mark: let's begin with bloomberg first word news. the obama administration is easy more sanctions against cuba, including eliminating a $100 limit on cuban rum and cigars american travelers can bring home. limits are also being lifted on cargo ship travel between the two countries and on some joint medical research. the changes take effect on monday. in north carolina the death toll from hurricane matthew has risen by 2, bringing the total in the state to 24. flooding forced thousands from the home straight at least 40 people were killed in the u.s. and more than 500 died in haiti. the uk's exit negotiations with the eu will be controlled by a

select group of 12 ministers from prime minister theresa may's cabinet, most opposed to increasing powers of the 28 member bloc. that is according to unpublished documents obtained by bloomberg data could be another sign the prime minister is planning a clean break from the union prayed in thailand tens of in thailand tens of thousands of people lined the streets of bangkok to pay final respects to the king. the world's longest reigning monarch died at the age of 88. his body was transported from the hospital this morning. his son and only heir apparent led the procession. mourning period will last one year. global news 24 hours a day, powered by more than 2600 journalists and analysts in over 120 countries. "bloomberg technology" is next.

selina: i'm selina wang in for emily chang, and this is "bloomberg technology." coming up, it's twitter destined to remain an independent company? the company loses one of its last potential irons as -- buyers as salesforce house out of the running. the growth strategy chinese companies global ambitions. we will discuss with the dcm cofounder. 10 years ago the founders of box got their very first vc check. the story of the four childhood friends now leading a $2 billion company. first, to our lead. twitter shares take another tumble after losing what some still considered one of its last options for a buyout. salesforce is officially out of the running. stock jumps on the confirmation today as investors breathed a sigh of relief that the ceo marc benioff would not spend billions on a departure from its core business. google and disney have also backed out recently. what's next?

brad stone and eric newcomer join me on the set to discuss. we reported last week that salesforce would likely drop out, but the stock price today makes it seem like investors still had hopes. who is left? >> if this were an agatha christie novel, it would be and then there were none. no google, no salesforce, no disney. twitter stagnant revenue growth. an environment that can best be described as rancorous with everything that's happening in the u.s. political system. there's always a price. it remains to be seen, the company is valued at $12 billion. if the price goes down, do we see google getting back in? perhaps. selina: it seems like there might still be chances if the price comes down. >> there always is. >> i think it's a strong sign

that any company that buys twitter will face heavy scrutiny from their investors, and that's a problem. you want to make an acquisition, you want to be able to be excited you are in a landscape right now where people look at you like, what are you doing. selina: it seems like jack dorsey might be happy about this. sarah frier had reported that he wants longer for his live video strategy. >> it is still early. it's intriguing. week six of the nfl, they got 3 million viewers for the broncos game yesterday. "bloomberg technology," we only started going live on twitter this week. it will be tough twitter's playing in the big league's. it's early, we should give them the benefit of the doubt. selina: another big story is samsung, new reports saying their loss of $3.2 billion from

the $3.2 billion previously reported. how is samsung going to make up for all these losses? >> the note isn't even their biggest phone, the galaxy s series. it's a hit to the brand and reputation more than anything. it's a diversified company, they have a growing semi conductor business. they have to unbacked trust. back trust. these headlines are terrible for the company. selina: it's hard to earn back trust when the mystery of what went wrong is still hanging in the air. what did we learn that was new this week about what actually caused this? >> we thought, ok, we figured out it is the battery, we will recall these phones. we find out that might not be the case, that sort of terrified. now samsung is moving away from the note 7 altogether. it's a terrible mystery for

samsung and puzzling for the rest of us. selina: could be good for some other brands. >> google is launching a new phone right now. good for apple. >> it's terrible for google. samsung is our largest partner. do people go to the pixel -- more than likely they go to the iphone, so this is overall bad for google, bad for android. the pixel like the nexus phones, we will have to see how much google gets behind them. that's always been the challenge with these google brand enhancements. selina: seems like it's bad for everyone and he keeps getting worse for samsung. can samsung recover from this? >> i think yes. the next galaxy, s8, will be huge. one would think that they are slowing down rather than speeding up, because that's what got them into trouble with the note 7, and making sure they make it big/with the phone. a lot of people will be looking

at this and wondering how samsung does. selina: when we say consumer sentiment has changed around the samsung brand? >> it will take time to say. companies come back from worse things before. automakers come back from terrible problems. especially because it's a premium phone -- that is what is troubling. you think that would be the one that is not going to explode. selina: snapchat moving closer to their ipo, they pick their bankers, morgan stanley and goldman sachs. it's interesting because what people are investing and now may be different in the coming years, the parent company calls itself a camera company. what are investors going to have to consider? >> it will be a bit of a leap of faith. on the one hand it's pretty encouraging, this is a company thinking deeply about its place in the technology ecosystem that realizes they have a set of dangerous tendencies around phone and camera makers and they want to move upstream and

experiment with hardware. they're going to think about creating the future they want to live in. technology companies in the past have not covered themselves in glory by putting a pair of internet connected spectacles on people's faces. maybe snapchat can do it. selina: what do you think? it's a totally different ballgame. >> i think the way snapchat has set expectations here has been hysterical. google glass was hyped for so long. snapchat is like, it's just a toy. on one hand. on the other hand, we are going to totally rename the company and say they are all -- they are all about cames. they have convinced us to judge them by, is it fun. at the same time they are saying, the company is about more than just a snapchat. >> would you guys where those? selina: did you get a pre-one? >> are they prescription?

i don't even know. selina: it's very secretive. as a millennial, would you buy them? >> i have a hard time imagining it, but we will see. the great thing for snapchat is this will bring the hardware closer to the user experience. maybe they can do things with that camera that we can't do now with phones. i'm not a heavy snapchat user. i think that is snapchat's challenge, to bring in the old. selina: what else might we have missed in tech this week? >> i sum of the week in our weekly newsletter, when story is uber is going headstrong into life in america. doing a lot of business there and wanting to grow. you can read about it, and fully charged, and subscribe. selina: eric writes a great letter every friday. thank you for joining us.

you are staying with us, brad. plus, the grth strategy fo chinese companies with global ambitions. we will discuss, next. if you like bloomberg news, check us out now on the radio. you can now listen on the bloomberg radio app, bloomberg.com, and in the u.s. on serious -- sirius xm. this is bloomberg. ♪

selina: chinese customers are reporting call connection problems with apple's iphone 7. complaints on the instant

messaging platform say the phone can't receive incoming calls from mobile networks in standby mode right customers are also complaining about apple's customer service. china represents about 20% of apple sales. thcompandid t respond to questions about how it is dealing with the issue. tim cook is spending time in japan, a market where apple products still dominate. cook met the prime minister. it is the apple tv's first trip -- apple chief's first trip to japan after taking up the coast five years ago. drawing their presence across global regions -- how is china's tech sector looking at western markets? still here with me is bloomberg global head of tech coverage, brad stone, and david chow. thanks for joining us. david, i know you are very

familiar with the company. -- with tencent i want to get your thoughts on what is their thesis behind their investment. >> i think the investment strategy is largely driven by their fundamental thesis for global investment that is just betting on the best companies around the world. when they first invested in dd, they had no idea there would be synergies with some of the other products, and there is now, using wechat. it's very consistent in the fact that it is the fastest-growing uber-like service in china and they bet on it. >> i was recently in china as well, talking to the ceo, and getting the history of that remarkable company. it struck me as -- the story is

so amazing and how the integration with wechat at the beginning of 2014 after the red envelope promotion around the chinese new year, tencent realizing how powerful mobile payments would be an propelling didi. you sort of wonder if didi happens without tencent and the huge investment it made in we chat and we chat payments at the time. >> i think it definitely gave them a boost. i think it became a capital game, whoever had the largest ability to raise money can subsidize many of the promotions that they had. for a while in china, some of the rides were free. some of our employees in china were telling me that it only cost them $.50 to drive, to go

on didi, while it cost more riding a public bus or subway. it's a major capital game, and that is the biggest reason why didi won. >> do you think tencent tries to replicate the ecosystem in the united states? >> i think they are slow and steady in the u.s.. they don't release some of their numbers. i think it is steadily growing. they also know that for social networks and messaging in the world today, it is a local market. japan you have line, china you have wechat. they are mature enough to understand that in the u.s., it's probably not going to be wechat, but i think they can still invest in the companies

that will become the wechat. selina: speaking of wechat being slow and steady, wanting to invest in the u.s., what about twitter? with that make sense for tencent -- with that make sense for tencent to acquire? >> i don't think tencent likes to invest in companies that are on the slight decline. it's quite a good fit in the sense that tencent does not have a property like twitter. at the end of the day it is social network, 340 million worldwide. in the u.s. alone they have 55 million. it's possible. but being anonymous -- many people can make multiple counts, use any name.

i think the fit between anonymous versus wechat, much more identity-based, probably not the world's best fit. as i said before, i think tencent just wants to bet on the winners and the next generation biggest. selina: what about alibaba's intention in the u.s.? why do they invest in snapchat? all he would say is, i really admire evan. i think he's a great guy, but no more details beyond that. >> it's more strategic in a sense that 80%, 90% of the deals relate to their e-commerce practice. however, i think they've always wanted a social networking property. they started their first foray in the u.s. with tango.

as tango went kind of flat, they figure they should go after another property. i think snapchat is a natural extension of their desire to get into some form of social networking, but we shall see. selina: it seems like alibaba has made more large deals than the united states and tencent has been making small investments, maybe acquisitions in gaming. why isn't tencent making more acquisitions in the u.s.? >> tencent is quite smart about getting into the u.s., from the perspective that they know even in china that the companies that do well when they get foreign investment or acquisition offers, the ones where foreign investors don't take majority of the shares. i think tencent realizes they are betting on the entrepreneur, and so they don't want to buy up a company and demotivate the

entrepreneurs, and the track record of entrepreneurs sting after acquisition, it's not great. selina: i also want to get onto softbank, which just announced -- hundred billion dollars fund with the saudi sovereign wealth fund. what do you make of that, brad? how will that change the landscape? >> it's a massive amount. we are seeing the saudi arabian investment fund coming in there. we saw that. i wonder if it allows technology companies to kind of keep investing, to keep doing economically irrational things. it does show that softbank was to be this global player. even though they've had problems with sprint and in the u.s., their quarterly performance, that they are still the most aggressive players at the poker table right now. selina: what do you think? what deals will they be hunting

for? i know softbank has backed your fund. >> yes, they are known to be a carrier in japan, but they are also probably equally known for their investments. i think it makes sense. i think trying to get the $100 billion is because the mt to get too many unicorns today who will be the future winners require a bigger check size. i think it makes a lot of logical sense that they raise the large fund to get into some of these deals. selina: strategically, where does this move softbank? >> if you look at how softbank paid for arm, they certainly leveraged more and they have to sell some alibaba shares.

i think with the $100 billion fund, they can actually invest without having to sacrifice, whether the ownership of alibaba or sacrifice, leveraging his operating company more. it's a win-win. selina: another unicorn i've been watching closely, you've been on their board. you reported they were in the process of raising $500 million. how is fundraising going? >> i think officially the answer is, we may not be fundraising. unofficially, i think the fundraising is going very well. >> do we see interest coming from asian investors? >> yes. many asian companies still want to get into the -- base. in china a lot of the p2p lending has slowed down and even in the u.s., the original fervor

last year is a little bit gone. so far i really broke through this year. -- sofi really broke through this year. they are doing more than $10 billion in loan originations, already on $100 million earnings running rate. i think the world has now recognized, sofi is the winner. they are number one. asian companies want to learn from the ceo, it is just a brilliant strategist. selina: thank you, david of dcm for joining us. a reminder that all episodes of "bloomberg technology" are now live streaming on twitter. check us out at bloomberg tech tv weekends 6:00 p.m. in new york. this is bloomberg. ♪

selina: spotify ceo consolidating power at the top of the world's largest music streaming service. he's taking on the role of chairman from his cofounder martin lawrenson, who held the position for the past decade. the changes come as ek leaves for an ipo plan as soon as next year. shares jumped more than 5% on -- slumped more than 5% on reports apple was hiring away several high-level staff members. as many as 25 employees and executives reportedly left the company, including the former coo. the spokesperson for imagination tech acknowledges a small number

of people have left but said there is no, quote, brain drain. coming up, we sit with the four founder of the box and hear how those childhood friends took their company to a $2 billion market cap. ♪

♪ >> you are watching "bloomberg technology." two more women came forward friday to accuse donald trump of sexual misconduct. the republican presidential nominee told a rally in greensboro, north carolina, the accusations aren't true. >> trump's running mate told the ohio-based tv station that he believes trump's denials and he

accuses hillary clinton's campaign of taking focus from the issues that are affecting the american people. president obama says quote, democracy is on the ballot in november. campaigning for secretary clinton friday in cleveland, ohio, the president criticized donald trump, proclaiming the election is rigged. >> her opponents made it clear he's going to drag this election as low as it can possibly go. and he figures if he makes our politics just toxic, maybe you will just to figure out you have no good choices and you get discouraged and you just don't vote. but don't fall for it. mark: the president said some nations do rig elections but they are tyrannies that oppress people. house speaker paul ryan who has been under siege from fellow republicans for his unwillingness to help donald trump, friday tried to draw distinctions between the gop and hillary clinton.

addressing college republicans in madison, wisconsin, the speaker accused clinton and liberals of pursuing a government heavy agenda for elites. >> they want an america that doesn't stand out. they want an america that is ordinary. this kind of a gloomy grayness to things. the america they want, the driving force is the state , a place where government is taken away from the people. mark: ryan's comments were his first significant public statements since he privately told republican colleagues that he would no longer defend or campaign for trump, whose name the speaker did not mention during friday's address. turkey is eager to join the coalition to liberate the key iraqi city of mosul. president erdogan says his country is quote, determined to take part in the mission. erdogan plans to make a formal proposal to join the coalition,

but says turkey has a plan b, and he says a plan c. global news 24 hours a day, powered by more than 2600 journalists and analysts in over 120 countries. i am mark crumpton. this is bloomberg. selina: this is "bloomberg technology." i'm selina wang in for emily chang. we turn to the story of the cloud storage company, which received its first round of venture capital funding 10 years ago this week. the four founders first met in elementary school in seattle before dropping out of college to start the company. emily chang sat down with them and ask them how they managed to grow box to a $2 billion market cap while staying friends all the while. take a listen. >> i think the secret is we are actually all friends and we have

kept anything in the business sphere to be focused on the issues as far as anything personal. >> you guys go on a weekend retreat every year, the four of you. how often do the four of you convene and talk to each other as a group? >> throughout the day we always interacting with each other and running into each other, being in various meetings together. >> there are many instances where me and aaron or me and jeff or me and dylan or all of us together would have these really intense conversations,

especially around business issues or around some big decision we have to make. me anaren were having this very kind of back-and-forth about this idea, whether we should do this or that. it got really quite heated and intense. i remember after that, aaron was like, do you want to go shoot some pool? and we went and shot some pool and it was like never even happened. that separation is quite powerful. emily: aaron, you met in fourth grade. how did this all come together? >> he was in fourth grade, i was in fifth grade. i just moved into the neighborhood and i think he was taking apart sewing machines or something at the time. >> blenders. >> i was like, who is this cool guy who picks apart blenders? and then dylan and i played trumpet together in fifth and sixth grade. and then sam moved into our city and eventually first new jeff and in we all started getting together. selina: how did the idea for box come about? >> we had all done various business ideas throughout high school, and at times, middle school together. and in college of my sophomore year, sam and i went to the same school and we were always talking about different ideas

and business ideas and had this idea for a secure way to sort files in the cloud and access data from anywhere. i pitched sam on the idea and he did not want to have anything to do with it. and then eventually told jeff about this idea. i think he may be considered it for an hour or two and then after that was uninterested. eventually dylan, talked to him about it, and i think based on how little he knew he was interested. that was what kicked it off. >> either the most gullible or most visionary. emily: how did you decide who would have what job? >> between aaron and me, it was sort of a natural filling out of the roles and responsibilities. he's much more focused on the brand side. i am naturally dra toward the metrics, the business model, the operations.

i don't know if we even ever had an explicit conversation about who would do what it is we started working on the idea together, things naturally separated out. >> i e-mailed mark cuban and mark cuban responded. the original e-mail was to get him to hear about box. in 2004, 2005, he was one of the internet's most famous bloggers. he had a blog and we were trying to get him to promote the product. in turn he responded and was interested in investing the company. and then, we were able to bring him on as a funder of the business. emily: how much money did he give you? >> $350,000. emily: we are 10 years to the month of the first venture capital investment in your company. what was it like to go out there for real money? >> it was a little bit -- we

felt really good about it. this was our first time going through it, but we had real customers, real revenue, and a lot of interest. that was something we felt good about, we felt it was the right thing for the business to accelerate growth. i don't know about intimidating, but we were learning some things on the fly. we did have some questions about who would be the right fit, what do we need. i remember going through for the first time, it was going down sam hill road, almost a door-to-door on a lot of days, firing each other up during meetings. emily: you guys made a pivot along the way from consumer to enterprise. tell me about the decisions you had. >> the biggest concern i had was, because we founded the company on this mission of focusing on end-users, we didn't want to lose that as we went to

the enterprise. there's a big struggle because we did not quite know, can we build an enterprise software company that would have those consumer instincts and dna we have when we started the company. i would credit jeff for figuring out that we definitely had to pivot. it was kind of an existential threat we had, but then collectively we figured out we could build a modern enterprise software company that wasn't going to compromise why we started the business in the first place. selina: that was emily chang with the founders of box. coming up, why the founders turned down a chance to be acquired and how they navigated their ipo. this weekend on bloomberg television, we will bring you all of our best interviews from the week, including our conversation with the twitter cofounder, the snapchat investor, and playstation exec. the best of "bloomberg technology" this saturday. this is bloomberg. ♪

now more of our conversation with the founders of box. with themg set down to ask how they navigated across her is. >> certainly a lot of it came down to pretty serious board discussions but ultimately when we thought about the big picture at every stage along our journey, and it is still true today, we thought about the size of our opportunity and we execute against that. have always held a deeply rooted belief that we can create a lot more value for customers and shareholders as an independent

company versus as part of a larger organization. we take those overtures seriously, but have always come down and have been behind building a large an independent company. emily: what year was this? >> in the past one of the more public was 2010 or 2011, 2011 with citrix. emily: was that tough? some of you wanted to sell, didn't want to sell. >> probably our parents. >> when of the things that is not a lot talked about when you are considering selling at that stage is that it doesn't really become about you anymore, especially as the founding team. it was probably more about the set of employees for whom it would have been like a life-changing kind of opportunity, and so you're not only making the decision for yourself as a company, that for them of, are you willing to take this risk and potentially have a much larger success both in terms of career and financial gains and all this kind of

stuff. the burden of the decision, it almost tips in favor of selling even though you may want to keep this company going. i think that was a lot of the struggle we had, we thought we had a lot of potential to make this a significant company in silicon valley and even the world. but there was this factor, there was a lot of people who are materially affected. emily: was there anyone of you who are leaning towards -- maybe we should sell it? >> i think we tried to be honest and look at both sides. in the end we were 100% behind, we have to keep this thing in the pennant. it would be not a good idea to sell. >> it was conveniently timed around when we did our retreat. we ended up doing one of our off sites. it was 12, 14 hours straight. what would we tell employees -- every single factor you can

consider, and we debated it. we did not go in with a particular position but we debated the heck out of it with a long time -- for a long time and we ultimately came to the conclusion that we had so much more opportunity ahead of us. emily: tell me about theoad to going public. was that hard? >> it was something even shortly after we turned down that acquisition offer, we had sort of as a board said ok, if we're going to do this, let's go big. it was a rallying cry for the board and the whole company, especially the people involved in that, and we raised a lot more money and said ok, we are going to build a very large, independent, public company. that was the moment when we started thinking more seriously about that great we are planning well in advance, did all the things you would expect a company would do. in the late stages as we felt we were really ready from an internal team standpoint, financial standpoint etc., and about two weeks after we had publicly filed, that is when the

market went in a little bit of a southern direction, and sentiment changed around high-growth, high burn companies. we spent nearly a year publicly on file before we ultimately went public. i would say that from just an overall sort of challenge of management leadership standpoint, that year was one of the trickier time periods. emily: how did you get through that? >> we tried to be as clear and transparent as possible. we tried to communicate regularly. here's how we think the market is recovering. that was probably the best tool we had. i would echo how difficult that was. are you going to go out as a public company or not and what is the timing on that? >> it weren't able to respond to many of those things. our employees, we know they're reading these things on the internet. it was a struggle of how much do we respond or address it

internally versus putting so much focus on it, the barbara streisand effect of we don't want to over emphasize this is a big deal, but you have to respond to it somehow. the key was being really transparent, highly communicative all the way up and down. >> it's one of those situations where now that you are a couple years out, you're probably glad it happened. it really tests your culture, your organization, all of the -- the skills of all of your managers because it is an instance start of culling -- sort of culling of who is in it for the long run and who can withstand some of the negative reaction, and who wants to build a long-term business? >> that was certainly a challenging experience that made us stronger. from a business point of view, we felt very viscerally the need to improve our operating profile, drive that. it is something we knew intellectually and talked about

with our executive team. the company seeing that and being a forcing function to mature thinking is a company was also pretty helpful, especially looking back at the late stage private companies not gett that same reaction or messageing when we did. emily: you guys are still there. are you concerned about that? >> a lot of the moves recently you've seen in the industry, whether microsoft or amazon or google, have an highly positive to our business, our technology strategy, our long-term prospects. the biggest issue we had five years ago was trying to convince people of the cloud and convince large enterprises that they can move their most important information to the cloud. that was a very expensive effort. and, it's now helpful to have

some of the biggest names in the industry moved to this architecture. we are now partnering with each of those companies where we can build on top of their clouds, but also integrate into the applications they use. so far all the momentum we have seen from google cloud with ryan greene angie sweet, amazon and then driving down the price, these things have served to benefit our strategy in how customers use our product. so far it has been highly positive and serves to disrupt the legacy architectures of technology. emily: m&a is heating up everywhere. are you guys thinking about potentially selling? >> we are a roughly $400 million revenue company. we still feel really good about our position. we always need to be thinking about what's right for shareholders, what's right for the company, what's right for customers. we are as excited as we have

ever been about the prospects ahead and feel good about will -- about what we're doing as an independent company. >> your team matters more than your idea. your idea will change and evolve. find the right people and spend a meaningful amount of time finding the right team and from that point you can build a good business. emily: you guys started so young and you grew up with this company. did you ever get advice from mark zuckerberg or larry page, or some of the founders that we all know and look up to, about building your team? >> yeah, probably more generic company feedback from folks in the technology world. people like mark benioff, john chambers, michael dell have been extremely helpful over the years in terms of dividing advisement -- providing advisement and help. because of how uncharacteristic

it is to be able to build a company with a few close friends, i think we are writing the lessons on how to do that. not a lot of people to go to about that issue. again, if you can get it working right where we have such a high degree of trust in your founding team, that hopefully will cascade and permeate throughout an organization where then everyone in the organization understands this will be an environment where we trust each other, we will push on each other like mad. there will be a lot of arguing over the issue and idea. that's not going to change the level of trust we have in one another. selina: that was emily chang with the founders of box. one stock we are watching, shares of amd hedged higher after alibaba said it would use the company's chips for cloud

services. alibaba is working on expanding the range of services it offers over the intnet and will work with amd to use the company's --. analysts say the -- this will kickstart the return to the market dominated by intel. cbs is close to hiring goldman sachs and j.p. morgan chase as it considers a potential merger with iraq,. -- viacom. viacom's sherrie redstone and her 93-year-old father of trying to revive the embattled company amid rating decline. a potential merger within the company under the leadership of cbs ceo les moonves. coming up, details of the next visitor to the red planet. europe's space agency gears up for a crucial weekend of work. that story is next. ♪

selina: 69 years ago today u.s. air force captain became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound. he was released through the bombay doors of a b-29 aircraft. jaeger filed his rocks it plain over rogers dry lake in southern california, shooting to 40,000 feet and exceeding a speed of 662 miles per hour. witnesses reported hearing a strange bang which turned out to be a sonic boom. in this edition of "out of this world," a european spacecraft is gearing up for the final leg of its journey to mars. at around --the european space agency prepared for a complicated landing wednesday.

this is the agency's first probe to attempt the difficult landing since the beagle 2, which finished in 2003. this new rover will test a parachute and retro rocket landing system. it also carries a small instrument package to record wind speed, humidity, pressure, and temperature at the landing site. that does it for this edition of "bloomberg technology." next week we have an all-star lineup of guests, including sean parker. remember, all episodes of "bloomberg technology" are now live streaming on twitter. check us out on @bloomberg tech tv. have a wonderful weekend. ♪

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