Jeffrey Katzenberg: “I don’t think there is any industry that generative AI will disrupt more than the creative industry”
Jeffrey Katzenberg: “I don’t think there is any industry that generative AI will disrupt more than the creative industry”
DreamWorks Animation co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg spoke to an audience in Israel for Sarona Partners’ ‘Silicon Valley Comes To Tel Aviv’ summit
“I don’t think there is any industry that generative AI will disrupt more than the creative industry,” Co-founder of DreamWorks Animation and WndrCo VC Jeffery Katzenberg said to an audience at the ‘Silicon Valley Comes To Tel Aviv’ summit. “What and how it will change is unimaginable at this point, but I know it will be stunning.”
Katzenberg was speaking at the summit which was hosted by Sarona Partners, an Israeli-international VC Fund and Tech Ecosystem headquartered in Israel with a presence in the U.S, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He spoke on Sunday to an auditorium at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art that boasted 1,513 attendees, 823 startups, 225 investors, and 123 corporates from 24 countries.
The summit was held for the second time and included lectures, panels, and workshops from high-tech executives with the hope to create connections between Israeli technologies, investment funds, and senior figures from Silicon Valley in California.
“Today, media and entertainment is not a growth market, due in large part to the fact that the consumer standpoint is unclear: consumers are undecided on what they want, when they want it, for how long and how much they are willing to pay for it,” Katzenberg continued. “I would also say that, out of all the industries, the media industry is the number one lagger in coming out of Covid.”
Katzenberg has described this latest decade of his life as a turn from the media and entertainment world into an entry into high-tech. It was “out of the desire to find a Solution”, he told the crowd. “The last decade in which I was involved in high-tech, is very interesting and exceptional because of the impact you bring to people with the help of technology. That's how I realized how important technologies are and affect every area of our lives.”
Katzenberg has found success with ventures such as DreamWorks Animation, which he co-founded with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, responsible for producing hit movies like Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, and How To Train Your Dragon. However, he has also faced challenges in the same space, like the ill-fated streaming service Quibi founded in April 2020 at the height of the pandemic designed to offer content designed for mobile devices as everyone was stuck at home. Still, WndrCo VC hopes to focus on the Future of Work, Consumer Technology, and Cybersecurity - and is looking at Israeli technology as a place for future investment.
"Israeli high-tech is blooming, and not only in Israel,” added Toot Shani, CEO of Sarona Partners Group. “About 35 Israeli unicorns, over 550 startups, and 93 Israeli companies that are issued on the American stock exchange, are currently operating in Silicon Valley. The goal of Sarona Partners Group is to connect every place where innovation flourishes. At today's conference, we proved that the Israeli innovation industry is still kicking, when our goal is to connect investors from all over the world to Israel, precisely in this period."
CTech spoke exclusively to Morris Levy, Managing General Partner at Sarona Partners and co-founder of shared co-working space The Yard, who highlighted the importance of Israeli talent and the mindset of entrepreneurs in Startup Nation. “The foresight to see that any problem is insurmountable and ‘we will figure it out’ is very refreshing for an entrepreneur,” he said during his visit to Israel from New York. “We see that in the States also, but it’s a little bit different here… Every founder you meet will be different. It’s not that there is an American difference and an Israeli difference. But culturally, that vision of ‘I can figure this out’, that’s very important.”
