tv Bloomberg West Bloomberg August 3, 2015 11:30pm-12:01am EDT
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emily: twitter shares close at their lowest since their opening. does it make them an easy acquisition target? i'm emily chang and this is "bloomberg west." the stripe ceo joins me to talk about the company's $5 billion valuation and taking on paypal. the ceo of github with more on the future of open source. first to our lead -- a stock we are watching -- shares tumbling to the lowest price since the
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ipo two years ago, pushing twitter below $28. this has been a steady march down after the comments from the interim ceo, jack dorsey. julie: it is going to be a long process for the company. we did see them touch an intraday low and record low. the slide was set off by the earnings report that the slide also began when you saw it fall off a cliff earlier this year at the last earnings report, when the company was cautious on its outlook. twitter has had a hard slog for a long time, down about 18% year to date and touched the lowest price since its ipo. we will see if it indeed is below its ipo price. sentiment surrounding twitter is
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not strong right now. one thing that did surprise me is the short interest is relatively low. even though people are selling the shares, after the declines we have seen, they are not willing to go out right short. emily: i want to bring in our m&a reporter, alex sherman. you say this makes them and easier acquisition target. i wonder if easy is the right word to use with a $20 billion market cap? alex: i think it speaks to julie's last point. in order for twitter to become an acquisition target to google or facebook, the stock made to fall more and investors are not adding that it will. i spoke to some investors today who said you can look to twitter to fall $20 or $17 a share and
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then maybe it would be an appealing acquisition target. it still nowhere near that level, so it's possible with the fall also far it is still too expensive. emily: my question is does jack dorsey and the founders of twitter really want to sell this company? julie: we haven't seen any willingness on that point and whoever would acquire it would have to have the patience that investors and traders seem to be lacking. if their message to the market is what we are trying to achieve is going to take time, you need a parent company that will have that kind of patience. facebook itself asked for patience. google has the sort of moon shots and other things, but it is an awfully big acquisition to swallow and wait for it to turn around and air freight. alex: it would be the largest acquisition for either facebook or google ever.
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it is a significant acquisition and we've heard no actual good source indicate twitter is for sale. emily: the only thing that i have heard is from an early investor in twitter who said there is no board religion that they would never sell. ultimately, they're going to do what is responsible for the company. but i wonder at what point is responsible not selling versus selling? alex: the two things we have talked about is the price may not be low enough and twitter may not be for sale. but there's a third question which is should twitter be for sale? can they do what they want to do as an independent company? that's what i think investors may be pressuring twitter on in the next 12 months or so? can you get user growth up without pairing up with google or facebook? maybe the answer is that it's easier to sell.
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emily: you said it more eloquently than i could have. we're going to continue to watch twitter, especially when it opens tomorrow. president obama puts his stamp on america's clean energy legacy. in a speech today, obama announced in 8.4 billion dollar plan to cut consumption from power plants and encourage renewable energy. 20% of all u.s. power would come from renewables by 2030. joining me now is the ceo of the second largest solar panel producer in the country, tom warner from sun power. everyone is focusing on the political ramifications but i want to know how big a blow is this too cold power and how big a boon could it be to renewables? tom: it is a really big deal.
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we've seen the cost of solar come down so dramatically that it is already mainstreaming. now we have this. we will see solar really ask load because of this and it is economic, so it is eliminating conventional resources over time. growth potential for the next 15 years will get a huge used because of this. emily: what does this mean for some power specifically? tom: it will have a positive impact on our business. we work great with american utilities. american utilities are showing leadership going solar and this will incentivize them to go faster into solar. we are an american company and we have been doing it for 30 years. we think partnering with american utilities to deliver what president obama has committed to. emily: what about in terms of technology? what do these new policies
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present? tom: the knock on salaries to be it's not economic. that doesn't exist anymore. now the question is how do you get solar energy and be able to use it when there isn't sunshine? what we need to do is have a two way grid and have some form of storage so we can use sunshine when we want to use it. this will spur a bunch of innovation. how do you you use solar energy all the time? emily: you have a partnership with solar city but you are also competitors. what sort of immediate impact have you seen from the joint venture with solar city? emily: what do you think of the -- tesla battery and what do you think the impact is that batteries going to have on the market? tom: the tesla battery is causing people to say this is for real. we are battery agnostic. we think there's going to be a lot of great technology and it is helping mainstream storage.
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it is a little early and will take a few years, but as we mainstream storage, you can use solar energy when you want. combine that with energy management and you get a great solution. you will have total control in the future. emily: thank you so much for joining us. really important, talking at the future of clean energy today. next, the stripes ceo on his new partnership with lisa. how the company plans to expand its global reach. and what is the github ceo planning next? ♪
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emily: visa is leaving a $100 million funding round and stripe, valuing the start up at $5 billion. lisa is betting egg on their ability to make digital payments more secure. i sat down with the ceo and cofounder and asked what stripe and visa got out of it. patrick: trying to move credit card numbers off of merchant servers and get them to transmit the cards directly from the consumer to stripe so that credit card numbers are not in some a different places. in order to secure the ecosystem and move forward. emily: you mean make digital payments more secure? patrick: absolutely.
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you should not give people the ability to withdraw arbitrary amounts from your account. emily: who are stripe's biggest customers? patrick: we could not possibly disclose the size of our biggest users. emily: can you talk about the typical annual payment volume for a typical customer? patrick: it's from somebody starting their first project some experiment, people running many businesses on the stripe. the prototypical company at the frontlines, right through to the biggest companies in the world. people processing tens of aliens of dollars a year. part of the promise of the platform as you can go from having that nascent idea wanting to try out the side project to being one of the
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largest companies in the world and you can see that forms all throughout whereas you started out on this system and have to migrate to this system. all of those changes are complicated and awkward whereas stripe provides a uniform platform. emily: is it fair to say stripe processes tens of billions of dollars a year? patrick: we have been on records several times saying we process tens of audience of dollars a year. emily: how much business are you getting from apple paid? patrick: the most interesting part is not to look at the absolute volumes. there's always an adoption curve for these things. it takes a while for businesses to react and tweak the products. apple themselves are working out how to figure out the role out and they just had support for businesses in the u k and we worked with them on that.
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i think one thing that is significant is if you look at the businesses that have tweaked our product to integrate apple pay effectively, they are doing much better. emily: do you have any concerns about a potentially newly energized paypal? patrick: this comes down to the product. this is non-paypal specific -- we care about anyone who is building a great product and great technology that is fundamentally about the customer, the people in these industries want to use the best technology. whether paypal is owned by ebay or someone else changes the question. emily: paypal has a sound payments network. is that question? patrick: paypal is trying to own the consumer identity.
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they are trying to in some way this intermediate the credit card companies, those who have a consumer relationship. at stripe, we build infrastructure for businesses. you are starting a company scaling a company or a large company looking to be more flexible and innovative, stripe builds infrastructure for the business. emily: paypal has gone public, squares going public, why not stripe? patrick: we not optimizing for the market. if you look at the industry we are targeting, we are at such an early stage. look on a macro basis -- 2% or 3% of all consumer spending takes place on the internet. stripe is a young company in terms of building the kinds of things they have said we want to build in terms of global coverage in hundreds of countries rather than just 25. figuring out to build a unified
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platform in these countries, to build up a higher-level functionality, we are focused on that set of issues, not the optimal corporate structure. we figure if we build the right product and technology everything else will take care of itself. emily: stripe is valued at $5 billion. why is that a fair valuation? patrick: for every company, it's a difficult exercise. i think it is easier for stripe than many other companies because the value of success is so absolutely clear. it's one of the biggest unsolved problems left on the internet -- this particular infrastructure -- how you are going to integrate everything together and support internet commerce.
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it's such a huge issue that the question of the path and how you get from a to b -- there's no doubt in anyone's mind if you solve it, it's not just with $5 billion, it's worth hundreds of ilion's. emily: there are reports that facebook tried to buy stripe. what happened? patrick: we don't comment on this kind of stuff. we are to build a long-term, independent company. i don't want to sound like a broken record but the scale of this project is so large. anyone on a good trajectory where it looks like you are going to be able to have a big impact to solve this stuff, i don't think you should be pursuing an acquisition. emily: that was the stripes ceo and cofounder. now to a story we are watching -- at&t announcing it will offer on the old tv and wireless phone services for $200 a month. the news comes less than a month
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emily: time now for the daily byte -- today's number is one and a half. one half out of five stars is dr. walter palmer's yelp rating after killing sees a lion. when his name was released to the public, the only three reviews total on his page, now there are 872 with 766 people giving him a one star rating for almost all descriptions having nothing to do with his dental practice and having everything to do with his hunting practice. there's no mechanism in place to ensure the validity of those who comment, so they are only human. github, which hosts the largest repository of code on the web is hosting a funding round by sequoia capital. with the companies valuation hovering around $2 billion, we wanted to check in with the ceo on his plan for the company. you guys have revenue streams
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from asset to sap. tell us where you are seeing the most growth. chris: all over the place. anywhere from small schools and universities to some of the biggest enterprises in the world. emily: you guys make software easy to collaborate on so that developers can work across projects at various companies. what about international growth? where are you seeing the most growth? chris: we just opened an office in japan. there is a strong presence in asia. we are seeing a lot more customers from those regions. emily: i want to talk about china because it's one of your top five markets and the government has tried to block access to your site. chinese hackers have become more aggressive. how do you manage that relationship? chris: it's interesting. we are learning a lot about the country and the culture, but the
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goal is to create a community where anyone can participate. emily: what is your take on more and more aggressive tactics? chris: it's something we see all over. we suffer attacks all the time from small groups and it's just going to be part of it. more and more people are able to use the internet as a weapon but more people are using it for good. emily: how do you plan to spend the $250 million of funding? chris: the core business is going great. the security is great, but what we are focusing on is making investments and expanding internationally. the japan office is part of that. emily: developers love github, but you have had controversial information that gets out online. sometimes it's the companies
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fault -- uber, for example was one of those cases. how do you handle that? chris: it is a platform and a tool. we're trying to get smarter about evil protecting themselves. maybe you accidentally left a password in their, so we are aware of that and working on it. we are creating a good safety net for people. emily: i know you have recovered from this over the last year but there was a situation where a woman at the company accused someone at the company of sexual harassment. both of them have left. how has the company recovered from that and what new measures do you have in place to make sure that doesn't happen again? chris: we have been doing a lot of work to protect and take care of our employees and help other companies figure it out. i think a lot of small companies
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don't take a jar seriously enough and they are so focused on growth. people is the core of your growth and him to make sure they are taking care of. we have different training programs, a diversity inclusion group, so we are working hard on it but i don't think we are near done or completed on it. emily: anything specific to women? there such a huge focus on women in tech right now. chris: we're working with groups externally like code 2040 to fix that problem in any way we can or at least help. emily: chris wanstrath github of, thank you for joining us. thank you for watching this edition of "bloomberg west." we have disney, activision and much, much more. ♪
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