emily: this is "best of bloomberg west" where we bring you the top interviews from the week in tech. coming up, carmakers are choosing sides in the right hailing wars as toyota and vw disclosed new investments. we speak to the man leading the pack in southeast asia. and eric schmidt speaks out on breakthroughs in house technology. we will have his interview from the breakaway summit, next. and peter thiel strikes back, we will bring you the full story on how he has been secretly funding

hulk hogan in multiple cases against gawker. but first, new alliances forged between traditional automakers and the ride hailing challengers. the news comes as a car industry braces for change, especially when it comes to the future of car ownership. by investing in the main players, the biggest car brands are hoping to secure a place in the future. this week toyota tied up with uber and vw took a stake in gett. here we take a look across the space to see who is leading the pack. ♪ >> carmakers are choosing sides in the ride hailing wars, this week alone volkswagen invested $300 million in gett and toyota committed an undisclosed amount to uber with plans to get into the car leasing game. in january, general motors took a $500 million stake in lyft and let's not forget apple's billion dollar bet on didi. with traditional card companies -- car companies looking for a

piece of the pie, which are leading the pack? fueled by mega funding, uber may get all of the headlines, but lyft is taking on a much bigger rival and through international partnerships with didi and grab. in china, didi claims to have more than 99% of the right -- ride hailing market. they boost more than 300 million users to my completing 1.43 billion rides in 2015. grab dominates in southeast asia with the presence in 30 cities across six countries and a fast-growing motorbike service. meanwhile, gett, which grew at 300% last year dominates in europe. as these startups scramble for supremacy, it is still too early to tell how the ride hailing wars will play out. emily: now to get a sense of how the ride hailing wars are shaping up in southeast asia, i caught up with anthony tan.

grab has raved $700 million from investors and has over 50% of the market share in private cars across the core region. take a listen. >> grab is the largest mobile tech platform in southeast asia, we have very localized services. so imagine, we have taxis, cars, and motorbikes. that is right. as you know, motorbikes is, you jump on right behind and it navigates you through the traffic that you would imagine any big city would have. so we get to give back to .5 hours of -- 2.5 hours of commute time too many citizens in jakarta, for example. emily: your great-grandfather drove a taxi, your grandfather brought the japanese auto market to southeast asia and you

occasionally drive a grab yourself. tell me about that. >> sure. cars have been in my family blood for a long time. and because of that, we felt comfortable dealing with, for example, governments, because i followed my father working with governments before we build a factory, getting the appropriate licenses, getting the land. so for us, learning from that, learning from how my family ran business, on how important reputation is, working with governments on a collaborative approach to basically build grab. and that is how it was founded. our first launch of grab, four years ago, we launched with someone very senior from the government. emily: grab, didi, lyft you announced a big partnership in december, which would cover half the world's population. so how do we see that progressing and when will we see more integration? >> you will see global roaming

product, whereby, for example, you here in san francisco, you can book a car in beijing, in singapore, and you have access to the world's largest fleet of cars and bikes. emily: so the idea is, if i go to singapore i can open my lyft app and get a car. >> right. note, you don't need to reinstall the app. it is exactly the same experience you have here in san francisco. emily: when will we see it in full swing? >> soon. emily: [laughs] how worried are you about uber's global expansion plan? >> competition makes us all better. for us at grab, we focus on serving our customers. going back to the global roaming product. again, very focused on the customer experience. as we continue with localized relevant services, like grab bike, motorbike taxis, very unique to jakarta, very unique all across southeast asia.

we are going to add a new payment piece, whereby we think of 95% of civilians use cash and no credit cards. they do not have credit history. we said, hey, how do we reinforce that message? how do we make didi relevant to customers and we are reinvesting in this payment piece to make sure our customers on grab taxi, grab car, grabbed bike, enjoy that. emily: does that mean over does -- uber does not worry you? >> for us, it is all about growing the market share and for us it is about serving our customers and winning their hearts. emily: google is valued at $6.5 million. what about grab? >> there is a range of valuations, by the way that we think about it is, are we a good value?

yes, we believe we are. and do we believe investors believe in southeast asia? southeast asia has 630 million people and one of the fastest-growing internet populations in the world. google just released a report on that and people at cic believe that grab is positioned to ride the wave. emily: can you share how much you raised in your last around? >> in total, close to $700 million. emily: the you continue to raise money to fund the expansion? >> we are always open to great investors and great partners all throughout the world. today we have seen people like softbang being bullish about southeast asia and grab. emily: so, didi for example is said to be targeting an ipo next year, what about you guys? >> right now, we target growing r-value.

-- building more value. building the biggest, greatest tech company. we have bold ambitions. we always think of how to find great partners, ipo's, just one of the many options on the table for us. emily: my interview with grab ceo, anthony tan. coming up, hpe saw shares surge this week after news that it would be merging with another company, what it means for business and the ceo. and microsoft hits eject on the smartphone business with job cuts planned for the department. is this the right move for the company? we will discuss, next. ♪

emily: shares in hp enterprise have been riding high this week after the company said they are spinning off the troubled services business and merging it with computer science corp. in an $8.5 billion deal. it focuses on service and storage for corporate customers.

this is half of the old hewlett-packard that is still run by ceo meg whitman. we spoke to our bloomberg intelligence analyst who covers hpe for more details. what is your first takeaway on this deal, is this something expected? >> it was not expected, but it makes sense. to be quite honest. the focus, one part of the entity focus on hardware, predominately networking, storage, and servers, and then finding a way to exit the services business to a company that focuses on exactly that portion of the business, it is a good strategy. it refocuses the company to a smaller piece of the pie, but the risk here is that now you have an extremely smaller pie that you are focusing on. one that is on hardware, predominately selling to corporate i.t. systems. so, will that be the long-term revenue growth area for hpe and do we need services to bolster that?

so that remains to be seen. in the near term, this deal makes sense. emily: what does this mean for meg whitman? >> look, it gives her a sense of focus. the results bear themselves out. after the split, hp has done well. and now after the announcement of the spinoff of the services, the stock is up. and at the end of the day, cash flow is improving. the debt profile should also get better and these are the measurable results that she has improved -- or things that have improved under her watch. she gets credit for that. emily: this unwinds an arguably bad deal done under former hp ceo mark hurd, years after the acquisition, anything else that you would tease out that we should be watching in the new hp? >> look, at the end of the day this is not a company either piecemeal or together that is going to post incredible growth rates from a revenue standpoint. this is modest revenue growth at best, coupled with heavy cost

cuts from time to time, coupled with some acquisition, some to vested teachers -- to vested divestitures. hopefully the growth rate -- this is the way we have to think about hpe and hp inc. in piece or as a whole. emily: that was our senior analyst. microsoft officially cut loose their handset business, cutting more than 1800 jobs and writing down close to a billion dollars in assets. two years ago, microsoft spent $9.5 billion on the acquisition of nokia but the company could not compete against apple and samsung. even those companies are struggling in a maturing market. we spoke done with the director -- sat down with an analyst and the director of mobile device research to ask how they see the smartphone wars playing out. microsoft has all but given up, does this mean they have given

up? >> they give up in the device war. in terms of software, they have not. they mentioned a third of their customers in the fortune 500 are running their mobile device management suite and they have downloaded 300 million uses of cash pieces of -- 300 million pieces of software to these alternative devices, they are non-pcs. i think that the way that they will target the mobile market is a lot different than maybe the way we thought they were going to go in and that is through ongoing subscriptions that they are selling to their customers. so, i think they are taking the right approach and taking a completely different pathway than most of us thought, which will probably be a more profitable pathway overtime. emily: microsoft and not happen -- microsoft did not have a lot of market share to begin with, but who gets what is left for grabs and who gains momentum and who loses? >> i would not say there is much left to grab, they were at a point where they were left a -- less than 1% of the market. we are seeing big shifts and the

vendors outside of apple and samsung, which are still the giants. even in the most recent quarter, we saw two new chinese companies enter the top five for the first time ever. oppo and vivo. two companies that have predominately done all of their business domestically in china, and now they are starting to get into the 15%-20% business internationally. we are seeing big shifts and if you look back three years or four years, we see this occur and people come and go over time. so i would say, those other companies we are seeing today. -- are the companies we are seeing today. if you ask me that question in a year and two years later, you will see more localized players because it will not always be the chinese. emily: ok. for microsoft, does this mean no phones, either? >> i think it is the refocused back on software, which we have been talking about. they are in businesses that grow and create margins, they do not want to be in businesses that have really no margin. this was a business that was a tough one. i think that was a business that

steve ballmer pushed. it was his last assignment. i think if amy and nadella, if they had the oldest decision -- full decision they probably , would not have made the decision. my belief is that they are cleaning up what was part of the old team and this is the right approach and they are repositioning the company around mobility and the cloud. it comes in a different form, which is, these software subscriptions, when i subscribed to office 365, i get them across any device i have. they do not care which device you have, they just want the software on it. i think that has been resonating with cios and that is why you have seen the enterprise business do so well. emily: ryan, are there any other small market share players hanging on that you could see also getting out of the business? >> i think the localized players will come and go.

no question about that. which ones right now, i think time will tell. as we start to see the middle east try to come onboard real strong, we are seeing localized players in india. there are couple big names that have been around that are facing challenges. we have seen a lot from htc, from a hardware perspective, i would say they are at a turning point where it could go out of business. sony is in the same place. these companies are struggling to make money on hardware and i tend to agree that microsoft is not out of mobile, just in it in a different way. and a much more profitable way. emily: isn't nokia still licensing the name to some companies? >> you will see that brand, that, no question. they have made public announcements about that. the challenge is they are trying to come back from how low microsoft took the brand. selling off the feature phone space, that is still a big piece of the market in some areas. i think it holds a lot of weight and it comes with supply-chain

agreements that will drive that section of the market under nokia's brand. whether they can revive things in smart phones and android, i think it will be a lot tougher. emily: what is the future of microsoft in a world where there is not as much mobile device growth? >> the high rate cloud, they are on servers and what is happening in the public cloud. you are seeing this as a real focus point that they are pushing towards, they will not give up the software business, but they are starting with cloud first, they want to lead with this solution. if you look at their business in the intelligent cloud, that is outpacing most of their peers. oracle and ibm are not doing that quite as well, they are outgrowing that space. they have a number of brand-new releases server-side, a brand-new launch of their database which i think will help them in the application

portfolio, they have a whole suite of new apps they focus on. analytics, communications, there are different ways that they are going down that we think are more back to the core of what microsoft was, which was a true enterprise software company. yes, do they care about the consumer, they do. but they understand what they are good at and they are going back to their core, in my opinion, from wall street's view, is a good thing. they do not want to accept the decline that they have seen. we are starting to see the operating margin stabilize and improve slowly on the operating margin line. we think, this will be a multiyear shift, this hybrid cloud, last quarter was one of the last -- worst quarters they have had. he will see the weight of the perpetual cloud and they are pulling along a big business. we think they are architecting the right future, it will just take time. emily: that was ryan reese and brent of ibs. and peter thiel strikes back, we will bring you the full story on how he has been eagerly funding

-- secretly funding hulk hogan in multiple cases against gawker. ♪

emily: this week we learned billionaire investor and facebook board member peter thiel secretly helped bankroll the defamation case that resulted in a $140 million verdict against gawker media. the lawsuit was filed by hulk hogan in 2012. and the ruling in the case threatened gawker's very existence. it is legal for third parties to back losses, but peter thiel's -- back lawsuits they are not participants in, but peter thiel's involvement highlights how it can influence the state of the media organization. owen thomas "outed" peter thiel. as gay in a gawker profile back in 2007. he is now the business editor for the san francisco chronicle. i caught up with thomas on the latest development. emily: so, knowing what you know now, do you have any regrets about writing the story? >> i have no regrets. emily: why not? >> first of all, i do not

believe i outed peter thiel. i think he did that himself to a wide circle of people in silicon valley. who then took it upon themselves to say, this is ok for -- but -- ok for us to know, but the unwashed masses should not know a detail about one of our own. emily: just because he told people who know him, does that mean it should be public? >> if it is an open secret, why can't you discuss it? gawker was founded to discuss open secrets. it was in our mission. fundamentally, and as a gay man -- emily: as a gay man yourself? >> as a gay man myself, -- not -- i feel like we need to live in a world where it is ok to say this person is gay, that person is gay and it is not viewed as a schoolyard taunt, but a human fact about someone that is interesting. interesting because not everyone is gay, we are a minority within the population, but it should be ok to discuss. emily: what are your thoughts? >> it is also ok not to be. >> it is ok not to be gay, i support your right. >> and i support yours, i think it should not matter and we are

moving toward a world where it does not matter. and that's a good thing. >> but if it does not matter, why not say it? >> might issue is shouldn't a person be entitled to be able to determine to whom they say it and when they say it, when it is their personal business? whether it is about this subject or any subject, to be honest with you. >> yes. >> it is not whether it is gay or not gay but shouldn't a human being be able to determine how they want to express themselves, whether you agree or i agree. that is my issue with it. emily: when you published the story, did you and nick denton, publisher of gawker, discuss this, debate it or was it an automatic yes? >> denton had -- the conversations with nick denton were typically one way. he would give me a tip and i would run with my investigation, my reporting, my journalism to see if there was a story there. that is typical between any

editor and their boss of the editorial chain. you get a possible story, you look into it, you determine what the story is that you want to write. this was a story i wanted to write. emily: nick denton just released a letter to peter thiel saying "this vindictive decade-long campaign is out of proportion to the hurt you claim. your plaintiff lawyer has sued not just the company, but individual journalists." thiel told the new york times "i refuse to mean a journalism means massive privacy violations." think much more highly of journalists than that and i do not believe they are in danger fighting back against gawker -- against gawker." >> i think the larger issue here is, should billionaires be able to dictate what is said about them. do we want to live in a world where the subjects of coverage

get approval over every single thing a journalist writes? if they don't like anything you write, are they going to fund a secret lawsuit, are they going to use every tool at their disposal to stop you? it is not about whether peter thiel is gay or not. it is about the successes and failures of his capital hedge fund, it is about his decisions as a facebook board member very early on in his life when it was a private company. all of these things were things i covered, all of these things were things that peter thiel may not have wanted us to run. does he get a veto on every single thing that a journalist does? emily: what is your thought on that? look, gawker went hard on bill cosby before anyone else did, hillary clinton and e-mails, tom cruise and scientology, not just this one story. >> does bill cosby get to determine what we write about him? that is personal business. >> i think we live in a world -- these are all fair questions, and is so my point is this. at -- you can see the perspective of a

journalist, this is why they become journalists. this is what they believe in. i think your intent, as admirable as you described it, i do not believe that is the intent of everybody and i believe there is mean-spirited and i believe the american public, which is evidenced by this election, by the way, would like some consequences for journalists also. the fact that you get to write what you want whenever you want, whether it is true or not -- i am not saying you in particular, but oftentimes people put their own spin on things. people want consequences. this is an interesting question about whether or not journalists get consequences, how do prosecutors get consequences, how do government officials get consequences? this is the example of a consequence where someone is shooting back, someone with capital. emily: should there be consequences for peter thiel? how do you think facebook should handle this? >> i think that facebook is in a tough position.

and i think peter thiel has been the earliest backer of the company. he is the one who said, mark zuckerberg, i believe in you. you've got something here. the first real money into the >> he does not need to be on the board. made outsupposed to be of people with diversity of opinion. >> he certainly has that. like he is not just diverse. >> with the newfound concern about the neutrality of facebook's news feed, and helps to have a trump delegate on the board. >> i think -- many of these are very fair questions. like most people, we care about what is in our best interest. so, mark zuckerberg and the rest of the board gets to determine what good corporate governance is, or wall street can determine whether they support that corporate governance. >> i would point out that facebook is structured that wall street doesn't really get a vote.

>> they knew that. they published that, same with google. they published all that so you knew before you invested what they were entitled to do. >> let's not say that wall street gets a vote. emily: one last question. owen, did you ever hear from peter thiel around that time? have you heard from him since? >> i never got anything on the record publicly, any kind of push back, any kind of dissatisfaction. emily: that was owen thomas, business editor and former gawker reporter with check ceo. coming up, the alphabet chair on why europe is anti-american and on to entrepreneurs. his exclusive interview from the breakaway summit next. ♪

♪ emily: welcome back to the "best of bloomberg west." i'm emily chang. alphabet chair eric schmidt spoke at the bloomberg breakaway conference this week and singled out improvements in health and technology that he sees ahead. our bloomberg editor in chief asked schmidt if the private sector was better investing in

these projects than the u.s. government. >> i am not willing to fall into the traditional cynicism about government. let me observe that our government spends an enormous amount of money on the wrong things. i would like to have a little bit of it on the things that are moon shots, enormous scale things that can benefit the country. john: you gave the example of health. what is another moonshot? eric: i will give you two examples -- the health thing is -- it can be understood as analog meets digital. so up until now, doctors have been living in an analog world and god knows, it's incredibly painful and complicated. we have been living in this digital world where we have all of the math and we understand scalable systems. we have finally been able to break through with modern monitoring systems, the genetics breakthrough, the dna sequencing machines and all of that kind of stuff, so you can get proper personal medicine and really change things.

there is a technology that you can reassemble and do gene editing. i can describe it if you want, but it is a very, very big deal. this is transformative not just of a little city like new york, but of the whole globe. that is how profound this is. it is a race. there is a similar one with ai and machine learning, which google is trying to do, primarily. so, that is one category. in energy, the most interesting question to me is can you -- i will say it rhetorically -- can you solve climate change, which i'm sorry to say is actually true, in case you are concerned. [laughter] eric: it is actually true that carbon does lead to these things. there's some evidence the current relative lull in warming, and i know it has actually slowed down a little bit and will actually get worse pretty soon. i can go on and on about that. there are people debating whether the renewable solutions are sufficient to solve this problem 100 years from now and if they are not, the most likely

solution is nuclear. nuclear has a gazillion problems. nuclear has never been able to be driven by the private sector alone. here's the question and i don't know the answer -- do you need a federal program to drive safe nuclear? right? that is being debated now. that is an example of the kind of debate. i'm not taking a position because i'm not a physicist. john: two questions on government. one obvious one, out of the existing candidates, i know you are a supporter of hillary, in general, do you see any sign that they are thinking in these ambitious ways on the presidential trail? eric: it is important to remember that campaign seasons are a silly season. [laughter] i have done enough campaigns now where i do not worry too much about it. it's more of a question of do you believe the presidency and the leaders in europe understand the importance of science and so forth? there has been a problem on the republican side that there's a group of republicans, but not

all of them, who do not admit to the importance of science and i mean that specifically the technology platforms. the kind of things that are real. i don't know, whatever the prejudice is, and maybe there's a similar group on the democratic side. but, it is a real problem when science becomes politicized. right? where does that matter to you? if we have not figured out how to do stem cells from blood, you might be dying from some disease because of some advanced technique that is now available is not available to you. this stuff matters. remember all of the debates about stem cells? emily: eric schmidt, chairman of alphabet speaking at the bloomberg live breakaway summit in new york. coming up, the search engine building a self driving car and betting big on voice technology. i'm not talking about google. i am talking about baidu. the company's chief scientist's next. ♪

emily: baidu, the chinese search engine is branching out of its core product, most notably, voice technology. it is also developing an autonomous car ready for purchase in 2018. i caught up with the chief scientist of baidu. he believes it could change the world just like electricity did. we started by discussing how that applies to self driving cars. >> i think that baidu has a different approach to self driving cars that most of the companies. let me explain. say you're driving along, and there is a construction worker on the road. the construction worker does that, you should stop. he does that, you should go. the behavior is totally opposite depending on the subtle hand gesture the construction worker makes. andrew: no ai system today can reliably distinguish between stop and go. we have a different perspective which is we should make modest infrastructure changes by give

that construction worker the ability to clarify communication. with little changes like that, we are optimistic about getting to self driving cars quickly. >> you're planning on testing your cars in china and i think the u.s. as well. what is the difference in how the drivers work between the two countries? what does it mean for ai and how the car works? andrew: drivers in china are incredibly aggressive. i was in a car on the way to the airport a couple weeks ago. it was a three lane highway. there were five cars driving side-by-side. [laughter] a big highway. not quite sure what -- it is a more challenging environment. and we can get data from that challenging environment. emily: are you still on track to have driverless cars on the road in two years? andrew: we are still on track to commercialize by late 2018. john: how are you going to make this available to automakers and auto partners and how will you share the data between your self driving car technology and the automaker?

andrew: you know, we are very focused on developing the technology right now. we are pondering with automakers. i hope we will navigate to a place and generate tons of value for automakers. and for consumers. emily: you have a personal assistant called "do-er." what are your ambitions? andrew: one of the things i'm really excited about his voice-based communication. the whole world is moving to cell phones. we spend so much time typing on these tiny keyboards. i think if you can talk to your cell phone rather than type on a keyboard, it will be transformative. you know, i think that most people underestimate the difference between 95% accurate speech recognition and 99%. 99% is not a 45% improvement. it is a game changer. it is the difference between you barely using and using it at all of the time. since the beginning of last year, across all baidu products, we have seen a number of voice

interactions triple. i think we are past the need, we have definitely seen rapid uptake. john: once you get to 99%, is that good enough that you can sell that speech recognition and build a business? what are your thoughts on that? andrew: one of the things we are trying to think through is how to take our ai capability is offer it to other companies. the ones that make sense. one of the challenges of ai is there are so many valuable variables to using ai that at least right now, it takes skilled ai people together with skilled domain expertise. and have those teams come together and work together. emily: there are reports that deep speech ii can transcribe chinese languages better than a person. how is that actually possible? andrew: our system has five years of audio data transcribed. this is in some ways a

staggering amount of data for a system to learn from. especially with speaking quickly or accented speech, our system is better than a person at transcribing short phrases. emily: is it possible to do the same for english? because, obviously, chinese written language is somewhat -- so much more complicated than the english written language, but will we get to a point where machines are better at transcribing voice than humans? it still seems like that, based on the english language systems i've worked with, it is a long way off. andrew: you know, it turns out, we are much closer to understanding the meaning behind a sentence. transcribing it word by word, short phrases, it's easier than human. it turns out the mistakes a machine makes affects the meeting more whereas a human get a few words wrong, but the underlying meaning is carried on. there is still a limit of understanding where machines are not approaching humans. we are working on it. i hope our english and understanding performance is

rapidly improving. emily: any plans to take on amazon echo or google home? andrew: i think speech at home is a fascinating area. i think it is in the early stages. i think amazon has done a nice job on its current echo product. it is still not clear how that plays out. emily: one of the interesting things about a voice technology is it could actually challenge traditional business models like google's model and baidu's business model. how do you see voice shaking up the way that you guys currently make money? andrew: i think that baidu and other companies are seeing voice input as a strategic direction that we must do well in. you know, this thing transformed the whole tech industry. steve jobs had the touch screen, he did it really well, but hbc might have been the first touchscreen. there is a fundamental new way for us to interact with computers. the cell phone, the smartphone

transformed everything. i think speech recognition has an equal opportunity. emily: that was baidu chief scientist, andrew ng, and art bloomberg news reporting. coming up, where will fitness maker pebble announce a new batch of products including its first ever non-smart watch device? pebble ceo is with us for an exclusive interview, next. ♪

emily: pebble announced the first ever non-smart watch device this week. pebble core. they took to kickstarter to raise the money as they have done the past, raising $4.5 million in the first eight hours. the market for wearable health devices is heating up as apple and fitbit try to expand their business. so, what is pebble offering? how do they stack up against the competition? pebble ceo eric joins me for an exclusive interview to discuss it. what is new? eric: the big news is that we have created our first non-smart

watch product called "pebble core." it is a tiny clip you can clip onto your shirt or belt, and you can go running without your phone. it does spot of five streaming and it tracks your run using gps. it can even send an emergency text if something happens while you're running. emily: so how is it different from fitbit? eric: it is a little different. this is meant to do a lot of the things your phone with or without having to strap your phone on your shoulder. where fitbit does tracking, this is aiming strictly at the running market. emily: it doesn't have a heart rate monitor, but you can sync it with the watch. can you expand on that? eric: this goes on to your belt or shirt. they can talk to your pebble. your pebble now has a built-in heart rate monitor. it makes a great combo. the watch has a sensor that learns more about your personal body. this tracks your gps and plays music.

emily: this is the newest watch. what iteration is this? eric: this is now our sixth smart watch. emily: what's new? eric: this one has a heart rate monitor built into the back. it tracks your heart rate while you work out or sleep. it has got pebble health, which is our new health initiative. emily: so this is coming out in january of next year. why skip the holiday season? why wait? eric: for us, we wanted to get it out into the world. that is why we announced it on kickstarter today. i mean, it is a complete in new product. this type of computer has never been built before. emily: so it is as fast as you can build it. eric: this is as fast, and it is also because we are going out into the community. we built this with the benefit of 1.8 million people who have purchased it in the past. also, the developer community. we have over 50,000 developers who build apps and watch races for pebble watches. this is a completely new product. we don't want to surprise people. we want to give them a chance to see what is coming up next. that is why we have been at this early and on kickstarter. emily: let's look at the numbers out there. idc says pebble captures 7% of market share.

that is for smart watch makers, but that i will drop to 2.7%. apple has a nearly 50%. android wear, 21%, what do you make of those numbers? eric: i don't know that those backup the numbers that we are seeing. like i said, we shifted over 1.8 million pebbles in the last 3.5 years. we are a small company going up against some pretty big giants. in the last three years, i think we are pretty much neck and neck with google or the android platform right now. we're taking a special stance. we are trying to build something that is a focused, simple, straightforward product. our motto is a great smart watch has to start with being a great watch first. that is why we have a watch with a battery life of up to 10 days. it is not something you have to charge every night when you go home. it is not like a consumer electronics product. emily: the way ibc puts it, they will enjoy modest growth in the short term, however, competitive pressures will cause it to lose share to giants like watch os

and android wear, how do you respond to that? eric: again, i just don't see that in the numbers we are seeing. just today, we sold 22,000 watches in the last 8.5 hours. that stacks up pretty well against some of the competitors that we're seeing. emily: how do you stay relevant? what is the long-term? eric: for us? we see a network of devices on your body. like i said, this is the first non-watch product we have created. it is not going to be the last. i think there is an opportunity for many types of devices on your body capturing information in helping you live a better life. emily: you did announce you were laying off 25% of your workforce earlier this year. what happened there? you said money is tight these days. so, what happened there and what is the next phase? how do you get through that? eric: earlier this year, we structured our company to focus on profitability. we knew there were a couple of

key things we had to do this year. the kickstarter launch being one of them. we are planning for a bunch of new products on the software side, the hardware side. we are really focused on creating a great smart watch experience that has awesome notifications and health tracking. we are planning to be profitable by the end of the year. emily: you have been doing this now for four years. i went to the original pebble garage four years ago. how would you describe the startup funding environment right now? eric: it is not necessarily something i spend a lot of time worrying about. we funded the business mostly in the last four years through our kickstarter campaign and sales. in the last six months, we veered a little bit into less profitable territory. we are ending to get back to profitability. emily: that was the pebble ceo. that does it for this edition of the best of bloomberg west. we will bring you all the latest throughout the week. next week, we speak to u.s.

energy secretary when the clean energy ministerial comes to san francisco. tune in at 6:00 p.m. eastern, 3:00 p.m. pacific. see you then. ♪

♪ angie: the big short is back in china in the last time that's were so high, the market turned into a $5 trillion row. boolean priceces falling below 1200, losing $100 in a month. full steam ahead, airing daily sees no signs of a slowdown in india. up, i'm angiest lau coming to you live from hong