tv Best of Bloomberg Technology Bloomberg December 3, 2017 1:00pm-2:00pm EST
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♪ emily: i'm emily chang. this is the best of "bloomberg technology." where we bring you all of our top interviews from this week in tech. coming up, a big week for uber as a company losses rise in the third quarter, and softbank seeks shares at a discount. and our exclusive interview with ceo meg whitman. we cover a wide range of topics , including her political ambitions. ngm's self driving car -- and g.m.'s self driving car. our test drive in the chevy volt and my conversation with the gm
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president. first to our lead, uber losses widened in the third quarter. the ride hailing service lost almost $1.5 billion in the period. this all caps on light when goober reported its financials to shareholders tuesday night as part of a formal bid from a softbank-led consortium looking to buy a large block of stock. softbank to get a nice discount. there's a 30% discount to its last private valuation, coming in at $69 billion. we caught up with someone intimately familiar with uber's inner workings, lane castleman, managing partner at greenbrier and the former head of uber communications in the americas, and eric newcomer also joined us on the set. eric this is the opening salvo : from softbank and it's consortium of investors saying, we will pay $33 a share, which translates into that $40 billion valuation and see if we can get , enough people to bite at that to meet the 14% of outstanding shares we want to acquire.
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emily: and what is the likelihood of that? eric you know, there is a lot of : appetite for liquidity and that is what softbank is counting on. people want to sell their shares, and they don't want to miss out. so people might offer them up knowing that if the price goes up, they will be able to offer them at the higher price later. emily: lane you have been , talking to former employees and you have shares to sell yourself. what are employees talking about? lane employees have a lot of : confusion going on right now. there is not a lot of information out. all we know is what we are reading in the press. and there is not a lot of communication with former employees. everyone is wondering, can i sell? will i be able to exercise and see monetary value from the stock that is been sitting here for such a long time? emily: what do employees feel about a discount like this? it, still, is a lot of money. lane for each employee, it is a : very emotional issue. right? they need to determine whether or not the lower value will translate to enough income for what they believe the stock is worth.
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emily: so how would this shakeup , the power structure, eric? the entire state of governance reforms are tied to this. the 17-person board that happens and some of the power gets restricted because of the super-voting shares losing power and all of that is contingent on this deal going through. it is sort of separate, but they have been attached by the fourth of there's a lot of pressure to get this thing done. reality is that they don't have a say on the price that gets said. this is down to the biggest uber's biggest investors like travis kalanick himself, right? lane: that is right. there is a misconception that they have a say in what happens next. there are a handful of people, maybe eight entities, a couple employees, mostly investors who , have always say of what happens next. we are just along for the ride and we hope it is a good one. emily: so, eric what kinds of , negotiations are happening right now behind the scenes? are going touments
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contain financial information about the company, risk factors, probably imagine a backpack that a mention of the hack , and say ok you , are selling your shares and you need to know something about the values of the shares to assess. softbank knows a ton about uber at this point so they are making a calculated decision about the share value. former employees and other sellers will have to do the same. emily: we also wonder what we don't know. the other skeletons in the closet. lane, you are communications expert. what do you make of the news of the big hack? lane: i do not believe in a coincidence, and the fact that this leaked out two days before thanksgiving in the midst of this softbank deal, is a little too perfect. and there is some potential behind it to make investors make a quick deal with softbank. emily: so, eric, another thing happening is the waymo trial that has been postponed. today, the judge had very harsh words for uber about another cover-up what exactly what
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.appened what exactly what happened? eric: they got this letter from a former employee that indicated that uber used encrypted message to an practiced deleted communications so they cannot be found in court later, you know? and that is super important here because google has been trying to turn up the 14,000 files. so now, there is a question of whether they would ever be able to find them in uber was systematically using encrypted messaging services. emily: now, lane it seems that , uber will be dealing with clean up for a long time. dara right now what , are you doing to find what other skeletons there are in the closet? lane: yeah you are mostly , worried about what you don't know, what is coming next. you have to do a top-down review of each division, department, and try to find out if there are other issues like this that exists? hopefully, most of them are already exposed, but your job is to deal with these. there is 15,000 employees right now, and there is probably other
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stuff out there that will bubble up over the next couple of months and years and they will have to manage it. ally: remind is eric about of the other issues -- london the other investigations? , eric: right now, joe sullivan, the chief security officer, who was pushed out and is tied to , tied to a lot of questions and his team is being looked at closely. i think tony west, the new general counsel will have to look into what the strategic services group, the uber internal counterintelligence group, what they surveilled and all that sort of stuff with the physical intelligence, whether there was any hacking against competitors. there are a lot of questions in relationship to the waymo case and other cases. that is a whole set of issues. there are five criminal probes as of october that are open, so to list them all is nearly impossible. [laughter] eric: there are a ton of issues that u.s. attorney's offices are looking at now to try to figure out if anything was criminal. emily: coming up, we will hear from uber board member arianna
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♪ emily: the chairman of the fcc is going on the offensive, defending plans to repeal net neutrality protections. the fcc chair since january took issue with everyone from web companies to celebrities who lambasted his plan to dismantle the obama-era protection. he took particular aim at twitter saying "when it comes to open internet, twitter is part of the problem. the company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate." now to cyber monday. amazon said this year was the biggest shopping day ever in the company's history. and according to adobe analytics, cyber monday raked in $6.59 billion in online sales, up 16% from previous years. we spoke to bloomberg's emma
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chandra on monday as the numbers were still rolling in. emma: one of the things you mentioned, adobe systems there. and they have come out with the biggest prediction for the day in terms of sales. they are expecting $6.6 billion in sales. that would be the most ever in the u.s., and as you mentioned, they have seen half of that being achieved. we heard from them earlier in the day when they noted that web traffic was up, and they noted that mobile commerce was winning the day with traffic growing about 21% and accounting for more than 50% of all visits online. and that is a trend we have been saying all year, and for a number of years in terms of the growth of e-commerce, and also the growth of mobile shopping. if you take a look at the terminal here at g #btv 1928, mobile e-commerce is a good 20% of all e-commerce. we also heard from first data,
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the biggest mobile payments company in the u.s., saying cyber monday has gotten off to a very solid start for e-commerce. seeing strong and steady growth throughout the morning into the afternoon. they said overall through the first 14 hours of the day, they said that cyber monday will show some very good year on year growth trends. emily: talk to us about who the likely big winners are, or is it all about amazon? emma: we always talk about amazon, as the biggest online company. everybody thinks they are going to be the winners. we know that traditional retailers and department stores are continuing to promote and offer deals. but really, it is considered that amazon and walmart are the big online marketplaces and will , be the big winners today competing on deals like flatscreen televisions, toys, gadgets, and a big push towards appliances and electronics.
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we heard that amazon alone is expected to capture all e-commerce holiday spending growth. and we heard back on friday from gbh insights that said amazon has captured 50% of the online spending on black friday. take a look at another chart i have for you here. it is g #btv 8686. and what you can see is that while amazon, which is the blue line here, is soaring ahead of walmart when it comes to market cap. when you look at sales, this is the bar chart underneath, walmart is continuing to outperform amazon. emily: so, emma i was surprised , to see that in-store sales, physical store sales, still account for 90% of retail purchases. so when it comes to e-commerce, there is still a lot of growth to be had. talk about the trends we are seeing when it comes to online versus off-line commerce. emma: that is absolutely true. it is always quite surprising to see that e-commerce makes up 10%
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to 11% of all retail sales. but the growth momentum is really with e-commerce, which is why there is a big focus on e-commerce both within analysts and investors looking at the industry, and among retailers themselves. if you take a look at some of the predictions for the holiday season as a whole and not just this weekend, you can see holiday sales growth as a whole being predicted between 3.5% and 4.5%, but if you look at the estimates of e-commerce growth, towards 20%.ore that is what we are seeing traditional retailers like macy's, target, and walmart being ahead of the game for a while, focusing on what they are offering online. and one of the things we saw from analysts who were reporting on what we saw on black friday, they said that what had been very promising this year among the traditional retailers was that they had better integrated the deals and promotions for products you can buy both
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in-store and online. so a customer could find the same thing at the same price whether they went in-store or online. emily: and the day is not yet done. a few more hours to capitalize on those deals. bloomberg's emma chandra for us in new york. emma, thanks so much. staying with e-commerce, the increase in online transactions also means an increase risk of cyber attack. in the fourth quarter of last year, there was a 20% jump in attempted hacks from november to december. joining us from boston, carbon black, patrick morley. what are you seeing so far this year? are you seeing a similar type of increase? patrick: the analysis that we did based on the data we collect was done on 2016, and we saw a material increase as you said, 20% increase in the month of december. and so, we anticipate that this year, we are going to see the same type of increased year-over-year in the month of december. and the primary driver on that is that it provides the attacker, the people trying to
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make money typically, all of the noise happening, like what you just spoke about in regards to cyber monday, all of that provides great cover for attackers to go and get consumers and get enterprises. emily: now, as i understand it phishing attacks have been the , most common. tell us about that. patrick: certainly, phishing attacks are used in a big way and they leverage social engineering. theagain, going back to holiday season, all of us are receiving in our inbox, many offers from retailers, shipping companies, holiday cards, etc. and we are trained to open those. we want to click on those links. and yet an attacker knows that , as well as we do, so they leverage that to get us to go to a malicious website, and to drop malicious code on an unknowing consumer or an unknowing employee. and then they are able to
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actually make an attack. emily: now we spent a lot of , time covering the equifax hack earlier this year. have consumers been more wary this holiday season? are retailers doing anything differently as a result? patrick: well i think it cuts , both ways for consumers because breaches have been in the news a lot. equifax and certainly a lot of the ransomware we heard about this year. there is an awareness that goes up. at the same time, the holidays are a hectic time for all of us. in our jobs and also trying to buy presents and do other things at the end of the year. and so all of that, as i said earlier all of that noise, it , allows us to put our guard down a bit. and it creates additional risks, for sure. retailers are smart about this. retailers recognize this, both online retailers as well as those who run physical stores and point-of-sale systems are very aware of this, and they definitely put additional security around this time of
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year in order to protect their consumers. ♪ emily: that was carbon black's ceo patrick morley. and a possible movie merger announced this week. the u.s.'s number two movie chain regal entertainment is in talks with a u.k. world group. according to people familiar with the matter, the deal would create a bigger international rival to the industry leader, amc entertainment. now remember, regal tried to find a buyer in 2014, but was unsuccessful. coming up, general motors is taking its self-driving flagship car out of the showroom and onto the street. just how it fared in real life traffic, next. and they used to be fierce rivals in the race to dominate uber-like trucking app. now they are joining forces. this is bloomberg. ♪
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on the streets of san francisco. this week, chevrolet unveiled its autonomous car, powered by technology. we got the chance to take it on a hands-free ride, or should i say, it took me on a ride. ♪ >> so we are waiting for a car. , the name of our car is pickle. we're going to take a drive today. emily: pickle is here. all right. let's do this. ♪ ♪ emily: all right. we made it. >> ok. we covered 2.4 miles, drove past 178 people, nine bikes and a 148 cars. emily: definitely a little
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jerky, some stopping and starting at times. you could sense the car trying to figure out what people are going to do. where the kids playing with a ball? were there construction workers that were not going to move? but i am in for around two. i think it will get better next time. ♪ emily: right after that ride, i sat down with general motors to see why they decided to let us ride in a self-driving car that is not quite ready for consumer launch just yet. take a listen. >> our objective is to deploy these cars in the most complex environments. that is why we are testing and demonstrating in san francisco. we wanted to play with scale and deployed with a really high level of safety. that is what we are marching towards. we have been moving at a really fast rate of development. that is why we wanted to give people like you an opportunity to experience the car. we're moving quickly. we are heading towards commercial deployment in some quarters. and we are really excited about the rate of progress. emily: how many quarters? daniel: some quarters, quarters not years. emily: so, my ride experience
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was fascinating. a lot of starting and stopping. i understand it is a complex environment. there were a couple of times a try to merge, but there was a car there and we jerked back in. there was a time we pulled up to kids crossing a crosswalk, and you can see the car realizing it was a long line of children, not just one or two. but it got a little confused. how long will it take to smooth over those issues? daniel: so, safety is absolutely the number one priority. and so, part of the experience you would've noticed today is that the car is relatively cautious, but again, that is all about safety, and safety will be the defining metric that will tell us when we are ready to deploy these cars. we're moving really quickly in terms of continued performance and improvement. that is why we want to give people an opportunity to experience the cars today. and then in some number of , months, people can get another read on where we are and see the rate of change. emily: how do you decide when you're at a point where this car would make the same decision that human driver would? daniel: that is what we are aiming for. we understand human level driver
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performance, and we want to deliver that same level of performance, and better over time. emily: there is still a steering wheel, pedals, a safety driver. how far away are you from a car without a wheel and pedals? daniel: it is back to what needs to be true to launch commercially, and that is getting the right level of safety performance. as soon as we get to that level, we will be able to pull the driver out of the car, the safety driver out of the car and , that will afford us an opportunity to rethink what the car might look like. emily: what about affordability? are they even close to being affordable, even for fleet companies? daniel: one of the reasons we think a rideshare environment is the logical place to deploy these cars, is that we can get a high rate of utilization on them. in the early days when the cars are expensive, we will still have a really compelling business case, still be able to offer rides at a more affordable rate then where human drivers are at today. emily: can you give us an idea of how much it costs to make one now? daniel: i could, but i'm not going to give you a number. [laughter] emily: ok. seven, what is the strategy to
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-- so then what is the strategy to , bring these to the market? daniel: the first thing is to get to a level of performance we want to have. we see the logical first mode of deployment in a shared network in a complex urban environment. a right your-type model. -- a rideshare-type model. emily: you have partnered with lyft and made a big investment with lyft and have an agreement with uber to rent them, small number of cars. whose side are you on? daniel: our objective is to get this technology deployed in the largest scale possible with the right level of safety. as we think about how we ultimately do that, we could have one partner, we could have more than one partner. we could potentially have no apartments at all. emily: what do you think you will have? what looks like the most plausible scenario? how do you work through those scenarios? daniel at this point, all : options remain open. as we get closer to commercial launch, those plans will crystallize. emily: now, we see the iterations of the various cars here. looking towards the next iteration, how do you get the equipment smaller and sleeker? how do you make it look more
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like just another car on the road? daniel: we are iterating at an unprecedented pace. you see three generations of a car here. we are working on a fourth generation right now. all of that has happened in less than 18 months. which is a really rapid hardware iteration cycle. we are going to continue those iterations as we get closer to and through commercial launch and afterwards as well. emily: how critical is the technology? is it possible to have self driving cars without it? daniel: right now we think it is , an important part of the equation. we are getting the cost of the sensors down dramatically. we think we can reduce that by almost 99% from where we are today to where we could be in the relatively near future to get the performance up and get the reliability up. with that combination of characteristics, we will have a really compelling multilayer sensor suite. emily: one of the most rewarding parts of the experience i
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thought was to be able to see the app, see the cars, see cars on the road, people on the road, and objects moving across the screen. how does that all come together? daniel: the car is obviously evaluating everything going on around it. and it is making predictions as to what those different characters are going to do. and then it plans its path around that. and so what you saw was a representation of what the car is seeing and how it is thinking about that environment. -- y: isn't based o is that based on cruse? daniel: that is all internally-developed technology. emily: all internally developed technology. when it comes to cruise, how does it differentiate itself from competitors? daniel: what we are doing is making sure we control all those pieces of the total system that we need to to move as quickly as we can. we are doing a lot of our own mapping work. we are doing a lot of our self -driving software and a lot of work on the hardware side. we want to keep iterating the entire system as quickly as we can, and by controlling all the pieces, it enables us to move more quickly. emily: can you give us an update
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on sales of the chevy bolt in general? daniel: chevy bolt sales have been going really well. we had a record month last month and we feel really good about , the trajectory. emily: so, a year from now, wearable g.m. self-driving effort to be? daniel: we will be in an interesting position a year from now, and we look forward to keeping you updated. emily: what has been your most interesting experience? daniel: it is really just being able to see the rate of progress we have been making. it has been really exciting over the last 18 months from the time that we acquired cruise to get a sense of where we are, and a clear line of sight on getting to the point where we can launch this commercially. emily: would you take your family on a road trip in this yet? [laughter] daniel: we have still got development work to go, but ultimately, that is the objective. emily: coming up, our exclusive
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choose by the gig or unlimited. and ask how to get a $200 prepaid card when you buy any new samsung device with xfinity mobile. a new kind of network designed to save you money. click, call or visit today. emily: welcome back to the best of "bloomberg technology." i'm emily chang. hp ceo meg whitman is prepared to step down in february. she joined us from discover conference image ready. -- in madrid. we discussed her decision to leave, and why the time is right for her now, and for hpe. meg: i have led a transformation that might be one of the biggest transformations in global business history, from a single company, enormous company that was really facing a lot of challenges, to four, really nimble, agile company with hewlett-packard enterprise. it is well-positioned for the
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future, and it is time for the next generation of leaders to take hewlett-packard forward. it is about getting the right person in the right job at the right time. i think antonio will be a fantastic next ceo. emily: why do you think antonio is the guy for the job? somebody who is benefit decades? -- somebody who has been there for decades. meg: i have said that the next ceo needed to come from inside. and when you come from the outside, which i did, the length of time it takes to understand the people, the products, the culture, the market, it takes a long time. and antonio and i crafted the strategy and he will execute that strategy as a standalone company and he is a deep technologist. the next ceo needs to be a deeper technologist. you may recall, i am more of a consumer technologist. he is an enterprise technology
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executive. and i think he will take this company to a place i have never dreamed i could. emily: some of the critics would argue that hpe need a landscape shift, and appointing an insider is not that way. how do you respond to that? meg: think about the transformation we have gone as a whole. also in terms of hewlett-packard enterprise. we shrunk down to about a $24 billion company. then we made six or seven acquisitions in the last six months, the largest being aruba, which is a fantastic acquisition, has opened up a whole new growth frontier as we called "the intelligence edge." gartner published a study saying, " the edge will eat the cloud," because so much data is being generated at the edge. it will require computer storage to get the edge. so, i think that the company is in very good shape. we are less dependent on the
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commodity server business than we were six years ago. we got value products and growth products and are the leader in high-performance compute. we developed flexible consumption pricing so you can keep workloads and pay for them as you consume storage. so, i think we are in quite good shape with a very coherent strategy that has matched to the needs of the market now. emily: how do you turn around enterprise spinning with more -- spending when more and more companies are out for same to cloud service providers? meg: yeah, so that takes a certain percentage of our market, largely the commodity server-oriented business, but there are so many workloads staying on trend, and what we have seen as the multi-cloud strategy. some workloads may be in a public live. there may be multiple public clouds. some might be a managed service provider. some may remain on trend. we have seen some companies moving back on trend because it
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has gone so expensive in the public cloud. so we have to enable a hybrid ip solution and help customers figure out the right mix where the workload should live. and that is a capability we are growing. we acquired a company called cloud technology partners. and that is what our partner does. help figure out where the workloads go to enable the future. and then of course, the edge has as much pressure and it is growing like a weed. emily: has that put a big chill on m&a a little bit side of the wheel house? or do you think eight pe will -- hpe will still be creative when it comes to thinking about doing deals? meg: yeah. well listen, i think we had some post-traumatic stress syndrome, and we did not make any acquisitions until aruba.
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and we have to be very thoughtful. we took due diligence to an extreme. i remember saying, i'm sorry about this, but you are the first acquisition after autonomy. so it is going to feel pretty tough, i think. but aruba has been an incredible acquisition for us. and i think we have got our momentum back around m&a. we have made six or seven very successful acquisitions. so, i think we now know what acquisitions work for us and it is complementary technology that we can put to our fantastic distribution system and partners, and accelerate the growth of those companies and maybe take out some cost and overhead. we have a formula now, and we also have to buy these companies right. we cannot overpay. and we have not overpaid to date. we are going to get know-how and frankly confidence to do good acquisitions. emily: so, in what areas do you
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think hpe will be doing some deal hunting? meg: yeah. our strategy is three-fold. we make hybrid i.t. simple, we power the intelligent edge and we have the services. we have cloud technology partners, as i mentioned. we acquired cloud cruiser that allows companies to meter how much technology they are using. we will be looking for certainly services acquisitions, and that something might come up in the intelligent edge that is germane to our view of that. we have made a couple of acquisitions for aruba, which is behavioral analytics to help with security. and then on hybrid i.t., we are really interested in the software. and we took our user interface and put it on the most prevalent server in the world, the dl 380. and so that is turning out to be a winner for us as well.
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but you can count on acquisitions, if we make them, only in those three areas. we are going to stick right to those three areas, because we think there is a lot of room and making hybrid i.t. simple powering the intelligent edge,, and making services that happen for clients. emily: we then discussed the political landscape. we began with one of the hottest topics -- tax reform. meg: i think we appreciate the reduction in corporate tax rates, although we pay below 35%, as do most corporations. but it will help on the margin for sure. we like the territorial tax system where we could bring in cash that is trapped overseas back. and we would make investments back in the united states. so there is a lot we like about it. i think being a californian, it is going to be challenging for people who live in california, new york, new jersey if that state income tax deduction
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against your federal return is lost. that will make it more extensive to hire people in california than in other locations. so i don't think it hurts necessarily the united states, but i think it will put pressure on the california workforce, and other companies in high state tax jurisdictions. emily: so, the big question is, what are you doing next? any interest in reentering politics, or have politics become too toxic? meg: well, i will not be and -- in elected politics again. i can't imagine it. i tried my hand at that in 2010. i learned a tremendous amount. i am a better ceo for it. but i think it is probably not my future. and so, i am not sure what i will do. i will certainly take some time off. i have been working pretty hard and continuously since i was 22 years old. so i will take time off and see what the future reveals. and i'm a big believer that things reveal themselves. if you told me after the 2010 governor's race that i would be the ceo of hp, i would tell you there's no possible way.
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and yet, it did. we will see what comes next. emily: our exclusive interview with hpe ceo meg whitman. onto another revolving door, speculation over disney's ceo bob iger's successor. it has narrowed down to a single candidate. ahead of disney's parks and resorts division is now the top contender. che peck helped oversee the shanghai disneyland, which had 11 million visitors in its first year. bob iger is set to retire in july 2019, leaving a transition for the top job. coming up, uber board member arianna huffington talks about raising money for the start up. uber's cultural turnaround coming in, and sexual harassment scandals rocking washington. this is bloomberg. ♪ ♪
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emily: alibaba is planning a $7 billion bond offering, one of largest by the corporate issuer this year. the chinese e-commerce plans to offer notes in five parts. maturities will range from 5.5 to 40 years. the deal will equip to $6 billion offering -- it will eclipse the $6 billion offering. this week, we caught up with uber board member arianna huffington. we covered important headlines from the week, from googlers -- to the wave of sexual harassment scandals in tech and media. but we began on the latest $30 million funding round at huffington's company thrive. huffington was joined by others. arianna: we spend the first year, and the multiple clients around the world, refining our ip, our behavior change, pathways, micro steps, and now
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with this new funding, we can productize it, create digital, science-based behavioral change offerings for corporations around the world, and for consumers to help them reduce the stress and burnout and their lives while improving the productivity. at the heart is this fact, which is entirely science-based that our well-being and performance are tied together. they rise and fall together. and when companies realize that, they will continue to accelerate their investment in human capital because that has immediate and verifiable impact on the bottom line. emily: what do you see in a company like thrive?
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besides the founder being arianna huffington? >> the big thing we look for is evidence of product market fit and hypergrowth. what is amazing as we looked at the rise compared to other companies. thrive's first year is out of the gate in terms of customer adoption, revenue growth, which was phenomenal. and beyond that, we look for evidence that land expand, renew, and refurb, they were landing big customers with sizable contracts before they had a fully fledged salesforce. they are renewing those contracts before the contracts were even due. they were expanding into different departments. and the best part we really look for is a customer referring this product, this service over to other people in the industry? people in human capital know each other very well. it is a small, close knit
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community. emily: arianna, you are trying to change behavior, which is difficult. what kind of change are you seeing, and how much work is there to be done? arianna: emily, there is a lot of work to be done. but what is exciting is that we are at a tipping point. that more and more individuals and more and more companies are realizing that we have been living under this delusion that in order to succeed, you have to burn out. what we have done, as well as b2b offering, was created a media platform that takes everything i have learned from 12 years at "the huffington post," and brings to gather the latest science that proves unequivocally that when we take care of ourselves, and put our own oxygen mask on first, we are more effective at work. and also, new role models. people in the arena. very successful people like jeff bezos and sheryl sandberg,
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writing about how they prioritize their own well-being, and that makes them better at work. jeff bezos, for example, wrote a piece that went crazy viral, and the headline was "why am i getting eight hours of sleep is good for amazon shareholders?" and he broke it down and when he only got six hours of sleep, his decisions were not as good. and as he put it, my value is not in the amount of decisions i make, but in the quality of decisions. so, people want that reinforcement. and that permission, if you want, that goes against a lot of mainstream culture, which thou which still valorize is people who ignores the data, that has a very negative impact on business metrics. emily: when it comes to
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entrepreneurs and the way you communicate with your portfolio companies, how do you deal with these kinds of issues? >> when we see companies we are attracted to, the breakneck speed they are executing, but what she is referring to is the case where we have seen our portfolio companies, people burning out. when we do exit interviews, we see their feedback, and their feedback is i wish i had a chance to build a deeper relationship with my coworkers, and process some of the things i am building and learning about. what we really are at is a tipping point where health care costs have skyrocketed in this country, and today, it is not a fringe hr discussion, it's a ceo level discussion. how do we attract, retain, and replenish our workforce with these amazing people that want to come to work excited about the day and leave fulfilled. i think that's the opportunity she is bringing content towards
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addressing. emily: speaking about another tipping point, i have to ask you about the continued sexual-harassment discrimination allegations in the media industry, politics, matt lauer was fired from nbc, charlie rose fired from cbs. bloomberg has ended its production and distribution arrangement with charlie rose. arianna, as a media mogul yourself, how big a blow is this? how big is it to these franchises, and how do they recover from that behavior by -- bad behavior by powerful men. arianna: we are seeing companies moving very fast, making decisions very fast. ending contracts very fast. and this is an indication of the cultural moment we are in. a cultural moment truly of zero-tolerance, where behavior that has been quietly accepted for decades is no longer accepted. it is a very, very important moment. and it is a moment that is going to make it much easier for women
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to flourish in workplaces, and to rise in workplaces because because again and again, we have seen how prevalent sexism has made it much harder for women to have sustainable careers of many businesses, whether media, entertainment, or anywhere else. emily: so, you know, when it comes to washington, senator al franken, arianna, i know some photos of you and him surfaced. there continues to be a question, where do we draw the line. you have defended him. why? arianna: the pictures of al and me were a part of a sketch, a comedic sketch that we did probably before you were born, called "strange bedfellows." so they were an extension of a comedy sketch. i think they trivialize the real pain and the real anguish of women who have been groped and harassed. and so it is not about defending al.
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it is about making it clear what us joking around at a photo shoot about a comedic sketch were about. emily: that was uber board member arianna huffington. the innovator behind google and -- android mobile platform left it in 2015, but it is now coming to light andy ruben departed after activation of inappropriate behavior. this according to a person familiar with the matter. the information first reported about google's internal investigation into his conduct. he has taken a leave from his start up. he told the board he needed time off to deal with personal matters. still ahead, talk about volatility. this week, we saw bitcoin surge past $11,000 only to drop more than 20%. and the fluctuations did not end there. so is this a bubble? we will discuss. next. this is bloomberg. ♪ ♪
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emily: a technical glitch may leave american airlines without any pilots over the holidays. the scheduling flaws have left more than 15,000 flights without sufficient crews. the airline is offering pilots 1.5 more times their hourly wage to pick up some of the flight. however, the union representing the pilots is filed a grievance saying the proposed solution violates its labor pact. this week, bitcoin topped the headlines. the cryptocurrency spiked and caught the attention of main street, but it's quick rise left many on wall street asking, when will this bubble pop? adam white joined us to discuss. coin base allows you to sell or
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buy bitcoin by connecting with its bank accounts. it has almost tripled the user base, now standing at 13 million. take a listen. >> this will become the biggest bubble of our lifetime item longshot. >> the record show, i did not say that. [laughter] >> mostly because it is so global. emily: they are starting a $500 million fund to invest in cryptocurrencies, says bitcoin could easily match their market cap. adam white joins us from new york. this is an online platform that allows you to buy or sell bitcoin for bank accounts that has a most triple the past this year, standing at 13 million. year, standing at 13 million. so, adam, biggest bubble of our lifetime? do you agree? adam: i don't think i agree with that. the price is an easy metric for everyone to point and look at. it is widely covered, fascinating, and one important
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quantitative indicator to look at the success of this technology. we spend a lot of time in the space looking at what is the utility of how many people are using the technology and what is the daily transactional volume? that happens separate from the price. but we are seeing great growth. emily: talk to us about the growth at coin base, the accounts tripling the two $13 million in the last year. where do you see that growth going? we started with about 5 million retail customers, it is effectively the easiest way to get started bind and selling with digital currency. we are now reporting over 12 million retail customers. and what we have seen what that is really, coin base becoming the easy on-ramp to the digital currency space. in addition to on boarding customers, we actually report our total trading volume. we have seen over $50 billion worth of cryptocurrency traded on our platform alone. these are both great leading indicators that we are seeing
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average, everyday users beginning to adopt an experiment with this technology. emily: you know, it may not be the biggest bubble of our lifetime, according to you, but there is a lot of volatility. i wanted to take a look at this chart on g #btv 1909. this compares bitcoin's volatility to the euro dollar the most traded currencies out there. what do you make of this volatility, how can people put trust in this currency if this volatility keeps up? adam: it is a great question. a think this will be short-lived, lifespan of digital currencies like bitcoin. we are in the very early innings of the introduction of this technology. and we are watching a marketing engage in this process of price discovery. with that, we are seeing rapid increases and recovery in the price. what is really interesting is i co-authored a paper last year. we looked at is the 2016
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volatility of bitcoin compared other asset classes. what we found is bitcoin was as volatile as both oil and less volatile than twitter's stock in the year 2016. my opinion, we are seeing volatility and that is not a bad thing. more liquid markets entering the space that will decrease the volatility in the digital currencies like bitcoin a really viable, financial instrument for the world. emily: that was adam white with coin base. meantime, tesla ceo elon musk says no, he is the person behind -- he is not the person behind bitcoin and that he's forgotten where he keeps his. he tweeted to a viral blog post suggesting he's the creator of bitcoin. he said, not true. a friend sent me part of a bitcoin a few years ago, but i don't know where it is. [laughter] emily: and that does it for this edition of the best "bloomberg technology." we will bring you the best in tech throughout the week. we will continue our coverage of cryptocurrencies wednesday.
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