Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good Company is a production of iHeartRadio. The two qualities
that you actually have to have to be a successful investor,
which are quite similar to the two qualities that you
have to have to be a studio executive. One, you
actually have to be able to believe in somebody's dream.
You actually have to in your imagination and your own mind.
(00:23):
You have to be able to see what they see.
Now here's the other side of it. You have to
be fairly skeptical and cynical because most dreams don't come true.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
I'm Michael Cassen, and this is Good Company. Together we'll
explore the dynamic intersection of media, marketing, entertainment, sports, and technology.
I'll be joined by visionaries, pioneers, and yes, even a
couple of disruptors or candid conversations as we break down
how these masters of ingenuity are shaping the future of business,
culture and everything in between. My bet is you'll pick
(01:02):
up a lesson or two along the way. As I
like to say, it's all good. If you want to
understand the future of marketing, technology and entertainment, you have
to listen to the people who are shaping it. And
today we've got two trailblazers who are doing just that.
One is a Hollywood legend who's defined entire areas of
(01:24):
storytelling Jeffrey Katzenberg. The other is a savvy investor and
strategist driving innovation at the intersection of content and technology,
Justin Wexler. At a time when AI is redefining how
we create and measure content, these two are at the forefront,
turning what many see as disruptive threats into powerful tools
(01:45):
that amplify human creativity. As trusted partners for marketers, they
are now setting their sites on helping them prove the
real time value of brand storytelling and bridging the gap
between art and analytics. So what does the future hold
and how of brands, platforms and creators stay ahead of
it in a world where attention is the most valuable currency.
(02:06):
Let's get into it. Jeffrey, thank you for joining me
today on Good Company. Jeffrey, as somebody who has really
been at the forefront and I would say defined Hollywood
for decades, what's the single most exciting way that you
see AI transforming the art of storytelling and media creation today? Again,
(02:29):
something that you've watched over this arc.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Well, great question, Michael thanks for having us. I think
there are many lanes to dive into there. I think
the most obvious one actually is in creating content and
what are the implications and applications that are here and coming,
(02:53):
and I'm quite excited about them. I think that they
are going to continue to democratize great storytelling. It's going
to not narrow the many, many, many different types of
stories and storytelling, but open it up to a whole
(03:14):
new generation of storytellers, not unlike what YouTube did when
it came along, and which it didn't diminish existing And
you can actually look at that through the evolution of
media in general, which is whether it's radio, television, movies,
these things one didn't displace the other. Actually we're sort
(03:35):
of expansions of that, and so I'm really excited about
the new tools for filmmakers. I do believe that AI
is not going to replace humans, but to borrow a
line I may have actually even heard from you, which is,
people who understand and can use the tools of AI
(03:57):
are going to replace people who don't.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Absolutely, and Jeffery, one of the things that you hear
from the critics and the pundits is that AI might
undermine that human touch in storytelling that jenase Quah.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
I don't agree. I actually I think that's a fear,
not a fact. As you know, I'm a dinosaur here,
been around for many, many, many decades, and I look
at the application of other technologies as they have come along.
Maybe the greatest of my career was a CGI animation
(04:33):
replacing hand drawn animation, which had had a sixty seventy
year incredible story past. And when CGI came along, it
didn't change creativity, it actually expanded it. And I am
an optimist and that I believe that will be the
case again. I do know, by the way, everybody that
was in the traditional animation business at the time thought
(04:54):
that they were toast, and they weren't. They relearned, they trained,
they apted. Maybe some you know, hand painting went away.
Other than that didn't change the challenge and need of
artistic expression.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
If we could be an agreement that AI is not
a replacement for creativity, but rather, as you say, a
tool to amplify it, could you share an example of
something you've seen where AI has already helped a creator
expand or diversify or create better quality. I mean, is
there one you can point to that you've seen.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
I mean again, we're at the beginnings of this. You know,
this is like, you know, we're looking at a two
year old toddler and trying to project, you know, what
are they going to look like when they're a college
graduate in twenty years or twenty five years. So I
think it's a little bit over the horizon, around the corners.
(05:51):
But every day we actually see things that are interesting
and fun. I saw a teeny little video the other
day of all of the characters from the Star Wars
that were like baby versions of them.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
I wonder what job of the Hut look like then?
Speaker 1 (06:09):
And then there was another one justin do you remember
what was There was another one that was babies from
the TV show Sopranos. Literally, if you go on and
you've seen this as like a little TikTok video of
all of the characters imagined as like two year old.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
I can't imagine Candle as a two year old.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
No, well you'll see it. It's beyond charming now. So
you know, I just saw that and honestly, it just
made me so happy and I just laughed at it.
And so, you know, that's just a little snippet of
something that you know, I saw the other day. And
but the answer is every day there are things that
just come across us that show the promise of it.
(06:48):
We're on the journey. We haven't arrived anywhere yet.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
But you're on the journey, and you know, I think
you're in the front car. You know, I have to
say that, Jeffrey, from everything I've seen justin with data
challenges at the forefront of generative AI. Okay, what ethical
guardrails do you think should be in place to ensure
that AI supports the creative innovation we've just been talking about,
(07:14):
but while remaining transparent and accountable. So people's bullshit detectors
are pretty high these days. How do we know? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (07:21):
So, and thank you for having me with you and Jeffrey,
it's quite the honor. So we look at generative application
both in the creative landscape as well as for business.
I would say on the creative side, sourcing and giving
credit to the creators that ended up in the models, right,
(07:42):
that content, that work that might show up in an
output that was generated with AI is very very important
going forward for studios, for marketers, and giving proper credit.
So we you know, one reason why we haven't made
any major investment in that category. In the startup ecosystem
is that we're seeing great outputs. But you know, the
(08:03):
last thing you want to do is get involved with
something that ends up getting in a lawsuit with one
of the major studios for you know, content showing up
in an output.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
But it's even more than a lawsuits. It's ethical. You know.
I saw this little piece. It is clearly a Sopranos derivative,
and that IP owner and that talent must be fairly
compensated for that.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
As much as I'm charmed by it, I'm also very
very very aware and cognizant if somebody spent a lifetime
making content of just saying, well, anybody can take it
and do what they want with it. I'm not in favor.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
I agree with you and justin I think you were
going down the road. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
And then on the business side or organizations that are
leveraging generally I both for internal use cases and to
interact with their consumers, there is an ethical component as well, right,
So you know, whether it's some of the major airlines
in the world or others that are now going to
be using genera AI, you have to have proper guardrails
in place when you're going to be interacting with your
(09:09):
customers leveraging this technology, and so there is a lot
of ethical concerns, particularly as a lot of our favorite
consumer brands do interact with children as well, So that
has to be one of the most top of mind
considerations when launching GENERATEI when you're a B to B company.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
So justin let's talk about this from the view of Wonderco.
You've recently become a partner at Wenderco and have been
working with Jeffrey and the team for several years already,
but kind of as a strategic force behind the shift
that I think you guys made that is perceptible to
me from marketing tech to AI driven innovation. How do
(09:46):
you identify what's the list of checks you have to
make in terms of emerging technologies when you look at
those that have the most potential for disruption in traditional
media and marketing. So what's the checklist you go through?
Speaker 3 (10:02):
So it's interesting that you described it in that way.
I think some of our earlier investments in AI marketing
is a great ends customer for them to get started.
Marketers are always looking for an edge they're open to
create creative ideas and concepts. Compared to other parts of
the organization, they're a little bit more open to risk
quote unquote, you know, compared to finance. So they're willing
(10:24):
to try new things. And the power of AI is
quite you know, innovative and revolutionary. And so whether that's
writer that started out in the marketing world, that's an
investment of ours for creating content, ad copy, blog posts,
pr statements. They've now gone well beyond that. They're working
with some of the largest financial institutions on even summarizing
(10:45):
financial advisor reports or working in the healthcare industry. But
it all started with marketing. We have another investment, Alembic,
that is a little bit earlier stage right now, is
purely kind of focused on marketing and proving the brand marketing,
and we'll go more into that, but they also so
have aspirations to go well beyond that. So I think
our portfolio is going to look quite different in the
(11:05):
coming years as the investments we make, some of which
have marketing as an end market expand themselves. So it's
just the nature of marketers that they are one of
the most open parts of organizations when it comes to innovation.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
So putting your respective investment committee hats on when you're
looking at investing in disruptive tech. And you know, I'm
sure you've seen this. One of my friends at a
large brand use to describe when somebody would come in
to pitch them an idea. They'd say, we're in And
of course we're in an audio mode here, so people
can't see this, but the handwaving mode. Wait, this is
(11:39):
going to be really big. You see that all the
time when people are pitching you on new concepts or
disruptive tech. What's your risk tolerance? Yeah, as investors, how
do you kind of measure that risk tolerance in terms
of what might trigger you to decline an investment?
Speaker 3 (11:55):
No, exactly. So we have two dedicated funds. We have
a seed funds that meeting you know, founders at the
earliest stages. They might not have proven product market fit
quite yet, but the concepts and the team could just
be so extraordinary that we want to get involved in
some way.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
So be precise. That's the hand waving part.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Those are sort of five hundred to million a million
and a half dollar investments, and it is driven first
and foremost by the founders themselves. You find people who
are exceptional people, you know, high drive, passion, determination, perseverance.
(12:36):
It's character and the passion around their idea. But you're
betting first and foremost on.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
The person absolutely, and then the other side of that justin.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Our main efforts are are flagship fund if you will,
you know, in our diligence, we make sure that they've
gotten Now it's from zero to one, which you know
Jeffrey describes all the time is quite impossible, and getting
one to ten is probable. But in our diligence, whether
it was with Writer, we spoke to the Hilton team,
we spoke to Loreal they already had some group of concepts,
(13:08):
and you know other companies as well, like our investment
in Alembic. We spoke to Nvidia, we have another investment
orby that already had Google as a customer. And so
that's what we look for in our risk tolerance is
you've been able to prove it now at at least
a couple of major brands and organizations, and we want
to be fuel to that fire to help you scale,
you know, all across enterprise and beyond. And so we're
(13:30):
not going to make a major investment in something that
has yet to prove it anywhere. So that's where our
risk tolerance comes in.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
Good company will be right back after the break.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Many of these investments, whichever side of those two fun
kind of perspective you've put out there, it gets competitive.
I mean, some of these are deals that you have
got people competing with you to participate in. I'd like
to believe Wonderco has a very early warning system, so
you probably see things maybe an advance of others because
of the reputation that you've created in the marketplace. But
(14:17):
a lot of it has to do with the trust
that you've developed over the years, Jeffrey particularly, but justin
really over the few years that we've known each other,
I've watched how you've built credibility with the marketers. And
so somebody that is going to take an investment from
Wonderco is getting more than money. Obviously, they're getting the
opportunity to leverage the trusted relationships that you guys have
(14:40):
with the marketplace. And you know, Jeffrey, I think back
to many many moons ago when you created one of
the more inventive and I'd say you created, but you
certainly were part of with HP back in the day
when you did a massive campaign with HP about how
the tools that HP were delivering. If I'm call me
off on this, but I know that that was as
(15:01):
much coming from you, my belief, as it was from
HP's advertising agency, because you saw the marriage of technology
and content so early. And that gives me the ability
to say what I say, which is you've got a
lot of fricking credibility with marketers. That helps. I'm guessing
as you're in these conversations.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Well, it's everything, Michael, I mean it is. You know,
it starts with thirty or forty years of dealing with
you know, these fortune hundred, Fortune five hundred companies that
I've had so many encounters with over the years, and
you know, I've always looked at them as partnerships. And
my ambition in every single partnership that I've ever had,
(15:43):
it's two very simple words. Exceed expectations. So matter what
the deal is that we made, you know, whether it
was with a fast food company or with an airline
or whoever the promotion or tie ins were, whatever the
piece of paper was, I wanted to exceed those expectations,
meaning flee and with that came credibility. I would say today,
(16:06):
you know, we are very very careful about our brand
and our reputation for our portfolio companies. We don't have
a ton of them, but we actually roll up our
sleeves and get in there. As you know, we make
sales calls. I will get on Justin, will get on
with the CMO, with the CEO and actually talk about
(16:29):
pitch with the founder of a company to tell them about,
you know, what we have to do. So one, we're
very careful and very precise in making sure that what
we're bringing to somebody is a high high likelihood of
a need and a value for them. And when we
(16:50):
come in, we're doing it with our reputation behind this
of just saying listen, we've tested this, we know that
it delivers on what we are telling you. And frankly,
I don't think there's a single time where we have
actually brought a company or product, you know, to a
customer and had somebody say it didn't do what you
told us it would do. I don't think once in
(17:12):
eight years.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Listen, Jeffrey, that goes a long way to underscore what
I'm about to say. You know, one is known by
the company they keep. And the truth is, not many
people can say what you've just said with the authority.
You've said it because it's true. You know. I know that,
because I'll let our listeners in on a little secret.
I've been watching you because I'm ten days older, so
(17:34):
I've got ten days more of visibility to know.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
I thought you were going to say ten days more
of wisdom.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Oh no, I said ten days older. I wasn't going
to compete. This is all my mother's fault. What can
I tell you? But but seriously, the idea and you
talked about your early view. I remember when you were
making the Olympic investment. You called me, I think more
than a year ago, early on considering it, doing that
(18:01):
marketplace testing if you will, because I know your patience.
And I'll let our listeners in on another little anecdote.
There's lots of things that Jeffrey Katzenberg is long on,
but patience isn't one of them. So not your long suit, Jeffrey,
in case you didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
So I'm shocked to hear that, Michael. Honestly, I've never
heard it. Nobody's ever said that before you first.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
But seriously, You've mentioned a couple of brands that've had
some good experiences here, Delta Loreal. People like that the
success brings a lot of friends. And what we've watched
is these announcements of things that don't really mean anything.
That's not the way you guys roll.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
But ours is a very selective process. I mean again,
we're not you know, we look to do five, six,
maybe seven of these investments in a year, each one
of which comes with the promise of not just the capital,
financial capital, but the personal capital of us to actually
(19:06):
help these founders build you know, the next generation, you know,
of world changing businesses. We always like to say that
we're not in this for singles and doubles. We are
home run hitters. We don't bat a thousand, but home
run hitters don't, so we don't do a lot. But
when we do it, we roll up our sleeves. We
(19:27):
literally have described ourselves to our founder partners that they
should treat the Wonder Co partners as extensions of their
c suite. We are there to work with them, for
them on their behalf, to help them realize their dreams.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
You know.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
The great thing is so fascinating to me, the two
qualities that you actually have to have to be a
successful investor, which are quite similar to the two qualities
that you have to have to be a studio executive. One,
you actually have to be able to believe in somebody's dream.
You have to see their dream. You actually have to
(20:05):
be able to imagine their dream. They come in and
they tell you this idea, this is the big this
is the story I want to tell, this is the
movie I want to make, or the TV show or
the Broadway show or the animated show. And when someone
says that to you, you actually have to in your
imagination and your own mind, you have to be able
to see what they see. Now here's the other side
(20:29):
of it. You have to be fairly skeptical and cynical
because most dreams don't come true. And so that complete
contradiction of those two personality traits are absolutely essential to
being a great investor and to I think being a
studio executive. In this our other partners, su Jay Jaswap
(20:50):
he has those qualities, you know, squared or by a
factor of one hundred more than me. I mean, he
is brilliant at being able. It's actually fun because we
laugh about how even his process of how he processes.
You know, he loves it today, he hates it, Tomorrow
he loves it. The next day he hates it. He said,
(21:11):
you know, I love you, I hate you. I love you,
I hate you in this And he always gets to
the right place in the end. But you have to
have those qualities in that conflict in you.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Guys. You made a pretty big announcement at the Nvidia
GtC in March. Is that something you can talk about
and shed a little light on. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Absolutely, justin go for it to your your your baby.
He either gets the credit or the blame one way
or another.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
This one's all him exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
I will just tell you when he told me the
idea for this, I justin, what is the line I
said to you?
Speaker 3 (21:44):
Hey, you said, hey, you know, Dembo doesn't fly. I'm like, well,
this one does. I think this one's going to fly
pretty far. So Alembic is a platform. I say it's
to friends, They're like, who's Dumbo? So that works?
Speaker 2 (22:02):
That's funnier. That's even funnier.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
So Alembic is a platform that takes a breakthrough in
statistics from the pandemic. You know a lot of people
have followed the medicine and medical breakthroughs and mr ANDA
and vaccines, but there was another breakthrough in statistics, taking
huge data sets. In that case it was from healthcare
and from hospitals and then being able to extrapolate future outcomes.
And we all remember headlines around infection rates spreading in
(22:28):
LA and Chicago and York elsewhere. And so this company
took that breakthrough and applied it to marketing, because marketing
also spreads. Like a virus, you get exposed to it
and there's an ab outcome you get sick or you don't,
or in this case, you know, you buy a flight,
a delta flight, or you don't. So mathematically there's a
lot of similarities, and so this team took that. They
built the initial platform for Alembic. They raised a seed
(22:52):
round of financing. Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia,
actually read up about it at the time and reached
out to the founder and said, I'd like to be
your first customer. So and Video applied this about a
year and a half ago to look at everything they
do from TV, radio, social, podcast digital both paid so
(23:12):
marketing efforts that they do but also earns when Jensen
goes up on stage at an events where it gives
a commencement speech, it's covered on TV or elsewhere, and
then they could show the causality of all that activity
down funnel to whether it's going on the video website
and downloading a white paper, watching an online webinar, all
the way down to a sale of their h one hundreds.
(23:33):
And so when we first heard about this company, I
spoke to the Nvidia team, spoke to a couple of
their other early customers, and thought, man, this is really interesting.
Can this be applied to some of the even larger
brand marketers in the world. And so we spoke to
folks at PNG and at Unilever and many others, and
while they have very talented scientists and you know, analytics experts,
(23:56):
this was still something that was going to be pretty
game changing for or even the largest of brands. And
so with that would build the conviction to make a
pretty major investment in Alembic. Since then, they've won a
number of really big clients, including Delta. Alicia Tillman, when
we met with her actually through your connection, described to
us the upcoming Harris Olympics and how they had no
(24:18):
real way to measure all those brand efforts, especially in
real time, because right after the Olympics ends, she has
to go to her CFO and her CEO and make
the request for twenty twenty eight Olympics. The tools that
they had at best showed you know, Nielsen ratings or
you know, some other higher level metrics on viewership, but
not at all how it ties into sales stream business.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
It's using that old eighties ninety model that you know
is what everybody used today. And remember this is completely differentiated,
you know, from programmatic, predictive marketing, spends here, performance marketing.
All of that has gone through stordinary innovation in the
(25:01):
last decade, but brand is still a black box, absolutely,
And you know, putting a name on a stadium or
an F one race car, or sponsoring a golf tournament.
There's a trillion dollars a year spent on brand marketing globally.
And you know that old saying, Michael, I think you've
probably said it to me too many times. I'm one
(25:21):
hundred percent confidence the fifty percent of my brand marketing works.
I only wish I knew which fifty percent.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
It's the holy grail obviously, because attribution is the biggest
challenge that that marketers have today in terms of exactly
that I don't know what the value of that logo
on you know, we did analysis years ago in a
rudimentary fashion of trying to say to a very very
large marketer, one of the five most valuable companies on
(25:47):
the planet Earth, actually, what's the value of them sponsoring
a concert? And it was okay, what's the value of
the hat and the T shirt and the logo and
this and the that nobody knew exactly the promise of
being able to answer that question, which you know, having
gone under the hood of a lumpit is what's so
exciting about it particularly but keep going justice.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
So it's leveraging you know, the pandemic breakthrough, it's leveraging
some of the most cutting edge generatively I and beyond that,
you know, causal AI technology, and it also incorporates it
just takes a massive amount of compute to do at scale.
Delta has tens of billions of rows of data every
second in a time series of you know, every time
(26:27):
they're showing up on TV, their their logo, whatever it
may be. And so Nvidia, in partnership with Alembic, have
kind of given the resources to do this at scale.
They've given one of the fastest two hundred supercomputers in
the world run on their top of the line h
one hundreds, and so why they featured Alembic is of
course their customer themselves, but they're also a really powerful
(26:49):
tech partner, and Alicia wanted to share this.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
But just to make the point here, this is a
both a science and a tech that was not available
two years ago. So you have a group of engineers
who came at this as an innovative application of a
new science. But equally important was the fact that, you know,
(27:13):
compute power is literally growing by a factor every year
the last two years, and Jensen stood on stage two
days three days ago and said it's going to grow
by a factor again in the next year. And so
it's the ability to actually ingest unimaginable amounts of data.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Yeah, the one thing about Jensen that that I've started
to identify is I know why he's got the time
to think of all these crazy things because he doesn't
have to think about what to wear. He's always looking
great in his black leather jacket, his black shirt. So
one thing he doesn't have to decide every day is
what he's going to wear.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
But he's pretty, he's pretty brilliant. And I have to say,
you know, listening to him for two and a half hours,
I could have listened to him for another two and
a half hours. As I said, I only understood half
of it, but even half of it was interesting enough
and inspiring enough. We believe we have a tiger by
the tail on Olympic. We have enough proof of concepts
here with brands and we you know, this is one
(28:13):
of those things. It literally changes the world if you
can create right now, the opaqueness between a buyer and
a seller on brand is extraordinary, Jeffrey.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
One of the things that's special here particularly and justin
this is a gift that we both get from being
in the environment with Jeffrey, is when you're in these
kinds of conversations, not only did you guys earn the credibility,
but you get to look at it through the lens
of having been a marketer, because you know, people shouldn't
(28:46):
confuse the fact that because you ran studios, Jeffrey, you
were also a marketer. You had to market the the market,
the movies. I mean, let's be honest, everything.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
No, by the way that's always been and still to
this day, is is that you know, it is important
to know how you're going to communicate to your customer,
your consumer, and whether it's in a movie theater or
on a streaming platform or on a broadcast network, you
know you've got to be able to sell it. And
the thing that's just really exciting to me is is
(29:16):
that if you can actually bridge that gap now for
brand marketers, I think the value proposition for everybody is
improved by this. This doesn't displace anything, it just actually enhances.
The seller is going to get recognized for the value
that they are now delivering to the buyer, and the
(29:36):
buyer is going to have transparency to the value that
they are investing their money in.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Here's the most important word that I hear from marketers,
and you've done a lot to help this word finally
be answered, or this question the idea of the return
on investment and the ability to be able to identify
where do you answer that you make the day. We're
(30:02):
going to hit pause for a moment, but stay with
us after the break. We've got more insights to share it.
This question may have already been answered and I think
it has in this conversation. But I'll ask to ask.
(30:23):
I'll ask of that maybe well, but maybe you'll tell
me I'm wrong. If you had to bet on one
thing that will define marketing in the next cycle, is
there something you would say that sticks out? And it
may be what we're talking about here, but there is there.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
We have, Michael. I mean again, I this is Dumbo
flying is the unimaginable in it. It's such a big idea. Honestly,
I told you when Justin came to me, I said, Justin, please,
you know you're being solid a bill of goods here
in this, buddy, this is just this is just not possible.
And he said, no, you got to come take a look,
(31:03):
because I think it is. And so I can't think
of a bigger positive impact on marketing than.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
This than this. I stand corrected, and I think you
answered the question. Guys, I get to switch to my
favorite part of good Company, and that's the lightning round.
So I've decided, since I have the pleasure of having
two of you, I'm going to ask each of you
an alternative question or two in the lightning round. Jeffrey,
if you had to give your younger self a piece
(31:33):
of advice. Do you know what it would be?
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Oh, for sure, a little patience, not a lot, not
a lot, but just.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
This nitge justin. Is there an industry buzzword that you
wish would disappear forever and you never had to hear
it again?
Speaker 3 (31:54):
You know, people talk about agentic and generitive, but I
love to hear it. We're at the forefront of that
right now, and we're actually seeing it get deployed at
these organizations. That's been the really exciting thing. You know,
while we've been investors in some of these companies for
a few years now, the rate of adoption has really increased,
even this year. You know, we're three months in. So no,
(32:15):
I don't I don't get bored of hearing those terms
at all.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Jeffrey, is there an opportunity that you passed on over
the years that you still kick yourself and say what if? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (32:28):
When we first started WONDERCOA, so this is now about
eight years or so ago, the Music League team came
in and pitched us on buying their business, and.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
I think that became TikTok.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Yes it did, and we stumbled around and I think
at the time maybe it was about a two hundred
million dollar evaluation, maybe three. The goodness is, we saw
something great there. We obviously had no idea what it
was going to turn into. But you know that, listen,
that's the dream, you know, when you're an investor, you're
looking for. You know, this week's headline is Whiz and
(33:06):
here's a company that you know, we have friends that
were early, early investors in that and they've literally gotten
five hundred times or a thousand times their initial investment.
Al You know, those things come along, you know, maybe
a handful of times in a decade, but musically was
(33:27):
probably one of our one of my misses.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Well, you know, but what you can't do as investors,
you know this is and there was an expression that
used to run around town in the in the dot
com dot com about schmuck insurance. And you know, you
watch those things, you go, I got to make the
bets here because I want to buy that schmuck insurance.
But that's dangerous as an investor, obviously, No, but it's.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Also been in our business, I you know, and you know,
because I got to ask that question all the time
in the movie business. And you know, my thing has
always been and it is true in in both in
the investing side and was on the media side. You're
judge for what you do do, not for what you
don't do.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Amen, justin I can't ask you about your younger self
because you're a pretty young guy. Is there a personal
triumph that you hold close to your heart other than
becoming partners with Jeffrey and Suj.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Yeah, that's pretty big. But you know, I started out,
I was a couple of years into my investment career
before I met Jeffrey and Souj and learned phenomenal amount
about finding investments and doing diligence on them. But you know,
you talk about the triumph I would say over the
last couple of years working with Jeffrey to actually get
these companies game changing partnerships or lighthouse customers. Now you're
(34:43):
not just betting on companies, you're actively helping to build them.
And you know, boy, when you see some of these
companies have success and you can say you played a
role besides only identifying them, even as hard as that is,
and getting those deals done, but actually, you know, helping
them build to their next milestone, that is really satisfying
as an investor.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Jeffrey Katzenberg and Justin Wexler. This has been a pleasure
for me. I know our listeners will have a great
time learning and takeaways will be strong. I want to
thank you both for joining me on Good Company today
and looking forward to the next time we get to chat.
Sounds like a plan. We'll be here. I'm Michael Cassen.
(35:25):
Thanks for listening to Good Company.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Good Company is brought to you by Three C Ventures
in iHeart Podcasts. Special thanks to Alexis Borger Purdeo, our
executive producer and head of Content and Talent, and to
Carl Catle, executive producer at iHeart Podcasts. Episodes are produced
and edited by Mary Doo.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
We'll see you next time.