Hari Ravichandran & Jeffrey Katzenberg
Founder and CEO, Aura
Founding Partner, WndrCo
Technology is evolving faster than ever, but protecting our families and our values has to evolve just as quickly.
-Hari Ravichandran
Summary
In this episode of Leadership Matters, Alan Fleischmann sits down with two visionary leaders whose partnership bridges technology, storytelling, and trust: Hari Ravichandran, Founder and CEO of Aura, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-founder of DreamWorks and founding partner of WonderCo. Together, they explore how innovation can protect families online and strengthen digital trust in an age of AI-driven change.
From Hari’s mission to make the internet safer through Aura’s family protection platform to Jeffrey’s belief in “doing good while doing good,” this conversation reveals how purpose-driven leadership can combine creativity, technology, and human connection to solve real-world problems.
Mentions & Resources
Guest Bio
Hari Ravichandran
Hari Ravichandran is the founder and CEO of Aura, the leading AI-powered online safety solution for individuals and families, valued at $1.6 billion, and Point Wild, a global leader in cybersecurity, protecting individuals and businesses, valued at about $2 billion. Prior to founding Aura, Hari was the founder and CEO of Endurance International Group (now Newfold Digital), which he built from a start-up to a publicly traded global hosting and email marketing company with an enterprise value of approximately $3.5 billion dollars and more than 3,500 employees worldwide. Hari is named on over forty approved or pending technology patents, was named Ernst & Young’s 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year (New England) and was also named to Forbes’ list of “America’s Most Powerful CEOs 40 and Under” in 2014 and 2015. He holds an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, earned a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Mississippi State and studied Electrical Engineering at Stanford.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
Jeffrey is an entrepreneur and entertainment industry executive who has reshaped the media landscape throughout his career. Today, he is a Founding Partner at WndrCo, an investment company focused on supporting founders who are building category-defining companies. Jeffrey works closely with WndrCo portfolio companies Aura, Airtable, Alembic, Netomi, and Writer on their enterprise GTM strategy.
Prior to WndrCo, Jeffrey co-founded DreamWorks, serving as CEO of DreamWorks Animation, which he grew into the world’s largest animation studio. Before founding DreamWorks, Jeffrey was Chairman of The Walt Disney Studios and previously served as President of Production at Paramount Studios.
Jeffrey is a donor and board member to many civic organizations, including University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, The Simon Wiesenthal Center, California Institute of the Arts, and is on the Board of Directors for Olympics LA28. Among his many awards and recognitions, he has received the Palme d’Or from the Cannes Film Festival, the Motion Picture Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, the National Medal of Arts, and the TIME100 Impact Award.
Episode Transcript
Alan Fleischmann
Welcome to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I’m your host, Alan Fleischmann. I’m joined today by two extraordinary innovators whose leadership has shaped industries, inspired trust, and redefined how technology and storytelling connect us all: Hari Ravichandran and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Hari is the founder and CEO of Aura, the leading digital safety platform dedicated to protecting families online. A serial entrepreneur, Hari has built and scaled multiple companies in technology, cybersecurity, and digital trust, each guided by a deep commitment to empowering people through innovation and protection.
Jeffrey is the founding partner of WndrCo, an investment company focused on supporting founders who are building category-defining companies. He’s also known as one of Hollywood’s most visionary figures, the co-founder and former CEO of DreamWorks and a driving force behind some of the most beloved stories and franchises in modern entertainment. Today, as an investor, advisor, and mentor, he continues to champion creativity, innovation, and leadership that bridges industries, including his partnership with Hari at Aura.
Together, Hari and Jeffrey represent two worlds — technology and entertainment — coming together around a shared vision: creating safer, more connected digital lives for people everywhere. Today, we’ll explore Hari and Jeffrey’s journeys, their partnership, and the lessons they’ve learned in transformation, storytelling, innovation, and leadership along the way.
Hari and Jeffrey, it is such a pleasure to have you on Leadership Matters. It is such a wonderful opportunity to go deep and wide on your journeys, your history, but also your vision going forward. It’s quite inspiring. Thank you for joining us.
Hari Ravichandran
Thanks for having us.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
Thanks for having us. We’re in your hands — where do you want to go?
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. Let’s start a little bit with your beginnings. What early influences and experiences shaped your interests? How do each of you think about leadership and, frankly, ambition? Maybe we start with you, Jeffrey, a little bit about that; then we go to Hari.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
I mean, I spent 40-some-odd years in the media and entertainment space — in movies, television, animation, Broadway, and so many great things. I loved it all. One of the recurring themes through virtually every chapter was the use of technology as a storytelling competitive advantage. I always wanted to have the best tech tools for the filmmakers and storytellers that I was working with. So I’ve had a long interest in tech. I’m not a technologist, but I sure appreciate and understand its applications.
So 10 years ago, I sold DreamWorks to Comcast after a great, great run. The changing business… Even 10 years ago, it was clear that being an independent animation studio wasn’t going to really be able to fully compete, and this company would be in better hands as part of a much bigger enterprise, which is what has happened.
So I partnered up with Sujay Jaswa, and we started WndrCo. One of the very first areas of interest for us was in consumer cybersecurity — how to keep people safe online, whether it’s your parents getting scam calls or robocalls or people trying to get access to their data, or yourself. Even back then, six, seven years ago, it was clear this was an explosive problem and challenge for individuals. Lots was being done around enterprise cybersecurity, but not so much about protecting people.
My partner and I met Hari very early on in our journey, and he was also on that same path, saw the same needs and opportunity there. And that’s when we partnered up with him.
So that was really the beginnings of Aura. I’ll let him tell you more about that.
Alan Fleischmann
When I think of DreamWorks and what you built, it was built on the most high-tech innovation. I mean, your creativity led, but it was lots of innovation that no one had ever seen before.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
When you think about the tech, it’s revolutionized storytelling.
Alan Fleischmann
Tell us a little bit about you, Hari. You’ve been a lifelong builder.
Hari Ravichandran
For me, I think the first time I actually tried out a computer — back then, it was an 8085 microprocessor — was when I was 10 years old. I was pretty hooked on it, pretty much right away. I started playing around with it and thought, “Wow, this is really cool. It’s incredible. You can do a lot of things with it.”
This notion of trying to solve problems — I mean, that’s just the way I saw my family do stuff as I was growing up. They were always tinkering around with different kinds of businesses, and they were trying out different stuff. My dad was an academic, but he always had some sort of a business that he was working on at the same time as well. So it was interesting to watch. The computer part of it, to me, always felt like home. It just felt very comfortable for me from the get-go. And so I knew from that point that’s really what I wanted to do something with. I just didn’t know what to do with it.
Then I went off to college, and then by the time I got to graduate school, I went out to Stanford. It was this crazy intense, amazing time, because a lot of the dotcom companies were just starting to take off at that time — you had Yahoo, you had Hotmail, you had Excite, which is another search engine. There were many of these things that were all coming up.
The intensity was palpable. It just felt like you had to go do something. Because at that point, I was a pretty young guy. I had no idea what to do, but I felt like I had to go do something. So that ended up taking me towards the first company I started, which went through a long journey of ups, downs, sideways. It was a 20-year journey.
When I started, I was 20 years old. This was at the peak of the dotcom boom era. At that point, we were so naive — at 20, we thought, “Oh, wow. It’s a two-year thing. We’re in, we’re out. We’re going to retire. We’re going to be dotcom millionaires and billionaires, and that’s going to be how it all goes down.” So much so that we actually named all the passwords in our computers “retired.22.” It was this great, amazing, exciting, everything-big-in-the-future type of a timeframe.
Then reality hits. What was supposed to be a two-year journey ended up taking us 20 years to build. And eventually we took it public, we took it private. We did a bunch of stuff with it.
All along the way, the problem-solving part was pretty fun. Leveraging technology, which I’d always loved, allowed me to solve problems at scale, which was another thing I realized about myself pretty early on — I wanted to be close to the customer. I wanted to actually do things that I could see the impact of. So that was a big driver for me along the way.
And mentors — I’ve been very lucky; since I started early, it gave me a lot of opportunity to make a lot of mistakes along the way. In a lot of ways, many of the folks I’ve worked with and many of the folks that I’ve partnered up with have been great — especially around the venture industry, the private equity industry, certainly public investors when we were a public company. Then when I met Jeffrey about eight years ago, he’s been a great mentor as well. We speak probably once or twice a day, it seems like anymore.
The thing about it is we don’t need specific people — I feel like I learn from pretty much everybody over the course of the day. Everybody’s got something to teach you, something interesting. You get a different perspective if your mind’s open. It feels like you have the ability to absorb and learn as the days go on.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s very cool. I guess a big part of this is the storytelling part of your journey too. You’re solving problems — storytelling doesn’t go too far away from one another, which I imagine connects the two of you a lot as well. The personal part of it, the human connection part of it.
Hari Ravichandran
As an entrepreneur, it really comes down, in my mind, to a couple of things. One, you need to like solving problems, because almost everything you get into, it’s generally something that nobody solved before. That’s what makes a company a successful company. So you’ve definitely got that element of it.
And you’re always selling. You’re selling something — you’re selling to investors, you’re selling to your employee base, you’re selling to customers. Some form of that. Storytelling is a big way how you do that. Because again, if you’ve got this amorphous thing, how do you tell the story of this problem to different people in different ways? How do you humanize it? How do you drive it with a sense of mission and something that people feel like they can connect to?
The first time I met Jeffrey, that’s what I told him. I’m like, “Hey, you know how to tell amazing stories. You know how to build great brands, and that’s going to be a huge thing for us as we get into this consumer cybersecurity journey.” Because these are families. These aren’t enterprises. It’s families and regular consumers, regular people. So being able to connect with them in a way that makes us relevant and we can drive value for them is going to be a big part of the journey. And so that was part of why this partnership’s worked out really well over the last eight years.
Alan Fleischmann
How many years has it been so far? Eight for the two of you?
Hari Ravichandran
Eight years. Yeah.
Alan Fleischmann
Wow. Okay, yeah.
So Jeffrey, you’ve led at every level — from studio executive to entrepreneur to investor to mentor. I’m curious how your definition of leadership has evolved. Now, when you think about the transitions ahead of us in technology as well, how do we be proactive and preemptive — I’m curious what your definition of leadership is today.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
Yeah, I think leadership has so much complexity around it. I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that, because I think a lot depends on the context in which you’re asking — is it leadership with partners? Is it leadership in small or medium businesses? Is it leadership in enterprise or philanthropy? They’re just many different lanes.
And I think probably the single most important attribute is to be more of a giver than a taker. Being willing to share, being willing to invest in people, to really be the wind beneath their wings. It’s something you learn with age.
So for me, I find that being giving, being generous, being supportive, is just so rewarding. And then with those qualities, you usually get great loyalty, commitment, and passion — all the things that you look for in a team.
Alan Fleischmann
And then the endurance of keeping that team together, I imagine, is the gift when you pick the right team.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
Well, that, to me, is the best thing. I’ve just been very lucky, very blessed. I’ve had extraordinary mentors and partners, and they’ve all lasted a very long time. I’m married for coming on 51 years. It’s probably my best partnership so far.
But it’s just so rewarding to have that kind of relationship. I just did a week ago — I interviewed Barry Diller, who I worked for for 11 years, when I was a kid, when I was 23 years old. Really, for the first real chapter of my career — he was my mentor and boss. It just was extraordinary, how much I valued that, how much I got out of it.
Alan Fleischmann
He’s obviously been doing a lot with his book. We’re going to have him on the show, actually, as well, to talk about his journey and his book as well.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
10/10. They don’t get any smarter or better.
Alan Fleischmann
And I bet he’d say the same about you too.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
When I went to work for him, he was a decade older than me. At 23 a decade is a long time — he called me “Little Jeffrey.” I’m 74. He still calls me “Little Jeffrey.”
Alan Fleischmann
It’s nice to have people like that in your life that keep viewing you as the youngest one. It’s nice to be reminded that we’re among the younger ones by a few.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
I told him in my interview, I said, “I’ve waited 51 years to ask you a bunch of these questions.”
Alan Fleischmann
And you’re going to answer them.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
He did.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s great.
When you guys came together eight years ago, was it for Aura, or was it the idea that we’re going to come together to find something to do together?
Hari Ravichandran
Yeah, it’s interesting — we were on this path independently, I would say. The thesis around helping consumers and families stay safe was something that I’d been pretty intrigued by and something that we were down the road going through.
There was a company that we were interested in acquiring that Jeffrey and Sujay’s firm ended up acquiring. So we were curious why a Hollywood person and the co-founder of Dropbox was buying a VPN business, which just seemed kind of completely out of the blue to me. So we called up some friends and said, “Can you connect us with Sujay and Jeffrey?”
So we got connected, and I think the first meeting was supposed to be like 30 minutes, ended up being like two and a half hours, because the vision of how we saw the world was spot on. Well, I don’t know if it was correct, but it was the same for both of us. So that kind of really gave us an instant connection.
When we parted ways, I said, “Hey, if we end up doing something here, would you guys want to partner up?” There was a company we needed to go acquire, so we needed some capital. I called Sujay and Jeffrey and said, “Hey, would you guys like to partner up on this one?” Actually, I think Sujay recommended this particular company.
So that’s how we got started. We partnered up then and we’ve been together now for eight years.
Alan Fleischmann
The vision for this actually had great purpose. Tell us a little bit about what attracted you to this and a little bit more about Aura, obviously. Based on what I learned, there was a lot of vision there. I mean, you were seeing things around the corner and over the hills, the mountains ahead of us that others didn’t see.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
Well, I’ll go back and just say, if you roll the clock back seven, eight years ago, it was clear then that all of us individually really had no defense against this growing wave of vulnerability for our online life. It’s not that there were no solutions; there were so many of them that none of us really understood what we actually needed to protect ourselves, our kids, and our parents from bad actors.
And here’s an interesting set of statistics of just how this thing has exploded into a tsunami of a problem. Back then, when we started, there was like under $3 billion a year of cybercrime against individuals and there was over $3.2 billion a year in burglary, theft — physical breaking in and taking stuff.
Now, this last report that’s come out maybe two months or so ago — burglaries have gone up and are now, seven, eight years later, over $4 billion. Cybercrime against individuals is now over $16.5 billion. So that’s how explosive it has been in just a little bit more than a handful of years.
So the mission was to say, can we help people be safer online? I’ll let Hari talk a little bit more about how we’ve gone about that.
Hari Ravichandran
Our mission has always been to create a safer internet, that’s been consistent over the years.
As we approached the problem, it was really interesting: as Jeffrey was saying, there were many, many companies in the landscape. If you thought about why that happens… Say you’re in the ’90s and a big technological event happens. maybe it’s the desktop computer. There’s a PC available that wasn’t available before. You get a lot of benefit, because you can do a lot of good things with it, and you get a bunch of negatives because somebody’s trying to use that to put viruses on your computer, or malware, things like that. So a series of companies come along and say, “Okay, well, let me help you figure out how to get rid of these viruses.” A lot of them are successful, they have good products, et cetera.
Time goes on, the internet comes along. Now you’ve got a new set of problems, and a new set of companies come along and they’re like, “Okay, well, let me go try to solve this.” Then the smartphone, then social media, now AI.
So you’ve got these waves of technological shifts that are happening, and in each shift, you have a problem and you have a series of companies that try to solve the problem. The difficulty becomes, how do these companies move forward in time? If you’re an antivirus maker, to get that to stretch over to a social media protector is hard, both as an organization, as a brand, and where your focus area tends to be.
For the consumer now, you now have to go pick eight different things, and the consumer is overwhelmed. “Okay, I don’t know what to go get. What do I put in? How does it all set up?”
So the way we approached the problem was to say, look, this is a hairy problem getting hairier. We’re not going to use technology any less, and as we adopt more and more of this, we’re going to continue to have more and more problems. So can we build a platform? Can we build a system where, as we get information from customers, we can grow with them as time goes on — whether they’re growing in age or changing in life stages, or the technological shift is going to move forward? Can you make a friction-free, easy-to-use experience where we can make sure we’re keeping this family or consumer safe, whether it’s from viruses, whether it’s from financial transaction fraud and scams, spam?
Now, like a lot of the work we’re doing is in behavioral health, which seems very strange. But one of the things we’ve now started seeing is, as you talk to families about safety issues, many of them say, “Look, my kids are on devices eight, 10 hours a day. I have no idea what they’re doing with these devices. I don’t know what the practical issues are — whether it’s cyberbullying or sexual grooming, any of those types of issues.”
Then there are the more subtle issues, where being on these devices means they seem to be having impaired sleep, or they’re having negative mental health consequences. So we’ve now expanded the platform to also address that. We have the ability now to be able to identify risky behaviors, behavioral changes in kids, be able to inform parents, make sure that whatever online activities help make them happy or make them go the other way — can we give parents some insights around that as well?
Again, by the way, AI was not a big thing for kids nine months ago. But now, since we have so many customers, we get a lot of first-order data and we see that kids are engaging with chatbots in very sexual ways. 35, 40% of these kids are engaging in a very sexual manner. You’ve got levels of engagement with chatbots that are almost higher than the engagement that they have with their own friends, in terms of the number of texts that we see going through.
So that’s a new thing. Now we say, “Okay, well, we have all the data. Let’s come up with some protective measures to help this family.”
Alan Fleischmann
So is the vision today different than it was eight years ago?
Hari Ravichandran
It’s the same vision. It’s the same. It’s still making sure that we’re making the internet safer for families. I think the way we do it is perhaps different, and the kind of problems are different. But that was always the bet.
When we were thinking about the business, we said, “Hey, what’s a big area that, over the next 20, 30 years, is not going to get any smaller, but going to get even bigger?” Cybersecurity definitely seemed like one of those things, because you’re really making a bet that technology is going to evolve; that we as human beings are going to adopt more technology; and that there’s good in us and there’s bad in us, then the ones that tend to lean in on the bad side end up becoming a threat to safety.
So that bet’s played out well, both fortunately and unfortunately. Fortunately for the business, but unfortunately for humanity. Because there’s now more scams, more breaches, more online theft, more negative impacts from technology to kids. So that part is also getting as big as the technology adoption curve is.
Alan Fleischmann
How do people get protected here? What is it that — because you are definitely focusing on a major fear that people should have. How do they actually get protected?
Hari Ravichandran
So they download an app, they put it on their phones. It’s a subscription. It can go anywhere from $10 to $20 a month, so it’s reasonably inexpensive for people to be able to buy it.
It then lets you get onboarded for every area of your life. If it’s your identity, we scan your credit, we make sure that your data is not in the dark web. If it’s transactions, we make sure you’re on a VPN when you’re going out to an insecure connection. But we also monitor your banking accounts and look for anything anomalous. If it’s on the personal side, we’re looking for patterns and behavioral changes that are happening based on device usage.
All of that comes out of one central stack on the back end. And we’re pretty heavy adopters of AI — we were even before the big AI wave came along about three and a half years ago. So we’ve got very robust deep learning systems on the back end, things that have the ability to predict and look at this family or consumer at a 360 level, and be able to look and see where there are potential threats that could be a negative. Can we come up with preventative actions? Or if something negative’s already happened, how do we help them remediate that issue on the back end?
The negative stuff is anywhere from like, “My dad got scammed, he gave information over the phone,” to, “My kid is in real distress, they’re cutting themselves, I have to have an intervention.” So it’s a very wide gamut of stuff. And the technology really enables us to be able to try to do a good job.
Alan Fleischmann
Is there a B2B and a B2C play here? Is it business and consumer?
Hari Ravichandran
We have both. We have a direct-to-consumer, which is about 60 percent of the business, and about 40-ish percent is through businesses. So we sell the product through enterprises for the enterprise to be able to offer to their employee base as a benefit. Sometimes the employee might pay for it, sometimes the enterprise pays for it; it just depends on what the setup there is.
And then we have partners — AT&T is our partner, for example. They’re one of our investors. So we partner up with them to be able to get product out to their customer base. So that’s more on the enterprise side of it.
But our product is the same, by the way, but the distribution partners are different. Now we’re starting to partner up with schools, for example, to be able to offer the product through schools to parents. We’re partnering up with large organizations like Common Sense Media and other folks as well. So there’s many of these pillars that we use to distribute the product to customers.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, I love that, actually. So really, this is about creating an environment of trust — which both have been involved in in different parts of your career. It’s all about trust. This is where you’re doing it to solve a big problem. I would imagine in the age of AI, there’s a lot more anxiety now about who do you trust and how do you trust. It’s a big part of the fix, knowing where to go. There are lots of other folks who are claiming they do what you do, but they don’t.
Hari Ravichandran
A lot of people do it in pieces. To be able to look at this holistic view of this individual or this family is a hard thing to do, for some of the reasons I was talking about earlier.
Trust is key, by the way. When you talk to a family about online safety or security, if there’s a big tech company that’s providing some of those securities to the consumer, there’s a healthy distrust. Data sales is another big area that families are really worried about. What data is getting brokered about them? What else is out there in the dark web?
So being somebody that doesn’t… We have one source of revenue, and that’s our customers. We don’t sell data. We don’t do any of this stuff. We work for the family, and that’s our job. So we’re completely a neutral party. We’re not tied to ads, or to big tech. Our job is to make sure that the family stays safe. Understanding that is really helpful to a lot of folks. “Hey, you don’t have any other agenda. Your job is to make sure I’m safe. I am renting you for 20 bucks a month to make sure that my family is kept safe online. And if you do a good job, I’ll keep renewing the lease.” That makes it a very simple handshake, basically.
Alan Fleischmann
So I’m curious, Jeffrey: After decades of telling stories and shaping culture, what drew you to this? I mean, you are protecting culture here again. I imagine investing in something quite practical here. Because if we don’t have online security and safety, the vulnerability for our culture and families is enormous.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
I mean, I’ve always been drawn to things where you can do good by doing good. By accident — and by the talent and intelligence of my partner, Sujay, and Hari — we’re doing good while doing good.
It was not as clear and obvious to me at the outset, but I’m so proud of what we’re doing and what a difference this is making into people’s lives today. Hari had a personal challenge with one of his kids, and I just saw him go from somebody who had a business interest to suddenly became mission-driven.
The damage being done to our kids today online is really… It’s tragic, it’s pervasive, and parents are lost. They just don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to protect their kids. So he set out to solve that problem. I’m literally honored and proud to be a part of that journey that Hari has put us on.
Alan Fleischmann
And the idea that actually one can do something to minimize the danger — there’s an optimistic opportunity here.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
You absolutely can. Here’s the way to think about it today: if you have a kid, a teenager, and they’re 15, 16 years old, they’re going to get a driver’s license. You don’t just on day one hand them the keys to the car. You get a learner’s permit. You go to a Walmart parking lot, where you can’t do any damage. There’s an onboarding process here. You get a temporary permit, and then you get a learner’s permit. Then over the course of a two-year period of time, they actually learn both the responsibility and the skill to be a safe driver.
We don’t do that today. We hand our kids these devices with no training, with no guardrails, with no guidance, and just let them go out into the water. And these devices are infinitely more dangerous than a car. So we’re giving parents those tools — not to take these things away from kids, not to prevent them from all of the positive things that come through connection, through knowledge, through information, all of the great things that we know come through being online — but just protecting them from the bad.
Alan Fleischmann
And are we seeing results from the work that Aura is doing? Tell us a little bit about that.
I’m loving the idea that this is a very solution-focused conversation. Everyone fears the danger. I think the biggest danger often isn’t just the fear. It’s the fear that we don’t know. You don’t really know what your kids are doing, and you don’t really have an idea of how they’re spending their time, but they could be very much in danger, unbeknownst to you.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
They sit across from you at the breakfast table, you have no idea. They’re sitting on the phone. You don’t know where they are, you don’t know who they’re with, you don’t know what they’re doing.
Hari Ravichandran
In a lot of ways, with kids anymore, the truth isn’t in physical life alone. There’s a lot of truth on devices in digital life. What are they engaging with? Who are they engaging with? What are they actually doing?
We know the stats are very clear — it’s eight hours a day that they’re on these devices. If you thought about it, would you — for a young kid — send them off somewhere for eight hours in the physical world that you had no information on? That would be a really scary thing for most families. So that’s kind of what we’re doing every day with the kids. It’s a big blind spot.
We get a range of feedback from customers. On the extreme end of it, it’s “Hey, we’ve identified something really worrisome here,” and we’re able to talk to the families. We’re very clinically driven. We have a chief medical officer. We have a full bench of psychologists, clinicians, and psychiatrists. We partner up with Boston Children’s Hospital. So we do this in a very evidence-based way, because we want to make sure it’s not a willy-nilly solution, that it’s something that’s very thoughtful and that has a lot of backup there.
We had one a couple weeks ago where the kid said, “Hey, I’m actually glad my parents put this on my device, because it seems to give them insights or ideas that seem to help them understand me better. So maybe we can have more conversations about my digital life and things that I’m doing online.”
The other really subtle thing we’ve picked up, which is really interesting to me, is, even though the kids are on there for eight-plus hours, when you actually go talk to a lot of these kids — we have a wellness council with a lot of kids through the Children’s Hospital, we partner up with them on that — when you ask them, “Hey, do you feel like you have a good relationship with technology or with you phone?” more than half of them say, “No, I don’t think so.” Then you say, “Well, why are you on your phone so much?” And they said, “Well, I don’t know how to put it down.” So it’s very akin to cigarette smoking, because you see in the data — the kids, the first thing they do when they pick up the phone, they swipe through it. And if you’re like a smoker, somebody that’s a chain smoker, most likely you’re getting up and you want to go get a cigarette. It feels that same part of the brain is what the devices are hitting up, and social media is hitting up.
So we’re able to help parents help navigate that — because again, you’re not going to let your kid smoke. I mean, most families anyway. So here it seems to be activating that same part of the brain. It seems to be driving that same kind of addictive behavior.
We aren’t there yet. I mean, we’re starting to see it now. We’re seeing some positive signs. But as a society, we still have some ground to cover from what we’re seeing.
Alan Fleischmann
What I like about this so much — it’s a little bit anti- what became everyone’s logic, where you thought you had to have multiple apps, multiple places, multiple verticals in your life. If you’re dealing with financial security, or you’re worried about identity theft, or where you put your password, family safety stuff, all that. What you’re saying is, actually, you’re most safe if you actually have one stop, one place.
Hari Ravichandran
I mean, you’re one person. You’re Alan, right? So Alan might go to the grocery store and buy something, Alan might go to work and do something, Alan might go and open up a new account someplace else. It’s not like there’s like 30 versions of you that we need to look at. We just want to look at Alan and how do we create this protective aura around you so you can make sure that you’re staying safe.
So when we talk about our company being very human-centric, that is the subtle shift, by the way. Because a lot of the older security companies, the view was, “I’m going to keep your computer safe, I’m going to keep your phone safe, I’m going to keep your data safe online.” We say, “No, we’re going to keep you safe, whatever it is that you’re doing.” You should have the freedom to go do everything that you like doing, and let us make sure that wherever we can, we’re keeping you safe. It’s not 10 different places you’ve got to go to try to protect yourself.
Alan Fleischmann
You also have an insurance element to this too, if I’m not mistaken? There’s the ability to actually protect yourself with identity theft insurance, which I had not heard a lot about, learned about it when I was studying Aura a little bit. You’ve got the safety tools, which is important, because I don’t think parents realize that they’re vulnerable if their kids are doing things online. Not only are their kids vulnerable, but the families are vulnerable.
Hari Ravichandran
Yeah, exactly. We see routinely cases where people have lost tens of thousands of dollars. It’s not just small losses — very destabilizing amounts of money get lost. It could be anything from a romance scam to a grandparent scam. Acouple years ago, pig butchering was like a big thing.
So you’ve got this whole gamut of scams. All of these now are getting more sophisticated because a lot of the criminals now have access to AI tools. So you can do synthetic voice, you can do synthetic text generation, you can do synthetic emails. You can farm data much more easily than you used to be able to.
I think this is the notion of making sure that, as technology is evolving, as you start to adopt a lot of different things, we want to make sure that all of it is well protected.
Alan Fleischmann
How are you doing it? How are you responding to all these scams?
I worry about AI a lot. There’s a lot of miracle, and then you have a lot of AI which is helping you empower and build and scale. So AI is not a dirty word, it’s a good thing, especially when it comes to speed.
But there is this fear of the dehumanization of our lives the ability to scam and get into people’s bank accounts. And we live in a very digital life and digital world. I imagine that the innovation side of Aura has to be so cutting-edge in order for you to be several steps ahead of where technology will be as well. Tell us a little bit about that.
And then, how do you actually maintain that sophistication? Because you want to make it simple for me and my family, right? You want to make it simple for the customer. But we want to know that in our trusting of you, that you’re constantly sealing the window and locking the door.
Hari Ravichandran
Exactly. I mean, it takes a lot of work to make something look easy. I think it was like a Keith Richards quote — “You have no idea how expensive it is to look this cheap.” It’s a hard thing to do, to take a lot of complexity and make it accessible and easy for folks.
So a lot of the work we do is continuously looking for different kinds of threats, different kinds of attacks that are happening. We do that with AI. We do that with people. We do that through a gamut of stuff. Our engineering team is just absolutely top-notch. The data science and the AI part of it, lots and lots of folks that are sector experts. We have people from the medical industry that are very, very good at behavioral health modeling, detecting anomalies inside the system, where something is changing. Then how do you deep dive to see, “Is this change that’s happening something to do with their financials? Is it something to do with something else?”
So we have to stay on the cutting edge. And to be honest, I would say, as exciting as the last 18 months have been, we also have severe anxiety around it all the time, because technology is moving at a breathtaking pace now. We continuously wake up thinking, “Wait, are we behind, or are we kind of okay on the curve?” It just depends on the day of the week, because somebody else now comes up with a new innovation this week that wasn’t there two weeks ago. And you’re like, “Oh no, we feel like we’re behind. We got to go faster.”
So at the moment, it’s the greatest tailwind you could hope for. But at the same time, it also raises the bar quite highly for us to make sure we’re continuously staying on that razor’s edge.
Alan Fleischmann
And how much of this is building partnerships? You spoke earlier about the Children’s Hospital and getting involved in the mindset of young people, reaching them. You’ve got great people that can actually help let young people themselves know where they’re vulnerable. They can become their own ambassadors, I guess, right? How are you doing that?
And how are you doing that at scale? Because it is that human-to-human connectivity here, in addition to being the great innovators on the technology side, that is what makes Aura different.
Hari Ravichandran
Look, man, I think there’s very high-level stuff, right? Someone like Common Sense Media — you have the trust of many, many people that you have kind of built up and earned over 30, 40, 50 years. You spend the time getting to know us, getting to know our product, doing the deep diligence you need to. And then in the right places, make sure that people understand that there are solutions out there that can help them stay safe. So that’s one example.
But the desire to keep other people safe — it’s a very human thing. For example, we launched this feature where any scams that are happening in that particular geographic region, you can now share with friends or family. We thought, “Oh, that’s kind of interesting and nice to have.” The day we launched it, we were getting tens of thousands of people just sharing scams with other people to other folks. So you can start to kind of build up this groundswell by having people feel like, “Hey, you’re doing a service for me, and I want to be able to share that with other people.” So that’s at the most grassroots level.
And then obviously, there’s business blocks on top of that. “Hey, who are you partnering with?” MetLife, for example, is one of our partners to distribute the product through large enterprises. AT&T is our partner. So how do you find that middle block as well, basically?
Alan Fleischmann
It’s in their interest as your partner, I imagine, to have you in their lives as well. Because they’re vulnerable. There are sleeves and windows and openings for anybody that’s out there right now. You being there to help their customers, their consumers, their families — it protects them too.
Hari Ravichandran
Yeah, and it builds up goodwill, right? If you think of that cycle of trust — the person you trust the most typically tends to be your bank or financial advisor at the very top. Then you’ve got your employer, which tends to be number two item. Then it’s like your school, doctor, et cetera; that’s the wave on the back end.
So typically, the way we look at the strategy is, how do we make sure that we prove to those trust pillars in people’s lives that we are good, we’re relevant, we’re working hard, that we want to make sure we’re doing the right thing? How do we then get that seal of approval from them that they’re then able to share with their customers, because they want to keep their customers safe too? So it’s a chain of good stuff that’s happening from top to bottom.
Alan Fleischmann
So there really is a very strong B2B moment, business-to-business element of your strategy. Then there’s the B2C element, where you’re going directly to the customer, to the consumer, the family as well.
And it’s usually in the family — is it usually the parents, or is it the kids? Or is it both?
Hari Ravichandran
Almost always the adults. It could be a person that’s a family of one, or it could be somebody that has many people inside their family, including seniors and kids.
Typically, it’s the CTO of the household. Sometimes it’s the mom, sometimes it’s the dad, but it’s the person that’s responsible for the technology decisions inside the household. That tends to be our target customer.
Alan Fleischmann
And how do you reach them? How do you educate them? I know you’re constantly doing this through all these different partnerships and means. But if somebody just literally said, “I need to protect my family. Where do I go?” Obviously, I hope they’re listening to this show so they’re going to understand where to go. What would they do? Would they just go online to Aura and sign up? How would that work?
Hari Ravichandran
That’s it. I think a lot of people will research. They’ll go and say, “Hey, is this a good solution? Who likes it? Who doesn’t like it? Who’s endorsing it?” So it’s important for us to be able to build up that trust.
Then we give people a 14-day trial. We say, “Hey, try it, see if you like it. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to pay for it.” We probably end up with 75, 80 percent of the people becoming paying customers. But most people that try it say it’s good.
That’s always a continuous thing for us — how do you keep innovating on the product and make the experience easier, better? How do you onboard customers better? So all those things we worry about and think about a lot internally too.
Alan Fleischmann
What could the people who are listening to Leadership Matters right now be doing? I mean, obviously, individually, they should probably make sure that they are your customers, because no matter how sophisticated they think they are, they should actually sign up, family to family. But many of them are CEOs and leaders, top folks in their own companies, and community-focused. What could they be doing?
Hari Ravichandran
I think that keeping your employees safe is a huge thing, right? Because again, even from a business framework for example, obviously, that’s going to be the number one item in their mind. So keeping those things that you love safe and protected as a benefit you can offer to your employees is always a good thing.
Then more practically, to your question about what should you be doing — I think it’s really interesting, because when you talk to a lot of folks, almost everybody says, “Hey, I’m actually worried about this, but I don’t know where to start.” It really is a mindset thing, because generally, I think there’s a notion that maybe there’ll be some new regulation that comes in that keeps us safe. Maybe there is something else that happens.
The reality of it is, to be safe, it really is the family and the person’s responsibility. They have to take charge of that and say, “Hey, this is an important thing. I’m going to make sure that this is done the right way for me and my family.”
A lot of times, you see that happen immediately after a negative event or a near miss. “Oh shoot, this has now happened. I need to now go do these things.” That’s a really painful, stressful way to do it, because now you’re solving something where you’re in a very stressful mode. So if you can start doing that a bit earlier, where you’re taking charge of your security, your data, and the data of your family early on, you could potentially avoid having to do that in stress.
Alan Fleischmann
And building that trust. I mean, are you hopeful, both of you? Jeffrey, knowing your reputation and your leadership, I think of you as being an enormous optimist. I mean, you obviously use the power of your leadership and your reputation to do good — it’s a huge part of who you are. I think of you being a great optimist.
But it’s not exactly easy to be an optimist when you’re frightened and fearful. And for good reason; I think Hari would say, you should be concerned and we should be worried. But I think, based on both of you, both are optimistic. I’m curious.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
Well, I’m the optimist, because there are solutions to problems. My optimism comes out of the fact that time and time again, great minds, great entrepreneurs solve problems. That’s what Hari has done with Aura. He has solved a problem.
Now the next challenge is, how do we make everybody aware that there is a solution to your problem? That’s the phase that we’re in right now — just letting people know you’re not alone. Every single parent has to face these issues today, whether it’s about their kids, themselves, or their parents.
There are people that are using that same amazing technology that’s created the good and some of the bad to now fix the bad. So I do have that optimism, enthusiasm, and belief that you can do good and should.
Alan Fleischmann
And the idea here is that if we become part of the Aura family, in essence, and let Aura become your partner to protect you as your family — and by your family, it could be your home, it could be your employment, your work environment as well… That this one-stop shop part intrigues me so much, because it’s counterintuitive to what we’ve been trained, but it seems to make so much good sense that you need the holistic partner and that trust.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
But you find that in many places. That is Microsoft 365 has been about, right? Which is, give me all my solutions in one place. Just keep making it better and solving more problems. It’s what Google has done with their suite of apps and applications, which is, try and look at these things holistically and be a single-point of solution for things that have a lot of complexity around it.
Alan Fleischmann
And the next generation of threats, which are going to be many — and the humility in which you both talked about that I find very attractive. The courage to fight it and to come up with the solutions, but the awareness that they’re going to be there. How do we anticipate them?
It goes back to that, if you’re part of that Aura family, then we’re going to be able to know that, as those new threats avail themselves and become part of our realities, we’ll be okay.
Hari Ravichandran
To your earlier question around optimism, generally: I’m an optimist by nature. I find that as a human race, we go off the rails sometimes, but we find our way back to the right path. Sometimes it takes longer than it should, but we always find the way back.
So I think as more and more people become more and more aware, those all end up becoming points of data for us. That’s why getting the message out there, having a lot of people being aware of this and engaging with the problem, is very helpful. Because again, as a company, we’re continuously looking for threats, we’re looking for patterns, we’re looking for all these things. But if it’s an outlier case, we’re not going to catch it, because there’s not enough data there, unless that person is part of our user base.
Our goal over time is to basically build up enough of a large community of folks that are working with us or are our customers — maybe their employer’s a customer, whichever way it is. The more of that we get now, we get a lot more signal. And as we get signal, we have the ability to make the product better, which can keep that whole thing safer.
That’s why scale does matter quite a bit in this industry, not just for size of business and revenue and all those things, which are all important, but even for the product to get better. More users just means we can do a better job being able to protect more people.
Alan Fleischmann
And is there a different entry point if you’re a family signing up for Aura than if you’re a business?
Hari Ravichandran
So as a small business, it is a different onboarding piece. We don’t necessarily build security for the enterprise. It’s the enterprise being able to offer that to their employees or to their customers that have a lot of consumers and families.
We are shortly launching an SMB product, actually, that’s coming up in the December timeframe, which is for small businesses, so they can then offer the solution to all of their employee base as well. Again, it’s the same product, but the onboarding looks a bit different there.
Alan Fleischmann
So what didn’t I ask you that I should have asked you guys?
Hari Ravichandran
This is fantastic. I think this is a wide-reaching —
Jeffrey Katzenberg
Are we having a good time?
Hari Ravichandran
I am.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
We are.
Alan Fleischmann
Well, it looks like you guys do.
WndrCo blows me away too. Because you’re using resources to partner, invest, and then help scale solutions. So I imagine from a WndrCo perspective, you’re changing the way capitalism is working, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
Well, yeah, but we’re following others that have done this before.
The great thing about what we’re doing at WndrCo is that there’s almost two lanes that are in parallel with one another. We’re starting companies ourselves, which is great because we’ve all been entrepreneurs and want to continue to be. We started businesses and built them and had successes with them and had some misses. So that comes with the territory. Nobody bats 1,000.
Then the other side of that is being able to invest in other great entrepreneurs who are doing what we think are world-changing ideas. There’s a fund that started many years ago called Founders Fund that I think was quite famous for doing this. I don’t know that we’re reinventing the wheel. It’s just the 2025 version of that.
It’s a very, very exciting time to be in tech. There is so much innovation going on today. The world is changing quickly, in all kinds of ways and manners. To be a part of that and to be in the middle of it — I have a mantra of mine, which is: never let your memories be greater than your dreams. I love that. So every day, I get up and I’m excited more for what I’m doing today. I don’t even remember what I had for lunch yesterday.
Alan Fleischmann
But you look forward to the lunch you’re going to have tomorrow.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
I do. Well, I look forward to the fact I’m going to go to a Dodger game tonight, having gone to one last night. So I’m particularly excited about that.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, I love that.
I know we’re wrapping up shortly, but I wanted to ask you both about how important — and I know the answer, just hearing both of you talk — how important is company culture?
Jeffrey Katzenberg
It’s everything. I mean, company culture is everything. It’s how do you create a place where you have loyalty, you have friendship, you have shared ambitions and goals and aspirations and hopes and dreams? It all comes back down to the culture that you create.
In my case, I’ve got five partners and 17 of us in this, which is a tight little group. Or, when you go to a company where Hari’s got 1,000 employees, or places where I’ve worked where we’ve had tens of thousands of employees, culture is everything. With great culture, you win.
Hari Ravichandran
I think it’s a flywheel too. I echo everything Jeffrey said. But it’s in the sense that if you build it correctly from the get-go, it sort of feeds on itself. It can go the other way too. If you get it wrong, it goes against you too.
A lot of what we’ve done for culture over the years, from my personal learnings, was getting the team to really feel like they own the problem. Because if it’s very much like a corporate thing — “Hey, here’s the thing we’re going to go try to solve, or here’s the strategy, or here’s what we need to go get done” — and the executive team doesn’t feel ownership for the problem, it ends up becoming a real impediment to scaling the business. So a lot of time we spend on making sure that the team understands, “Hey, this is the thing we’re trying to crack the code on, this is the real problem. Do we feel ownership? Do we understand that this is something that we need to take on?” Building that assumption helps everybody kind of find a common bond.
Then on top of that, a lot of the culture for us is the same as like in a household, right? Which is, you’re going to have conflict. There’s going to be stuff where people don’t agree. How good are you at resolving conflict? How good are you at working together and making sure that you’re moving that shared thing that binds you together forward?
So in some ways, having conflict isn’t necessarily a negative thing; it can actually be a very positive thing if we can find the way to bridge that and move the agenda forward a bit. If we can figure out, “Hey, the next time I know how to work with this person in a slightly different way that kind of latches a bit better.”
So I think those are a few things that we focus on quite a bit internally here as well.
Alan Fleischmann
It’s been wonderful to have this conversation, because it’s the combination of the human-to-human connectivity; the vulnerability and strengthening when you get it right; the optimism that we can solve problems if we come together and build the right culture, the right technology; and the innovation part of it that you can actually talk about AI, technology, and innovation in the same breath as human-to-human connectivity.
Then we’re talking about, ultimately, the security, safety, and sanctity of family — how we’re protecting that family, and knowing that we need to use the right security, safety measures, and technology as well. So this is very inspiring. I’m going to sign up personally.
Hari Ravichandran
We’ll send you a code, Alan. We’ll send that along.
Alan Fleischmann
I’m ready. I’m ready. And I’m urging everyone who’s listening to do the same.
And look, I’d love to have you both on individually to talk about your life stories as well. We got to talk a lot about Aura today, and that’s so important because we don’t have enough solutions out there for people’s biggest worries and real big concerns. But it’d be good to have you both come on and talk a little bit about what inspires you individually as leaders and your life stories a little bit more, because that also would be a wonderful takeaway. We can touch on Aura, obviously, and other things that you’re involved in, Jeffrey, and WndrCo.
Hari Ravichandran
Happy to do it, anytime.
Alan Fleischmann
You’ve been listening to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM and leadershipmattersshow.com. Jeffrey Katzenberg, you’re doing amazing things. Hari Ravichandran, you’re doing amazing things. The fact that you’ve come together to build Aura to solve problems, as I said, and then human-to-human connectivity with technology and innovation, gives us both the sense of trust and security, and optimism and inspiration.
So thank you both for what you’re doing. It’s a remarkable example of how creativity and purpose can actually scale. That’s how capitalism will thrive. We need more of it. So thank you.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
Thanks for having us. Appreciate it.
Hari Ravichandran
Appreciate it. Good to see you.
This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.