Up today live from CES in Las Vegas, we are thrilled to welcome Jeffrey Katzenberg and Justin Wexler from WndrCo. Jeffrey along with David Geffen and Steven Spielberg co-founded DreamWorks all the way back in 1994 and he's remained with the business through to 2017 where he left his role as CEO of DreamWorks and now he's a founder, managing director at WndrCo alongside his principal Justin Wexler, a business major with 10 years working as an investor for high-profile clients. Jeffrey, Justin, so great to see you guys today.
Thanks for having us. Nice and early in the morning.
Absolutely. So, pretty exciting. So, why did the two of you prioritize coming to CES this year?
Well, I have to start with I've been coming to CES for decades. I mean, literally decades. I don't even want to think about my first CES, but it's many.
It was still when the adult show was connected to it, right?
Well, there was an adult section. Yes. Actually, it was connected with the adult show. That is why that literally was like where it's... I don't remember whether that was...
I know there was a connection to it.
There was the another side of the convention center. Yeah.
Which I happily never saw.
Right. Right. Right. But it's many many many decades. CES has always been a great gathering spot and an opportunity to see sort of amazing great innovations both mainstream in terms of consumer electronics and how that was evolving and you always look forward to seeing what's the next big TV, what's the next great device, communications device. And so if you think about the 30 plus years that I have been coming to CES, how the world has changed, it's an amazing lens to look at. But what's happened in I would say certainly the last decade is that it blossomed into something that was much broader. And it became basically the sort of nucleus of bringing people together of related areas of which advertisers, CMOs, marketers became an essential ingredient and that's where we are today. And so it's why you're here.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean you have digital technology, you have entertainment, you have commerce. You know, you have the CPG and the big brands are all kind of colliding and there's just so much overlap in marketing and media today. You know, you have companies like Chase that are selling advertising, right? So you have banks selling advertising and then you have retail companies like Target, Walmart selling advertising. So it's not as linear as it used to be in terms of what defines a business.
Right. So for us it just becomes, as I said, just sort of the center of gravity of which in a few days, you can just literally... we've been every day starting at, you know, 6:30, 7 a.m. since Monday morning and over the course of 3 days, really just touch base with a ton of people. It's the beginning of the year, people are setting up their agendas and so it's been incredibly valuable for us and we're on day three.
Very cool. So Justin, you spend a lot of your time talking to emerging startups in AI, in enterprise, etc. Over the last year, what are some of the trends you've seen with some of the more successful companies either in your portfolio at WndrCo or just people that you've been talking to that you're excited about here in 2025?
Yeah, no, I appreciate it. So for us our lane at WndrCo is really to find really high quality technology that can serve the enterprise and serve the needs and desires and roadmaps of some of the largest brands in the world and that's a big reason why we're here at CES because many of those individuals... yesterday we were at the Delta Sphere, their keynote and we do a lot of business with them on their AI initiatives. So really great to be here for that. Over the years we've invested in software companies. We're super proud of Figma and Airtable and Webflow. Many of those serve the marketing community. Over the last three or four or so years we've invested in products now that are leveraging large language models and generative AI in different lanes particularly marketing but other areas as well. Two that we just want to highlight. One's called Writer. And that founder is here actually right after this. We're going to get breakfast and Jeffrey and May the founder are going to speak at that. Phenomenal platform that leverages a full stack from their own large language models that are really great for content creation, PR, blog post, all those use cases all the way through to software on top to make it easy for teams to actually get going within the organization.
Yeah, I've tried it before. It's a great tool.
Yeah. And had extraordinary acceleration in this last 12 months because a lot of people have technology but doesn't even know they know how to go to market the right way.
The way we frame it at WndrCo is that we think of this as the future of work and at work, how do we... and both at work but also at home. How do you empower people to be able to be, you know, more productive, to be better informed, and just giving them tools to be the best version of whether it's at work or at home. And doing it. Writer is a phenomenal tool. Very strong deployment in the CMO advertising lane and so exciting to see May build that virtually and almost overnight into now a multi-billion dollar company.
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting being an investor in AI because it's moving so fast and now there are tools out there that allow a one-person team to code on their own. And the question becomes like as somebody who runs a late-stage venture-funded software company, this what keeps me up at night is what's to stop somebody who understands AI just to build their own tool. What used to cost maybe $50 million in R&D now doesn't anymore. And I think since the barrier to entry for a technology company in a lot of ways is no longer technology, it becomes risky with a lot of upside in investing in AI companies and we're seeing a big bubble obviously right now.
So there's this concept around citizen developer where even business users within enterprise can now build their own tools to leverage that are personalized to them. Yeah. And we have another investment, Airtable, that's really core to their thesis but even Writer, they have AI Studio, you can build full-fledged AI applications as a marketer, you don't need developer resources. With Webflow you can design, go straight from design to code without needing developers. So I think the developer's role within organizations will continue to evolve and seek out technologies that then the business team could use on their own without having to ask for as much engineering resources.
Right. Which is just a massive change.
Yes. And when you have that you can have real personalization of tooling at scale within these organizations. The other big aspect of that is procurement takes so long. We see particularly the last three or so years the innovation from Silicon Valley and early stage companies is unlike that we've ever seen since WndrCo started. Getting through procurement and legal and security takes a while and so you could have a 9-month lag time of innovation that could help and impact today. And so one of the other big advantages to the citizen developer trend is that as technology evolves with platforms already past all that, teams can then leverage it without having to seek out new tools. They can effectively make their own tools with the vendors that they currently have.
Yeah, of course there's some of the complications in that is that you get legal and data security and privacy involved and they may not want citizen developers. So we're just...
There's a push and pull. We're seeing it happen.
It's uncharted territory and no one really knows because it's heading so fast.
Yeah. So it's incumbent on the vendor if they're going to enable that citizen developing trend to make sure the proper controls are placed for the IT teams so you don't run into those problems where someone might not be as sophisticated to understand the implications if they build a tool in a certain way within a broader platform.
But then the other part of it is that there are many aspects of work processes that are just repetitive.
Yeah. That can be automated.
And are so simplistic and yet so time demanding.
And they're honestly, they're terrible jobs.
The one that goes right to the top of the list for us is expense reconciliation.
Now expense reconciliation is a legal requirement that all corporations are required to do.
It'll all be scraped and submitted for you.
Well, no, it is... there's a company today called Orbee. Which again we've been invested in from very early on. A group of brilliant talent that came out of Google and built this platform that automates reconciliation here, expense reconciliation to like literally 100% accuracy, saved them in the first year of deployment $4 million.
And that's a big play for AI is efficiency, cost savings, right? And so taking drudgery out and freeing people up to be doing higher value work is...
You know, there's sort of these almost diverging paths here which is there's pie in the sky, let's solve the greatest challenges of mankind that AI is hopefully going to do some incredible things and those promises are huge and scary.
Yeah. Well, I'm going to stay on the positive side, right? And then the other side of it is taking drudgery and taking that out of people's day-to-day work and making their jobs more fulfilling.
I have a question for you about AI. If AI would have been at the state it is today when you first started in Hollywood making amazing stories, how do you think it would have changed your trajectory over your career and what do you think that means for the future of Hollywood in terms of everything you're seeing?
Well, it would have had incredible impact. I have been feeling as I've watched these extraordinary innovations that have been going on around generative AI and the applications around it whether it's for language or for storytelling or for visuals. It's incredibly exciting and you're talking to someone who has always wanted to be on the forefront of having the best tools for my storytellers as a competitive advantage. I've been going to Silicon Valley literally since the late 70s and when Silicon Graphics was coming out with their first workstations and how do you apply them for special effects? When Steven Spielberg made Jaws, he took a piece of plywood, cut it out in the shape of a shark fin, painted it gray, and dragged it behind a motorboat. That was called a special effect.
So, what I have seen over these years in terms of digital effects, in terms of CG animation, in terms of 3D, in terms of digital distribution, it is to me these are opportunities. And I've always tried personally, maybe it's just my own interest in seeing what's a better paintbrush. Right. What's a better... I'm going to use a word nobody uses. Typewriter. You know, these are tools to enhance artists and creators and storytellers. And so if I were in the center of this today or were those tools available back in the 70s and 80s when I started, I'm supremely confident that I would be jumping into it, hook, line, and sinker.
And that's your advice for younger people.
100%. And there are going to be new forms of story and storytelling. Yes, it's going to disrupt some pre-existing processes that exist today that no longer are going to make any sense. But just when I arrived at the Disney studio in 1984, there were several hundred workers in the ink and paint department that painted animation cells by hand.
Literally were maybe 200 of them. It was literally the ink and paint department. And there's a building on the Walt Disney Studios lot that on the top of the things said ink and paint. This I didn't know anything at the time but that's how animation was made. Now going back 84, so 40 years, 45 years, and so seeing how these things change and evolve, there are no ink and painters anymore but there also never been more people employed in animation than there are today.
The question that's fascinating and I appreciate the insight. A question that is just like burning in my mind as I hear you talk is over time since you talked about when you first got to Disney and all the innovation. Those were tools that would enhance storytelling. The question with AI is is it gonna replace some of the production and storytelling skills versus enhance because now what it can output, it's not just a step forward. I would say it's a massive leap forward and probably unlike something that you've... I mean you tell me but probably something you've not really seen in your career.
Well, I don't... it's hard to say. Certainly the impact of digital both on the making of content and maybe even more profoundly on the distribution of content has been utterly disruptive. It's turned everything upside down. I mean that is the foundation of Netflix.
Right. And which is now the dominant media entertainment company globally today. You know, you add up all the market value of all the other entertainment companies and one company Netflix is worth more than all of them combined, right? Which is extraordinary.
A company that 15 years ago, was barely... they had envelopes. I had them. I actually still have one. Envelopes.
The red envelopes that arrived. It's too late to return with your movie.
I know. So, is there a bigger tsunami than that? I'm not sure.
Well, I guess what comes to my mind is like but Netflix still had a company. So, Netflix still had to have investors and raise capital, etc. With AI, you could have an individual now with the right prompt and the right technology.
Well, you just said the right thing. So, if you really want to hone in on this...
And now prompt to me is just another word for author. Writer, director, cinematographer. I mean, I can go through virtually every aspect of it. Well, I'm not sure that a single person will be able to wear all of those hats effectively as quote the prompter.
And so my guess, and it is only a guess, is that there are going to be very specific skill sets and very specific artists that are going to perfect the deployment of those tools around whether it's a visual, whether it's a sound, whether it's around music, whether it's around speech, whether it's around scripting, whether it's around storytelling. All these things are possible. I will tell you as someone who is finding enormous, enormous productivity and satisfaction around using... if I opened up on my phone and you would see on my opening screen here Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Right, that's like literally everybody on your phone you organize the most important things to the bottom of your front screen.
The real question is who's the most famous person on your contact list?
Okay, that's what I want to know. I don't know. That's a scary thing. So, my point is that I'm finding these tools are empowering me to do things I never imagined before. They are helping me compose things and write things and create things. And I have to say, they get me a lot of the way there, but they're not doing it for me.
