♪ emily: i'm emily chang and this is the "best of bloomberg technology" where we bring you all our top interviews from this week in tech. big tech and the tax overhaul. how will washington plan for the sector's offshore profits impact silicon valley. we will discuss potential scenarios if the bill becomes law. plus, a bloomberg exclusive, coinbase ceo brian armstrong offers his take on bitcoin, which continued its spike this week. how the online platform has tripled its user base since it picked up the cryptocurrency. as big tech races to control

your living room, we hear from the brain behind amazon's alexa. first, to our lead. after senate republicans passed their version of tax reform in the u.s. we explore the ways the , proposed legislation could affect the tech industry. take a listen. >> it was a round of applause on capitol hill for gop senators as they passed their version of a tax bill. pushing the trump administration closer to its first piece of signature legislation. >> if they sent it to my desk, i promise all of the people in this room, my friends, so many friends in this room. i promise you i will sign it. i promise. i will not veto that bill. >> tech companies have spent to -- spent big to make sure their interests are heard. big tech stands to benefit in a few ways. the latest bill would slash the corporate rate from 35% to 20%. according to goldman sachs, the tech sector already benefits from a 24% effective rate. then there is the hordes of cash

stockpiled overseas. big tech stands to benefit from this legislation that allows them to defer taxes on foreign earnings until they bring them back to the u.s. at rates of 7.5% to 14.5%, down from the current 35%. >> if we get this passed, we have to as a country, it is going to bring back, i would say $4 trillion back into this country, which right now cannot come back. >> in our view, it should be a repatriation. this means it should be a required tax and so, you are not asking the people that have had earnings from their international subsidiaries if they would like to bring back money. >> the current bill would make it a voluntary repatriation, though the question stands whether bringing back this offshore money would go into anything other than buybacks or m&a. lastly, telecom firms could win

big if enhanced deduction for the capital expenditures make it into the final bill. theoretically allowing them to upgrade the fiber backbone of the nation. for now, the waiting game goes on until the final bill hits the president's desk. emily: the administration wants tech companies to bring back their overseas stockpiles of cash and keeping companies like apple from fleeing tax havens like ireland where apple reached a deal over $15.4 billion on unpaid taxes, to pay those back. let's start with the actual rate. it is a lower effective rate, but the effective rate is already fairly low. how much of an impact is this going to have? >> look every business wants , lower taxes. that has been clear in all of the debate about the tax legislation this year. companies in tech and outside of tech are happy to have a lower tax rate, even as a lot of companies are not paying the 35% statutory rate because of tax

breaks and other reasons. emily: what about repatriation? how much money will this bring back? $4 trillion? shira: i'm not sure where he got the $4 trillion. there are several million parked offshore that are considered permanently reinvested. but you have seen the ways companies like apple have done self repatriation. apple has $250 billion parked overseas, but is also borrowed $100 billion in the last few years to do things like buying back their shares, issuing dividends, things like that. you can look at that as a way to repatriate money without paying tax, which is what apple might be able to do under this proposed legislation. emily: there had been concerned about stock option legislation that was not in the house bill and was dropped from the senate will. -- bill. where are we with that? shira: basically a startup community's worst nightmare.

fred wilson from union square basically speaking out and saying this was a version in both houses for a while that looked like it would force start up companies to pay taxes on stocktions and restricted effective immediately even , before they were able to sell the shares. that would have put an undue burden on a lot of corporate workers here in silicon valley. emily: what you make of the deal apple has made with ireland? they have come to terms on an escrow fund to pay back taxes they say they owe. shira: this dispute over irish taxes with apple is going to carry on for many more months. basically, if you remember last year, the e.u. antitrust authorities said to ireland, you have improperly given apple a tax break that has allowed the company to avoid something like $15 billion worth of taxes over the years and you have to go get that back, ireland, from apple. there is basically a dispute

about what to do with the $15 billion while ireland, apple and the e.u. fight about that money. emily: how do you expect this to play out? shira: it will be in litigation for a long time. even if apple has to pay $15 billion, for a company of apple's scale, $15 billion is not a big burden. emily: this week, prominent tech investor shervin pishevar has been accused of sexual misconduct said he is taking a , leave of absence from his responsibility. five women who met him in a professional context said they were a sexually assaulted or harassed by him. current and former colleagues of a sixth woman say he groped her at an uber holiday party. he has sued the definers, a research firm founded by republicans, for spreading false information about him. they have responded to the suit, saying they have nothing to do with his accusations and the suit should be dismissed. in a statement, he wrote "as the legal case progresses, it is my

response -- it is my priority to ensure the family is not adversely affected. i am confident i will be vindicated." google won dismissal of the california action lawsuit saying the company systematically paid male employees more than females. san francisco superior court wrote -- this definition does not -- purport to distinguish between female employees who may have a valid claim versus those who do not. she allowed the women to file an amended complaint. the new complaint will make clear that google violates the equal pay act by paying women less than men for substantially equal work. coming up, just days away from its debut, bitcoin kept climbing this week. how bitcoin futures could impact the online trading platform. -- the online trading platform coinbase, that is next. if you like bloomberg news, check us out on the radio. you can listen on the bloomberg radio app, bloomberg.com and

sirius xm. this is bloomberg. ♪

♪ emily: bitcoin continued to climb this week. the largest cryptocurrency by market value was selling for less than $1000 at the start of the year. in recent days, several exchanges have come out with news on offering bitcoin futures. we caught up with coinbase ceo brian armstrong on wednesday. coinbase is an online platform that allows users to buy or sell bitcoin by connecting with their bank accounts. it is now standing at 13 million accounts. brian: there has certainly been a big influx in new interest in digital currency. part of that has been driven by institutional money getting really interested in the space. we have seen most of the large derivative exchanges out there starting to say, they are going to list bitcoin futures. that has driven a lot of interest. it is a big signal that traditional financial

institutions are starting to move into digital currency. sme, nasdaq, what does it mean for you? does it create new challenges? brian: it is a big endorsement of the digital currency space as a real asset class that more will trade. it specifically means we offer spot market data to a number of providers or are discussing it with them. we run the largest institutional exchange in the united states for digital currency. the other thing is that we are offering a custodian product where a lot of institutional investors need a way to store digital currency on behalf of their lps and clients. we launched a product for coin-based custody. those of the ways it might impact our business. emily: are you at all worried your clients might decide to work with traditional main street wall street companies rather than coinbase? brian: it is certainly an option. there will be more people involved in the digital currency space.

we are not going to be the only ones, and i think that is a good thing. there is going to be a diversity of players out there. there will be a lot of winners. digital currency is moving so fast that i think a company dedicated to it with 200 people who have built up this industry knowledge over the last five years will have a competitive advantage. emily: we have to talk about customer service. you have been experiencing a glitch, as you have with prior surges. why does this happen? brian: in a word, hypergrowth. we have hired from 40 customer support agents to 220 or so this year. by the end of next year, we will have another 400 or so. emily: in addition to the 200 you are ready have? -- already have? brian: yeah, and we launched phone support this year. we are going through a period of growth that is almost never seen in business. it is really difficult to be able to keep up with this amount of demand and we are not servicing our customers to the level they deserve at the moment. that is frustrating to see but it is my job from the top to

ensure we will get there. emily: can you explain why that happens? is it a glitch, a crash, what is happening technically? brian: it is just a huge influx of new customers. so our volumes, whether you look at it as our trading volume, new sign-ups, it has gone about 8x since june of this year. it is just unheard of. it is difficult to plan for that kind of capacity. emily: it is literally that you don't have enough humans behind the scenes to receive these complaints? brian: correct. emily: in addition to hiring new people, is there anything else you can do? brian: certainly, we can always improve the product. improving the product is the way to reduce the number of customer support tickets inbound. the team is working really hard on that. the key metrics we are looking at is average time to customer response, the core metrics we are looking at to make sure we are meeting our customer demands. emily: do you have any concerns this will decrease trust among

new customers? you will lose your customers as a result? brian: honestly, i do have that fear. it is difficult to go through aeriod -- go through a period of this rapid growth and maintain the same level of service. we have been watching those metrics and they are not where we want them to be. growth is a really high quality to have, but it doesn't mean it isn't a big problem. especially in financial services, we are held to a higher bar. we are storing people's money and people are right to call us to a higher standard. emily: the irs has been asking for more information about your holdings and profits. what are you hearing from your clients about this? brian: the irs sent us a subpoena for a large number of customer records -- in fact, all customer records over a several year period. we did push back on that strongly. the judge gave us a big vote of confidence and reduced the scope of the request by 97%. it wasn't down to zero where we

think it should have been for something that broad, but it was a partial victory. long-term, we want to help people pay all of their taxes on digital currency gains. what i think this should look like is something like fidelity where everyone gets 1099 statements. the irs gets a copy, the customer gets a copy. it should be that simple. we are working with the irs now thankfully to make sure we come up with a solution where everybody pays their taxes. this is one of those new areas technology keeps finding a new box that doesn't fit into the existing framework quite perfectly and we need to work , with everyone to make sure we get there. emily: given the uncertainty currently as you work this out, are you giving advice to your clients about how to report gains to the irs? brian: we try to stay away from any tax advice since that is not what we do, but we provide a report to our customers, a cost basis report they can send to their accountant. that is the solution we have in the interim until there are 1099's. emily: let's talk about what is happening to some of these other

cryptocurrencies. ethereum you can trade on coinbase. what do you see happening with ethereum versus bitcoin? brian: they evolved down different paths. bitcoin used to be 90% of the market cap of digital currency and it has come down quite a , bit. bitcoin is ending up, in my mind, being a little like digital gold, if you will. it is the oldest cryptocurrency, the one people flee to in times of uncertainty. it has not scaled to become a payment network with the transaction put through people might want. ethereum has kind of grown to do that and is doing more transactions per day than bitcoin. it also has a new, innovative concept of smart contracts. bitcoin, you can think of as a simple for function calculator. ethereum is almost like a

program language where you can run any software and run it on a global, decentralized computer. that is a mindbending concept . but it is much more programmable. emily: you have launched a new app called toshi, which seems sort of like an apt store for ethereum. explain what you are trying to do. brian: the analogy i like to use is the internet. when the internet started, it was really difficult to use. a browser came out on top of the internet with netscape and made it easy for anyone to build an app and access the internet. we are doing the same thing with toshi, which is a browser for the ethereum network. we are trying to make it easy for a developer to develop an app and users to use. we are a little bit inspired by things like we chat in china and pay tm in india, even in kenya, mobile money is a big deal outside the united states. people in emerging markets could

actually use digital currency to start to get access to financial services through something like toshi. emily: when it comes to the price, how do you see bitcoin versus ethereum playing out? do you see the bitcoin spike continuing? you see it surpassing bitcoin? some have suggested it will. brian: i don't like to give investment advice but in broad strokes the way i think of it bitcoin has a certain amount of , scarcity built-in. there will ever only be 21 million coins. if something is more scarce, the price can be driven up. ethereum has taken a different approach. there may be a moderate inflation curve, almost like the u.s. dollar and it might target 2% to 3% inflation per year. they are deciding what it will be. ethereum is not trying to be gold, which is what bitcoin is. it is trying to be more programmable like a payment network.

one other really broad thing you could look at is, where are the users going? where are the developers building the new apps? i see more developers building apps on top of ethereum today, so that is one other factor pointpoint -- which could to what it will be in the future. emily: we talk about this a lot on bloomberg. is bitcoin a fraud or not? are we in a bubble or not? if it is not a fraud, is it a bubble? what do you think? brian: i don't think it is a fraud. is it a bubble, maybe. digital currency has gone through a number of these. eriodsre there is a -- p where there is a plateau each time and it comes up and it comes back a little bit. we are going through the most recent run-up period, the fourth for us as a company. i expect it to correct at some point, but continue over time in an upward channel. emily: there is an update called segue which would speed up transactions. you guys have not implemented that. when do you plan on implementing that? brian: it is one of the things

we are looking at adding. it is probably not in the next top five things customers are requesting. emily: what are the top five next things? brian: people want more assets on the platform, they want a better experience, meaning identity verification, higher limits, the sign up on boarding experience, and they are asking for these new products. institutional customers are asking for a custodian product. people are looking at a way to trade more assets, have a better experience, and store it securely. emily: that is coinbase ceo brian armstrong. numbers that beat across the board as it tries to make the biggest takeover in tech history. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: google is ramping up for a hiring spree.

the company is recruiting thousands of reviewers to reduce inappropriate videos on youtube. they are introducing tougher restrictions on advertising and making greater use of smart technology. by 2018, google aims to have more than 20,000 people to review questionable videos on the platform. the announcement comes as youtube looks to bounce back from a string of embarrassing incidents of questionable content discovered on its site. on the earnings front, broadcom beat across the board in the fourth quarter and gave an upbeat sales forecast, indicating at smartphone customers are optimistic about demand. this as the chipmaker attempts the biggest deal ever with an acquisition of qualcomm. cory johnson joined us with more . cory: they have gobbled up lots of different parts. you mentioned qualcomm as a potential acquisition but they , have already gobbled up some interesting and big parts of the semi conductor world.

avago buying broadcom. brocade acquired by broadcom. that company also dominant in the storage business. but the results we see today from broadcom, looking back at the quarter that ended in october, really strong iphone business. what we see here is really great strength in gathering more and more silicon not in the old iphone, but the new iphone. we see that business showing up in the results. 17% year-over-year growth in the semiconductor space is very strong for a business this egg. emily: we have seen the danger of relying on apple as a customer. how much does broadcom rely on them as a customer as opposed to others? cory: it is absolutely the most important customer. broadcom has been successful at getting apple to pay whereas others haven't. qualcomm has been unsuccessful at getting apple to add more real estate in the phone.

broadcom has been able to add more real estate in the phone. interestingly, the quality of the phone calls apple likes to boast about, remember how crummy the phone was when it first came out? emily: i remember. cory: it was not just that the service was bad. it was actually hearing the calls was more difficult. broadcom has a great chip that sits at the bottom of the radio chip and helps us to listen a little better to the signals that come in through the phone and understand what we are saying to the phone. it helps power siri. those kinds of chips are important to apple and they are relying on broadcom. you can see those sales in this quarter. what we don't know yet is how successful they have been selling new routers, selling into servers -- think of the companies in technology that are really struggling now. hewlett-packard having horrible problems, cisco barely coming out of a turnaround having trouble selling hardware. oracle struggling. ibm hardware business, having a really hard time. yet we see the growth in amazon

azurervices, in microsoft , in google's nascent efforts in the cloud. what we see is people -- they may be buying chips from broadcom themselves. that is what i want to hear about in the conference call. what kind of success are they having selling into the white box manufacturers at amazon, at microsoft and apple and facebook? emily: what kind of update, if any, will we get on the progress of this potential takeover? cory: a lot of swimming upstream for broadcom. there is a lot they could do to sway the market, that would be to talk about financing and how they perform this. the financial guidance they just put out in this earnings report, the guidance is nebulous. it is, in the future, we will see margins go from 60% to 65%. we will see increased cash flows and percentage of net income. we will have a much financially stronger business going forward.

they are not putting dates on it , but they are telling us the business will go from really good to really great. i don't know if we believe them. they don't have a history of missing targets. emily: it is more typical to have a time frame. cory: it is typical to give us a time frame in guidance. they are saying it eventually. nevertheless, it suggests they see great things for this business and would give them the kind of financial leverage to do an acquisition and borrow the money to do so. emily: bloomberg's cory johnson there. still ahead, the brain behind amazon's alexa. all episodes of "bloomberg technology" are streaming online. you can check us out at bloomberg tech tv, 5:00 in new york, 2:00 and san francisco. this is bloomberg. ♪ is this a phone?

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emily: welcome back to "the best of bloomberg technology." i am emily chang. in 2014, amazon introduced the echo, a new device designed around your voice. the echo and alexa with it was only available for amazon invited prime members. that changed in 2015 when they were introduced to the general public bringing ai into our , living rooms and sparking competition between tech titans. prasadht up with rohit for an exclusive interview. rohit: the set of skills will improve daily communication. everything is changing in terms

of behaviors of how we interact with alexa. you set your alarms, you listen to your music through alexa, your smart devices through alexa. next what we will find, we are transforming from more natural transactions to more deep conversations. if you look at this, we have been working on the alexa price competition where the goal is to build social bots that can talk for you -- talk to you for 20 minutes in an engaging fashion. this is incredibly hard. even for a human at a party to talk to a stranger, 20 minutes is a very hard barrier to beat. emily: are you focused on making alexa more humanlike and more conversational? rohit: absolutely. we are focused on making alexa smarter every day, and more humanlike. we are looking into how alexa can understand different types of context. one of the common contexts that

is humanlike, that we as humans do well is how we carry information from the previous turned. if i said, what is the first album from adele, and play it, then you know the references. similarly, context comes in various forms. in terms of geographical and regional context, if you are saying, when are the spurs playing next? in the u.s. it will mean the san antonio spurs, where as in the u.k. it will mean the soccer team. these are some ways we are already making alexa smarter, and it will get better and that -- better and better. emily: what trends are you seeing in how customers are shop, and what are you doing to encourage them to shop besides discount? rohit: alexa is about improving daily convenience. shopping is an important aspect.

it is not the only aspect. one of the things as our tenet in general is to reduce friction or make attractions seem as seamless as possible with alexa. where we are seeing that happen very well, if you're trying to buy the daily consumables, like if you said, alexa reorder , batteries, those are working seamlessly. now with devices like echo show we are also making it possible , for you to look at what you are buying. if you said, alexa, buy a blue shirt, you can see the blue shirt on the screen, the multiple options that are available. and then select by voice, which makes it seamless to buy things and making it easier when you are looking at stuff that needs to be on the screen for you to make the decision. emily: i am curious about

privacy. what information is alexa collecting and keeping, and allowing developers to access? rohit: privacy is first of all very important to us. that tenet is based on being very transparent with our customers. i will start with first, it you -- if you look at how transactions happen in the, alexa only listens for the week word on the device. nothing else. it is listening for a particular step it of what you said with sounds like alexa. then when it is confident a wake word is spoken, it streams to the cloud. you see clear visual indicators, on echo for instance, a light comes on. on the echo show you see a light bar with a blue ring around it on the scene -- screen, which makes it very transparent. customers can go to their

application and the companion application that is on your smart phone or on the web interface, you can look at every utterance you have spoken to alexa that has been recorded. and then you can choose to delete them, or delete all of them as an option for you. the reason that audio is collected is for making ourselves better for the customers. emily: i am curious about partnerships. you have a partnership with microsoft. what can you tell us about the potential for more partnerships? we spoke to an attorney who also works on alexa, she said anything is possible when it comes to a partnership with apple or google. rohit: we are very open to partnering. we know our customers want different choices. if you look at our partnership with microsoft, we are making it easy for microsoft customers who cortana to use alexa, and

vice versa. we are open to this partnership because we want the best experience for our customers. emily: how do you view the competitive landscape? some people having rave reviews about google home, and it is getting more crowded. rohit: it is great that so many people and companies are interested in this space. that is great for our customers. at amazon we are customer centric, and we work back from our customer needs. we have been privileged to have millions of customers using alexa every day. that has given us clear needs that we need to solve. we are focused on that. i would also point out that we essentially a voice first interaction paradigm, and that is what our paradigm is. our mission is to get alexa everywhere.

cars, on the go and , now in the workplace. emily: amazon vice president and head scientist rohit prasad. bework does not appear to scared of any of the downturns from brexit. the office sharing startup is set to become london's private renter of offices, this according to data compiled by co. store. wework has announced expansion plans. it is also in talks to buy a 12 building campus near the liverpool station for $800 million. facebook will increase the size of its staff in the u.k. by the 50%. company is hiring 800 employees in london, predominantly in the engineering world. they are under scrutiny from british lawmakers who are concerned about russian interference in u.k. politics via social networks. autodesk shares have collapsed.

we sit down with the ceo for an exclusive interview. plus, airbnb wants to be the top destination for travel. a top exec joins us on their strategy, i had. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: a european union court has sided with apple in a trademark issue. judges ruled that it could easily be confused with the u.s. tech giant's ipad. they applied for a trademark and can appeal the decision one more time in the e.u.'s top court. the united nations designated 2017 as the international year of sustainable tourism for development. airbnb is using the u.n. guidelines to showcase its potential as the top sustainable option. we sat down with airbnb's global and policy public affairs head and began by looking at the , company's growth. >> what is really interesting, we are seeing travel called the flyover areas, and also an

emerging economies. if you look at a recent report, it shows 250% growth in indianapolis, indiana. what that speaks to, the network effect of the platform, those are places that have been traditionally underserved. hard for those hotels to justify buildouts. when you have the indianapolis 500 or the big ten football championship you see our , platform spring to life. emily: you are expanding in asia, africa, the pacific. what is the biggest challenge? chris: for us, it is just the pace of the growth. that is a high-class challenge. we just had our best quarter. over 250 million able on the platform. this growth is taking place underneath us. for us it is incredibly make sure ithat we

is working as best as possible for our guest. people he used airbnb do so on the recommendation of a friend or family member. i just came back from jamaica, tough travel. there was a conference on inclusive travel, how you can use travel as it becomes a bigger part of the economy, and how you can make sure everyone is benefiting from it. from a sustainability perspective and in a quality perspective, a big part of what we talked about, by 2030, most travel will take place in these emerging markets. how can we do things now to make sure entire communities are benefiting? folks see us, given that we are making travel accessible to traditionally nontraditional areas, as part of that collusion. it is exciting but an interesting thing to have a conversation with the front end. emily: any insight into whether trump's policies will impact international tourism? chris it is a great question. : we have not seen that yet.

we have been out front in terms of opposing the travel ban. we had a whole campaign called "we accept," which was around that. i think where you potentially see that is the u.s. brand the , home of the statue of liberty, does that take a hit as a result of that? as a derivative of that, travel and tourism it is growing so , fast, i am not sure that will be the case. you do see the reverse of it in the following way. when i was in jamaica, a number of countries came up to talk to us about how we can make our data accessible to them. to help inform their marketing because they are looking to diversify their travel, their inbound. where people are traveling from to go visit their countries. they were specifically concerned about becoming overly dependent on the u.s. for travelers, and wanting to diversify.

that is really being driven by some concerns about issues taking place here in terms of how welcoming the u.s. is perceived to be. emily: you worked in the clinton administration. chris: i am an old guy. emily: we recently covered sexual misconduct. what is your response to these allegations? chris: we believe what the woman have set out there. -- women have said out there. it has been a long time coming, and it was needed. there is a transition in the world. in terms of people willing to speak up and stand up on an issue that has been taking place forever. every day you read the stories, and i am incredibly impacted by the courage of these victims, these women to stand up and talk about these issues. obviously, they are hard to say. we condemn any of that type of activity.

we certainly believe what the women are saying out there. but even more broadly, we are in the middle of a significant transition in what social mores are and how people look at these and accept it and how the press , covers it. how willing people are to talk about it and engage on it. that is incredibly important if we are going to address the underlying substantive challenges. emily: that was chris lehane, airbnb head of policy and public affairs. auto shares tumbled after the third quarter. the company hit a rough patch with slipping subscriptions. cory johnson speaks with the ceo. >> there are several markets that are quarter less. the engineering market, that is the history. we are a big player in the product design and manufacturing space. what has become a super important emerging market is

construction. that whole industry is digitizing. cory: it is interesting in the procurement, if you work in procurement and design, in the actual design process you have faster and cheaper projects. andrew it is even more than : that. what is happening in construction is it is industrializing. it is looking a lot more like manufacturing processes. construction has got to be exactly the same. cory: you announced these big changes in the business model, particularly the move from maintenance to subscription, and how that is bumpier than anyone thought. the stock took a hit last week. in context, you still have about 72% in a two-year stretch. it is still a good run. andrew it is a great run. : we hit our goals. we exceeded.

25% recurring revenue growth. we were going through the dip, so we were negative for a while. we did exactly what we said we would do. i just think people expected more. cory: why would a customer switch from maintenance to a subscription-based fee for your service, as opposed to abandon it and go somewhere else? andrew: you probably talked to a lot of these companies all the time. customers are seeing companies like salesforce, workday, the way they buy software now is subscription based. it is kind of just the expectation. they like it, can turn it off and on as they need it. most customers are saying this is the way the software industry is going. there is not a lot of resistance. maybe from smaller customers, but not the bigger ones. cory: i kept hearing questions about the timing of the restructuring. why do the restructuring now? and what does it have to do with your long-term 2020 cash flow

goals? andrew: there were a lot of conspiracy theories. ofy: i am a collector conspiracy theories. andrew there is the famous john : f. kennedy quote, the best time to fix your roof is when the sun is shining. we had been planning this for a while. we knew we needed to invest more strategically in digitizing the company, specifically in construction. money was not in the places we needed it. we are going to invest every penny back in the company over the next six to 12 months. it is a reshuffling of where we are spending the money. cory: what does that mean for headcount? andrew headcount wise we will be : as big a company as we were before the restructuring. cory: where do those resources have to be? andrew: we had a bunch of initiatives where we were not doing what we want to do. we were digitizing the company and becoming super modern. reimagining construction and manufacturing. we had projects that were not in alignment with that.

we essentially took out entire projects and we are shifting money over to those that are more important. cory: there is a concern over the subscription number, just how many customers are joining the subtraction services. talk to me about what the story is there and what you expect it to be. andrew: that was the biggest piece of turbulence from last week. we delivered a solid result in the core. cory: when analysts are modeling this out, you get down to a unit number, a revenue per subscriber, maintenance per subscriber. when those numbers come down and you are switching to a revenue recurring model, that starts to matter more. andrew the revenue per : subscriber for the subscriptions that matter is up 20% year-over-year. what they got spooked by, and it is natural because it is a complex transition, we just said we will do fewer clouds subscriptions.

aree cloud subscriptions not important to our two year goals. are small relative to the core. small revenue per customer too. it will be bigger 3, 4, 5 years out. they are just small relative to the two year goals everyone is paying attention to. cory: what are the kinds of things you want to innovate around? in terms of your investment. andrew: what it means is we are going to be investing a lot and -- in the reimagining how people do construction and manufacturing processes. you probably know this. construction is the lowest invested in i.t. next to agriculture in the u.s. i think in europe it is below agriculture. this industry needs to be transformed. it is investing crazy in digital technologies. when you look forward, what we are going to be doing is helping our construction customers become manufacturers of

building. emily: bloomberg editor at large cory johnson with the ceo of autodesk. go jack has its eye on an ipo. how they are fending off competition. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: lyft announced its most recent funding round -- the ride hailing startup is valued at $11.5 billion. this was led by alphabet which backed uber early on. lyft has gained significant u.s. market share as its main rival, uber faces significant scandals and legal battles. meantime, go-jek is facing

competition but the ceo is not concerned. he says softbank and uber does not matter. he declared 2018 as the year his company's payment platform will take off. yvonne man spoke with him exclusively from the summit in jakarta. >> i think it is one of the most epic and innovating battles in southeast asia. they are both incredible companies. it is an honor to compete with them. the best of technology in ride hailing, with the most amount of funding. it is an incredible challenge to have for go-jek. we have been pushed to our limits, so we have to hyper innovate to adapt. the urge and hunger to innovate.

yvonne: they are approaching your market share as well as a lot of the services you are providing. does go-jek have to change their strategy? nadiem: no, i think our product strategy, our entire competitive strategy is designed around flexibility, hyper diversification, and mitigating risk. we have so many verticals that interrelate with each other. it is hard to deal with this animal called go-jek. you think you are competing with us on ride hailing, but actually you are competing with us with the user who is using food and riled -- ride hailing. you think you're competing on food, this is a wallet player that is leveraging that in order order desk in order to further reinforce its food and transport. we are a difficult animal to get. as a result of that, a little bit of that business jiu-jitsu that we have. that is how we survive and come out on top against some of the largest companies in the world.

yvonne: your payment system you said will go -- grow aggressively. what are the plans for 2018, especially since it is becoming a crowded market? others are really diving into this now. nadiem: just to address that we point, are actually the only large tech player in indonesia that has an e-money license. that is a pur tech playere. pure tech player. other large players do not have a money license. that is a good advantage in having some lead time to expand. we are ahead of the curve. competition will come in, and we are expecting it, and we are embracing competition, because that is what makes our product great. i think 2018 will be the year of go pay for go-jek. go-pay travels outside our app ecosystem and starts being accepted in a variety of

off-line establishments and a variety of online establishments. you will see 2018 as the year of partnership. there is a very long queue of partners that are trying to integrate go pay right now. yvonne: what do you make of the investment that softbank has had and has on uber? that lead to more consolidation in southeast asia? nadiem: it is important to have the integrity to pursue our vision. that is the only way we will be two steps ahead, by beating to our own drum. we have always been the underdog in terms of funding and resources, and we still come up on top. it is not about how much funding you have, it is about how hungry you are to create an exceptional product experience. emily: that was bloomberg's yvonne man with go-jek's ceo. that does it for this edition of "best of "bloomberg technology." tune in each day, 5:00 p.m. in

new york, 2:00 p.m. in san francisco. all episodes are live streaming on twitter. check us out. that is all for now. this is bloomberg. ♪ . . retail.

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near or far covered. leaving every competitor, threat and challenge outmaneuvered. comcast business outmaneuver. >> leaders in westminster struggled} a deal. -- struggled to close embrace a deal. while in washington, challenges given the government open. >> with a lot of work to do. >> the devil is in the details of tax reform is congress had -- heads to congress. disruption on one hand, consolidation on the other. media moguls assess their industry. >> it has been a wake-up moment for the big platforms. >> they are looking to exec