♪ cory: i am cory johnson, in for emily chang, and this is the best of "bloomberg west." we bring you all of our top interviews from the week in technology. coming up, the brexit vote. we'll find out what it means for investors. plus, our exclusive sit down interview with billionaire investor mark cuban. his choice words on everything from brexit to donald trump. and we will sit down with the ceo of box and ask how his company is preparing for a european split.

but first, to our lead. global markets were spooked by the britain vote to leave the european union. the tech industry cannot be escaping unscathed. investors are questioning what this means for london's future as the tech hub of europe. and what it means for multinational tech companies dependent on the u.k. economy. emily chang sat with saalim chowdhury, a british entrepreneur who is actually happy about the brexit outcome and voted to leave himself. we will also talk to sanjay beri, the ceo of netskope, who works with big tech companies and make sure their cloud complies with eu companies and now has to worry about u.k. regulations. take a listen. emily: first, why did you vote leave? you are based in london, but you are here on business. why did you vote leave, especially as a businessman? saalim: i could not vote for a system and policy that would would not ber allowed in britain. had britain been in europe 40

years ago, he would not be allowed in, simply because if we look at the system today, 85% of migrants come from the eu, and the rest is such a small supply. we have no scope for highly skilled and highly talented migrants from the commonwealth, which we had a rather interesting history with, let's leave it with that, and refugees. we need the extra supplies. britain is like the coolest school in a school district. we can either have the european system, which says, hey, we will take everyone from catchment era and exclude the rest of the populace, or we can have what hoping for, and many like me who voted to leave are hoping for, a system that allows for highly skilled brilliant talent from all over the world to come to london, which is a cosmopolitan hub. emily: given how financial markets are reacting to this, the volatility and the uncertainty, do you have any sense of -- and i cannot believe i'm going to say the word, bre-gret -- now that you have seen the cascading effects? saalim: anyone who votes leave knew well and good there would be volatility.

we voted for uncertainty instead of certainty. that is how fed up we were. right? you had lots of people going on to google, searching "what is the eu?" that is because in the 26 ars of the eu, they have not done a good job of selling to the british people or most eu member states what the eu was. so, to be honest, it is going to be a short-term rough ride. but out of it, we will come out stronger. let's be quite frank and honest. no one comes to britain for the good weather and the good food. they come for our minds, for our talents, and our institutions. emily: on that note, you work with a number of tech companies that have huge businesses that work in europe and the u.k. what is the impact for these companies going to be? sanjay: if you look at the tech industry itself, there is a commonality that will persist. if you look at the average tech company, they have 700 different vendors where they run their business on. a small percentage are based in the u.k. a u.k. company runs its business

on applications that are built from around the world. the eu, north america, south america, aipac. that will not change. one of the common themes i tell our customers and my own company who has a large office in the u.k., is business as usual. general data prevention laws. privacy laws. they are not changing. if you transact with an eu organization, over 50% of the u.k. has exports to the eu. that is not going to change. you are still going to have to have those privacy regulations. you are still going to have to adhere to them. they were formed partly with the u.k. input, so for much of it, it will stay the same. emily: mark andreessen has been tweeting about this. he retweeted an article from the "wall street journal" that says the u.k. will be less attractive for startups. one of the most important things is to be able to hire easily. the follow-up, one argument is the relief from eu overregulation could make the eu more attractive for startups. what do you think? saalim: i could not agree more. in reality, people like mark

andreessen do not invest in britain. to be quite frank and honest, i do not know what he is doing talking about my country. emily: he talks about a lot of things. [laughter] saalim: most investment in britain comes from british funds. if anything, the brexit will force them to redouble their investment into british talent, into british tech. so i can see that being a relatively positive situation. emily: if hiring becomes more difficult, there is a stat out there that one in three u.k. tech workers come from outside the country, if data regulations become more confusing, and if things become more difficult for syntax companies, for example, one extreme scenario that has been discussed is the idea that london's tech hub could migrate to berlin. could that happen? sanjay: i think there is a lot of innate talent in the u.k. you look at our organization itself, we hire folks born and bred in the u.k., some have migrated and some have not. we are staying in the u.k., but we also operate in germany and

we also operate in amsterdam. that is not going to change. how the tech, one of the things you alluded to is the tech talent that you can acquire from other areas outside of the eu, my feeling is there will be a lot of tech talent in the u.k., regardless of where it comes. emily: what do you make of the comparison of the brexit sentiment to donald trump here in the united states? and this idea that a lot of people did not admit they were voting for brexit, and the same way there are some people who may not admit they are voting for donald trump. saalim: let's be clear, brexit and donald trump, one is voting for someone who would -- who is, by most accounts, a little insane, versus a different way of running our country. just be part of a political bloc or not. they are not the same. let's be absolutely clear. but the motivation is absolutely on the same path. britons are fundamentally fed up. like in the u.s., we have an

issue where the top 5% or top 10% are getting all the wealth but the rest of the country is getting declining living standards. people are looking for change. people are looking for alternatives. as in the u.s., the political establishment are not living up to it. i am sincerely hoping this is a wake-up call to both politicians in europe and the u.k. to say, hey guys, we are not actually doing what our people want. that is why they have done this. we should listen. cory: saalim chowdhury and sanjay beri, ceo of net scope. coming up, the dallas mavericks owner mark cuban tells us what he thinks of presidential hopefuls hillary clinton and donald trump with some choice words. plus, how to prepare cloud computing companies for the possible regulatory changes following the brexit vote? ♪

cory: billionaire businessman mark cuban has some interesting thoughts on pretty much everything, and that includes brexit. we caught up with the serial entrepreneur and dallas mavericks owner on the set of

"shark tank," which he shoots in los angeles. on the top of cuban's mind, the historic u.k. vote. mark: absolute uncertainty. that is what the market hates. and i think we're in a very manipulative situation now. there is the political aspects on both sides of the ocean, and how corporations deal with those circumstances are going to influence what happens going forward in the u.k. and also here in our election. and what i am talking about is, if all of a sudden we see jpmorgan and all of these different big financial companies say, you know what, we are just moving everybody to berlin, now there is a tangible impact on jobs, and that is going to influence the conversation. it is the same in the united states. we are talking about nationalism, trump versus senator clinton or secretary of state clinton, if all these businesses are reacting to this take back our country movement by leaving, that sets the tone for the election as well.

look, if it happened that all these companies said, we are out, why would it be different here? on the flipside, if the united states is open, and we adhere to our treaties, then all of a sudden, tech companies, in particular in the u.k., who want to be able to work with the european union and have the treaties already in place, they might come here. if you see a big movement of tech companies here because, you know, there is no better tech foundation and employee base and customer base than the united states protect, we might see -- ech, we might see a wholesale inflow of those companies. which on one end says the u.k. brexit was a big mistake and also sends the message to our economy and u.s. voters that protectionism and cutting off those treaties would be a huge mistake. cory: you mentioned immigration. i mean, that is certainly a big part of it in the u.k. and a big part of the nationalistic discussion that is happening,

really led by donald trump. mark: immigration takes a lot of different forms. there is high-end for visas, you know, employees cannot get, people being concerned about their lives, being concerned about their jobs. i am not a fan of donald trump's approach. i am a tech guy. i have invested in companies that allow for or create the ability to test and evaluate people. a company called come various we are working with in israel, and several south american companies that say before you come into this country, we will ask a series of questions. we can tell with a high degree of accuracy, 85% and it will learn to be better, whether or not you will have a negative impact, whether you are a terrorist, whether or not you are a radical islamic terrorist, however you want to define people. there is technology i think is the first step that everybody is ignoring. i would just take a completely different approach. cory: are you concerned about the tone, though, the nationalistic tone? whether it is in the u.k. or here? mark: absolutely. it is scary. in my mind, hate never accomplishes anything. no one has ever won with hate.

i think that is the fundamental problem. hate does not solve problems. hate does not improve the economy. peopleesn't protect our or the borders. we have to be very careful about the verbiage we use because there is no win there. cory: we also got mark cuban's take on this year's turbulent election cycle. this is a guy who know something or two about billionaire tax returns. take a listen. mark: irrelevant. absolutely irrelevant. i mean, i know for my taxes, when it is tax time, there's a big living room table that i have, and there are big stacks all around the table, and i just look at the signature pages, and it takes me 45 minutes still to sign all of that stuff. and so, actually, i went and looked. any previous years to this last one, i couldn't have told you how much i made and what were my taxes. it's certainly not a reflection of net worth, and i don't think it is a reflection on how much anybody gives to charity or anything. in any one year, it may be up or

down, so i do not care if they released their taxes. cory: so why do you think he is not doing it? mark: i have no idea. my guess is it may have been a down year for him. and you know, look, depending in -- depending on your sources of income, you may say, i made a fortune on the market but i am not going to take my profits, and he may have had a negative income. that certainly would not match up to his brand. so, it doesn't matter. cory: you made some comments recently saying, suggesting he's gotten dumber as time has gone on? mark: yeah. that is pretty straightforward. if you look at how he's managed his campaign, he went from "maybe i'll be the nominee" to "ok, i am pretty much the presumptive nominee" before the others fell out of the race. if he was smart, he would have started to learn that in a campaign, in a national campaign, there are certain things i'm going to have to do, there are certain skill sets i'm going to need to make me smarter about running a national campaign. so, did he go out and hire people who can create a ground game? no. did he go out and hire people that could help him on an advisory basis, to help with the

whole political machine required to get the vote out? he tried, and all those people keep on getting fired and turned over. so rather than getting smarter and bringing in the help that is needed to run a campaign, he's doing the exact opposite. and where we have gone to is him pretty much being dependent on his kids. and we are not, it is not like -- they are good kids, they are smart kids. i've met them. they are impressive in every which way, but i don't know that i'd want them all of a sudden just coming into run a campaign. this isn't "shark tank" where it is like, "ok, you can help run this company." we're talking about running a campaign for the president of the united states. so getting stupider means not being able to hire the skill sets that you need to make you smart. i think he has gotten worse, and we are seeing it happen before our eyes. cory: i had dinner with some tech ceo's recently. people you know. it was an off the record dinner. i will tell you about, when we were going around the table talking about politics and the vice presidential choices for hillary, one of the ceos said

you. mark: good. cory: seriously. mark: good. yeah, i mean, look, it's not going to happen, but you never know until you take the first step and you put it out there. anything is possible. but i think tech illiteracy at the top for both candidates is a huge problem. you know, we talked about how do you deal with immigration, how do you deal with radical islamic terrorists trying to come into the country from whereever? right? there's no way just physically you can just interview everybody. you are going to need to use tech, whether it is facial recognition, there's a variety of other options. tech is going to get us there. somebody has got to at least start to understand those things and how they apply to all the big issues. you talk about dealing with the future, autonomous cars, robotics, ai, machine learning. jobs are going to disappear. you know, there are going to be jobs that are gone, just like making records in terre haute, indiana were gone. making cameras for kodak in new york were gone. coal in western kentucky. they are gone.

those jobs are gone. the question is, what are you going to do in anticipation of the fact that we may not have replacements? if you do not anticipate, if you do not understand the issues, you can't come up with solutions. i think that's a relevant problem that i can -- no one has the absolute answer, but at least i could help them start to understand that and come up with solutions. cory: that was our exclusive interview with mark cuban. still ahead, the challenges the brexit vote could pose to cloud computing companies. we talked to box ceo aaron levie, if that industry is ready. this is bloomberg. ♪

cory: britain's surprise vote to leave the eu could have a huge impact on cloud computing. cloud providers like amazon web service can currently shift data across europe without any interference, but operators may need to follow separate sets of regulations, one for the u.k. and another for the eu. emily chang spoke with box ceo aaron levie, who uses amazon to reach customers in europe. emily: does brexit change anything for you?

aaron: we actually architected our solution, i guess luckily, in such a way where, no matter how much fragmentation happens in data privacy policies or kind of how balkanized the internet gets, we will still be able to help our customers store their data in a way that keeps them compliant and safe in whatever regulatory environment they are dealing with. we launched a product called box zones that lets you store data in germany and ireland. it will certainly support london in the future if we want, but we have already architected our solution to work in a post-brexit world. that is separate from our philosophical views on whether brexit should have happened or not. emily: what is your philosophical view? aaron: we generally believe the world should get more open and get more collaborative, fewer walls and more bridges. i think our rough sentiment is that we were against brexit. but we understand there are lots of different reasons why things voted one way or another. emily: do you see any changes in

cloud data center partnerships, involving amazon, involving ibm? aaron: not because of brexit, i would just say this has already been a trend in general, whether you look at brazil or germany, or australia, or tokyo, or canada. all of these places have different kinds of data privacy laws and requirements. so it is the expectation of any cloud vendor that to be successful in the future, you will have to work in different regions. our job, where our value proposition comes in, we want to make sure it is as simple as possible for the enterprise. if you are in ge, and you work in 30, 40 countries around the world, just because there are different privacy requirements, different laws around data residency doesn't mean your people should be slowed down. doesn't mean they should have a worse or harder experience to get a job done. that is our job. emily: do you think there will be different guidelines? aaron: there will be. our job is to extract all that complexity away from the end user and from the customer. emily: in "usa today," you told

"usa today" that you think hillary's plan hits on every count. talent, patents, content, encryption, privacy. we recently spoke with mark cuban, who said this -- mark: i think tech illiteracy at the top for both candidates is a huge problem. you know, we talked about how do you deal with immigration, how do you deal with radical islamic terrorists trying to come into the country from wherever. right? there's no way just physically you can just interview everybody. you're going to need to use tech. emily: so he thinks trump and hillary are tech-illiterate. aaron: when was that? emily: that was over the weekend. aaron: ok. but that was before her policies came out. emily: yeah. it seemed like he was referring to how you would use technology to prevent terrorism. not, he wasn't talking specifically about things like patent reform, things like how do you make sure you have better stem education all throughout the country. that is what hillary's initiatives are focused on. how do you have tech and

innovation policy that can make sure america stays on the forefront of innovation? i don't think it was meant to address the terrorism issue mark apparently was talking about. emily: what do you think hillary clinton, a hillary clinton white house, would mean for silicon valley? and conversely, what would a donald trump white house mean? aaron: it is too scary to think about a donald trump white house would mean for silicon valley, so let's go with the hillary won first, or only. obama set the country up on really good footing from a digital policy standpoint. if you think about his investments in the u.s. digital service, and thinking through what a lot of these sort of future industries will look like in life sciences and transportation, he has generally been on the side of the more progressive technology policies. there's been examples, whether it is what the nsa does, some of our encryption policies where the tech industry would maybe disagree, that is to be expected. but he set the country up to be much more sort of digitally-oriented than i think the country ever has. now, what we need to do is we need to continue on that path. we need to continue to invest in

many of the underlying programs and initiatives that obama created, but there are also many other things we did not make enough progress on. obviously, immigration reform , with ensuring you get a visa if you come out here and gotten your masters or phd in science program. the ability to make sure stem education is available to every student around the world -- around the world will be great, but certainly in the country. the ability to bring high-speed internet to every classroom in every community in the country. all of those things are the next set of investments we need to make, and the next initiatives that we need to go execute on. i'm confident that hillary would be the right person to drive those. and i'm very confident that there would be a lot of risk in a trump white house. emily: so, one of your competitors, dropbox, announced at the bloomberg tech conference they are cash flow positive. did that light any competitive fire in you? that wasn't there before? aaron: we have long said we will be cash flow positive by the end of this year. we are still committed to that.

and in fact, we were cash flow -- cash from operations positive at q4 last year. about a quarter and a half ago. we have been on the path that we are on, and i think we are very energized by the competitive dynamic, but we are running the business the way that we are. emily: you know, a lot of observers are predicting more m&a to come. we saw microsoft buy linkedin. what do you think is in store when it comes to tech m&a? aaron: i think what you have is a bunch of large technology incumbents, microsoft, apple, , youe, ibm, sap, oracle have some of the largest companies in the world that have large amounts of cash. you have a sector on the start up side that has seen lots of innovation over the past five or 10 years with lots of funding from investors and venture capitalists, so you are seeing a natural thing emerge. which is, you have great startups, great companies that are innovating and being disruptive in their particular industry, and you have large incumbents that need to be able to continue to grow. need to bring in new talent,

need to grow in new markets. there will be an increase in mergers and acquisitions for the foreseeable future, and in fact, in perpetuity, maybe. because, as you have more startups get created the natural outcome is that more companies get acquired. emily: would box be a target? would you be open to that? aaron: i can't say whether we will be a target, but our focus is to create as much value as we can as an independent company. the upside is so great in terms of what we are doing. cory: that was our interview with aaron levie, the ceo of box. billionaire's push to spread modern medicine around the world. bill gates discusses pharma, drug pricing, and much more. and if you like bloomberg news, check us out on radio. you can now listen to me and my coanchor on the bloomberg radio app, bloomberg.com, and sirius xm station 119. this is bloomberg. ♪

cory: all right, welcome back to the best of "bloomberg west." i am cory johnson, in for emily chang. this week, bloomberg presented a focus on pharma. diving deep into pharmaceuticals and biotechnology with a range of stories and analysis across every one of bloomberg's platforms. bill gates has made it the mission of his foundation to use modern medicine to wipe out diseases of the poor across the world. he sat down with erik schatzker in boston. take a listen. bill: vaccines have still been the tool that has saved the most lives. even today, inventing new vaccines for hiv, malaria, tb, a number of these diseases that are still out literally killing millions of people, that's a top priority for us because it is a magical intervention. erik: and other areas like gene therapies, for example, or gene

editing, how much promise do you think they have relative to the perhaps easier work -- i hesitate to say it that way -- but that can be done in vaccine development? bill: well, the gene editing is such a basic tool, and it's going to pervade all the work in the biological sciences. i mean, those tools, even for diagnosis, doing gene knockouts to understand disease models, you really can't understate what a great set of tools they are. in a direct sense where our foundation sees them, we see them in our plant and animal work, because it will speed up better plants, and help on animal disease. and there, the regulatory pathways are complex but sometimes not as hard as human disease. for mosquitoes, this is a superior system to affect either mosquito populations or carrying the virus.

for something like hiv/aids, it's possible, although there's a lot of hurdles, that you could do gene editing to cure somebody from the disease, which would be fantastic, since we do not have a cure, we just have lifelong treatment. so i see it in so many of the different foundation programs. erik: many of the most advanced remedies are awfully expensive to develop, and as you know, the companies behind them are incentivized to generate the maximum profit possible. i am, of course, thinking of things like valeant and turing, but also the price of hep c treatments and immunotherapy, and blood disease drugs. what, in your mind, is the best way to control costs, so these medicines and treatments are not just available to the rich and well-insured? bill: i actually think the current system, despite some

extreme cases that i think have properly been labeled as "inappropriate," i think the current system is better than most other systems one can imagine. i mean, curing hepatitis c, this is a phenomenal thing. and now you have multiple drug companies competing in terms of the quality and the price of that offering. the drug companies are turning out miracles, and we need their r&d budgets to stay strong. they need to see the opportunity. for things like alzheimer's, they can reduce medical costs so dramatically and improve the human condition, and the pharmaceutical companies have been great partners of our foundation. when we need help in doing science, they are unique in what they can do. also, they are very good about tiered pricing. i mean, if you take hep c as an example, you know, i think that

-- and all of the responsible companies do this, -- they, the poor countries have an approach that was not warranted towards them making money, just driving access. so tiered pricing is often the way that you can square the idea that access and being able to fund new miracles -- you really want both. cory: you can find more of our pharma coverage on the bloomberg at pharma and at bloomberg.com/pharma. coming up, the man opening movie theaters to millennials. we will head to the city of angels for that conversation. and, pinterest gets serious about shopping. we will speak to the company's president about a new range of products. this is bloomberg. ♪

cory: from the fall of blockbuster to the rise of netflix, the business of hollywood has seen a tumultuous couple of decades. our next guest has been involved in nearly every twist and turn. he invested in the bay area rental chain in the 1980's, cofounded netflix with reed hastings and marc randolphs in the 1990's, and then went on to found redbox in 1995. he has turned his attention to movie theaters with another startup looking to disrupt the movie theater business called movie pass. it is a $30 a month all you can watch subscription service to go to the movies. we have the author of magic. emily: first of all, movie theater attendance is down. fewer people are going to the movies, let alone, you know, multiple movies every single month. why do think this is a good business? mitch: well, you know, seeing movies in a movie theater is absolutely the best way to see it. i have been a fan of movies all my life, and in fact that is why i love this business. but you know, the experience of going to the movies has just

started to get innovative. you know, we have got digital film being distributed now, we have theaters upgrading the environment, you know, great seating, they deliver food. but what has not happened is the business model where consumers participate in the business has not changed in a long time. you come up to the ticket counter, you buy a ticket, you pick the films from the newspaper or online, and that, i think, is really ripe for change, and it is exciting for me, because i love to figure out ways to get people to see more films and to enjoy film. emily: virginia, you are nodding. do you agree, or are you skeptical? virginia: absolutely agree. the return of movie theaters would be consistent with what has happened in the music business.

first, we believed that people want to, with the rise of mp3s, they would just want to be in their little world, with their ipods, alone with that experience. now we have seen the rise of live music. live music is a bigger business than ever before ever in the 20th century. all people seem to want to do is sell out concerts. there is something to being together, and, you know, in some cases, romantically being together on the classic old date, dinner and a movie. now, we have "netflix and chill." and there is push back on that netflix and chill model. you can hear complaints, even on twitter, about like, the worst tinder date is when the guy just wants to netflix and chill. now maybe he wants to take you to dinner and a movie, and i am for it. emily: so do you think attendance goes up as a result of movie pass, and by how much? mitch: absolutely. you know, you are absolutely right. the business has been flat to a slight decline in ticket sales. the only reason there is more revenue is the increase in pricing. but the experience can be a wonderful one, and i think if we can make it seamless from figuring out which movie you are

going to see to getting to the movie theater, to getting your concessions, to finding your seat, to comfortable seats, i think it can dramatically increase. you know, 10% or 20% is not unrealistic in the growth of the business. emily: and how do you make money off of this, because you're saying the theaters are going to get full price? mitch: the theaters get full price. you know, we're going to create an amazing amount of data. we are going to be able to move people from one movie to another, from one theater chain to another. and so i think, you know, our first, the first stage of this business, like in any other company that i have been involved in, is to prove our value and then to determine how to monetize that. but the first thing we have got to do is build a big customer base with a great product and a great service that is very affordable, and the byproduct is it gets people to go to the movies more often. emily: now we are seeing, you know, as somebody who was one of

the cofounders of netflix -- we are seeing netflix, amazon, all of these companies spending billions and billions of dollars on content, on original content. is that going to catch up with them at some point, or is this really going to pay off? mitch: you know, it is a great tactic, because, you know, there are so many choices out there. it turns out that people want a little bit fewer choices, but more relevant to their own interests, so as these companies, you know, use the intelligence about what people enjoy and what they like, and what they come back for, there is going to be, you know, better and better content created by companies like netflix and amazon. so i think there is a big future in this. the downside is there won't be as much variety, and that is where the movie theater really comes into play. you know, people who, there is 400 to 700 movies made every

year in the united states that are aimed for the movie theaters, and not all of them get played. it is a great environment to see those films, and if we can get more people to be more experimental in seeing their films, in the same way netflix, by having the all-you-can-eat subscription, we got people to try films they never would have thought about watching or paying for in an a la carte manner, and it opened up their eyes to great entertainment, and i think we can do the same at movie theaters. emily: again you are nodding, virginia. virginia: yeah, i have a question. that all-you-can-eat model has done really interesting things for content on netflix and amazon, in the sense that you get these maxi movies, that is what we used to call them, in the new york times, these 80 hour movies like "house of cards" that are made with a real filmmaker's eye to plot and complexity, and yet run and run

and run and run. they are an extraordinary achievement we have not seen before. what about returning to a real focus on the 90 minutes or two hours, and you know, what kind of new movies might we see on a movie pass system, or maybe you would ask viewers to spend six hours in the theater. i would do it. mitch: yeah, exactly. if you go back to what was popular in the 1920's and 1930's, you would spend the whole saturday at the movie theater. virginia: absolutely. i love this. mitch: there is no reason why many of these hit tv series or hbo series or netflix series cannot also be part of your weekend or your evening at the movie theater. so there is lots of opportunity, and there is a lot of empty time on these screens, where the seats are empty, where people, where there's a great environment. there is lots of potential here. cory: that was movie pass ceo mitch lowe and virginia heffernan. still ahead, it is not search

and destroy, but search and buy. pinterest president tim kendall has a new idea. this is bloomberg. ♪

cory: well, pinterest just got more serious about shopping, streamlining the user experience from shopping to the purchase. pinterest shop is a virtual shopping bag that will follow the user across devices. the company has also introduced a new camera search technology. emily chang caught up with pinterest president tim kendall. tim: what we announced today, is a broader effort called shopping with pinterest. because we want to help you discover stuff and ultimately make it as easy as possible to buy it on pinterest when you find something that you love. we announced the stuff that you just mentioned. a shopping bag that follows you. ability to buy on web, which we didn't have before. and then within visual search, we launched the ability to, within a pin, we can do automatic object detection, so if there's a picture of an outfit or picture of a living

room, we'll automatically detect the objects in that picture that are for sale and buyable, and if if you select one of those objects, they will render below and you can select and purchase them if there's a match. emily: so what is your hit rate? one of the frustrations as a pinterest user is you'll see a lot of things, you can't figure out where to buy it. maybe it doesn't exist anymore or it's one of a kind, or out of stock. how often are you clicking on something and there is success? tim: the idea is to just make this better and better over time. i'd say right now it's decent, but it is something that is difficult to do. computer vision is hard, and getting that match rate and that experience to be great is a challenge. we think what we have to date is pretty good, and we think we're going to continue to train the models, we are going to get better and better. emily: the other thing you can do within the app is you can take a picture of something, i can take a picture of your shoes, and it would tell me where to buy them, right? tim: yes, i was with the kids in the park on sunday, and i saw a

stroller, a double stroller. i am wondering, should it have parallel feet or serial feet, i do not know. and with this technology, i could take a picture of that stroller, and immediately, results would render that would show similar or the exact stroller and allow me to buy it within pinterest without leaving. emily: it sounds like a dream scenario, and something that many companies have aspired to do. twitter just closed their commerce team, facebook, there are so many failed examples of social commerce. why do you think it can work? tim: i mean, i think on pinterest, people are there to shop. just data about two weeks ago said said people come to pinterest, about 55% of people are there to shop. only 12% of that say that about social networks. so i think if you have people who are using your service to shop, retailers are going to be there. we have 20,000 retailers on the service. we've gone from two million items that are for sale to now 10 million items for sale, as of

today. if you have selection and you have people who are there to shop, we find that it works pretty well. emily: so, how does pinterest evolve from here? is it a shopping site now? tim: no, i think -- look, the mission is to help people discover and do what they love. and so, an important piece of that is that people find lots of ideas, and some of the ways that you make those ideas come to life is you buy something. in those subset of cases, we want to make that as easy as possible, but we also want to make it easy if you find a science experiment you want to do with your kids, that means taking a bunch of diy objects from your home, we want to make that easy for you, even if it does not mean buying anything. emily: does shopping become the main revenue driver? tim: i think advertising is the main revenue driver and will continue to scale. and there is a way in which i think advertising will naturally draft off of the shopping experiences that we build. but the idea is, let's make shopping work for the retailer and for the user, and we'll worry about sort of the

advertising model that sits behind that after we get that link. emily: now, you worked at facebook for many, many years, and you know what sort of rapid growth looks like. when it comes to pinterest, you're still getting more monthly users than snapchat and twitter. but if you look at the comscore, the numbers dropped ever so slightly from april to may. how are you growing your user base? tim: we have got a big focus on international. we just tipped, so we are now more international than we are in the u.s. we just tipped so the international user base is larger than the u.s. the u.s. user base is great and large. i think what we've shown over the past six months or so is the ability to really scale internationally. we have got a number of countries we're focused on. we are trying to make it in all those focus countries, we have great content that users want to find. if we make that match, it works. emily: how well are you doing in recruiting male users? tim: we're doing well. [laughter] tim: in the united states, if you look at third-party data, we're about 80-20. 80% female, 20% male.

the rest of the world, it's about 60-40, so it's more balanced outside the united states. when i joined the company four years ago, i think we were 98% women and 2% men. so we are actually making real progress against balancing that out. emily: when you compare your pinterest experience to facebook, can pinterest reaccelerate growth, is this a new chapter for the company? what is the vision? tim: so, i think, look, the vision is that we think we can do for discovery what google did for search. google taught us that if we knew what we were looking for and we could express it in a text string or two, we could find it. we think there's an amazing opportunity on your phone that when you don't know exactly what you're looking for, we can help you discover amazing things in the world. emily: and from a technological perspective, i imagine so much work has gone into making this even possible. tim: yes.

emily: what are the resources behind this, the engineering behind this that makes it a reality? tim: yes, so we have a huge number of folks that are focused on a series of discovery experiences that sit on top of this catalog of ideas. and this catalog of ideas is 75 billion pins. they're all ideas in the system. and they're all linked up with people that are linked up with collections. think about this graph of people mapped to collections mapped to ideas, and that's all human-created. and we're basically building technologies that trace that to create two discovery experiences. one is a home feed that you can browse that should be this personalized catalog that you can look at everyday on your phone. the other is a visualized search capability. cory: pinterest president tim kendall with emily chang. that does it for this edition of the best of "bloomberg west." june in this coming week.

we will bring you the latest in tech news throughout the week, but you do not want to miss our special look at china. tune in at 6:00 p.m. eastern. 3:00 here on the west coast. this is bloomberg. ♪

in sydney. a.m. vote counting resumes in australia with uncertainty in the air. this is "daybreak asia." ♪ betty: mermerger talks. two chinese brokers are set to be in discussion. they have $28 billion of assets between them. london stock exchange shareholders do -- approved the deutsche person deal, but the german regulator is not keen