00:00What attracted you as you migrated away from the big studio models to, you did also Quibi,
00:07I believe, which was the mini drama.
00:10Which is now actually working.
00:12They're actually monetizing that in China.
00:14$12 billion this year.
00:15You're ahead of your time.
00:16Well, it's better to be ahead than behind.
00:18Right.
00:19So you went to the venture capital world.
00:23What are you bringing to that in 2016 to now?
00:27Well, tech for those decades that I was in media and entertainment was always a competitive advantage.
00:33I wanted the filmmakers that I worked with to have state-of-the-art tech.
00:38Steven Spielberg, when he made Jaws build a giant shark out of plastic and dragged it behind
00:42a motorboat, that was a special effect.
00:45And you look at over the years.
00:47And so I was constantly going to Silicon Valley to get the best tech for our storytellers.
00:52And so I've always had an appreciation and admiration for what Silicon Valley has done
01:00and has continued to do.
01:01So when I sold DreamWorks 10 years ago, the natural thing for Act 3 for me was to go into
01:08company building and venture capital around tech.
01:13And I needed to go find somebody that knows everything that I don't know, which is a lot.
01:18And that's where I found my partner, Sujay.
01:20To extrapolate on the Jaws theme, Quint said, we need a bigger boat.
01:24Right?
01:25Right?
01:26So he comes to Silicon Valley.
01:27What do you bring to the table as far as what you're looking for?
01:30I mean, venture capital is shotgunning.
01:32You have to look at a lot of different companies, pre-profit companies as well.
01:37You have to believe in their management.
01:38I'm going to take it as a different thing.
01:39I think it's actually truffle hunting.
01:41Truffle hunting.
01:42It's a little bit different than shotgunning.
01:44It's about finding the best, the rarest, the most talented people.
01:47You're not just shotgunning blindly.
01:48No.
01:49You're putting the pig to sniff out the real gems.
01:52What do you bring?
01:54Well, so I grew up in Silicon Valley.
01:56So my whole life has been tech.
01:58It's been, you know, since, if you remember 30 years ago, we didn't have phones, we didn't
02:04have anything.
02:05And now the AI revolution is, I think, going to change 70, 80% of what our day-to-day
02:10lives look like.
02:11You know, the funny thing about Jeffrey is that he is a total force of nature, and he
02:17introduced, like, his network is incredible.
02:19His work ethic is incredible.
02:20And when you think about what's happening in Silicon Valley right now, it's about bridging
02:25all of these futuristic technologies and getting the largest companies in the world to adopt
02:29them, getting consumers to start thinking in new ways to keep up with the future.
02:35And for me, that's what makes it exciting.
02:37So who are you investing in?
02:38I know you're not necessarily doing the big hardware players, you're not hyperscaling,
02:42you're not large-language model.
02:44You're building or supporting companies that add the applications to platforms, and you're
02:50platform-agnostic, I would assume?
02:52Yes.
02:53Whichever large-language model or whichever AI platform.
02:56We're platform-agnostic.
02:57The truth is, at $3 billion, we're about one or two days of infrastructure spend in the
03:02data center space across the entire world.
03:05So really what we're focused on is what is, in 10 years, likely to be the most transformative
03:11uses of AI.
03:12The enterprise application layer is amazing, but we also look at what's happening in consumer.
03:16You know, we're seed investors in Polymarket, Yasir, which is the super app of North Africa,
03:21Quince, which is revolutionizing e-commerce in America.
03:24So all of these consumer things are incredible as well, and we almost kind of jokingly call
03:28it our anti-AI portfolio.
03:30You got to have a little bit of both.
03:32Do you see any parallels at all to the dot-com boom and then bust as far as that was a rise
03:39of a new platform?
03:40I don't think, I know that that is a reference point.
03:44I don't think it's analogous.
03:45I think the value creation here that we're seeing, no matter how much the capital expenditure
03:53is, you're seeing these companies grow at a rate that's never, ever happened before.
03:58And the adaption by consumer, and they're paying for it.
04:02It's just, when you're spending $600 billion a year in infrastructure, is that revenue model
04:08going to actually accelerate quick enough for there to be a valid ROI on that edit?
04:16But this is not a bust bubble.
04:19This may be-
04:20What about a shakeout?
04:21I mean, do you see, what does a shakeout look in the AI space as a lot of capital that
04:26has been put towards it?
04:27I don't know.
04:28We're pretty optimistic here.
04:30I don't want to be.
04:31I really don't feel like I'm a naysayer about it.
04:34But I would just say caution is actually a good lens to look at this through.
04:43So it has not stopped us from investing, but it makes us treat each one of things, it's
04:48like a silver bullet.
04:49You know, if you're going to take a shot, you should find the best companies doing the
04:53best work.
04:54And whether that's a later stage company like Databricks or Figma, you know, or SpaceX, or
05:00there's just, there's so many great companies out there right now that we do believe in
05:07the anthropic.
05:08It's, I mean, they're doing amazing work and there's real value creation going on.
05:13What is the end game then?
05:15Is it taking it to the public markets, IPOs, and obviously, but where are you on that trajectory
05:23with your portfolio of companies?
05:25Well, so one of the things that's very unique about us is we start a company every year.
05:28We call it our builds.
05:30We are in the process of potentially taking two of those builds public, hopefully this
05:36year.
05:36So that'll be an exciting milestone, but it's definitely not the end game.
05:40You know, the end game is these companies should have products that hundreds of millions of
05:43people hopefully are using in 10 or 15 years.
05:45That's really what's exciting for us.
05:47So how transformative are these technologies and how far and fast have they come that enable
05:52you to do what you want to do in your storytelling and in your business application to become
05:57profitable as well?
05:57Well, so let's just fast forward and say, you know, what are the, if you just say, what
06:02is AGI in a company?
06:05It's Waymo.
06:06Yeah.
06:06Right?
06:06Waymo is an example of something where the AI and in combination with the data, the sensory
06:12data, allows a car to do what a human used to do.
06:16And it does it spectacularly well.
06:17I don't know if you've sat in one yet, but it's magical, right?
06:20It's a magical experience.
06:21And way safer than humans, right?
06:23So it's not just that it's magical, it's also infinitely safer.
06:29Yeah.
06:29And so for us in the earlier stage companies, we're trying to achieve that kind of application
06:34of technology.
06:34Yeah.
06:35You know, how do we actually use something that will change how we all live our daily
06:38lives?
06:39What about your exposure to Chinese tech companies?
06:42How much do you have that?
06:44I mean, they're going gangbusters as well on autonomous driving and all the different
06:48companies that have come public here in the last year in Hong Kong.
06:51Yeah, what I would say is, is there was a period of time in which things were kind of
06:54frozen between worlds.
06:57And now you can see it thawing.
07:00So I don't think the moment is here quite yet where we're able to actually invest in mainland
07:06China, but certainly in the region.
07:09A lot of exciting things going on and investments that we are looking at here.
07:14We have a handful of very, very important LPs that come from the region who are great partners
07:20for us.
07:21So we're optimistic.
07:22We've been back here in Hong Kong three times in less than a year.
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