♪ selina: i'm selina wang. this is "best of bloomberg technology," where we bring you all of our top interviews from this week in tech. coming up, the roadblocks are piling up as tesla ceo elon musk tries to take the company private. we discuss who is on board and if government officials could step in to stop the deal. plus, what is the status of cisco's transition to a more software and subscription-based model? we'll hear more from ceo chuck robbins. and highlights from the bloomberg players summit. how does one of the most

high-profile in the nba balance his game on the court while tech investing on the side? we sit down with andre iguodala of the golden state warriors. but first, to our top story. elon musk is facing some roadblocks to take tesla private. the company has received a subpoena from the u.s. securities and exchange commission, indicating the regulatory scrutiny of his statements and tweets have reached a more serious stage. meanwhile, musk may be looking to saudi arabia's private wealth fund to secure the capital it needs, but it could give the fund leverage to exert significant influence. we discuss with bloomberg's detroit bureau chief david welch and bloomberg businessweek's max chafkin. max: the issue is that with the trump administration, it is not totally clear how cfius, which is the government body that regulates this sort of thing, foreign investments in u.s. companies, would treat something like this. earlier this year, the trump administration basically stopped the broadcom-qualcomm deal on national security grounds.

the idea being if qualcomm were taken over, it would somehow hurt the u.s., hurt our interests. you can imagine a similar argument made with electric vehicles and especially batteries, because tesla has a big chunk of the total electric vehicle production, definitely in the u.s., and plans to have a huge amount of battery production. so you can imagine that being an issue and it will be one of many headaches that tesla and elon musk will have to deal with in the coming weeks, months, maybe even years. emily: meantime, this report on the sec sending a subpoena. david, walk us through the continued hurdles that remain to getting a deal done. david: yeah, so elon has a lot of things he has to get done here. first of all, the issue with the sec seems to be getting worse and if this does mean they are opening an official investigation, as max was saying, you now have this. it will take a long time to wind through this unless the sec

weekly concludes he didn't do anything wrong. there are some shareholder lawsuits out there. he was sued when they did the solarcity deal, when tesla acquired solarcity in 2016. that didn't hold things up then, but this is now related to whether or not he had funding lined up and whether or not he manipulated the stock. so these lawsuits are sort of running in parallel with what the sec is doing. again, more hurdles for him that could take time. and then look, he's got to get a number of shareholders -- in his own words, about two thirds of them -- to agree to exchange their public shares for a private holding, something less liquid and something that is controlled by a man who obviously doesn't like scrutiny and may not be, certainly won't be as transparent once the company's private. he has to do that and convince the saudis or others to buy out ones who don't want to go along with him. a lot of steps here that are both market oriented and legal that he has to get done just to get to the point where he can really push the deal ahead.

emily: meantime, max, the board is under even more scrutiny and looking at the board dynamics, musk has said he will abstain from these discussions, as will his brother, who is on the tesla board as well. you also have some tesla board members on the board of spacex. there are reports tesla board is lawyering up. talk to us about the very complicated board dynamics here. max: yeah, so even in a normal buyout situation, this would be sort of rough, right? because the ceo has a huge amount of control and influence over the company and it is hard to have an arm's length transaction. this situation is worse for two reasons. first, because elon musk is so central to tesla's valuation. if he were to resign or be pushed out, you would imagine that the stock price would probably fall because a lot of people believe he is crucial to this company's future. the second problem is the board makeup, as you were saying,

where a majority of the board members have very close connections to elon musk. so it is hard to imagine how they are going to evaluate the transaction objectively. and you could imagine further lawsuits from disgruntled shareholders who may say they are not getting the best deal possible. on the other hand, we are not seeing any deals right now. it is not clear there is enough funding to make the original deal possible so we may be getting ahead of ourselves a little bit. emily: meantime, david, you have a new story out about the leverage that the saudi sovereign wealth fund now has, now that musk is revealing they will be a big part of this. at the same time, we are in the middle of administration that is working to limit the investment of foreign stakeholders in u.s. technology. you know, how does this add an additional really big wrinkle? david: yeah, this gets very interesting. the saudis already, according to elon, have close to 5% in tesla, according to elon.

and the sovereign wealth fund, according to elon, as strongly hinted in his letter, they would take on a bigger stake to help take the company private and he has been talking to them since 2017 about doing that. one analyst estimates they could end up with a stake as large as elon's, around 20%. if that happens, he is out of the public markets and doesn't have a bunch of short-sellers sniping at him on social media and analysts asking questions on earnings calls, but what he does have is now a new shareholder sitting on his shoulders that has a stake potentially as large as his. now, the saudis aren't like bill ackman or carl icahn in the sense that they are going to tell him how to run the company, but if you look at the investments they have made, they do often like those companies to make investments or hire people in saudi arabia. that is part of what they do is bring technology, knowledge, jobs into the kingdom. you could see pressure on elon

to build a giga factory in saudi arabia. that is one thing an analyst speculated about, but they will want something in exchange for helping with this each project. selina: coming up, turkey's president calls for a boycott on american-made electronics in response to u.s. sanctions. what a prolonged crisis in turkey could mean for the iphone and more. and if you like bloomberg news, check us out on the radio. you can listen on the bloomberg app, bloomberg.com, and on sirius xm. this is bloomberg. ♪

selina: president erdogan remained defiant in response to u.s. sanctions in turkey, vowing to boycott american electronics like the iphone and stand firm in the face of what he calls a "explicit economic attack." here is what he had to say at a speech in ankara this week. [speaking turkish] president erdogan: every single product we buy should be produced by ourselves and we sell them to others, instead of buying them from others. electronic products of the usa, we will boycott them. selina: the u.s. has shown no signs of relenting, warning there will be no negotiations about sanctions until a detained american pastor is released. bloomberg markets editor romaine bostick and bloomberg technology's mark gurman joined us to discuss the boycott.

mark: their market share in terms of smartphone os usage is small, 20%, but this news is significant optically. now people are saying, why is the iphone banned in turkey all of a sudden? people who do not understand the trade situation. but what if this is the start of a new thing, where different countries are asking apple to build iphones locally or they will make it more difficult for them to sell? we have seen this in india already and now we have the china-u.s. trade war and now we have turkey. so will this continue to be a domino effect and we will see more of this in the future? that is the problem. emily: apple ceo tim cook did meet with president trump over the weekend. here is a clue on what might have been discussed. tim cook did address the trade him dispute on the earnings call a couple of weeks ago. take a listen to what he has to say. tim: our view on tariffs is they show up as a tax on the consumer, and wind up resulting in lower economic growth, and sometimes can bring about significant risk of unintended

consequences. that said, the trade relationships and agreements that the u.s. has between the u.s. and other major economies are very complex and it is clear that several are in need of modernizing. emily: in need of modernizing. so romaine, tim cook is sort of hedging a little there. and what do you imagine transpired in the conversation with the president? how much sway does a company like apple have as the most valuable company in the world? romaine: it is the most valuable company in the world and is a major employer and has a major economic impact not just on california, but on a lot of other states as well. tim cook knows that. we should also point out this isn't unusual. any time you have a ceo of one of the world's largest companies in the world -- think in the past to names like general electric or boeing, other companies that were sort of at the top, they all had to have

good relationships with the administration that was in power at the time in the interest of furthering their business and really, just making sure the economic environment was stable enough to sort of facilitate whatever it was they were trying to sell. emily: so the president of turkey has called for turkish citizens to buy venus smartphones, which are made by vestal electronics. they are pretty excited. how do their products compare to the iphone? mark: oh, it is totally two different worlds. the iphone is this premium product while these venus smart phones are a little bit lower end, mass consumer. and when you think about the iphone's market in turkey, i saw a stat today on bloomberg indicating that an iphone x, obviously $1000 in the u.s., significantly more in turkey. it is about about 5x the average income on a monthly for some people in turkey, or people on minimum wage income in turkey. the iphone x is not an affordable phone, per se. certainly not affordable in the u.s., but definitely not

affordable to many in turkey. apple does not have as much distribution as they do in other places, only two apple stores across turkey. so in the scheme of things right now, not in the long term -- in the short-term it is not a big deal, but the big problem long-term is if other countries start tacking onto this and are asking apple to build things locally. emily: romaine, given the strength of the turkish lira in general, what is the actual purchasing power of people living in the country to even buy american electronics in general? romaine: it is not high. mark just talked about the five times of what the income is there. keep in mind that right now, an iphone x, the lowest model there would be about 7500 lira. at today's exchange rate, that is around $1200 or $1300 u.s. dollars. pretty pricey, particularly for an economy that isn't at the same level as the u.s. keep in mind, even for other electronics, this really isn't a big market for imported

electronics. when you think about the amount of products that turkey imports from the u.s., electronics is about 1/10 of that, less than 1/10 of that really, and when you get into things like smart phones and other things, it is much less than that. so this is not really an economy that was in a position to afford a lot of these higher-end models to begin with and now, with the depreciation of the currency, it is looking less likely they would be able to afford it given all that has happened. so i think that the message from erdogan is moot to a certain extent, at least until this economy gets back on track. most of its citizens probably aren't going to be able to afford these products. emily: the same for broader american electronics outside of apple? mark: the turkish lira simply makes these products unaffordable to people in turkey. apple has their struggles in turkey. this is not the first time they have had to deal with it. i'm really looking at this from the long-term, the long game right now. how is this going to affect apple in many other countries, perhaps more important than turkey?

emily: perhaps these threats are more bark than bite. i do want to stay on apple for a moment, though. hedge fund manager david einhorn sold shares of apple in the and sold shares of apple in the second quarter, before they crossed that $1 trillion threshold. einhorn, who runs greenlight capital, trimmed his stake in apple by 486,000 shares, reducing his position to about $26 million, this according to regulatory filings. we are expecting more of these 13f filings in the coming days. do you think we will see more of the same from other big tech hedge funds? romaine: i did look earlier today. you did get a couple other hedge funds like piedmont, which had a significant reduction in holdings. the green light one was a little interesting, especially considering einhorn is considered a value investor. it is not clear why he got out of this position, but he has really been on the wrong side of a lot of trades this year, including tesla and gm. as we get more of these filings, we have to keep in mind that the shares did have a pretty good run prior to the end of the

second quarter. so it wouldn't be surprising to see some hedge funds cash in their chips. you know, you could have easily looked at this stock at the end of june and thought that was the top. there is really not much higher this is going to get. of course, they would have been proven wrong, but it is not like they lost money on this trade. apple has been a fantastic trade for the past couple of years, which is the timeframe these funds ran it. selina: that was bloomberg's romaine bostick and mark gurman. coming up, tencent has suffered its first profit drop in over a decade as the chinese government cracks down on new game releases. can the tech giant recover? and later, how an nba champion wants to build a winning team for his tech investment. we hear from the golden state warriors superstar andre iguodala. this is bloomberg. ♪

selina: amazon has decided to aggressively broaden the programming on twitch to take on its video rival youtube, in a bid to grab a larger slice of the advertising pie. amazon is pursuing exclusive live streaming deals with dozens of popular media companies and personalities. twitch is offering minimum guarantees as much as $1 million a year, as well as advertising sales and prescription revenue. it looks like facebook has company when it comes to disappointing tech earnings. this time the results were out of china, where tencent posted its first drop in at least a decade. shares plunged in reaction to the news. the chinese social media giant has now lost more than $160 billion in market value since january. and chinese regulators forced tencent to halt distribution of a popular videogame and frozen approvals of game licenses amid a government shakeup. despite that, gaming and its popular wechat app are still going strong. we spoke to the managing partner

in beijing. >> in the gaming space in china, we have seen substantial amounts of government involvement around regulation, consumer protection. it has obviously been a theme the last few weeks. we have had faulty vaccines, peer-to-peer lending issues. so it is not too surprising to see them have struggled with some of the games coming out of the gate. i think in the long term, those can be corrected. for the sake of tencent, though, some of the bigger issues lie with the losses in total share of user time. other competitors are cropping in, taking up to 10% of what used to be a market dominated by tencent in that space. emily: that is basically like china's version of youtube. mobile gaming revenue declined 19%. how much of this is a result of bigger issues at play, whether it is trade tensions or the chinese government crackdown?

>> the largest cause of the substantial drop is really domestic regulatory processes and problems. there is a bureaucratic shakeup happening in the government now and because of that, there has been sort of a power vacuum. amid that, no bureaucrats want to step out and make a change that could severely hurt the government's broader censorship policy. because of that, these licenses have been halted for several months. for a long time, tencent was seen as this unshakable social media giant, but people forget that at its core, it is a gaming company and they make a significant portion of their profits, of their from gaming revenue from gaming and because of this, they can't cash out on some of their biggest blockbuster games, like fortnite. and the fact that one of their biggest blockbuster games was forced to be recalled after it was announced shows that they are not immune to the issues of the chinese government, and that is why we are seeing this reaction. emily: it is ironic given that the chinese government has helped the chinese tech giants flourish, in part by blocking u.s. technology companies from

operating in the country. ben, do you have any insight into why regulators are cracking down on these games in particular and is there any end in sight? ben: china has been suffering from an epidemic of gaming addiction. some estimates put it at 23 million individuals in china suffering from the addiction here. consumer protection has come to the forefront of the chinese government's agenda, and i think they will continue to look at different modes, platforms. others were hit by this as well that are responsible for grabbing extreme amounts of users' time and sucking their bank accounts try through in game purchases, so i think this will continue to be a trend for the foreseeable future, particularly in games. emily: selena, talk to us a little about the competition. where else are users spending their times? selina: in the gaming landscape, they have a lot of competitors but the regulatory crackdown is affecting industrywide.

we are going to see other players be impacted by this. in terms of engagement, wechat, tencent is facing similar problems that facebook is. it is coming so large and dominant that they are starting to reach saturation, so the growth rate is slowing. this new aggregation app has their eyes on strong artificial intelligence that is able to draw in users and keep them in the ecosystem. there are also a slew of other video sharing apps that are also gaining a lot of traction in china. that being said, tencent still is the dominant place where chinese internet users spend their time. in addition to wechat, they have their financial arm. they have a mini programs app that will draw users. users will be able to directly use services within wechat. so they have a lot of things at work that are trying to keep people within their ecosystem, but that being said, they do have a lot of co-competitors.

emily: what is your short and long-term outlook? ben: in the short-term, they are going to struggle. i don't see light at the immediate end of the tunnel for some of these games, some could get stuck in the regulatory approval process up until even next year. i think their main revenue in driver, gaming, is going to continue to be hit. but i do think there is plenty of potential for them to expand what they do. they need to continue to squeeze the juice out of wechat through improving payment mechanisms. mini apps, mini games. looking to add additional services, as they have with identification, biometrics, things like that and expanding along to new revenue streams. we saw with things like cloud computing and payment surged for them in this quarter, 81%. monthly active users, 800 million. so they do have an ingrained advantage over someone like alipay because people are already in the app and it makes it easy to use things like payments, but they will have to

expand those offerings to cope with the new regulations by the chinese government that increases the reserve rate each company has to have in the central bank. emily: in the meantime, tencent has invested $93 million in hundreds of other companies, including snap and tesla. are there any upsides to these investments that tencent will benefit from? selina: they blamed some profit declines on fewer investment gains in order to bankroll some of their other investments and other services. their snapchat investment, we have yet to see but so far, they have not done well this year. tesla, there is a lot of question about where that stock is going to go. people also forget that tencent has a u.s. investment arm that is very strategic. they have -- here in the bay area, they look at a lot of early-stage startups and looking at the data, they have been relatively active. they have not come with any issues in terms of those areas. those are really focused on the early stages of frontier tech investment.

it will be interesting to see how those play out. selina: that was been harbored of msa capitals. coming up, they are friends on the basketball court, but rival investors off of it. we hear from golden state warriors' star andre iguodala on his tech investment rivalry with his teammate. and bloomberg technology is livestreaming on twitter. check us out at @technology and be sure to follow our mobile breaking news network at tictoc on twitter. this is bloomberg. ♪ xfinity mobile is a new wireless network

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selina: welcome back to "the best of bloomberg technology." i am selina wang. andre iguodala may have three nba titles to his name, but he also has a host of hot tech investments, including limebike and footware company allbirds. the golden state warriors' star is one of the growing number of sports stars making a name in the world of venture capital, and he says it is actually a lot like building a championship basketball team. emily chang spoke exclusively with iguodala on the sidelines of the bloomberg players technology summit here in san francisco. andre: to invest in people, to invest in an entrepreneur. jeff jordan, he has taken me

under his wing, taken my team under his wing. he has helped us tremendously. he helps us invest in an entrepreneur that is not always the company. and both sides of that, investing in entrepreneur is definitely the way to go. people are genuine, people have a passion. people that really want to work hard and have the credentials, those are the ones that most likely will help you see through your investments. emily: what are some parallels you found investing off the court and on the court? andre: similar to being a general manager, actually, and i have a really good relationship with our gm, bob myers. we have a really good relationship, and we speak a lot about putting the right personalities together and putting the right coach in place. it is basically, you are putting a team together to win a championship and it is similar when investing. you have the right entrepreneur, you are putting the right ceo behind them, the right cfo.

you are getting the correct team in place, making the right hires and seeking the best recruits to come in and help your business grow as best as possible. emily: talk a little bit about what your portfolio looks like and where you have had success. andre: so i have been investing in a lot of different companies, whether it be consumer products, like harper wilde or madison reed. but at the same time, sports related, e-sports, tsm was my last investment. lime scooters, another product. that has made a lot of headlines recently. another thing, i have done a wellness platform with arianna huffington and i have dealt with sleep deprivation and doing yoga, meditating, changed my entire diet. that is something close to home that i can preach about every day to not just those in the sports world, but normal walks

of life. emily: have you had any exits so far? have you made any money? andre: i have not had any exits, but i have had some companies who are killing it. i have companies who i passed on and i regretted it. i just got the last round and that is goat, the shoe marketplace, the largest shoe marketplace platform. i actually passed on it because i was like, this is my introductory meeting and it was the first meeting i took, and i kind of did not quite know what to do with it, but it was a great learning experience. luckily i was able to get in on the last run. selina: and off the court, teammates kevin durant and steph curry are also in the vc game. that could mean some healthy competition. iguodala discussed his relationships and investment strategies. andre: we share information. there are some deals i passed on that steph got in. and i am seeing k.d. do some

great things with the deals he is in. they have been in some great funds. i look at it as african-american men getting into a space that we really have not had much to do with, or we have not had much access to. i looked at all of those as positives. the players technology summit is going on right now and you see a lot of diversity, a lot of african-american men. and it is definitely something that when you look back on, whether you make 1000 or lose your investment, that is something you look at as a positive. that is the legacy you want to leave behind. emily: a new fun has just bend launched called the culture fund, $50 million to back black celebrities black athletes, and it is to make money, but the proceeds go to boosting black nonprofits. what is your take on this fund?

are you part of it? andre: i am not a part of it, but i have great relationships with a lot of those guys. chris lyons, you probably would not expect me to say his name but that is a close friend of mine and he is working hard with that. obviously, mark and ben. they are close with it. but for me, a lot of those people are within that fund and it is a great thing. the hidden genius project is an oakland-based project where they teach african-american young men how to code and follow them throughout the rest of their lives. we have black girls code, they were at the players technology summit last year, and we have all-star code, which is an east coast-based group which is looking to spread and collaborate with the hidden genius project. so whenever you see our community being embraced and then we take that and give it back to our kids, that is when we start to see change and when you start to see our culture

being able to be equal. that is equality, giving access and having opportunities that we did not have previously. emily: $50 million for a company that has $1.5 billion under management, does not seem like much. there has been chatter that it is not that big of a fund. it could be so much bigger. andre: but it is awareness as well, because it could be bigger. the awareness, that conversation is good. it is not enough. what are we going to do to make it bigger? do we do it on our own? it comes to a time where it is up to us to do it on our own. and you see that with lebron james and the amazing thing he did with the i promise school and how that has caused a lot of chatter. kevin durant is doing some amazing things with conway, ron conway and tovar conaway, building track and field facilities for colleges and schools. michael jordan supposedly did

not give enough of a backing of lebron, but his jordan brand gives out scholarships to kids every single year. so just starting a conversation or providing starts it, and hopefully will continue to grow it every year. selina: that was our exclusive interviews with golden state warriors player andre iguodala, speaking at the bloomberg players technology summit. a group of tender founders, executives, and early employees have sued iac and match group, claiming the owners are trying to cheat them out of billions of dollars in options. the group, which includes former ceo sean rad, saying they are creating a low valuation version of tender to avoid paying the group money due under options agreements. coming up, dropbox ceo drew houston on running a company and the recent departure of dennis woodside. later, cisco gives a bullish forecast for the coming quarter,

signaling confidence that supporting consumer networking products is working. we will hear from ceo chuck robbins. this is bloomberg. ♪

selina: since going public in march, dropbox has had ups and downs. the stock price spiked on its ipo and again after its first earnings report earlier this summer, only to dramatically fall after the surprise departure of coo dennis woodside, despite another quarter of strong earnings. we caught up with drew houston and talked about what has changed for him since going public. drew: in some ways, it is kind of back to work or back to business as usual. and part of our path to being public, we have been running the company like a public company for the last couple of years so if anything, it has been back to recruiting and building. emily: you reported strong

earnings and you also announced you're coo, dennis woodside, who was there for four years, is leaving. investors seem spooked by that. should they be concerned? drew: i don't think they should be concerned. dennis has been amazing, and an incredible partner to me. when i think back to where we were when we joined the company, we were a fraction of the size, if you hundred million in revenue, and and now we are a global company with 2000 people and offices around the world. and it is actually because the business is in such great shape that he can pass the torch. so importantly, he has built an awesome team and we will miss dennis. and i am sure he will continue to go on and do amazing things, but i am also sure that the team he has built and led will as well. emily: what is your plan to get more individuals and corporations paying for these higher priced subscription plans? drew: we have been making a lot of progress, and to me it starts with building a great product.

over the last quarter, we added a bunch of improvements to the core dropbox experience, things like dropbox paper, paper templates and a number of improvements to the admin experience for ip admins. when we think about driving the option of the higher tier plans, some of the newer features like smart sync are only available to the highest tier individual subscription or the business version of dropbox. so we focused first on engagement, focused on making the product as good as possible, and we do a lot on the back end to drive conversion and build into the product ways to match people with either the paid plan that makes the most sense for them, or functionality they are not using yet. so if you are running a space on your computer, we can show you smart sync and that has driven a lot of our expansion and growth in revenue per subscriber over the last couple of years.

emily: at the same time, you have these cloud giants like amazon, google, and microsoft wanting a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. what will drop box due to differentiate itself? drew: for us, competition is not zero-sum. we have existed alongside the companies like microsoft office and google pretty much since the beginning. what our customers turn to us to do is tie it together. with office suites, they keep you within their apps but when we look at our customers and we look at their phones, they have got everything. they have got all the microsoft apps, they have dropbox, google, and nobody is helping them pull that together. so the fact that we partner with everyone and that we helped organize all of your content across a different ecosystem is playing to our strength. emily: that said, the cloud landscape is changing dramatically and i feel like you and i have been talking over the

last eight years or so, and it has always been about the competition. what keeps you up at night given how fast the landscape is changing? what do you worry about? drew: there is a war for talent out there, and that continues. making sure we have the best people and also making sure we are placing the right portfolio bets. it is striking a balance between continuing to improve our core product and also developing new products like paper, and planting seeds for future products that will be part of the core business. emily: what about acquisitions? do you plan to do any? drew: we will continue, absolutely. buying companies has been a great way for us to build our company, so whether that is bringing great talent in, we have done a couple dozen talent acquisitions, and even projects like dropbox paper have been seeded by those acquisitions. being a public company makes it easier to do larger acquisitions so that is something we will

continue to look at. emily: any areas in particular you are interested in? drew: anything that helps us -- people work better together. we take a pretty wide view of that, and we look at acquisitions in terms of how we bring great talent to the company, how do we accelerate our product map or how do we accelerate our business. emily: when you look at where the growth will come from, will it come from adding new customers or somewhere else? drew: really both. we are focused on subscriber growth and rising subscriber revenue. at the former, we look at our business. we have hundreds of millions of people who are monetizing users who have registered for dropbox. 11.9 million subs. we still have a lot of headroom among people who use dropbox, to grow. so we continue to be focused on driving subscriber growth, and we have been focusing on that a lot. those numbers have gone way up over the last couple of years. selina: that was dropbox ceo drew houston.

time for the latest installment of our next job series, where we look at the careers of the future. tech giants like amazon and alphabet are causing a buzz with their trials for drone deliveries and the race to get operating commercially, but in rwanda and east africa, one company is up and away. zipline has been part of a remarkable network, delivering blood by remote drone to hospitals since 2016. aki ito tells the remarkable story. ♪ aki: this is rwanda. nestled between these plantations, village homes, and meandering mountain roads is a patch of land no bigger than a football field. from here, this guy launches drones that carry blood to doctors racing to save their patients' lives.

>> my name is abdul and i'm a drone operator. aki: abdul works for a startup called zipline. >> this is where we catch the drones, the recovery system. and in front of you is where we launch the drones. aki: zipline is headquartered in california, but it is west of rwanda's capital, kigali, that the company has launched one of the first drone delivery and services. >> so beautiful. aki: does it ever get old? >> no. aki: abdul and his coworkers are tackling a deadly problem here. rwanda is among the poorest countries in the world, and much of it is connected by winding, bumpy dirt roads in the mountains that get washed out in the rainy season. that has made it incredibly

difficult for regional hospitals to procure blood in an emergency, leaving doctors unable to perform any -- many life-saving operations. >> the hospital have to procure the car, drive for three or four hours to kigali, get the blood, and come back. the idea is to give access to people who live in rural areas to the health care system. aki: when a hospital asks for blood, the zipline team gets moving. >> if it is a typical day, you grab a package, launch it. and then you wait for the next order. aki: guided by gps and other sensors, the drone flies itself to one of the hospitals it serves. then, it reaches its destination and drops off its payload. hospital staff retrieve the

supply and the drone heads back to base. abdul is doing pretty well for himself these days. he has got a job he loves and he is studying for grad school. but all that success today is built from unimaginable tragedy. when he was three, the rwandan government stepped up its decades-long assault on the houthi minority, ordering everyone in the hutu majority to kill all houthis. in just 100 days, 800,000 people were slaughtered by their neighbors and their friends. >> when the people in the genocide showed up, my father was the first to step out. to be the voice that was talking. asking where, where is the rest of the family?

basically, they hit anyone and everyone with a machete. aki: abdul survived. his two siblings and his parents did not. his grandma found him and took him in. >> [speaking native language] >> the first couple years of school was really hard. aki: you were dealing with the trauma. >> yeah, and after that, i found my life again. i said ok, so i get my education right and then i am happy with my life. i feel like i got another chance to live, and i think using it for serving the community and making an impact on other people's lives is what makes it for me.

selina: that was bloomberg's aki ito. coming up, cisco reports higher revenue from all regions in all of its major product areas in the latest quarter. we hear from ceo chuck robbins about the company's transformation. this is bloomberg. ♪

selina: in its latest earnings results, cisco took a bit of a victory lap. they say its strategy and product overhaul is clearly working. ceo chuck robbins discussed results and changing customer needs with bloomberg's jon ferro. chuck: we had a good quarter. i think this strategy is clearly working. our product and the innovation we are bringing to our customers as they navigate this multi-cloud world, they are being well-received. we saw growth that was very

balanced across all of our areas, and this transition we talked about, the business model work we have been doing continues to take over with our software and subscription business continuing to grow. to your question, relative to what is going on, we have a lot of things happening around us right now for sure. so if you look at our performance, i think we have clearly driven a significant amount of innovation in our portfolio. our teams have done an amazing job, and at the same time we have had a strong global macro economic environment to operate in. and right now, we obviously have some dynamics with the rising dollar. we have some uncertainty in some of the emerging countries. we've got the trade dynamics. so those are things we don't necessarily control, so we will have to deal with those as they evolve. but right now, things look really good. jonathan: chuck, we will talk about the transition a little more in detail. you bring up the u.s. dollar and it always interests me. how do you handle that?

is it something you have hedged or do you let it rip and balance it out over time? chuck: we have gone through this, you know, at various times over the years, so our teams know how to manage it. we actually have a set of processes that our teams deploy when this begins to occur, and then we typically come out the other side. but it is something we have dealt with over time and will deal with again. it is the reality of running a big multinational global business. our teams know how to handle it. jonathan: more broadly speaking, i want to understand the pickup in business. is it related to the strength in balance sheets in general or rising business confidence in general, or is something else happening, where we are seeing the spending driven by the modernization of legacy i.t. systems? chuck: i think it is both. i talked about this on our call yesterday. there is clearly a lot of business confidence. there is a lot of economic tailwinds right now, but at the same time, the launch that we did last year in our

intent-based networking portfolio, the collaboration portfolio, the security portfolio, those things are really resonating with our customers. when you look at the catalyst 9000 we launched, it has a software subscription on top of it and the fact that it is the fastest ramping product in the history of the company. that says there is some deep innovation there. that is obviously being bolstered by great economic conditions, so it is a little bit of both, but we will take both when we get them. jonathan: what about the conversation to have with clients at the moment, chuck? give me some insight on what your customers are investing into more generally, and more specifically, what are the areas of lower priority at the moment? chuck: if you look at what is happening with our customers, they are undergoing a fundamental shift in that historically, they have run their applications in their private data centers and now they have applications running in their private data centers but they also have -- they are consuming saf applications and

services from public cloud providers. their networks and how their traffic is flowing has fundamentally changed, and how they need to deploy security is fundamentally changing. so they are having to rethink their entire i.t. infrastructure, the architecture of the security, and we are at the heart of that. that is a big thing they are all focused on. selina: that was cisco ceo chuck robinson speaking to bloomberg's jon ferro. that does it for this edition of "best of bloomberg technology." we will bring you all the latest in tech throughout the week. tune in each day at 5:00 p.m. new york and 2:00 p.m. san francisco. "bloomberg technology" is also live streaming on twitter. check us out at technology and be sure to follow our global breaking news network at tictoc on twitter. this is bloomberg. ♪

taylor: "bloomberg businessweek." i am taylor riggs. a lot going on in the magazine. tyson wants to be your one-stop shop for all things protein. jason: and tmz's shift from hollywood to washington as it breaks into celebrity politics. taylor: a lot going on in turkey with threats of their financial crisis and any contagion effects it might have.