>> live from pier 3 in san francisco, welcome to the "bloomberg west" where we cover the global technologies and media companies reshaping our world. i'm emily chang. every weekend we will bring you the best of the west. bill gates is an entrepreneur, a visionary, and a philanthropist. now he wants to add myth buster to that list. he wants to destroy the myth that poverty and disease cannot be eradicated.

he put out an annual letter were he put for this annual letter, writing that by 2035 there will be almost no -- left in the world. here is the exclusive interview on how they choose their charitable causes to whether or not gates will return to microsoft. >> i think that the board is doing some important work right now. the foundation is the biggest part of my time, but then i put work into help as a board member. >> are you involved with the search for the new chief executive? >> we're working on that. there is nothing new to say. it is a good board.

>> do you feel a sense of urgency at all? does the board fill a sense of urgency? >> i cannot wait. then again, you want to pick the best person. they will move at the right pace. >> we had the fortune of having the mayor comeback. we are very happy to have him back. bill, has that ever hit your vision in the future of going back to microsoft full-time? >> my full-time work is going to be the foundation for the rest of my life. my wife and i are enjoying that. i get to do it in depth. i am not going to change that. i will help out part-time. >> in the 12 years that you've been in public office, technology, the industry itself has changed dramatically.

new pioneers. >> the basics really have not changed. education, business, philanthropy, is still about people looking at each other and listening to each other and working collaboratively. you have to be very careful not that think that technology is going to do everything for you. what does matter is competency, the education of our kids. that is the most important thing. there are enormous changes in the job prospects for people. some of them are going to lead us down a path of some very severe problems. nevertheless, the most important thing is every kid getting a good education. in some parts of the world, they understand that. and some parts of the world, they do not. sadly, in america we do not. we keep falling in rankings. now we're lucky to be in the top 30.

we have to get away from this partisan stuff and start devoting the resources we need up we're going to have a future. >> bill, you are passionate about training our young people, particularly with computers. >> that is a topic that mike and i think is incredibly important. we have been willing to create some controversy, saying that, let's help people be better. let's try out new approaches. some of this is unsatisfactory. technology can help a motivated learner. but how do you create the motivation? that is mostly a human problem. and how can you help the teacher do it as best as possible? >> as a final note, bill, tell me what you think about the state of the technology industry right now. >> the rate of innovation is faster than ever.

things like understanding speech and vision, taking large amounts of data and understanding that, big, high resolution screens that will be on your walls and in the opposite at home. we are in a fantastic time where finding information, scanning information, is going to get a lot better. and that will lead to productivity. we can simulate things so that new product design and innovation will go faster. we see that in biology, even understanding complex systems, and what drugs should be tried out, so i'm a great believer, whether it is helping the poor or the global economy, technology can help a lot of problems. >> if you go back and look at what people predicted a few years ago, and they were so wrong. everything has been done. in the next few years, we will improve technology more than was

done from the very beginning of electricity till today. >> exponential. >> it is an industry will that will have to adjust and change. some will do that successfully. some will not. some people have better jobs. some people have to find ways to make sure that they are included. it is going to be a serious problem. it is not just an american problem. it is a problem around the world. particularly, around the middle it is taking place. you get cheaper products, but we are employing fewer people. we have to find ways to get everybody involved. >> majority stakeholder, my bloomberg, and microsoft cofounder bill gates. some of technologies biggest names are headed to the world economic forum. we will hear from them, coming up, next. ♪

>> welcome back to the best of "bloomberg west" with emily chang. taking the stage at the world economic forum in switzerland. the salesforce ceo is there. among them, all of them sat on a single panel. they covered topics, including nsa surveillance. i spoke with them at length. >> interesting, all of them affected, maybe so forth the least. yahoo! as well getting those collection request from the nsa. here they are at this forum talking about the impact of their global businesses on this spying policy. >> all of them were asked, what would you ask, if you could ask president obama for one thing, what would you ask? let's take a look.

>> what one request would you make to president obama? >> transparency. understanding, so that we can help our users understand these request that we are getting, and the range of request that we are getting, and how that data is going to be used. and we want to regain the trust of our users. >> do you feel that trust has fallen because of this? >> i think so. not only in the u.s., but also, internationally. there are concerns about what the nsa is looking at. i think that transparency is something that would help. >> you do wonder what the fallout is going to be, internationally, in terms of how it is going to affect the growth of the companies. the international clients, for example, don't trust yahoo! and other companies to hold their data. >> every one of those ceos, at&t, yahoo!, they have all been

to the white house to talk to president obama, specifically, about that issue. cisco has been more candid than any of the other company out there. they said that their sales fell because of the nsa program. john chambers has been very outspoken about this. he has been outspoken about this policy because it is hurting his business. >> he talked about, on this panel, the need for more regulation. i don't mean to be too optimistic on his part. but the idea that the united states and allies could agree on the rules of the road. how we are going to do surveillance, if you will? >> look at the failing results. ibm had weak results, which we

will talk about later in the show. you can really see that this nsa problem is not just a civil liberties issue. it is a business issue. >> i heard the ceo of cells for saying, look, it is not just their responsibility. -- salesforce saying, look, it is not just their responsibility. >> vendors have to provide transparency themselves. they cannot pin it all on the government. >> is he calling them out? >> i think that is the other issue, where the companies stumbled around this when it first broke and edward snowden's leak first became known. they said it is not that big of a deal. they said, we wish we could tell you it is not that big of a dealt.

they continued to call for transparency. i'll be sure to see what those numbers look like when we can see it, and at the numbers matter that much. if it has, in fact, been a big meta gathering. yahoo is complaining about this. but they recognize the challenge to the business. >> in the past year, she talked about how mobile is changing their business. let's take a look at what she had to say about that. >> it is about crossover. by the end of this year, we will have more mobile users and mobile traffic then we have easy traffic. you have to be prepared for that. can you actually be a big company and be fast, and transparent, and have autonomy, and really enable people to keep

up with how we are changing. >> here's my question. she talks about mobile now for more than one year. but the same thing is happening at facebook and more of their users are going mobile. the same thing is happening at twitter. there are more mobile users than pc users. but it doesn't mean that more are using them. what does it actually say about the traffic in a growth? >> their intimates of a turnaround where everything matters big-time. this business of the huge transformation we are seeing across businesses, where it is not just about adapting to mobile, where you have something you like yahoo! that is trying to find relevance that it has lost over the last 10 years, mobile provides a great opportunity to them to be relevant in a place that they have lost relevance. they lost relevance on desktop,

and they could be relevant on mobile. there are 390 million mobile users. that is up for the quarter. that is a big change in human behavior. now that we're seeing those numbers, they can trumpet it out. but now they will be required, not actually required, but we will demand, tell us the metrics for mobile. we want to know how many users you have. >> how does it translate into sales? we know that advertising and sales are not doing particularly well. she just fired someone, so she is not happy with that leadership. >> mobile first development. it is hard to think mobile first

. you can argue that twitter is mobile first. but they said that, uncertainties, mobile revenues exceed desktop revenues. we have not heard that from google and yahoo!. we know that things tend to be less valuable on mobile. we will see how that transition goes. at some point, the companies are going to require -- we know that yahoo! was dealing with the fcc about what they did not want to disclose. they did not wanted disclose their reliance on that agreement, which could expire in a short time. if their mobile numbers looked really good, they would disclose them. if they have not disclosed, a.b. they are not a strong -- maybe they are not a strong. >> this discussion is going in an interesting. the moderator asked, what kind of technology has transformed her like the most?

one of them said that fitbit. they could tell when the other person was not working out. take a look at this. >> are you feeling ok? i was like, what do you mean, michael? he was like, i'm very worried about you. i'm your friend on the fitbit network, and i notice you have a workout. >> it is almost creepy. michael dell across the country could know that marc was not working out. >> both of them build their empires on the desktop. now they are really thinking about and actively engaging in this role of not getting fit. that is a thing for guys in their late 40's, i think. i am early 40's and i like both of these guys personally.

but i think that they're actively engaging in learning about this world where lots of data is being collected. a new kind of social network is being created. outside of it, there is a facebook connected thing like fitbit. the sharing of data is a big part of this, but there are massive amounts of data being collected. or you could be not collected for a few days. i am sure these guys are thinking about what this means, in terms of big business. >> what about what it means, in terms of privacy? where does the data gets stored? how do they get to see it? >> i am sure they are thinking about selling that the stores, and selling that data, and gathering the data, and spinning it in ways that can be used, not just trained to get his friends off the couch.

>> that was cory johnson, our editor at large. we will bring you some information from dell founder, michael dell, about dell's plans. that is coming up. ♪

>> this is the best of "bloomberg west". i am emily chang. dell, what will be computer maker actually looked like as a private company? the dell founder set down with us in switzerland. take a look. >> the hardware part is still an important part.

the value is certainly shifting to the software. these are areas where we have invested tremendously. we had 30 acquisitions in the last five years. we built a $21 billion enterprise business in this new area. certainly, as a private company, we are intending to focus more on those areas. >> before you jump in here with some questions for mr. dell, the michael dell ad on television is a home run to left field. you went back to all these companies. >> it is kind of an inspiring ad. >> i got goosebumps. >> i didn't cry, but -- >> i appreciate that. >> what you have in your hand? and how significant is that to what you are doing? >> we have a new eight inch

tablet. >> is this a shameless plug, or what? >> shameless plug. >> this is an eight inch tablet. it is also an entire pc. you take it with you. if you attach it to a monitor. you take it with you. >> it is just a small pc. >> is therefore the whole industry going? >> it is interesting. i think the death of of the pc has been talked about quite a lot. it turns out there are still one million of these devices sold every single day. >> are you kidding? >> but on a price competition basis, in india as an example, what is the distinction of this product versus what apple or microsoft is doing?

>> tablet business was taking off in 2013. it doubled from the first to the second quarter. it doubled again from the second to the third. from the third to the fourth, it tripled. there is a differentiation and services. of course, the real issue is, how do you integrate this into a company's operations, making it, not just about the product, not just about software and services, understanding how it works with the company to make people more productive. >> you are going to try to ship the lion share to this? or are you going to still primarily be a hardware company in, say, five years? >> we still have a substantial business in hardware.

but i will tell you, it is a good business for us. and it is a great foundation for us to build a relationship. you get into cyber security, systems management, information management. we are entering this whole age. >> that was tom keene with david kirkpatrick and dell ceo and founder, michael dell. coming up, the twitter cofounder will be joining us. find out why he says that the new start up is not a social network. ♪

>> this is the best of "bloomberg west," i am emily chang. the twitter cofounder has a new app called jelly. it has pictures and involves your social network. in addition to twitter, i sat down and asked him as a social media pioneer, why choose search? >> i did not need mean to do it. i asked myself the question, what would we build if we had to build something that could answer questions. that led us to mobile and social

and all of a sudden we had this idea we had to do. the other part of that answer is once i realized what it was, i realized that jelly is the product of my own personality. i enjoy helping people. let people help each other. >> did to start a company? >> we were going to hack on it and put it out there and see if people like it. as we talked about it, we thought this could be a good business. >> it has been out there for two weeks, how is it going? >> it is still early. it is hard to see what people will wind up asking over the long haul. there are three types of questions we see. one, should i buy this? two, how do i fix this or set this up?

three, what am i looking at? >> that is where the picture comes in. you have to post a photo to ask a question. why is that? some questions need photos and some don't necessarily. >> this is a mobile-only application right now. one of the things that makes mobile what it is your photos. it is something that tells you where you are out in the world. in my experience, most questions can be dramatically contextualized better with a photo. sure you can argue that some don't need them, i think things can be enhanced with a photo so i made it mandatory so you would not have that extra decision. you have to do a photo, you do not decide if you need one. >> talk about what else is out there.

what is missing from google? why are you trying to take them on? >> i am not trying to take them on, i am offering an alternative. i think there are some queries that are better answered via human mind than retrieving a document that has already been published. the key thing in this information is not knowledge. information is just an ingredient. it is one of many things that is transmitted in the human mind to actual human experience. we'll ask the person the question, you get more nuance and more knowledge. >> i have been doing it. i traveled last week and broke my carry on luggage. i asked what i should buy. i got 15 different answers and they were all helpful.

it worked out well for me. one of the things that surprised me was as soon as i asked my question, my husband asked if i was shopping. how many people got told that i wanted to ask this question? >> not everybody. my cofounders name is ben. what we are doing is taking your social networks and blended them into one network. we are sending your query out to a percentage of those people. not everybody, but some of the people you know got that question. >> what about questions you don't want people to know you are asking? that is what makes google great is you are anonymous. >> that is another decision we made early on. we felt it was better if you were not anonymous.

there were too many mean things that were possible. when you attach your name to something, you behave differently. >> does that inhibit the potential growth? >> it might. we were willing to take that chance. if you're not capable of asking the question to your friends, it is probably not the right service. >> you can say thank you. i wanted to ask more questions. tell me more. how long have you used it? is there a reason you can't send another message? >> we intentionally broke a lot of accepted norms. we had an early prototype that was very discussion based and back-and-forth and comments. people were not getting their questions answered quickly enough in a valuable enough way.

we switch to a model that said this is the question, answer it or forward it. we are sort of actively discouraging conversation. we feel there are plenty of other place to have that conversation. that may change, right now that is how we are doing it. >> this is not a social network. >> we do not want people to think this is yet another social network. the simplicity of jelly is it takes advantage of what we have been building for the last seven to 10 years. people have been collecting followers and friends and contacts. to what end? we are the response to that. maybe the answer to why we have been doing that is so we can start helping each other. >> why can't you search other people's questions? i could have asked what other people thought about luggage.

>> that may come in the future. right now, it is so early we do not have that much information to look through. down the line, we will build up a huge group of questions and answers. >> you're focusing on product now. your coo was at twitter. how do you turn this into a business? >> we are thinking of ourselves as a search business. there is a lot of opportunity that proves that is a good business to be in. we do not want to get-- it sounds strange to anybody in the

business world, it is cart before the horse. to build up that base and prove that there is value before you can how you want to offer more value in terms of revenue and generating product. we are holding off. we think there is opportunity in the search space because there is intent. when somebody comes to jelly, they want something. there is usually somebody who wants to get their attention. ♪

>> welcome back to the best of "bloomberg west." i am emily chang. twitter got off the ground in 2006. since then, it has grown to 230 million users. how has his experience at twitter influenced the way he

runs his new startup? >> it is a different world. in three days, jelly had more accounts than twitter took two years. it is so amazingly quick. you do not keep the growth like that. we get featured in the apple app store, it was crazy. i had to remind everybody that it would go like this, be prepared. do not think it is failure. the way you have to do it is build the system that has growth mechanisms in it. you have to trust that they will work. you not want anything artificial. >> anything you won't do at jelly that you learned from twitter?

>> we are not going to go down all the time. again, it is a different world. we can use amazon web services to host everything. we can spin up a new server in a second. with twitter, that was a lot of work. >> twitter is now a public company. how is life different for you? >> not really. it is different in that i have my notoriety, i have the ability to get my phone calls answered or make a big deal when i launch a new app. that helps. >> twitter was going public and it dredged up a lot of stories about the founding and drama. a whole book was written about it.

jack overhyped his role. you were the moral compass. you are the glue that kept it together. how fair was this portrayal? >> i think he did hundreds of hours of interviews. i think it was fairly thorough. fair-- he had to make someone a bad guy. he had to make somebody the fall guy. he had to make somebody the good guy. in that capacity, there was too much sharpness. otherwise, there was stuff in there that i learned. i did not read the whole thing. i am too scatterbrained to read cover to cover. i looked at my section and a couple of other things. there were meetings that were taken that i was not part of.

>> looking at twitter today, there has been this history of a revolving door. are you confident in the people who are leading twitter now? >> we picked them. what i have always said is, and i think this is true, twitter had the people it needed at the time it needed them. as it evolved, people switched roles. no matter how dramatic it was, people switched roles and they were in the right roles. >> their head of product just left. that set off some alarm bells because of twitter's past. people say they may be gun shy about new product. how do you see their ability to innovate in the future?

there are a lot of things about twitter that have stayed the same for a long time. there are some things that are different. >> this is something that every company faces once they go public. we have to make dramatic innovative moves on the product side but we have to be careful because we have shareholders. the shareholders and everyone understand what twitter is as a company. they have to make bold product maneuvers and changes. i think they will. >> a lot of questions about when it is going to turn a profit. do those things concern you? >> i don't have to. that is one of the reasons we put dick in that position. i have somebody watching my

back. that made all the difference. you were talking before about how i did not intend to make this a company. i was telling one of my friends and trusted advisors about the idea. he said, i'm in. and i thought he liked the idea. what does that mean? is that something the kids are saying? once he came on board, i thought i could make this. >> what is your ceo style? who is somebody that you admire? >> it sounds cheesy, but i look up to evan and jack. my main thing as a leader is to be as communicative as possible.

i need to make sure everybody knows everything they need to know. >> you can catch the full interview on bloomberg.com and on our apple tv app. why is top talent a top priority for tech companies? we'll talk about the value of a good engineer coming up. ♪

>> welcome back to the best of "bloomberg west," i am emily chang. tech companies are battling for the best talent, especially the best engineers. they offer perks like free food and vacations. what makes a good engineer so valuable? i sat down with mike abbott who invests in enterprise

infrastructure. >> i think great engineers want to work with great engineers. they want to make an impact on what they're working on. they want to work at your company. >> do they drive innovation in the sense that are they given a problem to solve? or do they come up with a problem? >> great engineers come up with solutions to address a problem. in many great product companies, the problems are outlined by the design team. in today's world, it is the design team. they may have a vision for a product and it is up to

engineering to think through how i come up with realizing that vision. there has to be a path for engineers to be able to provide input. how do we carve out time for engineers to have ideas? they had an opportunity for that innovation. great engineers love computer science. they want to be able to have that silence to work. >> speaking of engineers and product design, at twitter your head of product left and we do not know why. he said it was time to leave. there has been speculation that twitter has been a difficult company to create product. it has been the same and it is

difficult to make changes. what is your take on what happened there? >> i don't have the details. i think in most companies there is a center of gravity that exists. depending on where that center of gravity resides, there are implications for the company. with twitter, it has been the product. jack is a product person. the goals are set there. it is difficult when you have a product that is so focused on simplicity. you push to add new things. we have to balance the tension of how we keep the service simple yet think thoughtfully of how to extend it in ways that are meaningful for the users. >> you are working closely with

your portfolio. where's the center of gravity be? twitter has to make money. >> i don't know if there is one answer. in consumer companies, it needs to sit closer to the design of the product. that is what consumers want. >> the revenue team says we need to make money. >> if you have a great product, there are ways to extract money from it. that was done in a very deliberate and slow way. that technology was done way in advance of rolling it out. we want to be careful to not disrupt the user experience at the expense of generating revenue. having that discipline is important. on the enterprise side, that center of gravity is an engineering.

they are coming up with different types of solutions. innovation varies between consumer enterprises. that product manager in the enterprise company is representing the customer. on the consumer side, we did not know we had that problem. i did not know if i had that problem five years ago. >> that was mike abbott. is this the motorcycle of the future? there are two electric vehicle prototypes being worked on in san francisco. we will take a look. ♪

>> welcome back to the best of "bloomberg west." tesla has cemented itself as a lifestyle brand in electric cars. lit motors is trying to be the same thing for electric motorcycles. i went inside wit motors to reboot the commute. >> from the front, it looks like a normal electric scooter. from the side, it is anything but. it has as much trunk space as a small car. >> it is a pickup truck on two wheels. it is a vehicle for carrying everyday things. >> this is a three-year-old vehicle start up. they have two prototypes in the works. this looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. it is part car and part motorcycle.

>> take all the safety of a car and convenience of a car and marry that with the efficiency of the motorcycle. >> it is electric but at just $6,000 it is affordable. it can take big money and many years to in a new vehicle on the road. they hope to get both vehicles in production this year. >> i am developing a car for me. >> to do that, he has teamed up with a design guru. >> what i am excited to do is look at the complete package. how does this new type of vehicle become really attractive to people who know and ride

motorcycles and people who never have. >> back in the office, they are working on the c-1 prototype. they think they are ready for the fast lane. >> we are just creating a new type of vehicle. this is for any type of short commute. >> remember you can get all the latest headlines of the top of the hour on bloomberg radio. we will see you again soon. ♪ >> in the middle of the mojave

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