there was a senior at mit that hadi already knew, having had him as an intern. we were trying to recruit him into a small start up. he had his eyes set on a bigger company, because he was just graduating from college. we referred for him to go to facebook, which at the time was 200 people. hadi asked, can you say who were the smartest guys are in your class? he was not going to join, because he had a new company. at this point, we had them fly out to the west coast and gave them coding tests to assess how good of computer programmers they are. this is priority for all our investments. we don't invest if the technical founder can't pass a rigorous technical review. based on evaluating through houston's coding skills we decided to invest in dropbox. we spent the next several years

, even until quite recently helping dropbox recruit engineers. emily: what about uber? >> uber we weren't as early in. in fact i was we had an earlier investors because so many folks in the network early investors in a were. -- uber. >> giving into later stage investment, not everyone has access. what enables us to access like that is not based on what we know. it is because we have developed a occasion for helping companies like facebook or dropbox with recruiting. emily: watching from the outside at uber, what do you think went wrong? >> it is hard to manage hypergrowth. holds you should bar, some lines i think there was some no holds barred and are some you should bar. you should bar, some lines you should not cross.

it is hard for a company at large to know which laws you are paying attention to. you get to this point where anything goes, and i think things got out of control. emily: do you think at this stage your cousin can turn things around? >> i do. it is still in credibly healthy business at its core.

consider the tumult where the entire senior staff was axed. did we miss anything, cars not picking up their passengers? he is a prince among men, who inherently because of the humility and personal respect his character brings, people want to see him succeed.

emily: there is something missing from your stories about the amazing people in your network and the people you have funded in the network, and that is women. i am curious about how you would describe the role of women in the early days of the dotcom boom, and how you have seen that evolve or not evolve. given that the numbers really have not changed. >> the lack of women in tech is something that bothers everybody. it bothers women and men alike. it is very personal to us. our mom had a masters in computer science, so i grew up with a mom who was in tech. a large region why i started code.org was to fix the diversity issue. starting with the pipeline. the diversity problems are not only about the promotion path,

but also about the pipeline. if the graduating population is 80% white male and asian males, it is hard to have a balanced workforce from the students coming into the field are so imbalanced. >> what we have done at code.org is completely change the high school and k through 12 picture. we start teaching computer science using code.org materials as early as elementary school. the student base now wit students, which is much larger 25 million than the software engineering population in the united states. it is 45% girls. there are almost 12 million girls coding on code.org. emily: how did you do that? >> the answer really is teachers. we did a lot of great things. the key to getting u.s. education to adopt computer science has been the american teacher. if we want to reach students who have the least opportunity, they are not going to summer camps and afterschool clubs we have to

, reach them in school. entire curriculum is free and on the web. they could assign it as homework if they don't have enough computers in the classroom, but it is much easier for students to do it if they feel it is a standard part of school. everyone learns fractions whether they like it or not. when a school teacher gives you a sense of social universality you can't encompass necessarily at home. emily: how do you recruit teachers when they could be making a lot of money at google or facebook? >> we don't get computer sciences to become teachers. we get teachers to learn computer science. we are one of the biggest workforce retraining operators in america now. emily: how do you convince schools who are already resource strapped? >> the teachers are already in the schools. the math teacher, english teacher, science teacher, they see our schools should be doing

this. the oakland teacher who asked, why isn't oakland doing computer science? the first teacher there was clear. she learned on her own and taught a class. she wanted it to be in every school in oakland, so she came to code.org. we trained every district. two years later, every district teaches computer science. emily: what are the challenges that remain? >> funding is hard as well. we are a nonprofit. we are funded by the same tech companies that i believe should be fixing a lot of the gender issues in tech, so we are part of the solution.

those same companies should get credit for the work that we do. amazon, facebook, and microsoft are our three largest donors. when we are bringing 12 million girls into this field, those companies should get credit. emily: eric roberts, longtime professor at stanford, wrote a paper about the liability to handle computer science students. in 1984, everyone is excited about studying computer science. schools can't accommodate, so they start turning students away, and the number of computer science degrees starts declining. it happened again in the.com boom. he warns we are facing another potential capacity collapse today, because so many are interested, but can't accommodate. >> that is happening now. at the university of washington -- i live in seattle, a turn away 3/4 of the students trying to get into computer science. it is not based on their gender, but it is based on grades. i think everybody should have a chance to learn. the university system needs to understand if they can't teach the most important subject

students want to learn -- the university either needs to change, or students will go learn some other way. this is a really big problem for our country. i know code.org is exacerbating the problem, because we are bringing 25 million students interested in this problem. -- this field. the university faces a problem that is only going to get worse. they won't need to adapt to the demand. emily: my concern is it will hurt women again. if you are filtering students based on grades when traditionally -- >> it could. carnegie mellon has a similar situation, where there are so many spots or computer science. you can't just elect to choose that major, you have to apply. by edict, they said they will accept 50% female computer science applicants. they are essentially going to give equal number of spots to men and women.

>> that may tilt things toward women. emily: if you are a parent right now, what should you be doing if you want your kids to have a chance in this field? >> the first thing i would say is to make sure that if your kids are in school, make sure the school teaches computer science. most american schools don't teach computer science and most americans don't think the school system can change, but we have shown that a massive scale of tens of thousands of schools that schools can change. if parents ask the teacher, there's usually one teacher that wants to see computer science taught at that school and they will pick up code.org and start doing it. change happens at the local level. the parents think, what should my kids do? we tell them, what should your school do? emily: neo is your new thing, a community of engineers, there is a venture arm attached to it -- what is it? >> is focused on finding the tech leaders of tomorrow. our aim is to identify tech

leaders as young as sophomores in college. we identify them, include them in the community and invest in them. we have brought together this amazing spectrum of people including the cto of microsoft, original cto of google and facebook. there are amazing people who created amazing thing. the woman who founded past scrap, or the guy who invented photo tagging, the guy who created ios. not all of them are famous, but they have all contributed something amazing to the world of technology. we are bringing them together with a pool of young people who have been curated and selected based on talent and promise. emily: how is it similar or different? it is something similar in the youthful energy and in the belief of unlimited

possibility. extremely different in that these are not founders with companies. some of them are in some of them might become future founders but , we are not incubating business ideas. we are trying to find 10 or 15 of the best computer scientists in the country. emily: for the young men and women who want to make it in silicon valley, be an investor, be an aunt nora, be an engineer, what is the most important advice? >> believe in yourself. the tech industry is somewhere you can come from humble beginnings and make it based on what is in your heart. >> starting computer programming is like learning a sport or learning an instrument. anyone can start and if they put time into it they can become successful. >> i would add to that even if you don't want to become a coder, learning computer science can help out no matter what you do in tech. in this day and age, everybody should have the basic background

of computer programming. it is a lot more fun than people imagine. it can open doors in any field, but especially the tech industry. emily: hadi and ali partovi, thank you so much for having us -- joining us on studio 1.0. great to have you guys. ♪

haslinda: welcome to bloomberg's special coverage of the asean business summit. i'm haslinda amin in bangkok. over the next half hour, we will take a look at the key challenges facing southeast asian economies as the world undergoes what many consider to be a tectonic shift. ♪ >> a reoccurring theme at the asean business summit, an increasingly uncertain future. geopolitics are casting a shadow over the outlook as america retreats from the world stage under donald trump, and britain exits from the eu. a