level benefits for your team.
The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.
So if you're scaling, make it simple with deal.
Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free.
Thank you so much for having me.
With powerful AI tools like Affinity Notetaker and Deal Assist, you'll spend less time managing data and more time closing the right deals.
Learn more at affinity.co slash marketplace.
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 until it was in our hands.
That'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 to NVIDIA or Apple or Walmart or, you know, the biggest companies 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 Jeffrey's work today.
And we're also joined by his partner at WonderCo, 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-Khalioubi, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.
Jeffrey and Chen Li, 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 Kimball Musk's NovaSky 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.
And Kimball saw a real opportunity there, bought the company.
And I saw... you know, sort of amazing art exhibit of this at Burning Man.
Yes, I go to Burning Man.
So I know it's hard to see this person, you know as a burner, but there I was 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, 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 sought out and met Kimball for the first time, lost track.
And then earlier this year we reconnected on a new piece that he did, actually for something I had been working on.
And I just seen how far it had evolved in just a short period of time.
And what a great entrepreneur he had been and how he had very methodically and organically built this into business a very creative enterprise, but also a very smartly built business.
It was a cash positive business, bootstrapped, 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, you know, simultaneously to create these visual experiences.
And then, you know, the big idea, what could this be over the next couple of years?
And it was just very, very exciting to me.
Chen Li, is there an AI play in these AI-powered drone stories?
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 obviously all individually human-controlled.
Is the idea to make this platform available to creators and marketers and event organizers, or it's going to have to go to Nova Scot?
No.
It's meant to be proprietary.
Now, here's the analogy I would make.
In 1990-ish I saw this short film called Luxor, 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 uh it it.
It really to me showed just 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.
And that led to Toy Story, which led to what was a revolution.
Today, four of the 10 top films globally are CG animated movies, 30 years later.
Today, 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, 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 a sort of flat screen, whereas drones are multidimensional.
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.
There's so many innovative things that could be done with this that are unlike any experience.
I think Kimball has done something brilliant and much bigger than he even recognizes yet.
So I'd love to hear the origin story behind WonderCo.
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, 45 years in the movie TV business.
And, you know, they were great years.
And I was, you know, blessed to be involved with hundreds and hundreds of movies, 41 animated films, more than 100 tv 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, ryan roberts showed up at my doorstep on unanticipated.
It was a moment where it was very clear that the media industry movie, tv industry was going to go through major, major changes.
I don't want to 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.
Ovid came along and obviously changed, you know sort of, I think, took the timeline, which 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 was, I always saw technology as a competitive advantage and 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 you know hardware and software to make great movies.
And so there were many, you know, Pixar being a perfect example of that.
But you know, 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.
I don't read, uh code, i i used to say i don't write 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, the application of it.
So that was the idea is is that i went, i wanted to start over, i wanted a new career, wasn't scared of a blank slate.
I've done this other times and uh, You know I have a mission statement that I have sort of two of them that have framed my life, my career my, you know, both in work and in play, and in life and in family.
And so there are two of them.
The first, which is the most personal to me, is never let your memories be greater than your dreams.
And what that means?
Right is that Every day I get up and look for what's in front of me and I'm excited by the challenges, by the opportunities, by the things that go right, the things that go wrong.
You know the roller coaster of it all.
But you know 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 second one, which is a different conversation we don't have to have or we can have, which is, you know, I've always tried in 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?
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, 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 Li, who had been together for many many, many years.
So they had sort of been, you know, Batman and Robin.
And, you know, I joined up and we became the Three Musketeers.
I love it.
So Chen Li, how did you cross paths with Jeffrey?
And you have a very different background.
I think your background is more technology.
Yeah I, on the opposite end of the spectrum, 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 very jealous of what AI has accelerated.
But that's really carried me through coming out here to the Valley in 2002 and 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?
And through that, ended up at Dropbox with Sujay.
We were both actually in venture at NEA before joining Dropbox.
And that was really just a wonderful platform to be in 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 by the rest of the world and meant much of the value is created in that second part as much as in pushing the 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 on that journey.
When we come back we'll get a peek behind the curtain at WonderCo, diving into the philosophy behind the company's strategy.
Stay with us.
Real leaders don't back down when the stakes are high.
They innovate, they push forward, and then they take the stage at the Masters of Scale Summit.
Join us in San Francisco October 7th to 9th to hear from the CEO of The New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general and many, many more.
Apply now at mastersofscale.com slash apply25.
That's mastersofscale.com slash apply25.
If you're ready to take your startup from idea to impact, then AWS is your launchpad.
From data storage to machine learning to secure app hosting, AWS gives you the tech trusted by the world's fastest scaling startups.
And here's the best part.
Join AWS.
Activate today and you could score up to 100000 in AWS credits, tailored to your stage and network.
Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building.
Expanding your business in the US can feel like a maze.
Every state has its own payroll benefits and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth.
That's why founders use Deal.
Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team.
The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.
So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal.
Go to D-E-E-L dot com slash M-O-S and get up to three months free.
So let's talk about WonderCo for a second, because you both incubate companies and also you invest directly in companies like say, Kimball Musk's Nova Sky.
I want to dig into the incubation part first.
What criteria do you use to decide on whether 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 things that come to mind.
One is by the time we started WonderCo.
All of us in our individual journeys have been part of prior scaling and building experiences.
It takes just as much work to build a million-dollar business, a 10 million business, a 100 million business.
Building is just hard.
And so there's a lot of deliberateness in identifying the markets that can be massive in having an impact.
And secondly, having some sense of our core competencies and our right to win.
And it doesn't mean that you should also be exceeding expectations and pushing the frontiers.
There's a big difference between jumping into a circle that you have no clue about versus it's adjacent to areas that you already have had experiences building and scaling.
So those two things of go after giant markets and where your core competencies are those kind of come part and parcel in that initial process.
The second element is we do come across both in terms of just our ordinary day.
Being able to articulate what is the end user pain point or problem.
If we can't explain that to a lay person, it can't.
This is one of the reasons why I think Jeffrey and Sujay and I really have clicked.
Some of the underlying technology is so esoteric but, at the end of the day, what it's delivering, it's just got 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 good prepared mind about the size of the opportunity, the pain points facing customers or consumers.
And in those cases, we'll seek to build a company, incubate a company.
Jeffrey, many of WonderCo's investments are AI-driven, and we'll get to that in a second.
But before that, I just want to zoom out.
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 of 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, coming up on year three of the introduction of ChatGPT.
It's a baby, just so we're clear.
AI's been around for 10 or 15 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.
But there's no question that This has really fueled things, these LLMs and the investment that these companies are pouring into just the sheer scale of compute and the application of that.
I, I'm an optimist.
You know, 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.
You know, 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 in better, smarter, more rewarding ways.
There's this company we just recently invested in called Granola.
It's magical.
Like, I don't understand how this 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.
I have found for me my ability to go off and engage and take meetings sort of solo, without a wingman woman along with me, where NOLA has just empowered 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 was otherwise not able to do before.
You know the essence of when you sort of said what's being changed by AI and what's not.
What we're finding is 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 deal is getting done without an in-person meeting.
No venture financing is being done without a handshake.
It's all being radically done in person.
You build authentic relationships in person, not over Zoom.
And as much as granola 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 dues after the meeting and all that.
And you're like, yeah, that's, that's taken care of.
I can just focus 150 of my energy on on vibing with the person that I'm 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 maximize that magic, the humanness, and that's going to be amazing.
So I want to switch focus to storytelling because I really 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 startup's story is so important.
Jeffrey, what role does storytelling play 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 a, you know, a company can succeed.
I don't think an entrepreneur can succeed without storytelling.
And the greatest and most successful ones is It's not an accident.
When Jensen Wong started Nvidia, you know, it was a little graphics for, you know, gaming.
And he was an amazing salesman then.
You know when you think about what you have to do.
He had to like convince people to come work with him.
He 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 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 until 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 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 bringing that story to life.
So I want to 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 Kimball?
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.
Now already it's like, okay.
Now I'm picturing, yeah.
You try to figure out, okay, well, what were you dressed up in?
And what outfit were you wearing?
And, you know, where were you sleeping?
And who were you sleeping with?
And all of those things.
All right.
Right.
So it's just like your mind goes, I don't want the answers.
I don't want the answers.
But my point is, how did I get your attention?
How did I get your attention to think about and imagine what Kimball was doing?
So I'm able to give you a journey.
Coming up.
I ask Jeffrey and Chen Li 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.
This is Emily Worden Capital One business customer and owner of Emily Worden Designs, a bespoke, fine jewelry store that quickly gained buzz after opening its doors in Richmond Virginia.
My customer base grew exponentially once we had a storefront.
We had one engagement ring case at the time, and we had lines out the door every weekend.
As her storefront continued to have record sales, Emily knew it was time to up-level production.
We normally just purchase diamonds in very small batches or per order.
So we wanted to invest in not just one or two pieces, but a collection of natural diamonds.
Emily knew creating a collection would be a big investment but with the help of her Capital One business card, she was ready to bet on herself and bet big.
It was about $40,000, $45,000 all in up front.
Having the Capital One card was definitely reassuring to be able to make such a large investment purchase.
And of course, to get the cash back that came with it.
To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards.
So, Chen Li, you are invested in a company called Creatify, 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.
Before, there's obviously been platforms that help you.
Well, ChatGPT is pretty good at writing for you.
But really the next frontier is for many emerging brands.
How do you tell the story on social platforms?
That's where the audience is now at.
To me, it's still a creator tool.
That core spark and idea and authenticity is still going to have to come from a company, a person.
And what Creatify is.
As Steve Jobs would say, it's the bicycle that lets you go from zero to 60, at least zero to 20, 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 30 second ad?
How does Creatify kind of encapsulate that kind of like emotionality in the content?
So this is what's also really amazing about large language and large vision models is there has been many incredible ads that's been created through the generations.
Both brands who spent millions of dollars, but also more grassroots.
You know the Dollar Shave Club ad that kicked off that right.
And what you can do is actually there's public directories of the ads that have done well or that are shown a lot.
These are the transparency efforts that Meta and other have done.
You can 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 as almost like the conceptual framework or outline under the hood And for a particular company, using Creatify, what they can do is they can extract out what are the narrative points but then map it against this outline to give you a better shot at making something that almost gives you a little structure out of the gate that makes for a more emerging story arc ad.
And when I look at that at its core essence, you might just squint to see it, but the magic of granola is actually the same thing 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.
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.
You'll see, this pattern I'm sure emerge across other companies and products.
So 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?
These are very different worlds.
So I think what's happening in one doesn't necessarily translate to the other.
But you know, Hollywood is going to be, I think, aided and advantaged.
In what are these remarkable tool sets?
I know there's a lot of anxiety about, you know, replacing everybody, whether it's a writer or an actor.
Movies were around for 30 years and then TV happened and everybody thought well, that's the end of movies.
It was not.
Movies continue to become, you know, hugely popular globally.
And then YouTube comes along and you know, with all the great stuff that's on YouTube and TikTok today, TV there's never been more television watch than there is right now today, 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.
You know, these are customer first businesses, I think is where most of the disruption is going on.
And again 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 Oppenheimer or Barbie, there's an appetite for that out-of-home experience.
And to me...
I look at again to sort of you know 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 50 years, right?
The box hasn't changed.
The seatings are a little plusher.
The concession stands are the same candy that has been there for 50 years.
It's like okay well, look at sports, what sports has done 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 seating, the sightlines, 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 Li about Wonderco'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 Shen Li take it.
So the problem is massive and it's literally out of control.
There's two things around consumer.
We look at it as consumer cyber security and safety.
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 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 it's like the amount of stuff that is thrown at all of us has become overwhelming.
And what Aura set out to do was to sort of bring together one solution and 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 Li, 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 10 of them.
And that costs you $150 a month.
And you went, oh my God, that was the big idea.
That was the white space that you know.
Our partner Sujay, looked at you know 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.
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 cybersecurity and cyber safety for your customers?
Okay, well, it's two different things.
So let's just stick with security.
Then you can pivot over to safety because safety is a completely different lane.
But by the way, all in one for us, Aura is meant to be 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 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 companies.
Obviously the big catalyst for the stats from Jeffrey earlier for why digital crime has risen much faster than burglaries is security.
The internet is frictionless and cheap.
It's easier to commit crime online and more lucrative now.
This is going to get accelerated with AI.
Initially currently the companies, especially whether you're a bank or 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 attacked with these next generation tech, whether it's AI-driven network, pen testing and other things which are frankly terrifying.
Right.
What I see and engage with there with founders really gives me a glimpse into the horrifying future of what could be.
But thankfully there are many founders building tools, often in sandboxes, seeing what's the worst that LMs can do, to then understand what are the ways you would mitigate that.
And then we will take those defenses to consumer.
But 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.
You know that if we have an Oracle Assistant product that by default if it's a number that comes from a number in your address book, they'll let it through.
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... you know, something else.
And most of these robocallers are not smart enough yet.
This is obviously an arms race to get through that.
And so everybody around us.
We've installed it and we've stopped getting robocalls, which was such a bane of our existence.
You know five, six years ago.
I want to talk about health 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, WonderHealth.
Wonder Health is our newest build, so 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 uh Shenley 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 uh solutions and so many different ways to sort of come at longevity.
How do you live longer, better, right?
How do you extend that healthiness to, it's not about lifespan, it's about health span.
So when we went and looked at the universe out there, I would say 95 of what we saw was snake oil salesmen.
It's not science-based.
And then there's 5.
That is actually some really super smart people, very talented people, some of which we admire, a couple of which we actually made some investments in to support them in their business.
But The idea that we looked at and saw is that there really wasn't a enterprise that was driven singularly by state-of-the-art research and scientific, deep scientific research and outcome out of it.
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 34 categories.
So we went out and we've actually found 70 of them who we invited to join up and be associated with this wonder health lab.
And the first thing we said to them is what is the state-of-the-art testing and 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, 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 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 100 guinea pigs and we would then share the data of these 100 guinea pigs with this entire research scientific community.
And they never got to see one another.
So they only had their lane.
And so the idea that they actually could get insights, because whatever you do with your sleep actually is going to impact everything else, right?
But they were in their little silos there and they didn't get to see all the metrics.
So 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 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 productize and make available to millions, if not tens of millions of people.
And that's the ultimate goal here is is it's a discovery platform for what we hope can be real breakthrough innovation around longevity.
I'll ask you my final question, and it's a question I ask of all my guests.
Shen Li, I'm going to 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 you can have a derivative of that, but you cannot replace that with AI.
So ultimately, I think that storytelling is what is eventually still very authentic and personal about humans.
It's to 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 is a creative soul.
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 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 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.
And it's a philosophy that I will take with me.
My conversation with Jeffrey and Chen Li 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.
Before you go, please leave us a review and rating wherever you're listening to us.
It helps more people find the show.
Thank you.
Pioneers of AI is a WaitWhat original.
Our executive producer is Eve Trow.
Our producer is Rachel Ishikawa.
And our associate producer is Jordan Smart.
Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern.
Mixing and mastering by Brian Pugh.
Original music by Brian Holliday.
And our head of podcasts is Lital Mulad.
You can join the conversation on LinkedIn Instagram TikTok, YouTube and X.
Just search for at pioneers of AI.
Thanks so much for listening.
