Edward Norton seeks to revolutionize board meetings
Hollywood actor Edward Norton — known for titles such as Fight Club and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery — is also an active investor in the tech industry. In 2022, Norton unveiled his latest venture: Zeck, a website aimed at reimagining board meetings to bridge the gap between board rooms and company leadership to optimize decision-making. Norton co-founded Zeck alongside Robert and Jeffrey Wolfe, the founders of Moosejaw and CrowdRise.
Yahoo Finance Senior Tech Reporter Allie Garfinkle sits down with Norton to discuss the current entrepreneurial landscape and how companies can benefit from Zeck.
"This is a cloud-based platform for companies and non-profit organizations to put together their board meeting materials in a way that's just massively more dynamic and efficient," Norton, who is also the Chief Strategy Officer for the software startup, says.
Norton explains his interests in current entrepreneurship and describes what fascinates him most about AI: "What I think is really promising about AI is not the replacement of people at all, but actually the enhancement of our own capabilities."
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Video Transcript
ALLIE GARFINKLE: Edward Norton is one of the most recognizable actors of his generation. You know him from films like "Glass Onion," "Fight Club," and "The Grand Budapest Hotel." But what you may not know is that he's also a successful tech investor and entrepreneur. He was an early investor in AI data company Kensho, and he co-founded both media measurement firm EDO, and early crowdfunding platform CrowdRise.
He's here with us now to talk about his latest venture, board presentation software startup, Zeck. Edward, thank you so much for being here.
EDWARD NORTON: Pleasure. Yeah, thanks for having me.
ALLIE GARFINKLE: So let's start with the basics. What is Zeck?
EDWARD NORTON: Zeck, we call it death to the board deck. The quickest way to say it is that this is a cloud-based platform for companies and non-profit organizations to put together their board meeting materials in a way that's just massively more dynamic and efficient. The dynamic of boards was a really broken one. We thought that this was something that we actually knew how to address.
ALLIE GARFINKLE: What did you come up with.
EDWARD NORTON: If you think about a board, it is often composed of people who have invested money in a company or made big donations, but really what's happening is monitoring and protecting the investment, right? We definitely noticed that it was a very toxic dynamic that companies essentially say, hey, we're going pencils down to prepare for this meeting.
You know, the idea that in 2023 we're building 93-page PDFs in slide presentation--
ALLIE GARFINKLE: PDFs of doom essentially.
EDWARD NORTON: Yeah, the PDFs of doom, less than 48 hours before. You're expected to read this thing. And then you get there and what happens it gets narrated to you. And we really thought we can crush that down, make it easier on all sides, and bring the best of what kind of always on cloud-based platforms can do.
ALLIE GARFINKLE: What's the long-term ambition? Can board meetings be not terrible?
EDWARD NORTON: They ought to be things that people leave saying, that was really, really good. That was constructive. A board should be an asset to an organization not--
ALLIE GARFINKLE: A hall monitor.
EDWARD NORTON: Not a hall monitor. Yes.
ALLIE GARFINKLE: Now, for you personally, why tech? Of all the things you could be doing in your spare time.
EDWARD NORTON: You know, it's funny we're in the era of tech, so people kind of use it as a catch all. I actually don't relate to the things I've done in an entrepreneurial sense in the category of tech per se. Like CrowdRise was really innovative in terms of social fundraising. Were we bragging about our tech? Like, not particularly. We were solving a problem. But I think some things I've been involved with do involve what I would call sophisticated tech.
ALLIE GARFINKLE: How do you define that?
EDWARD NORTON: Well, what Kensho was doing in terms of application-- long before ChatGPT, Kensho's work on large language model, AI application to financial market data was, you know, best in class. This is Daniel Nadler, who founded Kensho, and founded EDO with me, and now has founded this incredible large language model AI application for health medical research called OpenEvidence.
If you imagine the capacities of ChatGPT, but applied to the incredibly important problem of how do people keep up with the pace of published medical research so that clinicians are able to fact check themselves through plain language query in a way that is truly unprecedented.
ALLIE GARFINKLE: That gets you excited. What about that excites you?
EDWARD NORTON: Because-- because I think what I think is really promising about AI is not the replacement of people at all, but actually the enhancement of our own capabilities. My friend Bennett Miller, who's one of great filmmaker, he just did an art show of photographs that he created using DALL-E. AI did not create these images, it was this obedient servant that let a great artist like Bennett compose and curate images through thousands and thousands of iterations.
It's interesting because now we have this moment. You have writers and actors striking and worried about things like AI. It is the right moment to negotiate these things.
ALLIE GARFINKLE: So what makes now the right moment?
EDWARD NORTON: Well, there's two things. One is that the technology-- the technology is hitting this liminal edge where amazing things artistically are being generated. How good can it be, and you know, does it fully wipe away the human input or not? I really don't think so, and I think that these things will largely become to be seen as tools much like CGI, right? Computer graphics didn't ruin photography.
The business landscape of media is changing right now a lot. I think what we're going to see very soon is that there is no linear television at all. Everything is everything everywhere all at once. The big seismic shift is that people are realizing it can't all be through subscription, and so that's why all the streaming platforms are moving to ad supported models.
You will stream on demand whatever you want, and if you don't want to pay for premium ad-free, you'll just watch it with ads. And what that means is suddenly Netflix is one of the largest television ad supported networks in history, and that means that that's why it has to be negotiated now. The pie is about to get bigger.
I bet Netflix is-- Netflix's market cap will go higher than anybody thinks it's going to go when people realize how effective an advertising platform that company is going to become. When you look at what the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild and the Actors Guild are actually negotiating for, it's like 0.0-- you know, it's tiny percentages.
Bob Iger has literally said it. When a guy who's says I'm not an advertising guy, says ad-supported streaming is about to become one of the biggest growth centers of Disney, so you basically have the granularity of targeting that you get with Facebook and Google, but with Disney's content. And that's going to be insane. I actually think the issue of the moment for the artistic unions is not AI, I think that's a little bit of a boogeyman.
ALLIE GARFINKLE: Then what is it?
EDWARD NORTON: It's what's about to happen in the revenue structure on content through ad-supported models that's going to be a huge windfall, and that's why the agreements need to be recalibrated right now. The new lifetime value of content made by streamers is about to change completely.
ALLIE GARFINKLE: Edward Norton, we have to leave it there. Edward, thank you so much.
EDWARD NORTON: Sure. Pleasure.
