♪ emily: i am emily chang in san francisco and this is bloomberg technology. upstart pops 30% out of the gate. we will talk to both ceos on the first day of trading. the retail landscape could be transformed for good post pandemic.

longtime e-commerce investor joins us to share her take. free speech, privacy, and data sovereignty. these are the pillars touted by the ceo of parlor. it became a magnet for conservative users. butough stories in a moment first u.s. stocks rising on speculation that lawmakers are getting closer to a stimulus deal aimed at reviving the national economy. we have more from new york. president elect biden just told reporters he things the deal will happen tonight. -- thinks a deal will happen tonight. >> you saw the stimulus back and sentimentweigh on today, as did the federal reserve. crude oil and the s&p 500 did

and slightly higher but stocks did drop initially after the federal reserve did not change its bond buying program and did not extend the majority. treasury -- that initially lifted treasury yields in the dollar. -- and the dollar. even though stocks did squeak out again, there was a tilt to today's session. the nasdaq 100 close to a record high today. it was helped by gains in google, amazon, twitter, the quintessential stay-at-home stocks. another bright spot was paypal. it has to do a lot with bitcoin. paypal began allowing its customers to buy and sell reptile currencies, including -- cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin.

bitcoi katie, thank you so much. i want to get back to the much-anticipated stimulus deal. congressional leaders are rushing to finalize a really plan in time to pass crucial government spending legislation. the measures are expected to be worth $900 billion. president elect biden calling the talks encouraging. i want to bring in our congressional reporter. he is on capitol hill at this moment. president elect biden saying he does not expect a deal to happen tonight. >> things seem to be slowing down a little bit. there are some remaining issues. one of the main problems, immigrants did agree -- agree to the state

and local governments. instead, they submitted an offer to the republicans that hands the money to fema. not aats say it is backdoor. a lot of technical back-and-forth on that. we are down in the weeds. if they cannot produce a bill tonight, maybe a house vote on friday and the senate could vote on saturday. i think we are very close. we are getting you details, one headline saying the deal is to include $17 billion in aid for airlines. what can you tell us about the sticking point? >> the airline thing seems to be

a done deal. $4 billion for airports as well. one of the things we are still seeing -- the direct stimulus checks, initially, they pushed for $1200. concerted push. deal only has the $600 checks. it is smaller than they wanted. there could be some movement to get that higher. republicans say they cannot vote for anything over $1 trillion. at this point, it will remain that way because the alternative is to reduce the supplemental unemployment insurance benefit.

that is a key item for democrats. emily: biden has said this stemless built will be only a down -- stimulus bill will only be a down payment. how much weight can we put behind that promise once he takes office? >> the major issue, especially if democrats do not take those two georgia seats, will be dealing with a republican senate. he does have some ability to get some things done next year toward putting forward and infrastructure package -- an infrastructure package. perhaps he can do some government spending to increase the relief. it is going to be a tough slog. , theyare some critics could have cornered trump into doing a $2 trillion deal six

weeks ago. they did not do that deal and they may never get it. emily: mitch mcconnell yesterday finally acknowledged that president-elect biden had won the election. now that you are seeing more republican leaders getting on the side, how does that change the dynamic heading into inauguration day and the dealmaking that needs to continue? >> the key thing is getting the biden nominee approved. start interviewing and doing the background checks for people like janet yellen, who will be the treasury secretary. or the health and human services secretary. we have not seen movement on that. it is going to be something we are looking. biden wants to have his team in

place on january 20. we will be watching very closely. r bloomberg congressional -- r bloomberg congressional reporter. we will be waiting for more updates. popularnt company of a online marketplace wish went public today. their founder and ceo joins us coming up. this is bloomberg. ♪ the usual gifts are just not going to cut it. we have to find something else. good luck! what does that mean? we are doomed. [laughter]

that's it. i figured it out! we're going to give togetherness. that sounds dumb. we're going to take all those family moments and package them. hmm. [laughing] that works.

emily: the online e-commerce wish went public today. -- airbnb andny doordash doubling in their debuts. -- you are priced at the high-end of the range. what is your reaction to breaking the ipo price when so many of these other companies have soared out of the gate? >> thank you for having me. very exciting day for myself and the team. no real reaction.

if i watch the stock price all day, i will drive myself crazy. we expected market volatility. we are focused on the longer-term and utilizing the proceeds from the capital raise to achieve the vision we have been pursuing all along, to and providemerce more along something the lines of tiktok for shopping on your smartphone. the markets will reward us. emily: welcome to being a public company. investors are going to be focused on your stock price. think about price in the final hours given what we

saw with doordash and airbnb, wanting to strike the right balance? honestly, this is not something i have done before. it was getting the right investors to come on board long-term and see us through this journey, which will last decades. emily: plenty of investors have said similar things. an ipo is about along journey. let's talk about what is ahead for you, which is an online discovery where you can connect third-party retailers with customers at low price points. what is your product roadmap? peter: continuing what we are doing. we continue to double down on that. demographic, 75% of

them earn less than $75,000. 300 million households in places like europe, where we have a larger consumer base. innovate.e to make the shopping experience not just about intent and doing fulfillment but really innovating. making it is video -- the shopping experience fun again on smartphones. complete the comprehensiveness of our catalog and be the shopping destination for value-oriented households around the world. emily: quality control remains a big issue. some customers have complained

what they get does not look quite as good as it does in the picture. maybe it is a counterfeit good. some people have received empty boxes. what can you do to get this under control? peter: it is another one of our core focuses, along with logistics. we have a huge amount of consumer feedback coming to us from different languages. our customers provided us with 85 million reviews and ratings. of our products. 72 million reviews and ratings of our vendors. customereet expectations? amplify the products that are working well. of all of the work we have done on logistics, the reason why our business is much more robust, we control over 90%

of our shipments. 2016, we controlled 0% of our shipments. do a lot more in terms of quality control and providing a much more reliable, faster fulfillment experience as well. about from a customer service perspective? when you are working with third-party retailers, you have only so much control over them. how can you take more control of that relationship? peter: we are a part of that relationship, whether it is customer support staff or power users. objectiveroviding feedback on the quality of products within their expertise, and providing guides, answering

questions, and really making that connection. our suppliers are in china and a lot of them don't speak the language. transactions in over 100 countries on any given day. we will continue to scale for a long time. emily: you said you turned down an offer from amazon to buy the company a few years ago. amazon is one of your -- if the most formidable competitor. what is your plan to take on amazon over the long-term given e-commerce is growing? peter: the way i see it, we don't think we are competing with amazon. computer interaction.

i love amazon, and it saves me time. and i can afford it. our customers are looking for different kind of trade up. in order to say -- from this engagement perspective, our platform, over 90% of the engagement and transactions and android overo be ios. it is a different kind of experience. it is a discovery oriented experience. we are predicting what kind of products they will like and getting them to buy them.

inspiration, awareness, and demand for a lot of these products. emily: peter, we will have to leave it there. very interesting to hear your roadmap ahead. congrats. another tech ipo, the lending platform upstart going public. that one soaring 30% in its trading debut. i will speak to ceo next. every year, we set out to do one thing: help the world believe in holiday magic. and this year was harder than ever. and yet, somehow, you all found a way to pull it off. it's not about the toys or the ornaments but about coming together. santa, santa, you're on mute! just wanted to say thanks. thanks for believing.

companypstart, the focused on providing ai solutions to lenders to evaluate loan eligibility went public today, soaring 30%. date up almost 50% print i spoke with -- 50%.

earlier, i spoke with dave girouard. dave: i am not a believer that a pop is a bad thing. for most of us, you want to get through this process. we are a company generating cash. just getting through it before the end of the year and focusing back on the business 2021 is the big one for us. roadblock is going to delay the ipo. did you think, maybe we should wait? dave: we were ready to go. we started this process over a year ago and it was interrupted by covid. we have been in this process for the last 15 months. by no means do we have any interest in postponing it.

emily: your technology helps make loans happen. talk about the demand you are seeing during the pandemic? dave: 2020 has been a difficult year. assumption going in that credit would be abysmal. what has happened is that for the government's stimulus, the consumer has done relatively well. savings levels are up. credit card balances are down. spending is down. which is good for the consumer. ai lending has proven itself. with respect to the performance of the loans, it is almost like covid never happened. the model did well despite the disruption. emily: should investors be at all concerned about the risks they are taking on? helping toand ai

make these loan connections. can something fall to the cracks ? dave: we provide the technology to the banks who are the lenders. revenue is paid by the banks. we do not have direct exposure. our technology performing well is vitally important. that is our proposition to the bank. a better product for the consumer. emily: tell us about the technology. dave: it is like other ai systems, and enormous amount of data that you gather. you are developing machine learning algorithms. very analogous to autonomous translation.age

it requires a lot of algorithms. it is enormous training data. the system just learns and get smarter every week and every month. approvemprove -- we can more people at lower interest rates. notion of ai in it. we are upgrading the software, etc., and that makes it a better product for the consumer and a better product for our bank partners. who are your competitors? what do you have on the competition? dave: almost anybody offering credit to the consumer is some sense is a competitor. they all kind of look the same to us because they use a

traditional approach of credit score based lending. they are similar. we have a model that is so different. whether their five competitors or 100, we have built a proprietary system with a lot of advantages. we have competitors that also serve banks with technology. we are both the consumer and an enterprise company wrapped in one. emily: now that you are public company, what are your plans? how does this help you accomplish more of your goals? dave: first year as a public company is super important. for us, we are a growth company and we need to push the ai further. pushing from personal loans to automotive lending. millions of people are paying

far too much for their auto loans. we can help with that. emily: upstart ceo dave girouard , day one as a public company. talk t ceo of parlor, coming up. ♪

emily: welcome back to bloomberg technology. the social network parler bills itself as nonbiased, free speech social media. it has been the apple choice for -- it has been the alternative for facebook and twitter. john matze is with us now. in a crowded social media landscape, how do you differentiate parler from the other options? john: thank you for having me on . parler is a paradigm shift.

a lot of the tools and things that are central and authoritative on facebook, twitter, other platforms, we are giving back to the people to choose to use by respecting the first amendment and respecting people's privacy. emily: what kind of traffic have you seen since the election? since then, it seems like things have slowed down. john: this has been a trend ever since parler was founded. if you go back to the beginning of this year, we had 300,000 accounts. now we have 12 million. a large chunk of the growth was around the election. a lot of it was six months before the election as well. this is a normal trend in our space. we insert ourselves into what is going on by offer people a solution to not being censored

and not have their data pillaged. during these viral events, we see some great growth and we look forward to having more of them next year. we have a lot of fun once planned. plant.ones emily: let's be fair, you have a lot of conservative viewers flocking to their platform. is there something that liberal users could find value in? john: there are a lot of people on the left on the platform. they are outnumbered greatly by conservatives right now. we are not defined by he was on our platform but our neutrality. tople on the left will want have conversations across the aisle. toy will be coming to parler

have that discourse. what is really nice, especially for everyone, when you follow somebody, you see the content that you opted into. what you want see to see and you participate in away that you've created. if you want to see left-leaning content, follow people on the left. if you want to see sports, you follow sportspeople. you get what you want and not what the platform wants you to see. that is why this is a paradigm shift. these other places are manipulating what you are saying based on data they have gathered on you, which is why i call them data polluters -- pillagers. emily: the president has not signed up for parler yet. do you think he will?

why isn't he there yet? john: i see that as inevitable. it is not something we are basing our entire strategy off of. parler will succeed no matter what because we have founding principles that are required today in changing the atmosphere of social media, changing the direction of our conversation online, one that people are back to the people, back when the internet was new and fresh. that is what we are trying to bring us back to. not a place for big tech oligarchs. if he joins, that's great. if president elect biden wants to join, he is welcome as well. we want everyone to join. one day, we think everyone well. emily: have you had any contact with the administration? john: i like to stay out of marketing and out of these

conversations. i am an engineer by trade and i like to stick to that world. only: facebook crackdown qanon finally after many years. did you see a pop after that? have you attracted a number of qanon followers trying to find a haven? john: i do not think we are the pervert place for -- i do not think we are the preferred place for qanon. the movement, i don't like it. i argue with them on the platform if they are there. we welcome everybody. not that we are trying to find them to bring them there but they are welcome. i am not -- it is not my preferred audience. emily: let's talk about your audience. rebekah mercer, a big conservative donor, how much

input does she have and how you run the business? are you seeking her out for advice? john: she has a relationship as an advance or -- as an investor. not part of the day-to-day. a lot of what we do is central around our marketing team, advisory team. she is not a part of those conversations because she is an investor. if you purchase shares of facebook, you are not welcomed to the day-to-day. it is a similar situation. emily: let's talk about the return on investment. there does seem to be an issue with inappropriate interaction. john: if you look at any social platform, you will get people trying to attack it.

promote advertisements, and agenda. yes, we crackdown very hard on anybody who does that. i would not describe it as a problem. 99% of people don't see it. anybody sharing that stuff, most of it is flagged automatically by our sensitivity filters. it has been manufactured by the press to make us look back. we are building more and more algorithms to put in the hands of people to use to work out any issues they have. either they do not want to see that or they don't like toxic speech. they can have the word filters, the moderation filters, things they can set themselves to avoid any scenario. emily: what are you doing then to make money? if you are not selling data, how will you build this into a long-term sustainable business? -- we arere doing

doing what we call humane advertising. for example, right now, advertisers can blanket make and add to the community. they can also say, there is a prominent individual over here and i want to advertise to everybody following him. they getut a deal and to sent money because he offered his following list to be able to promote to the audience. the nice thing, people are not having their data mined and they are not being targeted in a creepy way but we can still have humane ads that are making us a really good amount of money. we opened this network two months ago in beta form and we are seeing a tremendous return

already. emily: there has been some concern about the experience being buggy. there have been some glitches. up 12ve managed to rack million users. you have the ftc scrutinizing facebook along with other branches of the u.s. government. success prove that facebook is a monopoly -- that is not a monopoly? isn: parler is proving there a possibility for competition as much as people are trying to stop us. rightfully so because we are bringing in a lot of people every day. in regards to facebook and

thingr, parler is the one stopping the government from going into these antitrust suits because we are proving competition is a possibility. our success is their saving grace. emily: interesting take. john matze, fascinating to hear your vision for the service. thank you for taking the time to join us. we will hear from kirsten green on the board of his and hers. next. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: his and hers has attracted a quarter of a million subscribers in just three years. the company provides primary care and mental health services and even covid tests. it is also planning to go public. green,joined by kirsten founder and managing partner at forerunner ventures. his and hers has rapidly grown with a very customer friendly interface in just three years. it has turned into a telehealth provider. what has been the secret to the success? kirsten: from the minute the company launched, they knew they struck a chord with the consumer. in the first week, they

a million dollars in recurring revenue. the team has been focused, because the moment is right. it is what consumers need. it is part of a modern trend. with this early traction out of the gate and success, the team is focused from early days and thinking about how to build an organization that can thrive as a public company. emily: they are now planning to go public. why go that route instead of a traditional ipo? it is only a three-year-old company. airbnb waited 12 years. kirsten: it is a 2.5-year-old company. the team feels confident about

the opportunity. they feel they have built a trusted and high quality health platform. we are offering in 50 states today, enabled more than 2 million consultations across dozens of different categories. it is brought to the forefront the demand and the need for telehealth services. everrs became harder than -- it offered a couple of things that were relevant. one was the speed and the certainty and flexibility given that it is a young company. in this case, the team found a trusted partner with the oaktree team. you invest across consumer and retail technology,

e-commerce. how do you think the retail industry will be forever changed as a result of the pandemic? kirsten: that is a great question. all of us are wondering how we will be forever changed. nine months have been -- has been a long time and you habits have been formed. of big things -- new digital behavior. people were shopping across expanded categories like never before. instacart and many delivery companies, doordash. peopleere still a lot of who discovered them. given the nine months in, habits have been formed. people are more comfortable shopping across a broader set of

categories online. a lot of it has been a positive experience. of omni-channel retail. we have been talking about it for over a decade. it has been largely lipservice. this is the first time you saw retailers at scale jump into action to say, how will we use the resources we have to meet the customer in this moment? you saw things like buy online and pick up in store take hold. there are new ways that people like to shop and new elements of the business model. lastly, the importance of local came into focus. need or the desire to go to your local store or the conversation of the importance

is of those businesses to the fabric of our towns and cities. people have shopped local. people have ordered food from the restaurants. they wanted to support local business. are goingse trends the direction where a lot of things were headed. this year, they really took hold. emily: you have been active getting more women entrepreneurs funded. i am curious how much progress you think we have actually made. do you think we need more mandates? honestly, emily, apparently, we do need more mandates. the stats are nowhere where they need to be -- nowhere near where they need to be.

it would take decades to get to parity when you look at gender diversity and minority diversity. from any angle you look at it, do we need more focus on it, and it is yes. mandates can be helpful because they offer a stake in the ground of what is minimally acceptable. it is the threshold you need to at least be operating at. imagine that i every board is having this conversation. we will be required in short order to have two diverse directors. two is not enough but it is a start, and we will take it. one female and one underrepresented minority. in the market, of the 3000 companies public on the nasdaq, 75% of them do not meet that

criteria. there is work to do and putting something out there, this is the minimum, that will at least move the needle to that point. once they get there, they will start to see more dynamic conversations. they will have deeper connections to their audiences that they are serving. constructive for business and those benefits will lead to more parity. obviously, at your firm, there are many talented women investors. exhibit a for how it can be. kirsten green, great to have you back on the show. thank you for taking the time. facebook taking a bite out of apple, taking out a full-page ad criticizing the iphone maker in

major u.s. papers. i will tell you why, next. ♪

emily: facebook is attacking apple in a series of full-page newspaper ads. criticizing the iphone maker's plans to restrict some data gathering and arguing the anticipated software changes are bad for small businesses. strategy facebook is taking. what can you tell us? >> it is very interesting. we know the two companies do not like each other. we have seen their ceos exchange barbs. we have seen them come out with statements especially around this ios update. this is the most aggressive facebook -- facebook has ever

been against a competitor. it seems to me they are trying to do two things. they are trying to deflect some of the attention they are getting for some of their own antitrust issues. they are trying to shape their own reputation. a company that is here to fight for small businesses during a time of need. i'm not sure how well it is working but it is a big swing for facebook. emily: isn't going to work? -- is it going to work? >> i don't think facebook's reputation is strong enough for anyone to take them seriously. i posted the ad on twitter and nine out of the 10 responses i got were this has got to be a joke, right? this is the company that uses our data to show us targeted ads and make money. when you swing at a company like

apple that does have a lot of goodwill, facebook is learning that is a hard thing to do. next point.is my his facebook being a little -- is facebook being a little tone deaf here? it's max of desperation -- it smacks of desperation. >> read the room, facebook. i think facebook sees this as a chance to lean into the things it thinks it does well. really provide services for businesses that are struggling because they cannot do in person shopping or sales. if you are a small business, facebook is a good tool for you to reach people. facebook understands that and realizes it is better at that than most anyone else out there. it is leaning into that in a way

that is probably good but they are trying to stand up against apple at the same time, which is difficult. emily: any sense that apple was at all rattled? that theyrstanding is were a little surprised with the aggressiveness that facebook showed today. they have been exchanging these types of barbs for a while so it was not totally surprising. but it was a big step for facebook. what i don't know is whether or not this will change anything for apple. we have seen them delay their ios updates to give people more time to prepare for them. facebook and take a little but of credit for that but i would be shocked if apple were to come out and change everything in the way that facebook wants them to. it is hard to convince apple to do that. emily: ok. that is one to follow.

that doesn't for this edition -- that does it for this edition of bloomberg technology. i'm emily chang in san francisco. this bloomberg. ♪

anchor: good morning. we are counting down to asia's major market open. anchor: welcome to daybreak: asia. as fed jaygold rise powell says the case for new physical action in the u.s. is strong. he also says he will not raise rates until inflation is back on track. anchor: the p