emily: he was tapped to be heir to the softbank empire. nikesh arora came to the u.s. for grad school. in 2004 he got the job of a lifetime. larry page in sergey brin hired arora to help move google into an online ad powerhouse, making him one of the most sought after tech execs in the world. a decade later he was named president. but as his retirement approached, arora said it became

clear he wasn't quite ready to step down. now arora is one of the most prominent free agents in silicon valley. joining me today on "studio 1.0," former softbank president and google chief business officer, nikesh arora. thanks for joining us, great to have you. >> thank you. emily: i want to start at the beginning. you were born in india. your dad was in the air force. tell me about your up bringing. >> i grew up in a lower middle class family in india. my father worked for the indian air force. we moved every few years from city to city, wherever his job took him. we grew up with some degree of discipline in the house, because that is what you get when you work for someone in the armed forces. emily: tell me about how you came to the u.s. and your initial experience. >> i got accepted to northeastern. i had $200 or $300 in my pocket, i had my father's retirement

account of $2000. it as long can have as you give it back to me before i need it. emily: and you knew you couldn't go back unless -- >> no. emily: unless you were a success. >> unless i was able to pay him back. emily: how did you end up at google? >> iha had done a small startup in the u.k., which got merged into t-mobile. i came back to the u.k., and i was trying to figure out what to do next. one thing led to another, i met -- we hit it off. he introduced me to larry and sergey, who happened to be visiting europe the week after. walking around the british museum with sergey. then he and larry invited me to california. people time meeting many who you kno and that was itw.

emily: google had just gone public, but the business model was yet to be set in stone. >> the business model was pretty robust. google was around doing $2 billion in revenue at that point in time. but i would say the international operations in scaling was still very early. was doing really well, and he already put that into place. we took the model that he built and deployed it across europe. tim and i used to compete on how big can we make it. emily: google has since become alphabet, dominating the online ad market. what do you see as the biggest risk to the business model? >> we fail to realize how much effort and execution it takes to build an advertising juggernaut, which google has built and has in place, which works really

well. facebook has built one, too. i don't think there is a third. i don't think there is a third platform out there which has the scale to be able to build what google and facebook have built. i think we are going to see more and more concentration at google interface look in the advertising space. that's not going away. emily: would you say it is a duopoly, and is that ok? >> it's a duopoly, yes, for now. there are many other players who are relevant in the advertising space, both off-line and online, whether it is snapchat or twitter or pinterest in the future, or some of the traditional players who were doing a phenomenal job of trent shinnin transitioning. for the first seeable future, will google and facebook be the largest players? yes. emily: do you think there will ever be a third player, a third

company, that takes a third of that pie? >> i think it will be hard. but i think there will be a collection of companies, which, amongst themselves, might come out as much advertising share as google or facebook, but it won't be one, at least for now. emily: roger mcinerney, who invested early, just wrote an op-ed saying, "i am terrified by the damage being done by these internet monopolies, like gambling, nicotine, alcohol, or hair when, facebook and google produce short-term happiness with serious negative consequences in the long-term. with advertising business models that drive companies to maximize attention at all costs, leading to ever more aggressive brain hacking." howdy respond? -- how do you respond? >> every marketer's dream is passion about the brand, and i don't think whether it is online or off-line advertising.

smart enough that they get bombarded by advertising and it overwhelms the primary purpose of what they went somewhere for, whether it is the newspaper or on my website or video. they vote by walking away. emily: you ran google for five years. they just got a $2.7 billion fine, there are more inquiries open. how big a threat are these european regulatory issues? >> i don't think they are a serious threat to the long-term business. google is economically innovative which works in so many different products. i don't think anyone conversation is a long-term. is they are required to modernize things that is between them and authorities but i think broadly speaking google is innovating in so many different a technologyore

company that is constantly innovating been a company that has one particular track. emily: when it comes to facebook, amazon, apple, microsoft -- what do you think is the biggest threat to google? >> i don't think about threats to google because i don't work there anymore. all these three platforms have tremendous power of distribution. whenever they introduce new services or new ideas, they can deploy that to 2 billion people around the world. that huge. there has never been a platform that lets you touch 2 billion people in the frictionless faction. emily: do you think google can ever catch up to amazon in the cloud? >> it's an interesting notion we seem to perpetrate, we all seem to want to talk about winners and losers. we seem to think when there is a winner, there is a loser. it is perfectly fine for multiple companies to exist in a

space and do well. we are so early in the journey of the cloud that in 10 years from now you will see that all the early leads will normalize to some degree. if you look back and see thousands of companies who have not even initiated their transition, eventually they will have to end up there at some point in time. we're so early that it won't matter. emily: all these companies are making a big bet on original content. is that a smart bet? will it put too much of a dent in margins? >> i'm not sure that this huge move by large companies going to original content is going to result to a whole lot. a lot of money gets spent in content. if you are willing to make a bet, which netflix is doing, billions of dollars per year to make a business, you might get somewhere in disrupting traditional content. eventually it will converge around one or two large players, and i think you should not underestimate the platforms.

the platforms as we discussed our facebook, amazon, apple, and google. as long as they can figure out a mechanism to distribute content and allow the content creators and content providers to make a fair share in that process, i don't know how much you need to get into it. emily: travis kalanick leaving google, right call? ♪

emily: how do you see the state of ai, and who is ahead, and who will win? >> i think the ai conversation is long. i think we are in early days of ai. a lot of ai -- we don't have good data. is going to be garbage in, garbage out. the technical horse power it, we needto apply to start getting smart about collecting data and being able to utilize it. emily: do you think elon musk's doomsday scenario is overblown? or irresponsible? elon, he is one of the most interesting tech visionaries among us and we need people like him to have these conversations, but i think you might be early on his prediction. emily: what about self driving cars which tesla is working on?

google, apple. what happens? it will beus thinks a while before we see a large proliferation of self driving cars. i think the economics, the regulation, the retooling required to get this to happen at scale, is far, far away. we haven't thought about the ownership models in the societal problems that will cause, or how do you park these cars? where do you put them? we may see people who can show you things don't work, that could happen in short order, but i think large-scale deployment and having an impact on the rental business or ride hailing business is still further away than we think. emily: should uber and lyft and didi, should all these companies be working on self driving cars? >> i don't inc. the right hip -- i don't think the ride hailing

businesses should make their own self driving cars at this point. emily: why not? >> i think it is early. i think the ride hailing industry hasn't settled down. we haven't quite figured out where the industry will stabilize. i think they have lots of work the way logistics and they move cars from one place to the other, managing supply and demand. they are very early in their evolution. if they focused on creating operational excellence in their current business, they might be better off. there's lots of tech companies working on self driving cars. i think a partnership approach might be better than trying to do it themselves. emily: i know you have spent a lot of time thinking about the ride hailing business. when you are at softbank you put a bet on -- >> yeah, we had long conversations about ride hailing. we were very impressed by the uber model. by that point in time, we felt

softbank would be better served investing in some of the other players, so we invested in ola taxi in early, in grab southeast asia, and alibaba and tencent. we havesubsequently, doubled down on many of those bets. an industry find where you feel that somebody has developed a product or service from which there is no going back, is here to stay, it's a great place to be. when things go from a nice to have two must have in your life, you realize this is a winning scenario, and you understand that this is going to get more and more popular over time. i think it is clear in china that didi is the only player.

you can see where, if they keep executing well, this is the huge opportunity for them. this also plays into the needs of the country, where you don't want to have car ownership. it's much easier to take large players like didi and get them to work with the government. emily: so uber has pulled out of china, out of russia. do you see them making the same decisions in india, in southeast asia, in brazil? >> i actually believe it is possible for two players to coexist in the market and coexist happily. but i think it requires the markets to rationalize and stabilize. there are many industries who have multiple players that coexist, like telephone services. they are competing every day with someone to make a large amounts of money and i think it is a large market. they go it alone?

i think they probably could. emily: do you see that with uber u.s.?yft in the >> as of now it is. [laughter] emily: does that continue? butell, it is hard to tell, i think it will continue for some time. there are so many different conversations and moves in the market that it is hard to tell where it will stabilize. emily: travis kalanick leaving uber, right call? >> i think for now, yes. i think somebody needed to take responsibility for all the things we read about, and i are expected to step up and take responsibility for all the good and all the bad. they hade all heard, some serious cultural issues in their operations, and somebody had to take responsibility. i think the board encouraged him

to take it and that was the right decision. emily: can the culture be changed? can uber accomplish what it needs to without a founder at the helm? er we'll talk about ub and the great service and product it has created for people. credit goes to the early team, the doggedness, the ability to take on a whole bunch of things against all odds and build a great product for the consumer. should they have done certain things differently? yes. some of those things need to be fixed. should they have a different culture based on everything we have read? yes. clearly a leadership change is needed and that is being talked about. i think it will be a challenge, because every situation we see, the risk appetite changes. the good news is uber has multiple founders and some of the others are still involved. one hopes they can provide the

backbone for risk appetite while a new leader works with them on cultural issues and tries to make uber as good as the product. emily: your name has been floated as the ceo job. are you up for it? >> i think the board has made clear they are looking for a ceo , an existing ceo. emily: are you interested? >> i cannot answer that question, since i have not had any conversations. emily: you have not? >> no. emily: so what is your advice to whoever ends up in it? >> whoever ends up in that role has both a cultural set of issues to fix and also a full series of operational things to do. at the end of the day, if you don't have operational excellence in a company, you also have cultural problems. uber also has to work on the leadership issues within the company and the board. ay have a fractious board and

management team which needs a cohesive leadership approach. emily: you were the heir apparent. you were supposed to succeed him. what happened? ♪

emily: what game is he playing by approaching uber to invest in uber after investing in all uber rivals? what's going on? >> that's a great question for massa, you should have him on. emily: what do you make of the moves he is making? --massa is one amazing thing

one thing he has that i haven't seen anywhere else in the world, as you get older, as we get more successful, our risk appetite changes. as hard as you try not to change it, it does change. in hishas zero change risk appetite, he wants bigger and bolder things. he's an amazing optimist. vision, at a 300 year or a 50 year vision, he doesn't do things in three months, six months. he's found some partners who he is working with to give him access to a huge amount of capital, and he is sowing the seeds for creating this cohesive information revolution. emily: you are the heir apparent. you were supposed to succeed him. what happened? >> i think when he and i got

together, we had an amazing two years, we saw eyes i on many things -- saw eye to eye on many things. he was going to take a backseat and be more chairman like and find a ceo to perpetrate his legacy. when he and i met when he was 57, he said, i think you would be a great successor. i said great. as it came closer to him turning 60, sometime this month, he realized he wasn't done. evident, he seems to have renewed energy, and he definitely wants to see this information revolution through with all the investing he is doing. emily: there were some shareholders that complained about you, that you had a conflict of interest, that you are overpaid. did that play any role in you leaving? did you ever get to the bottom of who is behind it? >> no, we never got to the

bottom of who was behind it, but the board established a independent committeen who looks at everything. they found no issues because there were none, there was nothing to look at. massa was very supportive through the entire process. he tried to explain to people in the company that when you hire people from silicon valley, you have to pay them what they were paid. emily: are you still involved at softbank at all? >> no, i was done with that last month. -- i: so, from the outside know you are supportive of the risk-taking, but can he really take these risks? >> i think he has the capital. willows some of them work in some will fail spectacularly. his track record speaks for itself. reily: softbank and massa a potentially behind a t-mobile merger with sprint, which softbank owns. is that a good idea and what does it mean for consumers? >> do we need four operators in

this capital-intensive industry, where people are sucking down more and more bandwidth and want access anywhere and everywhere for everything? maybe not. that is a question for the regulators. i think three players in that space of the perfectly fine. weather deutsche telekom and massa can get to a deal is speculative. emily: you lead the way for softbank to invest in india, including the investments in snap deal. some of the investments are in trouble. wrong orat that's would they be doing better if you were there? >> i think it is fair to say that the euphoria in the indian tech space was driven by the huge success we saw of the various companies going public in china. we said, if china can be so successful with over one billion people, maybe we should be

concentrating on india, because it could be the next market to explore in a good way, and we should be investing their. valuations got run out in that market, in the spaces where you have seen success in china. not so much in the right healing space, but in e-commerce. that people did not factor in is jeff bezos decided he did not want the same fate in india that he had had in china. when jeff decides to invest billions of dollars into a market, now you have one well-funded player who has the technology and expertise around the world to execute the space. as you can see, it has generated the resources to do so. deal ended up with a

similar backer who wanted to give them billions of dollars. i don't think it is clear right now who was going to win in the long-term in the e-commerce space in india, but as we have all learned, one has to be cautious. emily: there is global and political uncertainty right now. new scandals out of washington every day. should at impact investment, global tech investment? different always had kinds of uncertainty in the market, which changed people's outlook in the short term. overinvestment and underinvestment. many people have not made money in overinvestment, and it is hard to invest in things. but it has been established again and again, when money is scarce and there are a lot of think to invest in, people make a lot of money. right now, you should find great opportunities.

i'm not worried about the uncertainty, although i think the uncertainty is impacting. emily: so what are you up to right now? >> one of my up to? i just joined the board recently at richemont. they have a little bit of tech investing they are doing to try to see how the industry transforms. i spent some time with some of the unicorns in the valley, helping their founders and management teams. emily: like who? >> i and not at liberty to discuss -- i am not at liberty to discuss. but i spent time with my two young kids. emily: are you still investing, personally? >> sparingly, yes. emily: where will we see you next? what is next for you? >> i don't know what is next for me. i will continue to support various entrepreneurs in the valley until something

interesting knocks me off my life of leisure and forces me to work 80 hours a week. emily: nikesh arora, thank you for joining us. >> thank you for having me. ♪ ♪

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