DreamWorks & the Science of Storytelling | Jeffrey Katzenberg & ChenLi Wang, WndrCo

I went and tried to buy the company from Steve Jobs for $50,000,000. He wouldn't sell it. There's $700,000,000,000 of capital investment being made in twenty four months. I mean, it's a unimaginable number.

Do you think the bubble's gonna burst in 2026?

I think it'll be a reckoning.

How many unicorns have you invested into, and can you name all of them?

I've lost count. My

movies are only as good as their villains. Ursula, Gaston, Scar, Farquaad, Ty Long. Like, can

go on. Is that bad storytelling or good storytelling?

It's good storytelling to bad outcome. It's evil storytelling. If anybody knows of Barry Dillard, he is a rascal, tough, grinding, hard, demanding person to work for. And for me, was exhilarating. By the time I was 30 years old, he had made me head of the movie studio.

Think about it in the context of today, it's just mind blowing.

So this is the hot question. What happened in 2025? Chad and Lee and Jeffrey, welcome to Sorcery.

Well, happy to be here.

Pumped a beer.

Thanks for having me at your gorgeous office.

Good, good. Well, our home's your home today, Molly. So let's do it.

Well, we certainly made it that way walking around. I appreciate that. Well, I wanna talk about so many things today. Definitely, we need to go into the origin story of Wunderco, the state of the VC world. We're coming off of a really hot year of 2025 and going into 2026.

And we'll also get some of your predictions and more on the fun strategy. So this is the hot question. What happened in 2025?

Alright. So I think one thing we observed is new technology just takes time to get molded and shaped into products and into experiences that actually make an impact in people's lives. I think this is really the year where we saw some really cool, oh, yeah, this is different. AI is gonna transform how we do x and y, and it's not just people playing around with like, hey, look how this is like a show your friend over their shoulders type of moment, but really, this is a new way of doing business. It's still gonna take a decade, I think, from here to fully iron out all the kinks of how companies work, how people collaborate.

But it is it's almost a relief that given all the excitement and hype that this is going to be a wave that we can build around for a decade to come. I mean, I I subscribed others said also subscribed to this view that even if you just froze model development at this moment in time, there's still so much more that we need to figure out and do and productize to actually make delightful products and experiences for consumers, for businesses that alright. We're excited about what the research and everything is going, but even if that froze, there is so much to do. That's what's exciting.

Yeah. I mean, think that's it. I think we saw what were the big dreams and promises become tactical, and the tactical revelations had both good and bad in it, and that there is real value creation, real productivity. And then I think the other side of it is, is that it got overheated. I think that the enthusiasm and optimism got ahead of itself.

And I think that's think that's what still, 2026 and 2027 are gonna be revealing. In the meantime, there's lots of great stuff to be done.

Do you think the bubble's gonna burst in 2026?

I don't know whether it's a, I think rather than look at it from the sort of extreme notion of what that means for a bubble to burst, I think there'll be a reckoning here in which those that actually are producing real results and are being deployed in really effective and efficient ways that you can actually see an outcome quickly, and it's real. I think some of the bigger aspirations are not going to, they're not all going to win. I think that that's the thing that, know, this is not gonna be, it's not gonna be a zero sum game, a one winner take all in it. But I also think at the same time, not everybody is gonna win at this.

So I wanna talk about some of the breakthroughs and some of the leading companies that you have been fortunate to invest into. So Chen Li, how many unicorns have you invested into and can you name all of them?

I've lost count. I think that the special stories are the companies that we got to know the founders early, built a relationship, had that shared, you could see the vision. You could also sort of say, yeah, a lot of things need to go right. And there's a little bit of a murky mind maze to go through. And then there's setbacks and there's challenges along the way.

And then when they finally do break through, that's when they get all the celebrations, but we're like, remember those tough, dark moments that, you know, we were texting late at night about, it's like, nah, you'll get through this. Like that's actually what's more rewarding for me is because you can only control the inputs and the grit and we all recognize how much macro and luck and just circumstance factor into what ultimately happens. And, yeah, that that that's what I think about day to day.

Are there any companies that you're particularly excited about? I know you guys have backed Bridge, Harvey, a handful of others.

So in the we've been fortunate working with some great founders in that the Kurzar and Abridge, Harvey's. And those are just great examples of who would have thought multiplying matrices of numbers and predicting predicting the next token can unlock, if you just zigzag across two years, things that are transforming how doctors do their work every day, how lawyers do their work, how lawyers and their clients do their work. Love going to startups offices and getting the vibe and culture of the place. And one of the things I do is just kinda look around and see how many screens have that right tab. And it's like, wow, cruises everywhere.

So,

yeah, it's like in a year. If I just did like a walk around in an office in twelve months, it just went from zero to 100 practically. And that's what makes this place special, this is not just startups here, I can go to startups all around the world, in New York, in London, in Stockholm, and yeah, that right tab is right there. And then by the way, you've seen the other thing is in the upper right bar on Macs, you can see what are the icons. I used to work at Dropbox, so I'm still like hunting for, thank God you still have Dropbox, but we're fortunate to be investors in 1Password, and that's more or less become ubiquitous.

We've became investors in granola, that's effectively become ubiquitous in startups. And so between the right pane and the top bar, we are trans you know, we invest in the future of work, and you're seeing the future of work on people's screens. That's pretty exciting.

It's pretty exciting. Yeah. Before we go too far, because I know I'm already jumping the gun, but let's talk about the origin story of Wunderco. You guys have such a special firm, and it's something that I love. I mean, I'm from LA, and so I met Anthony a couple years ago at this point.

And the convergence of creativity and storytelling and venture was just so natural to me. And I thought it was like an incredible superpower and also entirely motivating and like an ambitious strategy. So can you walk me through the origin story and how you got together this team?

In 2026, it'd be ten years ago that I sold DreamWorks. You know, think it's safe to assume your audience probably knows more about my past than they need to, but there's one little piece of it that I think informs how we sort of got to where we did on putting Wunderco together, which is sort of a recurring theme through every chapter of my media and entertainment career was the use of technology for storytelling as a competitive advantage. Every couple of years, there would be these new, amazing new innovations coming out of Silicon Valley, and I kept coming up here to find the latest and greatest and to then import it back into Hollywood. Steven Spielberg made Jaws, it was a great documentary fifty years ago, he built a shark, a plastic shark, and dragged it behind a motorboat. And then, a number of years later made Jurassic Park, which was really the first live action movie in which there were these digital creations that were mind blowing to say the least, and certainly a major evolutionary step in storytelling.

I think 1989, 1990, I saw a little short film from Pixar called Luxor, The Lamp, And I was just so mesmerized and blown away by it. I actually first tried to hire John Lasser to come back to Disney. He had been there before I was there, had left. He wouldn't come, he didn't want to leave. Then I went and I tried to buy the company from Steve Jobs for $50,000,000 which is at a point in time when he was struggling with NeXT and actually was kind of financially stretched, he wouldn't sell it.

And then made that three picture deal that turned into Toy Story, which turned into, you know, one of the most transformative moments, in Hollywood in storytelling, once again, powered by tech. Three d revolution came along as we're about to see Mr. Cameron's latest and greatest. I just, I can't wait to get to a theater to see it because he's always raising the bar super high. Anyway, so I've always been really enamored, fascinated, gravitated up here.

The first Shrek movie was actually made here in Redwood Shores with a studio with 800 employees. And I actually got some exposure to some of the early venture capitalists, I was always attracted to and fascinated by the fact that I felt like there was a sort of common goal that, know, I'm a truffle hunter, they are truffle hunters. And many of the signals that you look for in great founders are the same signals I look for in great storytellers. So when I sold DreamWorks, I wanted to have a new career, I literally wanted a third act, and to start over, and there are many things that are attributes, and I have some that are liabilities, and the attribute column is I know what I know and I actually know what I don't know. And so that sent me on the pursuit and hunt to find great partners.

Partnership to me is, honestly, I look at it foundationally as maybe the single most important thing I've had in every chapter of my career, and I continue to believe that today, Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, David Geffen, Steven Spieler, these were my mentors and partners over the years. And so I set out to find the equivalent for this next chapter, or next act of my life, and I found that in Sujay and Shen Li and Anthony and Jeff Nyken and our most recent one, Justin Wexler, we just have a phenomenal partnership. And what's amazing about it is that we're all actually quite unique from one another. I don't know, I can't do. I would so rely on Shen Li on the technical side of it.

Then he looks to me as the storyteller in this. And Anthony, who you know and have met, has just got this incredible social meter and ability to just see over horizons and around corners that is invaluable, and then are really sort of guiding light in all of this. Sujay is just really one of the most exceptional and talented, extraordinary people I've ever known. So that has really sort of been the foundation of the partnership, and what's most exciting to me is that ten years later, it's never ever been stronger. It's like we have found the sort of core of what makes us special and unique and how we complement one another and work with one another.

And most of all, it's just fun to be here.

Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30,000 companies, including one in three venture backed startups in The US. Nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash. REX is literally built to help founders avoid that. Unlike traditional banks that let your money sit idle, chipping away at it fees, Brexit's designs help you spend smarter and move faster. Their all in one solution combines checking, treasury, and FDIC protection into one powerful account.

You can send and receive money globally at lightning speeds, get 20 times the standard FDIC coverage through their partner banks, and even high yield from day one. With same day and even same hour liquidity, access your funds anytime. Companies like Scale AI, DoorDash, Service Titan, HIMS, Anthropic, Flexport, Robinhood, and Plaid. Trust and use Brex. Start today at brex.com/sorcery.

That's brex.com/sorcery. Turing is training the next generation of AI with tasks that require real expertise and real world judgment. That's why companies like NVIDIA, Anthropic, Salesforce and Gemini partner with Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces, the kind of infrastructure Frontier Labs need to train superintelligence. Visit turing.com/sourcery.

So what was it like going through all those chapters, all those years evolving the practice and the firm and strategy?

Yeah. What probably is less known is that Wunderco started as an investment holding company. And when we got together in 2016, Sujay and I, after leaving Dropbox, we read about John Malone who comes from Jefferies World, Cable Cowboy. We read about the outsiders and some of the over the last fifty to hundred years, companies that have been good stewards of capital and built great generational businesses. And that informed a lot of how we thought about starting something new in 2016.

Also, we looked at our skill sets, had just I mean, Jeffrey spent his entire career founding and building scaling companies. Sujay and I joined Dropbox when it was about a 25% startup. When we left, it was 2,000 plus people. We had deep conviction that there was something to be done with all the talented folks that we had hired and seeing them grow in scale, and that we could do it again in different contexts, in different situations. That's led to us building companies in consumer security, in other areas that we can talk about.

And it was really that operating building centric mentality that was probably the guiding light to this day of how we operate. Now we have different strategies, different ways of how we work with companies and founders, but that's So

it would evolve fairly quickly in our strategy, which as Chen Lee said, we started as a holdco, and we really wanted to do two things. We wanted to build companies, things that we would start ourselves or we would buy something that had maybe gone sideways and we saw an opportunity around, or literally just looking at market mapping, big ideas that could change the world. We always start from a place of as big as we can possibly imagine and dream, and then look for, is there a solution to that problem? And if there is, great, can we find a way in? Can we find someone to invest in?

And if not, let's just start it ourselves, and so we've started eight companies since 2018. The holding company next year will probably be $400,000,000 of free cash flow, extremely profitable, and growing really, really nicely, which is kind of an amazing thing. Along the way, we started to see, as we were building, that there were some great investment opportunities, venture opportunities, and so the very first one was 1Password. We actually looked at 1Password to make it a part of our cybersecurity, consumer cybersecurity portfolio, it was a great, would have been an incredible bolt on. Problem was it was too far along and too big for us to do it, but what was clear is it was a terrific investment opportunity, and that really sort of was the catalyst for us to say, okay, let's do this in a sort of, pay an homage here to really three firms that I would say are probably most analogous to what we're doing today, and what we continue to aspire to, so Founders Fund, they built those companies.

Peter Thiel and those guys, they started PayPal, they started Palantir, they're builders. They're also world class investors, and they do both of those things, and there's actually great synergies that come from doing that. Next one that came along to do their version of it, so each one is driven very much by the uniqueness of the people and the personalities, was Andreessen Horowitz, where Mark and Ben, again, phenomenal founders, built incredible companies, came together, and sort of at the outset were doing that same thing, but having that founder's mentality. And the guy who is then the next one up and is about four, five, six years, I guess, ahead of us right now is Josh Kushner today. He's just you know, crushing it.

I mean, he's just really, you know, we look at that and just great admiration for, you know, what he has done and continues to do, and you know, our ambition is we're at bat, we're the next ones up to bat to follow on that tradition. Now, we won't be the same as any of those three, but we're certainly, that's the kind of lane that we find ourselves in today.

When you think about building these companies, what's the process?

Find a big idea. I mean, the latest one that we're doing, which is really sort of in its baby stage, is the whole thing around longevity. For as long as man has been around, he's been in pursuit of the fountain of youth. Everybody wants to be healthier longer. And so it's a perfect example where we looked at the world and everything that is going on in that marketplace today, and actually saw a pretty compelling gap, and 95% of what's going on around it today is snake oil sales, driven by people trying to sell supplements and new treatments and processes that are really not driven by actual science, and that was the light bulb for us.

By the way, it's not to say that there are some great people that are doing admirable work in this area, so I don't want to paint the brush of just saying that, I would just say by example, I think Peter Artia is pretty unique and doing some great stuff. We invested in a company alongside him, more in the disease detection and prevention area, which is very, very different from longevity. And so having seen that, we realized the opportunity was to actually build something that is foundational to it is the leading research scientists around the world. Can you bring them together under one umbrella, gather extraordinary amounts of data shared across these different verticals? Because longevity is many, many different, you know, there's mental acuity, there's bone density, there's skin, there's just metabolism, there's so many different expertise in that area, and so we started Wonder Health in New York, and today have 70 of the leading scientists in the world who are affiliated with us, and we are in pursuit of things that will become, we hope, we believe, we're fairly confident, big consumer opportunities.

I think at the outset before we even started that, our typical process is, we meet every Monday, we're on text 20 fourseven, is debating what are the big opportunities, and then from there being relentless, there's one word described Jeffrey, relentless about meeting every interesting founder, scientist, practitioner in the space. Cold emails go a long way to just learn and soak it all in. And sometimes in the course of that, you'll meet an exceptional founder who might already be on a journey and those turn into investments for us, but sometimes we have a slightly unique view or it's a market that for whatever reason, of capital, because of what's trending at the moment, doesn't get its fair share of daylight, and then that's when you have to develop the conviction to lean in and roll up your sleeves and do it yourself. And by the way, convince other people, storytelling, to come along on the journey with you because of what you see as a potential opportunity.

Yeah. When when I was listening through all of that, I mean, I think health is a really interesting category in particular because to your point, it's full of snake oil salespeople. And I have to ask you this. As a world renowned storyteller, do you view that kind of storytelling that goes so viral, that's so effective, very converting, is that bad storytelling or good storytelling?

It's good storytelling to bad outcome. It's evil storytelling. Listen, storytelling, which is the thing that, you know, I think I've appreciated and understood and valued, you know, my whole career, which is storytelling is fundamental to every aspect of business. It's not just, can you create a good story, I. E.

A movie or a television show, or, you know, TikTok video, or, you know, those are all great forms of storytelling. But interestingly, for business, I don't know of a business that has been or is, or can be successful without storytelling. It begins in the most basic way, which is, Hey, I got an idea. I need to go find really great people, in this case, 70 of the leading research scientists in the world, to come sign on board. We had to tell them a great story.

I mean, these are people who've spent their lifetime dedicated in the labs, in research. Okay, well why now, and why us? Well, you gotta tell them a really good reason, and you gotta do it in a really compelling way. And so, you know, if you want investors to invest in your business, you actually need to be able to do a really good job of telling them a good, compelling, thoughtful and appealing story if you want them to put their capital with you. And then when you do have a product and you're ready to go talk to whether it's B2B, to enterprise, or SMB, or to a consumer, you gotta be able to tell them what you got and how it's gonna make their life more better, bigger, faster, something, right?

So storytelling is, it's fundamental to everything that we do, and I feel like our focus on that with our founders in particular here in the venture world has become more and more appreciated and more and more valuable. And as the perfect example, which is we talked about Harvey as one of the companies we're super excited about and incredibly impressed with Winston, who's the founder of it. And literally in the very first meeting, when we talked with him, he said, I need help with my storytelling. Like, I know my product crushes. I'm like, there's no ends, ifs, or buts about that.

How do I get that out there into the world? And the same thing with shiv, you know, at a bridge, you know, and interestingly for him, it wasn't just the enterprise that he needs to sell his product into, it's then the doctors, which is the demand side of it, he needed to do the same thing. And so those are just two very recent great examples where, you know, I think the resource that Wunderco is able to bring to them is unlike anything that they can find. Listen, we all look for the cheat code. What's the thing?

What's the thing that we can do? Because our money, it's the same color as everybody else's. Our green is no different from anybody else's. It's not better, it's not worse. You know, it's capital, and so sure, that's great, but if you wanna win deals, if you wanna be in deals, if you wanna be with the best talent out there, what else can you do for me?

And I think that's what we've tried to hone in on, and so when it comes to the product side, Shen Li is literally in the all star, all star camp there in this. He's done it multiple times in it. He's held in the highest regard. And I watch with him with founders, you know, who are looking for that product roadmap, and they're looking for someone who just has knowledge, experience, you know, and outcome who can really get in there and under the cover and really understand what's driving, what's the stickiness of it, what is the thing that is going to make it must have and must value to it? There's just, you know, there are few people in the world like him.

Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called generated assets, and it brings AI into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before. Here's how it works: You type in an idea like AI powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow or defense tech companies growing revenue over twenty five percent year over year. Publix AI then dispatches a swarm of agents that scan every single US stock, evaluates them, and instantly builds a custom index around your thesis. What really stands out is how clearly it explains why each stock is included. And before you invest, you can even back test your idea against the S and P 500, so you're making decisions with real context, not just guessing.

And beyond generated assets, Public lets you invest in stocks, bonds, options, crypto all in one place. They'll even give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com/sorcery, paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosure is in the description. Founders ship faster on Deal.

Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast so you stay focused on scaling. Deal takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance. So your team can grow without borders. It's why more than 37,000 fast growing companies trust Deal to move fast. Visit deel.com/sorcery.

That's deel.com/sourcery. Jenley, what do you look for in product leaders and in products? Are there like, how do you sniff out the BS from the opportunity?

This is what I could do it in person. I think passion is infectious. Mhmm. And you can't hide behind a PowerPoint deck, you know? I've done, recently there was one company in med where we did like a live demo where I actually installed their product.

I was screen sharing, They installed the product and were basically walking me through it. And I was asking questions both about how to use it, but also about, hey. How did you do this? And when you get to that level of depth I mean, I I love it. I I geek out on this day in and day out.

That that's just it it I don't know how you can not be genuine about that.

I mean, it's so fascinating. I find this, it blows my mind here. Like the first thing that you should be doing is try the product. Yeah. Yeah.

And I cannot tell you how many times, how many people, they don't actually like go try granola and just see how it's magical, right? And by the way, I can tell you when you've actually tried the product, Now, most of this goes over my head just to be really clear in this, which is why Shen Li is essential in this in it. But granola, I got it in a, in a silhouette of a second. Don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand, granola's magical. And, and, and you could see it just in the, in the, in the moment of it, it really is, there's something about it that is really, really, you know, special.

And by the way, the most recent one that for me was this thing, Whisper Flow. Yeah. And how come it gets it right? Like in a way that I've never seen, you know, voice to text, which is, I don't know about you, but everything I'm always doing, I'm, I've spent, there's no question. 98% of the time I have to make corrections.

With that, rarely. It's extraordinary just the quality of that. And so when those things come along and trust me, when they are sitting with us and we've actually used the product and they can, you and you talk about it that way, well, alone gets them like that much more excited about wanting to, you know, have you engage with them.

Maybe a little vignette. Years ago, I read that Steve Jobs obsessed about the back of the circuit boards that went into the computers. He wanted them to look pretty, even though nobody really opens the computers to look at that. And that was sort of his craft and dedication and almost a message he sent to the team. And one of the first times I was using Granolah, some founder was listing through companies in the same competitive domain that they were in, and I was trying to keep a list of it, and some of the names were very esoteric, and then later I read the notes, and they had been spelled correctly.

And I was kinda like, how did you do that? You must've done the product must've gone and done web searches to verify we were talking about this space, these were probably the other companies, this is the right way to spell those companies and polish up the notes to do that. And that was one of those kind of edge case things that we used to obsess about at Dropbox. There's just not very many companies that has the culture and the craft and intuition to do that. And so it's, it is still actually still rare.

So when I see that and I'm like, wow, you're really obsessed. Whoever did this is really obsessed with that. And that it's not that is that feature going to unlock some viral? I don't know. But that that's like the craft and dedication to it that, I don't know.

I just personally have a soft spot for founders who do that.

I'm so curious to hear your answer about this because I feel like we always hear about new benchmarks having to do with revenue and different kinds of milestones and stuff like that. And, yes, there's benchmarks and evals for models. But I'm curious from your standpoint, like, looking at the companies that you look at, what are the kinds of benchmarks that you now evaluate off of in this, like, AI era? Like, what is the new standard to which, like, these apps, these companies, infrastructure, cybersecurity, health companies that they internally should be meeting?

So first is I think through the entire our entire careers, pre Wunderco and Jeffrey's entire career, we've been people people. I think the ingenuity and creativity of people and how magical there's spikes and how when you compliment people and how what they can create together is the secret sauce. We've seen countless times, how he goes to Databricks, for example, how he's reinvented the company multiple times to have that intuition about what they've built, what the market needs, where the world is going and building toward it. None of that shows up in a benchmark. The irony is many people now talk about AI replacing humans.

We have never assessed our best humans based on benchmarks. I mean, how many years have parents complained about standardized testing or dumbing down their kids? And yet I think we're going down the same route with the first wave of benchmarks. They do very well. I mean, other people said they do very well in benchmarks and they fail in the real world.

And I think it's time to stop thinking about the next generation AI as just this very quantitative uniform thing. It is about how do you actually let them do the best that they can do with the right context, with the right workflow for your particular problem that you're solving for a particular user and customer. And I don't think it's gonna come. I don't think I don't know. Is it 70% of those use cases actually require frontier models?

I think you can again freeze the model and it's the ingenuity, the last mile that's actually what's gonna create a magical product.

One of our sponsors is Turing, and they're an AI research accelerator. So they're helping support these models and get all the benchmarks and evals and all these kinds of things and get to super intelligence. And, you know, the CEO, Jonathan, I've talked to a couple of times. We had on a pod, and his point, similar similar to this, is the models are great. Tratch PT five was amazing.

We're starting to forget what magic feels like because it's normalized. And so what happens when everything is automated? I don't know. What do you like, what do you think everything's gonna feel like if if, like, maybe in five years? I don't think it's gonna happen in the next year, but, like, things actually start to pick up and, like, all of a sudden, you get magical products, you get magical companies, you know, Some of these processes are a little bit more automated.

They're understanding text transcribing much, much faster, and, like, those kinds of workflows get streamlined.

I think this is actually a famous Jeff Bezos quote about how consumers are never satisfied, and the bar always gets raised. Yeah. That's what probably will keep us in business for decades. What personally motivates me is, yeah, we now take it for granted that they do all these things, but you're like, but you still don't do that correctly. And, I, I don't know.

Is it, there's probably a vein around personalization, but not in the way that we currently think about personalization because, there's still so much context that's scattered both in our individual lives and in the company's life across so many different sources. And there's a countervailing force, the bigger company you go to between role based permissions and security and all those things that will just take years, unfortunately, from having sold to those companies to to to navigate before you actually unlock the context in an appropriate way to actually make these products just like, oh, you actually got how You read through how my company works for the last ten, fifteen years, and this is what we should do going forward based on my culture. Or to sort of say, this is probably not good enough for what we should do in the future. So even though I have read all your context, this is how you should, this is my recommendation for how you might wanna think about things differently. So I just think it's gonna it's gonna take a while to unlock that, but that's the opportunity.

So you talked a little bit in the beginning about the overall structure of Wunderco. I'm curious if we could put some numbers behind that. So how much are you investing at the seed round, the growth, and these build strategies?

So we have our core fund that will do both builds and invest in venture companies. Builds, we'll do about one a year, and we'll put $5,075,000,000 dollars in those builds. We take quite a bit of ownership in the early days because frankly it's our sweat equity, it's what we roll up our sleeves, and we all pitch in, this is not sort of every partner does one. That's why we sort of say we feel more like a company in a day to day of how we operate, but it's fun, it's much more collegial. On the venture side, we'll invest $5.10, $15,000,000.

We don't have a strong view on things like we must have x ownership, we must be in this round. We found again, going back to it, be the people business. Of course, the best returns are coming from as early as you invest, but if you just invest in generational founders, it tends to work out if you look back at the last ten, fifteen years for us and for others. Anthony and I also have a lot of fund with the time that we spend on our seed fund. It's a $50,000,000 fund.

We're typically investing $500,000, which means we're not leading. We are participating alongside other great seed investors, many of whom we've known and worked with for ten, fifteen year, twenty years. Many Dropbox has been a great fountain of producing VCs, over the last ten, fifteen years, so I get an excuse to work with many of, my former colleagues still, some which share my passion for product or for, figuring and cracking that early go to market for for companies. So frankly, I think there's just a love and passion for what we get to do every day, and we've kind of tailored our fund size and strategy to to really letting us do our best work and hopefully helping founders, inviting them to do their best work.

And which fund are we at today?

Three. Three. Three and three.

Yeah. Amazing. So this is gonna be a fun question because I think I'm gonna get wildly different answers from the both of you. With Brex, they're all about performance, and so they're the modern intelligent AF finance platform. But they they I always queue up this question because they're about performance.

And I think part of performance is like who you surround yourself with and who you're motivated by and you're inspired by. So from both of you and your backgrounds, who is someone that you admire most and you've learned the most from?

Somebody I know personally worked with or

just anybody? Yeah. You

go first. Well, I would say, again, as I said to you, I've had most extraordinary set of mentors, partners over my career, and I would give all of them, know, I'm not sure that if I take the four from the past, going to take the current out of the equation to answer that. So I would say they all had equal importance and value to me. So Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, David Geffen, Steven Spielberg. The one that was most impactful for me only because I started when I was 22, 23 years old was Barry Diller.

And I worked for him for almost eleven years at Paramount. I started as his gofer, PA, I was like the errand runner or whatever. And he just invested in me and in my career. I think he believed and saw things in me I didn't actually see in myself yet, and really took a very rough diamond and I think honed it into something, and by the time I was 30 years old, had made me head of the movie studio, just think about in the context of today is just mind blowing that I was running one of the seven studios, movie studios at that young age. So I read his book, Who Knew?

When it came out last spring, and it just really sort of moved me in a great way, and I actually sent him a very loving text out of that. I've said it out loud at a conference, so I don't mind saying it again, which is, you were, you are, and you will always be the most important mentor of my lifetime, and for that, I love you. And if anybody knows of Barry Diller, he is a irascible, tough, grinding, hard, demanding person to work for, and for me it was exhilarating, and I just couldn't have done better in that environment, and so I would say probably Barry, but I would say Steven Spielberg taught me as much about storytelling as anybody. And, you know, I learned about animation from Walt Disney. He wasn't alive when I came to work there, but he had these amazing archives and research material that I sort of poured myself into and learned all these breathtaking lessons.

Like this to show you the brilliance of him. He said, my movies are only as good as their villains. So I would say to you, Ursula, Gaston, Scar, Farquad, Tai Lung, like I can go on and just name virtually every movie I've ever made since then, animated movie. You don't have a great antagonist. There's nothing for the protagonist to do, right?

So think of those pearls of wisdom. And so I've been lucky. I've had many, many, many great inspiring people in my career.

For Sujay and me, we were very fortunate to spend our early careers at NEA, and learning, watching. And again, either what they say and then you see how they carry themselves and act when companies are not going well, and you have to figure out what to do next, Dick Kramlich and Scott Sandell. That was just a eye opening because it's actually irrational as a I started my career in finance and you build models and you're like, that is not what the next token would predict for what would happen to this company. And then Dick and Scott would say, no, we're gonna do this. I believe in them.

And you can tell sometimes even the founders were wavering and they almost got confidence and belief from Dick and Scott. And that was what was incredible about just watching them and the integrity, the way they carry themselves. Then of course we went on our own journeys at Dropbox, but really coming back here in how we build companies, how we have to work with founders, all of those kind of memories, I think come back. So I think those two have shaped me. What Drew and Arash believed in stalkingly about first principles thinking and specifically about talent, it's now a common thing that you wanna hire people with successful company.

Many of the folks that we hired and worked with have become very successful wherever they went, but we and Drew and Arash took a risk on them. They did not have the fancy resumes and pedigrees. Some of those profiles didn't actually work out for us. We bet on talent and that was a big thing on them. It's like Chen Li, first principles are they the most talented person, even they don't have the resume and the pedigree to have done the sales job or done the international expansion job, just bet on the person.

And that's also shaped some of how we've hired and worked with our founders in terms of how they thought about hiring, growing their teams. And again, that's not benchmarks. That's like recognizing humans as individuals with spikes and potentials for the right opportunity. And then personally, lastly, and this is one I share with our other partner, Jeff Nyken, it's Charlie Munger. Just that super even keel gratitude, but fierce curiosity about everything you do.

It's like evergreen. And to just see what he did over his career and all the things that didn't go right, and his mentality through that is just so admirable, along with Jeffrey's work ethic, is insane to keep up with. That's a struggle day to day.

That's amazing. Well, that's a really good place to end this. Thank you guys so much. It was a pleasure. Thank

you. Good. Good. Thank you. Appreciate it.

This was fun.

Hey. It's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today, and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.