Storytelling, AI investing, and the future of longevity tech with WonderCo

Executive overview

Most founders get stuck pitching features instead of stories. Jeffrey Katzenberg and ChenLi Wang — Hollywood veteran and Dropbox product pioneer — argue storytelling is not a soft skill but the core engine of every successful company.

WonderCo incubates and invests in AI-driven consumer businesses, applying a framework: target giant markets, leverage existing competencies, and always anchor technology to a human pain point a layperson can understand.

The best builders are the best storytellers — narrative is a core business function, not a nice to have.

What WonderCo looks for

• Only pursue markets large enough to justify the effort of building.
• Identify where core competencies give a genuine right to win before entering.
• Every company is a consumer company: if you can't explain the end-user pain to a layperson, it's not the right bet.
• Invest when an exceptional company already exists; incubate only when the market is mapped and no strong player is found.
• Raise capital or take a founder meeting in person — no big deal closes over Zoom.

How to tell a compelling founder story

• Open with something personal and unexpected to immediately capture attention.
• Give the listener a journey, not a feature list.
• Connect the technology to a feeling or outcome the audience already cares about.
• The best stories make complex things feel obvious in retrospect (Jobs and the iPhone).

Nova Sky drones

• Kimball Musk's drone light show company: bootstrapped, cash-positive, AI-orchestrated.
• A few engineers control thousands of simultaneously flying drones using AI.
• Katzenberg sees it as the equivalent of the first Pixar short — a glimpse at a new storytelling medium.
• Unlike film, drones are multidimensional: characters can fly into the audience, not just across a flat screen.

Creatify and AI-generated video

• Creatify democratizes short-form video ads for emerging brands without production crews.
• Models trained on high-performing ad libraries extract narrative structure and apply it as a template.
• The same pattern — raw input plus an intelligent outline — underlies Granola's meeting notes product.
• AI tools act as a bicycle, not a replacement: the core creative spark must still come from the human.

Aura and consumer cybersecurity

• Internet crime caused $16 billion in losses in 2024, a 33% year-on-year increase.
• Aura consolidates identity protection, financial monitoring, and scam blocking into one consumer product.
• Enterprise targets are currently under more sophisticated AI-driven attacks than consumers, but consumer threats will follow.
• Simple AI voice agents now screen unknown robocallers before they reach users.

Wonder Health and longevity

• Longevity research is fragmented; roughly 95% of consumer offerings are not science-based.
• WonderCo built a lab in New York with state-of-the-art diagnostics across 34 health categories.
• 70 leading scientists contribute; 100 initial participants share data across all categories simultaneously.
• Goal is to find cross-category patterns and productize discoveries for millions of people.
• Focus is healthspan, not lifespan.