When he was growing up in Los Angeles, Anthony Saleh said he found entrepreneurial inspiration in the VHS cassettes of Walt Disney Co. DIS -2.25% classics such as “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin.” After receiving the tapes for his birthday, he would rent them out to friends for 25 cents a night.
At the time, Mr. Saleh gave no thought to the company behind those movies, or the executive, Jeffrey Katzenberg, then largely responsible for their production throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Yet more than 25 years later, it is Mr. Saleh whom Mr. Katzenberg is turning to for help plotting a course out of the rubble formed when his first post-Hollywood venture, Quibi, imploded.
Mr. Saleh, 35 years old, has been Mr. Katzenberg’s point of entry to the early-stage technology companies the mogul is evaluating far outside the Hollywood bubble, both men said. After managing music and investments for rapper Nas for more than a decade, Mr. Saleh is overseeing early-seed investing at Mr. Katzenberg’s WndrCo, plugging the company into a lucrative but crowded venture-capital field following its high-profile failure with Quibi, the mobile-video app that shut after less than a year.
Anthony Saleh’s investments on behalf of WndrCo have included Dapper Labs, the creator of digital collectibles company NBA Top Shot.
Photo: dapper labs/Reuters
“Jeffrey can open any door, but he’s never done tech investing,” said Sujay Jaswa, a managing partner at WndrCo who met Mr. Saleh when he and Nas invested in Dropbox Inc., DBX -0.08% where Mr. Jaswa was chief financial officer.
Mr. Saleh’s investments provide a road map for where WndrCo is focused after Quibi’s demise, and so far have included Dapper Labs, the creator of NBA Top Shot, the digital collectibles company that has successfully ridden the cryptocurrency wave this past year. Mr. Saleh’s initial $150,000 investment on behalf of WndrCo is now valued at roughly $11 million.
Mr. Saleh says his background in music, where he had to manage fans and their expectations, has helped him guide tech firms that want a similar relationship with users.
“I apply my understanding to other industries, because for technology to be adopted by the masses, these companies need to understand how consumers think,” said Mr. Saleh.
After an initial $15 million investing portfolio, Mr. Saleh has started raising money for a new fund worth $100 million, according to a WndrCo filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last year.
“‘I had a supercalifragilistic down.’”
Mr. Saleh’s investments also function as a farm system for WndrCo at large, which can take larger stakes or potentially acquire the companies down the road, said WndrCo leadership. Quibi’s failure was one reason Mr. Saleh has dropped the pursuit of media investments, he said.
“I had a supercalifragilistic down,” is how Mr. Katzenberg, 71 years old, put the experience of Quibi’s failure.
The short-form video app premiered in April 2020 to much fanfare, having raised nearly $2 billion and recruited stars such as Liam Hemsworth and Reese Witherspoon to contribute to shows for the service. But subscriptions never caught on, and the entire venture folded after eight months.
Mr. Katzenberg’s work with Mr. Saleh in tech firms follows the trajectory of other one-time leaders in Hollywood, from Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner to former Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox head Barry Diller, who have traded the backlot for venture-capital and broader investing.
Jeffrey Katzenberg is evaluating early-stage tech firms far outside Hollywood.
Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
For entertainers, venture-capital investing is hardly a stable Plan B, as some bets never pay off and years can go by without a return on investment. Yet Mr. Saleh and his team are capitalizing on a surge of interest in early-stage investments globally, in part spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has boosted sectors that benefit from lockdowns and an increased reliance on technology.
In 2021, global venture investment hit a new high with $643 billion, nearly double the $335 billion seen in 2020, according to financial-data provider Crunchbase Inc. Funding for early-stage companies nearly doubled to $201 billion, with seed funding up 56% to $29.4 billion, the Crunchbase data show.
The two men acknowledge they aren’t the likeliest pairing. Mr. Saleh started working for Mr. Katzenberg after meeting him through his son, David, who had invited him over to his dad’s house for Sunday afternoon football watching. The elder Mr. Katzenberg and Mr. Saleh bonded over junk food in the kitchen.
Months later, Mr. Katzenberg asked Mr. Saleh for some guidance on whom he should meet with as he figured out what to do with WndrCo, the men recalled. Soon after another meeting at his son’s wedding in Italy, in 2016—conducted minutes before the men were expected at the ceremony—Mr. Katzenberg offered him a job.
Colleagues describe Mr. Saleh as WndrCo’s barometer of what is catching on in the broader culture. Last year, Mr. Saleh pushed one of WndrCo’s high-profile investments, the cybersecurity company Aura, toward an endorsement deal with an organization not immediately obvious as a partner: the National Basketball Association team the Minnesota Timberwolves, which put the Aura company name on the team jerseys.
Mr. Saleh knows he isn’t what some expect when they hear they are meeting with an associate of Mr. Katzenberg’s. They might expect someone older—and whiter, Mr. Saleh said. When he grew his hair long during the pandemic and braided it, he wondered, “Are people looking at me like I’m a gangster?”
The Hollywood offices of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo, which is part of the lucrative but crowded venture-capital field.
Photo: Da’Shaunae Marisa for The Wall Street Journal
He asked Mr. Katzenberg if he should shave. Mr. Katzenberg made it clear—with the help of an expletive—that he didn’t care.
“He understands consumer behavior not by reading market research,” said Mr. Jaswa of Mr. Saleh. “He’s just in it.” Dapper Labs Chief Executive Roham Gharegozlou added that entrepreneurs today often want to be in touch with their audiences on a more cultural level, as opposed to “just software developers who don’t want to meet their customers.”
It is a shift in tech thinking that mirrors the entertainment industry’s embrace of fandom, said Mr. Gharegozlou.
Mr. Saleh knows something about fans. He started investing through his relationship with the musician Nas, a bestselling rapper since his 1994 debut “Illmatic.” Mr. Saleh met Nas in college, and soon started managing his career—booking him overseas gigs to expand his international reach, and getting him to show up on time for shows.
Several years into their working relationship, Mr. Saleh and Nas joined a multitude of entertainers parlaying their wealth and influence into investing, a trend that continues today and includes everything from Ryan Reynolds’s investment in telecom company Mint Mobile to Gal Gadot’s backing of Goodles, a plant-based macaroni-and-cheese startup. It soon became a significant part of the duo’s work.
“8 a.m. meetings—that changed my world,” said Nas.
While working with Nas several years ago, Mr. Saleh cold-emailed Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz to discuss ideas, Mr. Horowitz said. The two men got to know one another, and in 2013, Mr. Saleh called Mr. Horowitz to say he and Nas were interested in bitcoin after seeing how many “unbanked” people in the world had no checking account but did have a cellphone—a dynamic he said could decentralize finance. When Mr. Horowitz later heard about Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange platform, he brought the duo into the investment.
Last year, Coinbase Global Inc. was one of six investments in Mr. Saleh’s personal portfolio that ended in a public offering.
Write to Erich Schwartzel at erich.schwartzel@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
Sujay Jaswa is the co-founder and managing partner at WndrCo. A previous version of this article misspelled his name. (Corrected on Jan. 16, 2022)
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