taylor: i'm taylor riggs, and this is the "best of bloomberg technology." we bring you all of our top interviews from this week in tech. coming up, crowd strike found themselves in the middle of the trump-ukraine scandal. we hear from the ceo in an exclusive interview. plus, peloton begins trading and we speak with the ceo after a lackluster opening. and exit stage left. ebay's ceo steps down from his role at the online

marketplace. who will help invigorate the floundering company? we begin with what was a historic week in washington. on tuesday, nancy pelosi formally opened an impeachment inquiry on president trump. the investigation centers on a phone call president trump had with the president of ukraine and whether he betrayed the nation's security by seeking to enlist a foreign power to tarnish a rival for his own political gain. in this case, the son of former vice president joe biden. while not tech related per se, an interesting company did show up in the partial transcript of president trump's call. that company, crowd strike. i spoke with the ceo about the mention of his company in that presidential phone call. >> the only reaction i have is that in 2016, we actually

performed the dnc investigation. we worked closely with the fbi and turned over all the forensic data, and we stand by the conclusions we have, and they were backed up by the intelligence community. i think a lot of what we have done has already been said, and after that, you know, i do not understand where we are with things. taylor: fold this forward, then, into broader comments about where you think your company fits into general election security. we are approaching 2020. george: election security, i think, is an important topic. if we think about how electronically connected we are with voting machines and we are past the hanging chads of yesteryear, i hope, so when we think about the ability to protect those systems, it is incredibly important for our democracy as well as the integrity of the election itself, so it's a big topic. taylor: what is your role in working with, let's say, federal agencies like the fbi, or with the dnc or the rnc?

where do you see yourself playing a role? george: we are certainly not partisan, so we help all sides of the aisle and work closely with a lot of state, local, and federal government agencies to make sure they have the best security in place going forward. taylor: i could do financial analysis all day long, so let's dig into some of the earnings and what we can expect from you. let's go through the income statement. talk to me about topline growth. i'm looking here, really solid, triple digits. expected to slow maybe a little bit in the coming years. where do you see sources of future growth? george: one of the things when you look at crowdstrike is its ability to cross sell modules. that is a key element of our success. when we started the company, we looked at companies like salesforce and workday and thought there should be a pillar of cloud computing for cybersecurity. the security cloud had not been done before. part of our success is being able to collect data, security telemetry at scale and be able to create new modules and be able to cross sell that into

our customer base. if you look into our most recent earnings report, about 50% of our customers have four or more of these modules. we have 10 of them today. that has worked out in our favor in terms of being able to go back to our customer base in addition to getting new customers. taylor: has this shift to the cloud provided a lot of future opportunities? george: absolutely. i think that's one of the areas where we have seen the model we ave created as a true native architecture be embraced. it's one of the reasons we have been so successful. in 2011, end point security delivered from the cloud was so popular. it is not just about endpoints and laptops and servers. it is really about protecting workloads, and those could be on premise or in a cloud like amazon or the google cloud, and that is really important. you have to be able to protect these wherever they are at. taylor: when we look at the bottom line, not profitable yet, but losses are slowing. what is the pressure to be profitable? george: the way we look at it

is first, what are the unit economics? we have really good unit economics, and as some of the legacy -- i call them fossilized vendors -- get acquired, change their business model, try to move to the cloud, which is difficult for them to do, we think it is a great opportunity to go out and get new customers. we added 730 net new customers last quarter, which is over double from the year before. as long as we continue to increase the rate of adoption of our technology, we will continue to invest there, but the amount of money we spend on sales and marketing from a unit economic perspective is right where we want it to be. in fact, it is on the upward end of being very efficient. if you look across the companies in general. taylor: there has been a lot of market consolidation. nantech, vmware being bought out. does consolidation help or hurt you? george: i think it is a net positive for us and a natural evolution of this market. if you look at what happened in salesforce automation, oracle buying sebold. the natural comment around that is the fact that it was hard to shift from a perpetual model of

legacy architecture into something that is cloud-based and truly subscription-based. a lot of the companies you talked about were having a hard time making the transition in the cloud architecture as well as their overall revenue model nd had these mixed subscription models, which is very difficult. taylor: you ipo'ed in june. it has been a tough year for some companies that maybe are not profitable, valuations still too high. any advice you can give on how to ride the wave? george: first, you have to start with a great company. i think the elements of a great company to ride that wave is that they have something to do with the cloud. they are sas-delivered. they have a subscription revenue model. they have higher retention rates where they continue adding new modules or bits. and i think those are elements that make you successful. i think the market is smart enough to figure out what companies have great earnings potential in the future, and those are the requisite

characteristics we have seen, and we are fortunate enough to fall into that category. taylor: that was crowdstrike ceo george kurtz. coming up, a tough ride for peloton. they open on the nasdaq nearly 7% below the ipo price. we hear from ceo john fulley. and if you like bloomberg news, check us out on the radio. this is bloomberg. ♪

taylor: tech ipos were in the news this week. peloton debuted on the nasdaq, dropping nearly 7% after raising $1.6 billion. jason kelly sat down with ceo john foley shortly after its trading debut.

john: we are playing the long game. we see this as literally building millions and millions of subscribers around the globe in the coming years. now we have the money to do that. we are fully funded after today's primary, so we are feeling confident. jason: when you think about the last couple of days and weeks, you mentioned the markets. i mean, wework is on everybody's mind. it is a tricky ipo market, to say the least. do you have a sense of where the miscalculation was? if there was one? john: i tell you, jason, this is my eighth fundraiser for peloton. people either see it or they don't. there are believers and nonbelievers. those who believe, who have invested in peloton, they have been very, very happy, and they -- and we will continue to delight the capital partners who invest in us. jason: you mention fully funded. what will you do with that money?

what does expansion look like? john: we are building a $50 million streaming television studio in new york city, nother in london, where we will hire our foreign language instructors to stream to our german market, which we open in 60 days. we are investing in new content, verticals, the treadmill market, u.k., germany. we are in investment mode. someone earlier today was saying you are losing money. it is semantics, we are investing money and feel good about what we are doing. jason: how do you feel about the consumer market? you sell a very high-end product. we are in a bull market. we continue to be other than some volatility we are experiencing. what do you hear back from your customers, and more importantly, your potential customers about their willingness to write a big check or charge something

pretty big on the credit ard? john: one of the most important things we think about at peloton is the optics of affordability. if you have a bike and you and your partner ride it, it is insane value vis-à-vis anything else. interestingly, you wrote the book on fitness, so you know this, but fitness has been a recession-proof category for the last 15 years. more dollars went into fitness in 2008 and 2009, so there has been secular growth for the last 15 years and if we create the best value in fitness, on verage, our bikes are ridden 12 to 14 times a month, divided by 39, a couple of dollars for a workout, it is obviously orders of magnitude better than going to the boutique fitness world, and we will show over time it is better value than oing to the gym. >> you have described the company in the s1 and the roadshow as all sorts of things, a technology company, media company, it obviously does a lot more.

where will you be primarily spending money? is this a content push coming? john: i would say that at our core, we cannot hire software engineers fast enough. we are a software company, tech company at our core. we've had to learn our way into media, now we have 13 emmy award-winning producers. we just hired this fantastic new chief content operator. she will build one of the most special media divisions in any category. but to your question, the investment will go into technology. we will open retail stores, logistics, more markets, but certainly, software engineering s at our core. taylor: that was the peloton ceo john foley with bloomberg's jason kelly. this week brought pretty of turbulence to wework. co-founder adam neumann stepped down from his ceo role on tuesday to salvage the planned ipo. the copresident and chief financial officer and sebastian

gunningham, the vice-chairman, were named co-ceos. i discussed the shakeup brett wallace and gene munster. >> i think the writing was on the wall. this is where the momentum was. my reaction is to think of this in three chapters. there is the past and things that were very good and things around the leadership that were not as good. the leadership had a lot of the power that built the company. then there is the present, and i have to applaud everybody involved in how smooth this is going. it was just a few weeks ago this started, and they already have some replacements, temporary or permanent. adam, the way he stepped aside, was respectable. so i credit the company for that. it is different from uber's leadership change. it took a lot of time to find a replacement. that is what was surprising to

me, the pace. then there is the question about the future. to circle back and talk about the timing, i think it is unlikely that anything happens in that october frame. equity investors are going to want the senior management to have a handle on the business nd that simply takes time. if i was going to guess, it would probably be early next year if they want to maximize the valuation. they could do something more quickly, but equity investors would factor that in with an even lower valuation. all in, good move but we are still a ways away from an ipo. taylor: brett, i could arguably give you a victory lap. you and i spoke after you wrote a smart but scathing report on wework about their financials.

what changed for you today? brett: what we found ourselves saying about the situation is that wework suffered from three things that are not good news for a company. first is significant losses, the second is opacity making it difficult to analyze the company. the third is arrogance. there are a lot of things to put in the bucket of arrogance, the 20 votes per share, the related transactions, a number of things. the only thing that changed today is possibly the third bucket, arrogance. but losses and opacity remain. and having watched this play out over the last couple of weeks, among our customer group, a month ago i was not hearing anyone saying adam is the problem. even a week ago, i was not hearing that. so this is a new solution, but i'm not sure it addresses some of the problems people have had most significantly about

handing over $3 billion or $4 billion to this company. taylor: gene, i fold you back in as an analyst. corporate governance change does not change the top or bottom line fundamentals. is that still the biggest concern? gene: no, and i know that is not consensus thinking. i think this business, it is a concern if investors don't know that. they understand this business has a ton of cash need. the leadership is really critical here. it sets the tone. think about all the leaders of these tech companies. it is almost like the performance is embodied in of the leader. i think it is critical. i don't think the cash burn is the critical issue for investors. i think they understand

that. if you want to think about upside to the story longer-term, how they spend money will be important and how they scale the business. but this is a little more meaningful if they can really change some of that. and when i talk about the change at the top, that is a really hard thing to do. to change the culture of the business to be more judicious. that is why i think it will take longer to get public. there will be some teething and probably some departures around this before the rank-and-file are comfortable. taylor: gene, talk to me about the big risk of removing that visionary leader. we talked about elon musk, who is associated with tesla. mark zuckerberg is associated with facebook. you talk about uber and their leadership changes. what is the risk you remove neumann and the vision goes with it? gene: it is probably the biggest risk.

that's the catch-22, there needed to be change. but to answer, it is a material risk, culture is critical. as an equity analyst, i always focus on income statements and balance sheets. as a private investor and venture capitalist, i realize with public companies, culture is absolutely critical and cannot be overstated enough. if i had the hefty responsibility of stepping in in some capacity, that would be my number one concern, not to lose the vision. taylor: that was brett wallace and gene munster. coming up, amazon focuses on alexa privacy as it unveils new gadgets in seattle. we'll have the details of their newest product lineup next. this is bloomberg. ♪

taylor: on wednesday, amazon introduced the echo studio, a high-end speaker to rival the apple home pod and google's home max. it looks similar to the home pod, making it noticeably larger than any existing echo. it costs $199 and is available for preorder. i caught up with amazon's senior vice president of devices and services to ask about the changes. dave: we have taken a different take on how audio is developed. we have five speakers built in that gives a sense of music surrounding you kind of how the artist wants the music to be portrayed, and we think that is n industry first, and we are looking forward to seeing how customers like it. taylor: you are taking on big

rivals. sonos, apple, google. are you happy with your penetration rate? dave: we think this isn't a winner-take-all game, first of all. you mentioned one of those companies who is a great partner of ours in sonos. they are great partners. we think customers want selection. that has always been the case with amazon. we offer lots of selection and choice. we want to give that same choice, whether it is sonos or our products, and we are looking forward to seeing what customers think and whether they like it. taylor: the pricing is interesting to me. $199 versus the homepod at $299. it feels like everyone is really trying to be competitive here on pricing. are you worried that it is a race to zero? dave: i don't think so. we try to price our products with as much value as we possibly can. we have always had the philosophy from the first day with kindle to price our products since the first day with kindle as to price our products in a way that we want to make money as amazon in the

device and services business and customers use the products, not when they buy them. if we give them good value and the service behind it is really compelling to the customer, they will use it for years and years. we think the price points we are at now are great. taylor: i was chuckling a little bit when the headline crossed that said alexa will now tell when i'm frustrated with her. how will she be able to tell that, and then what does she do? dave: we built a pretty deep machine-learning model to be able to recognize when customers are frustrated, and it is important to realize we are not checking whether you are frustrated with the world around you or detecting that or somebody in your family. we are only detecting when you are frustrated with alexa herself. and when that happens, we want to try to teach alexa to autocorrect herself. the example i showed was a music example. i asked to play one track. she misunderstood. i got frustrated. she corrected herself. we think it will be valuable on

the path as these digital assistants, alexa specifically, become more conversational over time. taylor: when it comes to privacy controls, what new privacy controls have you added with these devices? dave: we did a lot on privacy today. we added new utterances that allow you to ask alexa, tell me what you heard, so she can clarify that. you can ask alexa in coming months, tell me why did you do that, so if she does something that you did not think was right, you can understand the context of that. and we added a new feature at our privacy hub that gives customers the ability to auto-delete their voice utterances on a rolling three and 18 month window. we think customers will like hat as well. taylor: in between that rolling three or 18-month window, confirm for me if there is audio listening, transcribing, recording before i delete those. dave: we have a different setting, and i think we are the first in the industry to allow customers to opt out of human beings annotating any voice recording that we might

have. you can also turn that off if you want, but some of the personalization of the service and some of the capabilities of the service will get worse if you do that, but if a customer wants to, we want to give them that option. and we have also had, from the very beginning, the ability for customers to delete any single utterance, any group of utterances, or all utterances with the click of a button, and those are in the alexa privacy hub. the key for us is to give customers lots of options, and they can balance the level of personalization with the level of privacy they want. taylor: why is it opt out instead of opt in? dave: like i said, a lot of the capabilities we get from those voice recordings makes the service more important. let me give you one example. we just launched hindi in india last week, or maybe two weeks ago. we know that in the first three

months, as long as we have enough data, that the service is going to get something like 33% better, more accurate on behalf of hindi-speaking customers. if we did not have that capability, we did not have those voice recordings, we could not make those improvements. the state of the art of the science would not allow us to do that. we hope customers will come with us on that journey and be able to have us do that to improve the service. if they don't want, they can opt out and delete their utterances, and everything will be fine. taylor: coming up, ebay is just one of the companies to see its ceo step down this week. what changes are in store for the company after the departure. and bloomberg technology is livestreaming on twitter. check us out @technology and follow our global breaking news network @tictoc on twitter. this is bloomberg. ♪

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taylor: welcome back to the best of "bloomberg technology." i'm taylor riggs. it was announced tuesday the ceo of ebay was stepping down on the -- amid the companies ongoing operating review. underwhen big has been pressure from paul singer. pushing theeen company to spin off some of its businesses, including stub hub. ebay's chief financial officer has been appointed as interim ceo. i spoke with spencer soper about the move. spencer: parts of performance and holding the company together, not selling pieces

that activist investors want sold, this is bringing ebay closer to the scrap heap. it kinda feels like ebay breakup part two. it's a similar situation that -- it's a similar situation that ebay faced about five years ago when carl icahn was pressuring the then ceo to break up paypal. now, we don't have a promising up-and-coming company that they want to spin off like they did with paypal. it's more just to break up what's left over. taylor: what are the activists pushing for in terms of breaking up the company? how do they think they can unlock value? spencer: there's been pressure to sell their ticket market, a local marketplace similar to a craigslist type thing or the start up, offer up. they are there could be synergies.

they are resistant to that arguing there could be synergies. stubhub, for example, they say we sell sports memorabilia and band memorabilia, and if someone is getting a concert ticket or a sporting event ticket on ebay, maybe they will spill over and buy a t-shirt, but those synergies never materialized, and it's been the same story for ebay since the paypal split. there hasn't been much growth. amazon is leaving it further and further in the dust. taylor: what can the interim ceo do that the previous couldn't? spencer: it's hard to find a bigger champion for ebay. -- wenig wasg enthusiastic and took efforts to rebrand it, shed its image as this online garage sale and reestablish it is the place to go to buy new things.

none of it caught on. it seemed like inertia set in. it looks like scott is a placeholder until they find someone else. that's going to be more telling. when they find a new ceo for the company, are they going to look for a person to break it up or someone to re-energize ebay, which was the plan that never really went anywhere. taylor: how can they compete with amazon? spencer: not that greatly. they have tried to distinguish themselves more, and they would even joke at their ebay conferences saying we are not the place to go if you want toilet paper in an hour. amazon has the commodity play. trying to replenish people's homes and cupboards, and eva -- ebay is the place for enthusiasts, like if you are a car buff i do need to find hard to find car parts. if you're into videogame accessories, you might find difficult to find items. they tried to differentiate themselves that way. but, in terms of delivery, you could be talking days or weeks

to get things delivered. those things were difficult hurdles, for shoppers to get over. if you are used to getting things in two days or less, you find something you like, and you have to get it in a week, that's a long time. taylor: that was "bloomberg technology"'s spencer soper. tuesday marked at change at the top of juul labs. as the highly valued company faces a growing public backlash against vaping, the company announced the chief executive officer, kevin burns, will be stepping down. former altria executive will take over. altria said it was ending talks with phillip morris. i caught up with liana baker for all of the details. >> this seems to be the week for ceos stepping down. i saw ebay before, but juul had a lot of regulatory hurdles that i would say that investors ,n the company, like altria

thought the previous ceo did not handle properly. this is quite a fall from grace. the company had been valued at $40 billion. who's to say where the valuation is now. after states are cracking down in whole countries, like india, are banning these vaping products. taylor: you have a formal altria executive taking over. what are the plans for this ceo? >> he is a safe hand to oversee juul's transformation. he had been at altria for many years and had overseen some of the regulatory approvals for that philip morris international is now rolling out in the u.s. through altria. that is a safer product, at least in the eye of these

companies, compared to vaping. he has that strength in washington to deal with these regulatory issues. it remains to be seen what changes he can make quickly. the story gets worse. taylor: i am glad you brought up phillip morris, because they announced they were ending the merger relationship they were in with altria. am i correct in saying the merger is off and the ceo is stepping down, that i am tying those together? >> it is no coincidence, and the sources i spoke to today would agree that while these are companies that are maybe destined to be together, now is not the time because of all these negative headlines and regulatory headwinds around juul. when altria invested, they did not know it would get so bad with nine deaths connected to this and several federal investigations. a really isn't the time to announce a $200 billion merger with that much uncertainty. taylor: philip morrison announced their product that they will work on getting that

into the u.s. and work with fda regulators to get that approved. any sense of the extra competition that that creates for juul? >> it's funny. that company has been around for a while in development and was supposed to be this hot new thing, until vaping came along with juul. these companies seem excited to roll it out. atlanta is testing at there, but i am not spoken with anyone who has used it, i a haven't used it myself, and i'm curious, what exactlyple be smoking because it is heating the tobacco but not burning it. it's supposed to be a milder inhale. we will see how audiences and customers react to it. taylor: that was bloomberg's liana baker. coming up, more discussion as a co-ceo calls for more progressive minded solutions to climate change using technology. and, dropbox dropping details on

its revamped services. we will hear from ceo drew houston next. this is bloomberg. ♪

taylor: australian tech entrepreneur mike cannon-brooks is using his platform to fight climate change. he sat down with bloomberg's ed hammond tuesday to discuss climate, tech, and why the future needs to be ready for more disruption.

mike: we have a very complicated business sector when it comes to this. in finance and insurance and lots of other areas, australia is very progressive about this and worried about climate changing moving forward. even in the mining sector, i'm incredibly pro-mining. if you look at the opportunities for australia, in a green world, what do we make? panels, batteries, nickel, copper, we have a phenomenal amount of opportunity before you get to sun and wind. that doesn't mean the fossil fuel part of mining is incompatible with future climate. we don't have to trans and -- transition out of or put in plans to transition out of. ed: you talked about elon musk a couple of years ago where he said he could build a battery in 100 days and he did. he is the standard bearer of sorts for this push to be more green and more environmentally friendly for a long time. it's representative of a lot of people in the industry who are

making claims about where we should be heading. is there a problem, people like mr. musk who is so aloof and otherworldly that it's hard for the average person to relate to them and say this is something we should be on board with? mike: sure. in australia, we have some phenomenal examples of where there should be opportunity. i absolutely agree. it can be hard to connect to him. he's an awesome character, but he's not a regular guy. nor should he be. he is amazing for humanity, but you have to have both regular connectivity in all parts of society. in australia, we have a lot of examples. we have the highest penetration of household solar in the world. more people sleep per capita under solar panels in australia than anywhere else. that's a movement that can be made. if you are sleeping under solar panel, you understand this. when it comes to batteries, it's

even more crazy. we have more batteries in australia, full stop, residentially than anyplace else -- any other place in the world. then the rest of the world put together, more residential areas. we have these engaged populations that understands the issues. we've got to get that aligned with stable government policy. ed: another area where you have been strong with the government is that you say they need to do more to position the country and the business sector for this sort of wave of technology that will disrupt much of tech, retail, and the obvious industries, but in your mind, every industry will be a tech industry. are they doing enough? mike: we are working well with the government in trying to push forward in this area. obviously, we sensible policy, sensible settings on technology. these are complex topics of encryption and other things. but, we still need to be varying -- be very engaged and move that

set forward. secondly, we need to have a viable tech industry and tech enabled every other industry in australia. a simple stat i like to give is we are 1% of the world's gdp. if we are not 1% of the worlds technology production, we are going to be in trouble as an economy. as the economy moves toward technology, it is the biggest industry in the world and is only getting bigger, we have to be producing some technology in australia. we have to produce 1% of the worlds technology to be 1% of the world's gdp. we need to keep moving the economy forward. that's education, immigration, sensible policies. -- sensible policies settings and all tough areas. ed: immigration is a huge part of what allows some countries to be more successful at technology than others because the tech workforce is transient and will go where they feel the most interesting companies and best opportunities are. what does a country like australia have to do to attract that workforce to an extent where it can produce that level

1% tech gdp? -- that level of 1% tech gdp? mike: we are doing a relatively good job recently. we are in a pretty good spot. it could always be better. to be fair, over the last couple of years, it's in a really good spot. most of the policies settings are sound around you must invest in education, local, and the way we think of it, we need to invest in talent coming up from the bottom. high school and tertiary education, we need lots of graduates. we have lots of talent. that's not the problem. what we don't have is lots of experience. the higher up the company you get, the more we don't have people in australia with 10 years worth of technology experience. we have to import those. and we have to make sure, internally, that when we import half, or an area, the half that

we import are helping the other half, and that is how we grow the economy. hopefully, that talent stays in australia. it's a great lifestyle, great place to live, a lot of sensible jobs, the economy is doing pretty well if you look over a three decade period. we are hopeful we can get that talented individual into the -- we are hopeful if we can get that talented individual into the country, they will stay, and long term contribute to the economy. taylor: that was mike cannon-brooks speaking with ed hammond. coming up, dropbox is dropping details on its revamped services. we will hear from ceo drew houston next. this is bloomberg. ♪

taylor: dropbox is going way beyond filesharing. the san francisco-based company announced new services

wednesday, including a new desktop app which functions as a digital hub where workers collaborate on projects with their colleagues on projects that require access to digital files. --found all about the spaces dropbox bases with the ceo, drew houston. drew: we announced dropbox spaces, which is one of the biggest changes we have ever made to dropbox. it's our first step toward the smart workspace, a calmer and more focused working environment. it changes the dropbox experience from being a folder full of files to an intelligent team workspace for all of your cloud content. dropbox is becoming this new app that brings these other apps together. it cuts down on the noise and makes it a calmer space. -- comber experience. taylor: tell me how you are building on current customers or if you want dropbox spaces to be

new customers. drew: we have built our entire business on collaborating on files, but with the smart workspace, we are going beyond that, on a bunch of dimensions. first is supporting every kind of cloud content. so, you can still have your powerpoint in dropbox, you can -- dropbox, but then you have your others in one place. second is it is a much more engaging experience. in addition to the content, you can see all the conversations around it and the context around it, and you can send someone a slack message from dropbox or see your calendar or start a zoom meeting. we found a lot of customers were struggling, switch between a bunch of different apps. we see an opportunity to organize your working life across all these different tools, while still maintaining a choice to use what you want to use. taylor: talk to me about topline revenue growth. when we dig into your financials, very strong double-digit topline growth. some analysts, though, at least on the average consensus on the

bloomberg terminal, looking like he could slow to the midteens. what are you doing to maintain that topline revenue growth? drew: first, we start with a huge opportunity. in many ways, dropbox spaces expands on our opportunity because many companies or many teams need to collaborate on files, but every team needs to collaborate around content, so we start with solving a problem that every person in every company has. and with the new dropbox and with spaces, we are evolving the experience. now, we have a new generation of our product that does a lot more for our users than we have in the past, and now, our focus is getting in into people's hands. taylor: analysts are starting to forecast what could be your first annual profit in 2019. are you on track to reach those goals? drew: it is a testament. we have a really efficient and scalable business. balancing growth and profitability has always been

important to us, and we have, in many ways, applied the consumer enterprise playbook to business software, so we have this really efficient self-serve motion where people spread the product for free, and that is how we have been able to grow the business, and it has worked really well. taylor: there's been a lot of scrutiny, recently, on unprofitable companies. you've been public for about 18 months or so. what's been the biggest challenge? drew: it has been pretty straightforward for us. in many ways, we laid the tracks for being a public company years before we ever filed for an ipo. so, the biggest challenge is actually something that i think is healthy for us, which is it's like being drafted into the majors. there's a big scoreboard. we've got to perform. it creates a big sense of urgency. on the one hand, there might be parts of that which are

challenging, but i think, in a lot of ways, it builds a healthy discipline and rigor into what you do, creates a lot of urgency. taylor: that was dropbox ceo drew houston. one of dropbox's partners made their own announcement this week. the video sharing company unveiled a tool that lets visitors -- businesses, brands, and agencies find and hire world-class video professionals to create content. ed hammond sat down with the vimeo ceo. >> this really isn't a new offering. it is just another way for us to lower those barriers for businesses and make it easier. we don't think of ourselves as a marketplace business. we are a software and service, or sas, business.

we have a wonderful community, this creative community on scale. the way we can leverage it and add more value is a differentiator. ed: you can't access it for free. you said you're not going to be taking a cut. how do you monetize this? anjali: this is not really a separate revenue line for us. the reason we are doing it is to increase engagement. and retention on the platform. like any good staff business, we are interested in building long-term value and relationships with our customers. the vast majority of vimeo's revenue is annual subscription plans. for us, this is about the more people that are coming to the platform to make video, the more value they are finding, the more they will engage with tools and the longer that will stay. that is good for our revenue. ed: does it give more power to the businesses who were using the site to access content, because they can say this is the kind of video we want or this is the commission we want to put out there, and creators can come to them and say we are well-equipped to provide. anjali: what we see is, if you

are a business, brand, agency, or entrepreneur startup, you need to make more video every day. you are making video for social media now. your audience expects higher quality. almost netflix style quality content. the barriers for you, the demand is there, but it is really hard. it's hard to figure out who you can work with, find someone on your budget. in many cases, businesses are not thinking about video. they are thinking about growing their business. this is really about lowering those barriers. what we found is that there is a high demand for this from both sides of the community. ed: it's impossible to talk about vimeo without looking away. vimeo is one of the companies has its own results broken out. talk to us about the path to an ipo, and where you are headed on

that. this has been said, and it is true. for vimeo, ipo's not a business strategy, it is a fund-raising vehicle. right now, with iac, we have the well-funded shareholder. our focus is not about ipo. it's about capitalizing on this massive market, $20 billion market, for serving the people behind the camera, and not investing in content like others are doing, but investing in the the businesses and creators making the content. taylor: that was ed hammond who sat down with the vimeo ceo. that doesn't for this edition of the best of "bloomberg technology," where we bring you all the latest in tech throughout the week. tune in each day at 5:00 in new new york and 2:00 p.m. in san francisco. bloomberg technology is livestreaming on twitter. check us out.

@technology, and follow our global breaking news network @tictoc on twitter. this is bloomberg. ♪

david: from the time he was a boy, he knew he wanted to make films. he lost his mother at the age of 11. but he first saw his father cry when they went to see a movie together, showing him the power of telling stories on film. ken burns studied at hampshire college. there he made his first documentary about historic sturbridge village. but it was his hour-long film on the brooklyn bridge that brought ken to pbs, and a partnership that has continued for almost 30 films, exploring much of u.s. history, from the civil war to the roosevelts. now burns brings us his latest work, "country music," airing over 16 hours in eight epse