♪ emily: i am emily chang and this is "the best of bloomberg west," where we bring together the best interviews and news highlights from the week in tech. coming up, are start of evaluations just a bit of financial make-believe. we take that question to the seed investor who spotted some of silicon valley's most celebrated entrepreneurs. y combinator's president. plus, piling into renewable energy like never before. defying the theory that lower oil and gas prices would break

funding away. we will meet the business minds driving the sector forward. is the tech story finally over? i sit down with a veteran in the tech mediato ask which sector he is watching for the next big thing. first, the top story this week -- investors wondering if soaring start up valuations are a bit of financial make-believe. this week, we explored the question on whether the unicorn bubble has popped. we bring you some of the highlights. here, i sit down with y combinator's president and dropbox ceo. what do you have to say about the mutual fund? >> we don't pay that much attention to it. what we focus on his we have 500 million people using dropbox, 8 million businesses using dropbox, 150,000 of them paying like expedia, all these new big deals. our customers are happy and we are happy. emily: if you could do it all over again, would you take money from a $10 billion valuation? >> the markets were different

then. so we, like other companies, will be affected by the public markets. whatever we are today, it will be something different tomorrow. valuation is an output, so you have to focus on inputs. emily: on one hand, people say this is just on paper. snapchat has gotten written down and then britain now. -- then written up. but it does have a ripple effect on sentiment. how much do they matter? >> it doesn't matter that much. stocks go up and down. fidelity marks them down and up. i know fidelity marked down the dropbox shares at one point. it is unclear to me if they themselves even believe the markdowns, because i have once before offered to buy the shares from them after they marked them down and they did not sell it to me. but i will offer again. we would love to buy them. emily: because it is sort of affecting sentiment. even if it does not affect the changes you are making that dropbox, it says something sentiment about dropbox.

>> you have private companies at a scale they were never before. they would have long been public, so i think everyone is trying to figure out how to talk about them, and there is a new playbook being written. when you talk to investors, the markdowns, markups, whatever, it is a bookkeeping thing. it is not like the fund manager sitting there, evaluating the performance of the company, so they rolled their eyes honestly, too. so they focus on or what we focus on our what are the ingredients of a great company? you have to have a big market, awesome team, product people love, that is what you need to spend time on. the days,ly on in google would have killed you. how would you keep them from doing it? somethingnator is that people want. so our customers love dropbox. we have spent so much time building a product that people really love. this is the one thing that we

do, and we have built a huge audience, and we are solving a problem that every person, every company in the world has. and that is really at the heart of building a successful company. >> one thing i always wanted to ask you related to that when you , guys were in nyc, everyone said, google will kill them, apple is going to kill them. like, google has this product ready to launch and it kept getting delayed and it would be the dropbox killer and microsoft had one, and i think that this is a tough thing to get around because that scares people. team oryou motivate the deal with uncertainty when you have these 800 pound gorillas around the corner? >> probably most of the people that join the company have been dropbox users for a long time and they love the product. when you step back, you realize that any company that becomes great always has competition. facebook was worried that google would come after them, google

was word microsoft word, after them, microsoft was worried ibm would come after them. if you don't have competition , you are not doing something important. competition is a fact of life. i think that jeff bezos says it well, you want to be customer-obsessed and not competitor-obsessed. emily: frank has told me that an ipo for them is two years out. what is the answer from you? how are you thinking about an ipo? is that still going to happen? you be open to selling the company? >> we don't need to raise money, so that is not something that we need to be too worried about. you have to have the control of the foundation in place. the business needs to be doing well. and the conditions in the market need to be good. the market has not been very kind to public companies, or public tech companies, lately,

so we are not in a hurry, and that is why it is part of the flexibility we have gotten by raising money. it is for our customers. emily: quickly, how do you keep employees motivated as you put off whatever exits there is to be had? >> the best thing we can do for anyone who is a shareholder is make the stock price go up in the long run. you do that by building value. we try not to get fixated on what is the valuation right now. people will get liquidity. we will solve the problems, but the most important thing we can do is build a great company. emily: my conversation with y combinator president sam altman and dropbox ceo judy heston -- drew houston. coming up, we continue to talk the conversation about startup valuations of one of the hottest unicorns, airbnb cto. later this hour, verizon jumping into online video. taking a big stake in awesome

tv. what is so valuable about the content and what verizon's broader plan is. we will bring you the details. ♪

oury: continuing conversation on startups and funding, investors are pulling back on deals, with activity falling to its lowest level in four years. investors seem increasingly inclined to put their money in a more mature company. airbnb's ctoth nate blecharczyk and y combinator president sam altman to get their views on the funding dynamics in the valley. now that we are seeing a broader economic downturn, how is this impacting your business? >> we are off to a great start.

the great thing about airbnb is we offer consumer choices. not only do they get a more personal experience and more authentic travel, but we have price points at any level. in a recession, there are opportunities to still travel and find something in your price point. emily: this is still up for you in a recession, almost. nathan: so many people rely to pay their rent with airbnb, so we do see that that during economic challenges, more and more people are opening up their homes, which makes it a great experience for travelers who want something different. sam: you guys raised money for the first time in 2009 when it was actually really hard to raise money. how did you think about building the business when people worried about the market turning again? you have any lessons to pass on? nathan: one of the things he realized in 2009 -- all of 2008, we tried to raise money and this is before the recession began. people thought, this is a crazy idea, it cannot be a big market, and we got turned down left and right.

then at the recession began, and we came across sequoia, who saw our vision and we were so blown away that the top investment firm would invest in us after so many said no. what we learned from that is it is amazing what you can achieve when you set your standards really high. ever since that point, we were particular about who were our investors. sam: did you literally go for a year with no one else investing? nathan: a year, at most. and we were on the verge of quitting. when we went to yc, that if they do not produce changes in results, we would quit. emily: what is your advice to founders now getting a lot of no's? nathan: it is all about perseverance at the end of the day. you have to pace yourself. you usually have to prove it a couple times. paul graham says startups die of suicide and not homicide, meaning usually, self-inflicted wounds. they do not plan appropriately. sam: how did you survive when

there was no money before? nathan: we traded breakfast cereals right in advance of the election. emily: did it really generate revenue? nathan: it generated more than we ever made in the year. emily: that is insane. you are working on so-called "magical trips," which is a play to own more of the travel experience, like bike rentals, tours. what other services can airbnb provide to hosts and travelers, and how do you expand the business opportunity beyond the trips? nathan: what we're seeing is that airbnb will increasingly go mainstream. one third of all their hosts are over the age of 50. in traveler segments, business traveling has become an interesting segment. we have 5000 businesses registered with airbnb. big companies like morgan stanley, google, salesforce having their employees book travel.

what is happening as those companies are saving money, but also the employees are getting to feel like they are at home when they travel. it is good if you are on a long trip. emily: how safe do think the market is outside of what you are doing? what is the market for? nathan: tourism is one of the biggest industries, second to oil and gas. you see different number is out there. anywhere from $2 trillion to $6 trillion. we think we can play a big part of that. we do not think that is off limits. emily: would you ever get into ride sharing, or partner with uber or lyft to take travelers from the airport to airbnb? nathan: i don't want to speculate about those type of things. [laughter] sam: would you do longer-term rentals? many years ago, i found my apartment because i stayed at an airbnb first. nathan: that's a common use case. when you move to a city for the first time, before committing to a long-term lease, why not stay in different neighborhoods to find the right place?

we do have a lot of folks who book for one month to three months. emily: i want to address the regulatory issues. you guys helped draft a law in san francisco to legalize airbnb basically saying it is legal if you register there is a report first. from the city that claims airbnb still has listings from unregistered hosts and will not cooperate with the city. what is your response? nathan: the core problem there is the registration process for the city. it is tremendously complicated. it requires you getting two different permits. what is forgotten is that these are ordinary people whom they are asking to go through these steps. the city isn't really promoting this. in a lot of ways, they are cracking down on this. for example, they sent a notice to hosts in san francisco to itemize all the belongings. and say they need to apply a business tax for everything from

silverware to the couch, the tv. it does not make sense, and they are missing the bigger picture. but we do have a good relationship in some ways with the city that we have had impacts for the last year and a half. emily: brian told me ipo is more than two years away. you have told me the same thing before, but sources are telling us that airbnb will be profitable this year, is that true? nathan: we are doing very well, financially. we had a big year last year and it will not be too long before we are profitable. sam: do not rush. emily: advice from the top. nathan: we think there is a lot of growth opportunity, still. we are definitely in no rush. if we had been in a rush, we would have been profitable long before. emily: how are you thinking about unit economics and the environment? nathan: we are extremely well-capitalized. we see all these new segments that we think we can thrive in, we are growing in china, cuba. we want to think we will invest in growth but we are also , running the business. emily: dallas y combinator sam

altman with airbnb cto nathan blecharczyk. coming up, how the company could become the next billion-dollar unicorn. later in the program the tech , story is over, according to one of our guests. we will tell you why on "the best of bloomberg west." ♪

emily: could homeadvisor be the next tech unicorn? the online business that matches consumers with home service professionals seems to be pushing to a billion-dollar valuation. chris terrill, the ceo, sat down with erik schatzker and talked about what it takes to push the business over that billion-dollar line. >> i think we would think it is possible in the next three years or five years, but we will see. it could be faster or slower. it depends on what kind of investments we make and what sort of things we do the next 12 to 24 months. erik: what percentage of the market are you figure you have? chris: if you look at the best

estimates, it is a $300 billion market, in terms of value of jobs that are created. right now, we are about $30 billion in project value. that was last year. we figure if we take 10 million service requests last year, it will grow around 15 million this year. if you look at service requests, we are in the 5% to 7% range. erik: here is what i would term the problem -- you have a business growing perhaps in $360 million three years to $1 billion, but because of all the money you have to spend on marketing and the hiring and the sales force to support it, your margins are only 5%. shouldn't a business growing this fast have better margins than that? chris: we are investing. when you invest in sales, invest in television, we know what the lifetime value payback is. you will see the margin expansion continue in the next three years to five years and we'll get back to where we were historically. in the past, we had 15% to 20%, so i think this helps us extend the marketplace and lock in

supply and demand and we will see margin expansion follow. erik: the people interested in your business look at the $60 million spent on tv advertising this year and wonder what it will be next year and the after that? is it on the slope upwards , kind of indefinitely? chris: i don't think it is indefinitely. there is a point in which we will invest in a stable period. i think we will continue to spend for a couple more years. spend 60 million dollars this year. i think we will continue to spend the same incremental pace over the next years but that will flatten out as build up awareness, aided and unaided, and you get that repeat usage and it pays off. erik: there is the other obvious question, why television? tv advertising costs a lot of money. chris: true. it is expensive. two things. one, post housing crash, baby boomers were the ones that were left standing.

they had discussion income, the watch a lot of television so it is a great way to get to our core audience. also, i have been in television a long time, and it is oh ri positive. it is unusual in this space to be positive on your television and we are, so it is a powerful medium for us to drive qualified homeowners who understand our value proposition and want to use our service and do it in a profitable way. erik: one of the nice things about working for barry diller, he is willing to buy things to make your business better. a few months ago, ifc made an offer for one of your business competitors, angie's list. i have to add it was an unsuccessful offer at the time. what was the rationale of combining the two businesses? chris: it was an interesting point in time. we have an incredible monetization engine. we had high-growth, and they had qualified traffic they were not sure did -- they were not sure what to do with. so it was an interesting point in time opportunity and we looked at that opportunity and they decided it was not a fit for them so they go back to business as usual.

erik: is the rationale as valid today? chris: they are in flux and they are making a lot of changes. we'll have to wait and see. erik: not everything has to be an acquisition. chris: true. erik: you could do partnerships. chris: true. erik: what you want are good leads to new businesses. what other platforms might generate those leads? chris: great question. we are working with big and small alike to find where this partnerships are. what is interesting is our engine is so unique. our matching engine is so strong and powerful. we are finding that lots of folks are interested in letting us come into their ecosystem and get in front of the homeowners they naturally have. i think you will see some interesting announcements coming up. we have our apple tv app, the apple watch, and we are doing interesting partnerships, like the one we did with realtor, where we continue to try to get our engine in front of homeowners who could use it. erik: how long until homeadvisor is ready to stand on its own feet, ready to be spun off?

the way i see match group was in the fourth quarter. chris: that is above my pay grade. i would defer to mr. diller, but he has shown incredible ability to put together things like the expedia group and go after big industries and be successful. i think what we are building is a powerful nucleus within the home industry. it is a huge industry. i have no timetables on anything beyond growing the business and doing it in a smart and organic way. i think if barry feels like he wants to spin it out, great. erik: will you need more capital? chris: i think we'll continue to progress aggressively. we are ready put plans in front of ifc that already push investment cases. i think they are interested in seeing this grow. erik: they're willing to commit more capital? chris: i think they are very interested in seeing us grow. emily: that was chris terrill with erik schatzker. still ahead, we take a look at

whether there is any stopping their rooftop revolution. news, take bloomberg a look out bloomberg radio. "the best of bloomberg west" continues after the break. ♪

♪ emily: welcome back to "the best of bloomberg west." i am emily chang. this week, we took a dive into the world of renewable energy. wind and solar have been thriving despite a historic collapse in the price of oil and natural gas. the sector broke investment records in 2015 and is getting about twice as much global funding as fossil fuels. of those, experts believe that solar energy will really comment to dominate, because it is a technology and not a fuel that will likely become more efficient as time goes on. i asked about is the prevalence

of solar inevitable and how soon can we reach the point? >> we are only a 1% of u.s. households penetrated today, but the growth rate we have been able to achieve in eight years, nine years of time from zero to 100,000 customers with adoption 100% year over year, that starts to compound and it will happen faster. emily: how much faster? lynn: i could imagine solar is about 20% to 30% plus of our energy sector within three years to five years. emily: what are you doing to reduce installation cost and will solar be competitive with utilities without tax incentives , without other incentives and tax credit? lynn: solar is competitive today. a lot of people do not know that all of energy is subsidized. the global subsidy for fossil fuels are $5 trillion, so fossil fuels in the u.s. received eight times the subsidies that renewables did in the u.s.

what we are saying is let's have an even playing field. so today, even with the subsidies fossil fuels received, we are 20% cheaper and costs are going down. the power is going up at the same time. a lot of people will say "oil and natural gas is cheap," but what drives power prices is the investment and transmission of the distribution lines, which are aging in this country which is really old and introduces risks, which is why we have brown outs and blackouts. what happens is as utilities need to upgrade and modernize, prices go up. emily: what about the battles you are dealing with now? the end of metering could be a huge blow for the entire sector. how do you expect these to play out? lynn: what is happening today is consumers and innovation are driving change , despite what is trying to be done under the -- on the regulatory side. but we have seen happen is that when you look at the facts,

rooftop solar strengthens the grid, because it is produced on-site, so you don't have to invest in as many transmission distribution lines, things that cost money. those are the things that utilities make money off of, and they don't like it. what these battles are coming down to is competition. when consumers can choose cleaner and cheaper energy, they will drive the change. emily: the battle is far from over on the regulatory side. what do you think are the next flashpoints in the debate? lynn: we had big wins this year that set us up for long-term success. first, the federal government extended our tax credit and gave us a five year run rate. second, california established their longterm support for the market. that is a huge and important market. two places where we are really showing that we will leave in this country to switch electricity from dirty fossil to renewable, so what i see

continuing to happen is there will be battles and utilities will try to protect their monopoly. when we look at the facts, we will see that rooftop solar is a benefit and society and we will , win nine out of 10 times. there will be a few extreme examples, such as what happened in nevada, but something similar happened with gay marriage in indiana. emily: that said, solar stocks are down across the board. are you facing slower growth? why aren't investors buying into this? lynn: fundamentals have never been better in this industry. i have been doing this for nine years, and they have never been better. first, consumer demand is strong. we are saving customers 20% on electricity. this is something they need. and they are continuing to adopt it. secondly, you are seeing real entry barriers in the industry. it is hard to do. so there is some short-term noise as companies enter the market. some of them have trouble raising capital. but quality companies with quality assets have not. that is why you have seen companies like ours.

we just completed our best year ever. our prospects for the future are terrific. we just closed a very attractive financing, so a lot of people are saying are the markets closed, can we continue to raise capital? that is what we did last month. we were able to raise financing through the credit cycle in 2008. the reason is that these are very high quality assets. these arhomeowners who have very high fico scores, they pay their bills. these systems perform. we have been operating for 8 years, so we have the track record. when i look at a market like this, i am a very encouraged, because i think it is a short-term entry barrier. emily: that was sunrun ceo lynn jurich. staying with renewable energy, this week, we got a chance to speak to a company that could become the first in the world to generate a serious amount of energy from our ocean tide. u.k. start up title look to power is- tidal lagoon

proposing a multibillion dollar project that would supply power to coastal cities in wales. it is in negotiation with the british government to secure the subsidies for the project to go ahead. the chairman's keith clark sat down with caroline hyde in london. she began by asking how his tidal technology would work. keith: the tide comes in twice a day, goes out twice a day and we built a lagoon, a big pile up rock that encloses the large piece of area. turbines make power predictably. that is the great thing. it is dumb technology, capable of improvement. it is safe technology. it is going to work. it works for about 120 years. and we will tell you when you will get power four times a day, because it is the moon. so this is just such an easy way of harnessing really efficient energy, that is low carbon and is predictable. caroline: talk about the scale. how much power are we talkin about? keith: the great things about

the lagoons is the bigger you do it, the more economical it will be. so our first one is about 570 watts. that is about 175,000 homes per year. as we increase that, as we -- if we double the size, we go from 16 turbines up to about 90 turbines, but by doubling the enclosed wall, we multiply the enclosed area by 10. we go up to 5000 500 gigawatts. it gets to be really serious as part of an energy portfolio. the aspect we are focusing on, this is a great program. swansea is a great first project. for a start up like us is a big , $2 billion project. this is $10 billion. caroline: for international viewers, swansea is in wales, it is west of the united kingdom. where else could this move to? keith: there are some great locations. india, the western corner of northwest india, canada, france,

great sites in south america. we believe this is a form that that we will export. we are already looking at other sites, but we need to do swansea first. we need to show something we are capable of doing, we have the learning and expertise, we know how to run the supply chain and how to enhance that. caroline: this has been delayed because you need subsidies, government help. how sizable are the subsidies do you need? keith: with government at the moment, as we speak, we need a subsidy, particularly for swansea. we believe we will be compatible with nuclear. as we increase the size of the projects, that radically reduces. caroline: with nuclear, you mean on an equivalent price point? keith: on an equivalent price point. but that rapidly gets more advantageous as we increase the size of the project. and we have a learning curve. unlike offshore wind, they had

an improved -- as they did more projects, so did the price curve. so onshore had the same thing, a massive decline in price curve. we are not even assuming that. the scale of the project gives us that price scale, and on top of that, we will set up the u.k. supply chain, so the turbines are clever, but they are not nuclear reactors. caroline: they are not the only answer. you feel this works within a whole array of power plants. keith: the u.k. will have mechanical engineers saying they will have 40% shortage of power in the u.k. even with conservation measures. you could argue that it may be 30%, but we have an issue. that is the equivalent of 30 gas fire powered stations. we will always have an energy and element of nuclear. we need solar, we need offshore. onshore is a political nightmare here. this gives you predictable security power, which becomes more and more efficient, and it

gives you an export market. and it is zero carbon, and we have a climate change act in the u.k. and a global agreement that decarbonize economies by 2050. caroline: it is hard to negotiate when you have oil prices at $30 a barrel, how does that affect your negotiation? how does that affect your longer-term aspirations to have affected and competitive this ? keith: if anything, it helps. if anyone will put the 10 billion pound project into investment in new oil fields is gone. shale gas -- how much debt is there in the u.s. economy? i heard $200 billion of debt in those companies, with equity at risk, too. none of those survive at oil prices sub-$30. most need $70 to $80. we will see a carbon tax of some sort, or a carbon ration, if we

are going to meet the two degree rule. we are going to ration what we do with oil and gas. there will always be markets for oil and gas. we should do things more intelligent than sticking it in a boiler to burn. caroline: how much will this project cost in the longer term and how much will future projects potentially cost? keith: once we get -- the first project is about $2 billion to install. the next project is about $10 billion. expect to bee exporting and expect to have a six. six will get you up to about 8% total electricity supply. now, by the time we have done that, my bet is that they will have invented storage, because they are out there saying that energy storage is the key. we are going to go through a revolution now in the way we run lhc -- allergy city. we do not have the money to invest that way as a society. either here nor global. we need more distribution of

power. emily: that was tidal lagoon power chairman keith clarke speaking to bloomberg's caroline hyde in london. ♪

emily: this week, we had our first installment of the spark and met the near scientist to received the macarthur award for figure out for the first time ever how our retinas take images from the outside world and process them so the brain can understand. it started as a pure research project but now she is building a device that could bring sight to the blind.

>> my macular degeneration started about eight years ago. it results in loss of central focus vision. like i am looking directly at the camera right now and i cannot see the lens of the camera at all. i cannot recognize faces. i cannot read hard copy any longer. >> rosemary is one of about 8 million americans that are partially or completely blind. the damage to her retina is irreversible, so there is no biological cure for her fading vision. in recent years, bionic technology has allowed us to make headway against some disabilities by integrating humans with machines. but creating bionic vision has remained a sticky problem. no one has quite been able to untangle the complex relationship between the eye and the brain. at least not yet.

>> people love work -- people have worked on pathetic's to help blind people for probably more than 20 years. the focus has been implanting electrodes into a patient's retina so they will see a spot of light wherever the electrode is. when people first put the implants into patients, it was really exciting to be able to drive a blind retina before the patient saw anything, but it was not that effective. nobody worried that much about it at the time because they assumed, if we had more electrodes, we will make it better and better and it will be ok. but it is not really true. there was a factor missing, and that is the signal processing, basically the code the retina uses to communicate with the brain. when information comes into your eye, a goes into your photoreceptors and goes through all of this complicated signature to the retina output cell, and then they send a signal to the brain.

the big question is what code did they use to give us the sensation of seeing something. this is what i work on anyway. you can take a retina out of an animal's eye and put it on a bed of electrodes, and you can present it with all sorts of images and record the output, so you can figure out what the relationship is between the outside world is and the code that the brain wants to receive. so we were doing this. and we unraveled it. ♪ >> this is vision, the code that the eye uses to communicate with the brain. if you're looking at this image of a baby's face, your brain is receiving this pattern of electrical signals. we have known for decades that this code exists, but dr. nuremberg is the first to have cracked it.

dr. nuremberg: i realized that not only was it useful for a stepping stone to figuring out how the brain works, but it had huge potential application. the way it would be implemented in the real world for a patient has two parts. that could a device be worn like glasses that would take images in and extends the code in the form of light pulses. it can change the redaction. when you shine a light on a certain gene, it causes it to fire and an electrical pulse. you picture that you could pulse it in the pattern of a neural code and it would send images up to the brain. >> dr. nuremberg's next step is to hold human trials to prove her technology can restore vision. patients like rosemary would be

injected with the light sensitive gene and then be shown images in the neural code. dr. nuremberg: the best is to have someone be able to see faces, to create contact with other people. even if it does not work the first time, just knowing i have the code and pass it on to the next generation, someone else will be able to do it. go downnot even dead that path of hoping there will be a cure for this disease, but it would be a miracle if i could see again, clearly, as i used to be able to see. emily: dr. nirenberg is seeking fda approval to start clinical trials of the technology. coming up, the tech story is over, according to one veteran tech journalist. we will tell you why. ♪

emily: john battelle, cofounder of "wired" magazine has spent the better part of three decades writing about, investing in, and using technology. this week in a new post on "medium," he wrote "the tech story is over." he says it is time to move on to the next big thing that will shape our future, just as technology has for the past 30 years. wouldw company, new co, work in partnership with media in order to find and follow that next big story. i caught up with him and asked, what is the next big narrative? john: for 30 years, i did follow the tech story, because i thought it was not being well covered or given a full view. the story of tech has changed our entire society and we know that continues.

however, it is no longer the next story over the horizon, the one that may be changing everything. and i am interested in that story. what is the equivalent today of the tech story when we launched "wired" magazine 25 years ago? that is my the tech story is now point. so mainstream and incumbent that i interested in what the next story might be. emily: before we go to what the next story might be, what about apple and the fbi and how the government is struggling to figure out how to deal with new technology? that is a huge story. john: that did not take 10 months or 10 years to figure out. that took 10 days and it went away. they figured it out. emily: for now. what if apple creates a truly unhackable phone? john: i'm interested in the new element that might be changing the ecosystem. emily: so what is the next big story? john: to me, it is the reinvention of capitalism

itself. every story that we tell goes up to this idea. you talked about solar, tax evasion. these stories are all going to one very large story, which is the form of capitalism that we created, the engine, the muscular american capitalism that we've lived with for the last 70 or so years. is faltering. it is not sustainable, and i don't mean only in a green way. i mean it is not giving us a society that is increasing returns. and we want that kind of society for our children and grandchildren. and we will get to it if we reinvent business. emily: you just launched a newco shift, a media property that is entirely on "medium," to capitalize on this. what are you doing there? john: "medium" is an interesting place to launch. i love the name, because it is a happy medium between the wild west of the open web, which is rife with fraud and difficulties

of modernization. and the very large platform, not really built for publishing, so medium is right in the center, it is built for publishing. it has a social network underneath it. it allows us to focus on what we want to do, which is make great content about this story. emily: you said the comparison is like "wired" meets the "economist." explain. john: we think the technology story -- the "wired" piece -- the approach that "wired" takes is to look all around the world and do longform journalism and we are interested in that. "economist" is focused on a cogent analysis and a weekly cadence and we will release stories on a weekly cadence. emily: you have founder of twitter commenting on your piece, saying that "wired" is irrelevant. you agree? john: i was pleased to commented on it and he told me that "wired" brought him out of nebraska to san francisco, where he created blogger and twitter, and medium.

so i would not say it is over. emily: john batelle of newco. that is it for "the best of bloomberg west." we will see you next week. have a great week. ♪

♪ emily: he was the most unlikely candidate for the job. a young entrepreneur in vermont with limited investing experience. yet in 2008, sergey brin and larry page tapped him to start a capital fund. one year later, google ventures , or g-v was born. ,since then, the investment arm of awful that has become one of the most active vc firms in silicon valley, with $2.4 billion to spend and investments in over 300 companies, including