long period of time -- >> [inaudible] >> it's a little bit, i mean, that would be rough, but the scale that we're operating at, but we were for a long period of time. and it kind of means that every problem that you encounter related to to scale is going to be twice as bad many two months' time. and so you don't have a lot of time to fix it and address it. but it's very exciting, and it focuses the company, it focuses everyone on, you know, what's really important. and, of course, it also helps attract and retain a lot of talent. so the only thing worse than growing really quickly is not growing very quickly. for a start-up, it's a lot worse the other way around. because growth, you know, it kind of feeds on itself. it's, growth is how start-ups kind of put a stake in the ground about their vision of the future. it's how you say, listen, we are right. this is the shape of things to come.

and it's sort of how you prove that to the world. and that means that when you're growing, there's a lot of challenges to that, but you also can attract all the best people, you attract a lot of capital, you get attention from the press and from customers. and so it's much worse -- it's a much better state of affairs than the alternative which is to be growing fairly slowly. >> and what's your sales pitch to engineers and sales people as you continue to grow? >> our pitch is basically that businesses only have three systems of record. they have a system of record for customer information which is sales force, they have a system of record for financial information which is, like, you know, oracle and net suite and intuit for much smaller businesses, and they have a system of record for employee information. and right now there is a gaping hole in the universe for that third leg of the stool. and by by the way, we think it's by far most valuable of the three for a lot of reasons. and, you know, all of the

companies, you know, that are successful in these spaces are, you know, 50, $100 billion companies. and we think that our growth indicates that zenefits is a company that is shaped like that hole in the universe. and so our pitch is like, listen, you know, this is a chance, this is a chance to work for a company that, you know, on some level what we do is dreadfully boring. but, you know, in several years' time, zenefits, i think, will be something that's used by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of businesses around the united states to make life, you know, a little bit easier around this crucial area of, you know, compensation and benefits and compliance and, you know, all this sort of stuff. you know, and that's a fun and really important project to work on. >> and why was this an area that fascinated you to begin with? >> well, it's an area that was a real pain point for me personally. so a lot of our product road map at zenefits comes from stuff that i personally just resent

and dislike doing as a company founder, even today. so i'm still the only adman in our system. so we have people in hr now, but they actually don't have access to the hr system, and i kind of do all of it myself. >> why is that? just for practice or -- >> because i'm a little crazy. [laughter] but mostly it's because it means that i experience a lot of the pain points in the product. so, you know, right now one of the things that happens is at our scale we get a lot of employment verification requests, people trying to -- you know, lenders, people applying for an apartment, that sort of thing. so every time that happens, i have to go into the system and help pull that information so we can respond. and so we're thinking, gosh, how do we build, like, an automated sort of employment verification system that, you know, employees can use and do this themselves and, like, take that work off of, you know, sort of hr staff at a lot of companies? so it reveals to me, like, a lot

of the kind of pain points and a lot of the stuff that is not fun to be doing. >> and you guys deal with some interesting regulatory challenges as well. from what i understand, you guys are now aca compliant? >> well, we're launching actually today, we're launching a product which is basically free affordable care act compliance, you know, for all of our customers. and the thing about aca compliance is it's one of those things where, man, super boring, but let me tell you, none of you guys want to deal with it. and starting in january and february, at the end of this year, beginning of next year, you know, almost every business in the united states is going to have to start filing, essentially, a second tax return. so if you think about the tax return as a business that you file today, you're going to have to file a second one with the irs for, you know, essentially health insurance benefits. and it's something like people are estimating it's going to take most businesses about 13 hours of work a month to do this stuff and probably about 3 or

$4,000 a month to kind of cover the cost of doing it. and zenefits is going to do this completely for free, and we will do the whole thing for you. so we will track everything, we'll, you know, keep track of all the data, we'll fill out all the forms, we will file them for you -- >> so is this mostly a problem that small businesses have to deal with or larger scale businesses also have to deal with it? >> one of the things that happened with the affordable care act, by the way, i think zenefits is pretty much the only business in the united states where more government regulation is a good thing, because they've created more problems that we can solve for our clients. and when companies are doing all this stuff in our system, when you're, you've got your payroll connected up, you're doing your benefits, time tracking, all that stuff through zenefits, we actually have all the information we need to handle a lot of this other stuff for you. all of that stuff ends up becoming almost like a protocol level that we can build applications on top of them.

and a lot of those can be compliance-related where we can just handle this stuff for you. and, you know, for larger companies they have, you know, just armies of people that can handle all of this administrative work. but for smaller businesses, you know, if you're a 75-person company, you know, you don't have someone whose job it is to spend, you know, an extra 15 hours a month just like tracking all of this boring aca compliance stuff. so if you can just give that to zen efits and make it go away, that's pretty cool. >> that's one of big sales pitches in general for smaller companies, right? >> yeah. make all of the stuff that you don't like go away. and really we think of our sort of mandate as everything that has, like, a nexus to the employer record. everything that has some tie to employee information which is most of the core systems of running a business, when you think about it. because we have all that information, all that data in our system, we can just entirely

eliminate all these headaches associated with this stuff. >> and you primarily work with smaller businesses, but verningly these -- eventually these businesses are going to to grow up in theory, right? do you expect to grow up with them? how do you convince them to stay with you as opposed to other hr providers? >> right now our size is 5-1,000 employees. but we're much bigger than that ourselves. there's no fundamental breakpoint that to occurs at 1,000 employees, it's just that above 1,000 employees, other stuff exists. ..

whether it is getting the documents and letters signed, getting them setup set up on benefits handling compliance and then then there's a button when you need to terminate someone that does everything in reverse and as things change they get married or have a kid or any of that kind of stuff all the systems automatically update and so the way we think about it is

what are all the places when you buy your new employee and where do they need to get set up. across other parts of the organization but someone needs to get up and running before these different systems. and we are going to partner with others to sort of get integrated into connected benefits. we want to keep those connections connections open it and opened and wanted businesses to be able to choose the payroll company that they work with. can you elaborate a little bit more on that?

the quality is very binary. it is completely one issue. you don't buy a house because the plumbing is really great plumbing. there is a solid payroll system the clients can use for the benefits that we think the differentiator. the differentiator is about the

applications that you can build on top of that to make people's lives easier. you've written this roller coaster and what would you recommend for people. there's never been a higher where we've stretched on the amount of equity that we were going to give them. it's going to be expensive and should we go there. every time i turn around three months later we are so glad he did that i don't know where we

would be today if we hadn't made that move. do you have a story behind that? >> i think for me when i started benefits i was probably you know, listen we are just going to have engineers and sales people and what are these other functions like why do you need them. it was a long time before we had a really solid finance teams in place and i've been wrong every step of the way in terms of all that stuff. every single one of the changes i look back. all of the things that we were a little bit late you can't do everything at once but in rich

respect, i wish we had started all of that sooner than we did. >> would you advise everyone not too as they are running their companies to not do? >> i would probably worry a lot less than most people give him. i focus on getting the right investors in very early on the very early on raising more money than you think you need. i started a company before this where we struggled to raise money and we were told no by everyone in silicon valley and pretty much all of them outside of silicon valley as well and so we aired on the side of raising a little bit more than i thought we needed at every round and we always ended up finding ways we

could use that to accelerate growth or invest more. >> how do you deal with this competition with people coming after you and things like that? they are either pivoting to sort of focus. a lot of people are acknowledging that this idea, sort of an all-in-one system while it's a lot of the systems were disconnected which created a lot of headaches for employers, this idea of an all-in-one system is like the right approach to the market so you see a lot of people adopting that marketing messaging and branding in some sense a reflection of what the benefits the marketplace. i think there will be be enormous advantages to scale in the market both in terms of the

system of record for employee information and also on the health insurance side we've build real electronic interfaces with all the major insurance carriers and that means we can transact electronically when almost everyone else is having to deal with this stuff and we can do that because we are the largest source of business for almost all the major characters in california in terms of the amount of new clients so they are very willing to build integration and stuff like that. i think it is going to be a long time before other companies can get to that kind of scale. >> thank you so much for joining us. ' the

>> remember what i said about the letter and how if you you will be tweeting and it's not as exciting as you think it would be but still a prize so we will be watching. in the meantime devoted to the next panel. if you are into that, get ready. please welcome the next guests than a pauper from "the new york times," bobby lee from china and the moderator john banks. [applause]

>> we are selling that bitcoin today. this guy right here. everybody knows what it is. >> that would be cool if he showed up. i am a reporter. there's also another reporter down here who wrote a book about that bitcoin which is a piece of paper, multiple pieces of paper that's closed up and you can read inside of it so he wrote one of these which is fascinating and folded all of the pieces of paper. the founder of bitcoin china.

for those who are not familiar with give them a three word description you'll have the description to give them. >> i might take five words. a giant spreadsheet in the sky. the world's first digital asset the best form of money. now it's all going to fail and are mine safe. >> the height of bitcoin two years ago i see much better investment in infrastructure

than we needed a it going on right now as opposed to the hype. just like a lot of interest around $600 million in a very short pier co. of time and everybody's expectation is that it would change in six months and that didn't happen. we are paying the price for that right now and hopefully things will begin to get on track soon but they are getting better so even though i hope things get better soon i can imagine them getting worse before they get better. >> you're saying that they have been excited about the idea that it's too young and expected massive returns. >> never happened before. this might be unusual. >> it's sort of like they say the best time is the worst of times. what's great about today is that we actually have bitcoin.

we live in great times and we have a digital class and we could have on the computer by phone that's never been done before so that's the best time. we are also in the year were almost two years of the market it hit over $100,000 so for a lot of people they lost faith but i don't think so so it's good to be interesting things i things ahead of us on the next few years. >> all of those that did raise hand a chance for you to look at it right now. in this case it is good unless you got in early than that is a whole different story than you have a tesla. >> i think what's happened is that bitcoin has a reminder

about what money is. it's about trust and it was initially sold as a trust with system and i think that's why a lot of rotarians got into it and it's attractive to a lot of people because it promised this thing that was run by code and you didn't have to trust humans and i think what the experiment has reminded people so far is that money always involves trust and is about knowing somebody else is going to want this tomorrow or thinking somebody else is going to want this tomorrow and with bitcoin, there've been a lot of things that have made people not trust it and people got excited about the idea that you have to get more and more people to trust this thing and i think that the underlining code is still very strong. it hasn't been broken and that's something remarkable why wall

street is looking at it today but for people to use it as money they have to trust it and if they trusted they trusted less than today the price could go down further and if there is a problem with the code and if the cryptography behind it is vulnerable it could become worth with much less on the other hand again as i mentioned wall street right now is plowing lots of resources into this exhibit is a reason to think that they will be collected. what happened after that because you actually did your diligence.

i spent some money testing the robustness of the protocols for the service on top of the particle and my assessment of the protocol is the one just briefly mentioned which is that it is robust and you can always have a service on top and that is what happened here they were frivolous or incompetent but if you have a problem with the provider end of the provider isn't up to par. >> so they are getting stronger and better. you yourself are putting the private keys into space or where are you putting them?

>> we keep them off-line in one location. >> where do you keep the keys to this place? they are in places like switzerland. >> so you like the way that nathaniel per trade you your per trade as half a half man who comes down and does amazing things and you are a gently style action hero. you didn't read this part yet but did you like the book that

he wrote? >> i did like the book and i think they've done a good job of being at the same time entertaining and bitcoin has a very short story. if you read the book you get up to speed and everything. that made the impossible to do but right now they do a great job getting up to speed in a very entertaining way. have you guys read the book yet, digital gold plaques? do you have any stories from researching the book where everybody could make it? >> the book opened at this event in tahoe and the latest edition was just this weekend at a

private event held at the capital that brought together a lot of the big people and what's interesting is this event was held at the vacation house at the speed boat on the lake. they were scattered around the globe and a lot of them not social people and then you see the development and that is what drew me to write the book is that it is a great story if nothing else if it goes away tomorrow the fact that this came out of nowhere six years ago and became a global phenomenon and something people actually spend money on is crazy. and at the same time to understand the technology it really is useful to understand the people behind it and the

people that were deciding to use it is a very forgiving topic. it was a lot of different things and in this case when you grow up in argentina you can tell us about it, he grew up the grandson of immigrants escaped the communist revolution and of those historical experiences played into why it was attractive and very attracted to do very different things in very different places and that tells you a lot about the world even if you're not going to buy bitcoin and it tells you why it could matter and what it could

do in the future. it gives them a good chance of not going away. >> so they are not going anywhere away. so if any of you bb that i might go away as long as it is with us at will be with us because it is really the world's first and most successful form of electronic money value that isn't controlled by any government or system, so it's already moderately successful i would say and the reason it is is because people tell you this. so the genie is out of the bottle. i can imagine a couple of ways in which it disappears and there

are the things i don't know so i would say that i'm i am the most biased speaker i can imagine and even then i always tell people they shouldn't own an amount they cannot afford to lose because there is a chance that by non- trivial i say 20% but again i'm very biased. at the same time there is a 50% chance that it's worth more than a million dollars. so it is 200, a thousand times so it makes sense for 1% of the savings and it can make a lot of sense but no more because it is a risky investment. >> has it stopped being a compelling investment and is it no longer -- if i put a bunch of money into decline beneath the bitcoin rideout what do you

think over the past couple of months? >> i think what it comes down to is if it succeeds, is it like the protocol and that is the big question that faces them right now is the predecessor to the thing that matters or is it the thing that matters? is a decentralized spreadsheet in the sky that everybody keeps and that is the idea that right now a lot of people are putting a lot of money into and i think that that genie is out of the bottle and people are going to find ways to use this in exciting ways and the question is are they going to use it in a decentralized spreadsheet or are they going to use a different kind of spreadsheet that they build?

>> the second they have existed for a long time. >> about these keep the private database that they keep. the banks currently seem to believe that if all of them come if 20 of ten or 50 of them are maintaining their records together and if one of them goes down, if in the system where 50 people are keeping the ledger one of them goes down you still have 49 of them and that's more robust. >> i don't think it has anything to do. the differences in in the difference is in the different banking system and the private lechers.

>> this debate that we are having right here is the debate over whether it's going to matter what the technology that it's introducing to the world that is introduced in the world. >> it's either in the concept or bitcoin is a -- >> i think no matter what, it is likely to continue on as long as the technology -- the banks can predate their private database and continue on. the question is how much each of them draws in. right now there's still a lot of people using bitcoin it solve for legal transactions but it's not the only reason to use it. if the banks go over here and create things people are still going to want to use bitcoin. there's still good reasons to

use it and so you're going to have them both. the question is does this this end of beating into this so you get the 1 million-dollar value -- >> i feel like you they feel you have some nerve to you right now. what are the startups that you are expecting to see him. what needs to have been for the next generation or the next iteration of bitcoin? >> a lot of people here that's great and the entrepreneurs here i would say as you start the idea gets to something really passionate and so for me it was bitcoin. so for me running the startup is

hard. so going in the area that you are passionate about and for us it was bitcoin so we are still very excited about it despite the fact the industry has wavered a little bit. what do you want to get to the next? who >> the things that have to happen for another 600 million that have gone into the companies and we are beginning to see the infrastructure of the $600 million but just at the beginning so i think that is happening. i think that there are some interesting things that can happen either on top of bitcoin and some of the most interesting things here are creating a separate and there are some companies doing interesting stuff. >> if they say you have

unlimited resources to work on the problem of solving money it would never occur to me to work on building a public good. it would be in the con strains of the company that has intellectual property to raise money and the board of governors in the service. the way bitcoin is they have none of that. it's basically developing the public good. so when you think of what are the problems out there that a benefit, it is a public good that is shared between all of us and there is a lot of ways of trusting the company to solve it and we think of the entities that come to mind. >> for me in fact the near-term problem seems to be less in money. ..

i really like the blaster but i don't like the internet. it's ridiculous. they want to say something nice

about without saying something nice about it. >> friends and neighbors. >> but they don't realize the blockchain does not work without it going. the blockchain is the first decent -- the minors maintain it because they get paid in bitcoin. none of them work without the minors being paid with bitcoin. >> this is beautiful. i love this stuff. were these guys any good or? are we happy? [applause] >> thank you very much, friends and neighbors. let's head out. ♪ >> hello. am i on? is this thing on? the fork is in bitcoin, that's good. it's always w weird to introduce the images i'm going to do that i'm very, very excited about this one. when i first met our next guest,

i was a little bit flustered. he is a big deal. and he asked me what is the greatest questionable? i kind of sputtered out a few really awkward answers, and he asked me, no, are we alone? gary miller -- yuri milner is one of those successful investors in the world. he's exploring with his cash and we're really excited to have him join us on stage. please welcome the yuri milner. [applause] ♪ ♪ >> welcome. >> thank you. >> you are worth $3 billion. is that correct? >> possible. >> possible. no comment? my first question is like you invest in these companies that is most to reach like huge demographics of people, the everyday man. do you feel like it's hard to relate to the end users to the services you invest in?

is it hard to relate to the end-users of the companies that you invest in? >> well, it's sort of interesting that we have to investments around the world. 40% of our capital is in u.s., 30% in china, 20% in india and europe. and one would think that things will look very different given the diversity of cultures and demographics and so on. but what you see again and again and again is a lot of similarities that a lot of business models with small variations the repeat themselves just all the time. spinning you've got that pattern down.

[inaudible] >> that $200 million investment on facebook will put you on the map as an investor in a lot of ways. you had a $4 billion gain and then you sold the stake in both facebook and twitter, right? >> well, we usually don't talk about selling our positions, but we made big investments in both facebook and twitter, invested $800 billion total in facebook, and 400 million in twitter spirit and you don't want to tell you whether or not you sold the stock. but you should be the twitter ceo? >> the thing is that we, as a matter of principle, we never joined boards of the companies. and this is not for us to make those considerations. >> let's talk about that for a little bit, not joining boards. you are kind of running every hands off investment strategy.

was the purpose of that? why not get involved in? >> well, we do get involved but on an informal basis. when we invest in companies, many of them already have strong boards, and we will never push ourselves onto those boards. but we do keep a very tight dialogue with the founders and we often help them with some insights just from our experience globally. if you would see something interesting in china or india, which can be applied in u.s., in a particular situation, and that's where we come in and bring the founders attention to all those amazing phenomena happening around the world. so that's how we see our value. in addition, we develop this

strategy of trusting the founders to the extent that we always give our votes back to the founders so they can vote our shares. >> do you think your money is more attractive to founders because you historically have never taken a board to seek? >> i think initially maybe if that was the case when we made our first investment in 2009, but more we see recently that it's our sort of global experience and something that would bring to the table, which really matters when they make decision to take money from us. >> you said the other day, how many trips to the moon and back have you traveled? >> the team is really small, but the way we are different from probably most of the other funds is that we have one team which is global, when king is covering

all the continents. and that really makes our job pretty physical when we have to move around a lot throughout the year. and just before coming on stage i did the quick math and it turns out that six partners collectively are traveling to the moon and back three times a year every year. >> okay. that's a lot of travel. speaking of international investments, you've invested in transportation startups in india and china. you said in an interview that hoover was kind of a big blob, that she lose a little sleep over over. given the conversations going on right now around 1099 and w-2, in general like regulation issues with over as they continue to expand, are you still losing sleep over the deal or is it something are kind of

okay with? >> you have to start sleeping again at some point so you can't just not sleep for a long time. but i think over is really -- uber is an amazing business and the reason this is so much more difficult than facebook and google is that it is really very much off-line business but actually the consternation of off-line and online which really makes it much more challenging to grow as fast as they have. it's really called for a special type of person to run these companies, because of this unique combination of off-line and online and the skill set which is required for that. >> okay. what about like the fact that private valuation has been so

ballooned up and the public market gets the hits on the ethics of down? do you think uber will live up to its 40, $50 billion valuation when it goes public? >> i think so. what many people don't realize is that uber cannot be valued based on the market because uber itself is growing the market. so when that is taken into account i think the valuation is absolutely justified. i feel very confident that uber will do very well from that point onward. >> so you said earlier that about 40% of investments are in china. your portfolio. i think i read on the internet, hopefully it's correct, about 60% of these gains are coming from china. clearly a bird's-eye view of that space. with what's going on with china's economy, is that part of the same pattern of kind of growth plateau we've seen at a chinatown or something larger happening? >> it's really hard to say at

this point in time. the next few months i think will give us more evidence and clues of what is really going on in china. but i think if the u.s. experience is that any guidance, if you go back to 2008, 2009 when really we would making our investment in facebook, it is clear evidence right now that even in a crisis situation when economy is not doing well, some of the tech companies can actually accelerate. it's easy to understand because many corporations and individuals are more thinking about saving. of course, technology provides those saving opportunities. and i think it's very possible that we'll see a similar pattern in china. >> so you have a 70 -- present

state. is that a tech companies are benefiting from this type of situation? >> yes. and because they are producing high quality, inexpensive followed, i think the world will be a significant drive inside the china and other developing markets to get high quality thing, maybe half the price of some more established brands. >> you also have investment in jd and ali baba, e-commerce platforms in china as well as wish, another e-commerce platform and attorney. can we throw up the slide i had? chinese growth in e-commerce as well outpaced that of the u.s., despite the fact they got a later start than this. why do you think that that is the? >> well, it's really an incredible phenomena. china really started 10 years

later, 2005 roughly versus 1995, and the e-commerce market is larger. but what's really incredible is that it's growing faster. so u.s. e-commerce market is growing roughly 15% year while chinese market is still being significantly larger, is growing 50% a year. and actually there are a few reasons explained that. one is that the retail and u.s.e as much more organized. there is about 85% of retail is actually organized in u.s. versus 20% in china and 10% in india. so from that standpoint even off-line retail in the u.s. is doing pretty well, so there is less of a disruptive potential in e-commerce. on the other hand, the density of the population in u.s. is significantly less than in china

and india. if you take top 10 u.s. cities in all three countries, then you would see the chinese cities being twice as dense as densely populate as in the u.s., and in india actually four times more densely populated. of course, the density of the population is very conducive to efficient shipping. this is one of the drivers. but i think the hope for u.s. markets is that the recent data, especially around generation y., shows that in the next few years and maybe this is really the beginning of the big trend, there will be more opportunities for e-commerce even in u.s.

if you look at the data, baby boomers have, you know, 75% of baby boomers who wanted to live in a single-family house, then they can certify% of generation x. and only 50% of generation y. so this is really dramatic shift into moving from single-family homes to multifamily homes in the u.s. another encouraging sign is that 90% of generation x. and baby boomers have the propensity of using cars to travel to their jobs, while only 75% of generation y. does. so you see some interesting science of e-commerce becoming fundamentally more economical even in u.s. so i would say that the

possibility for more e-commerce, opportunities in u.s. is really opening up the next few years. >> i want to transition to the future. elon musk has interesting things to say about artificial intelligence. essentially he is not a fan. he thinks it's an existential threat to humanity. what do you think the future of ai is? >> i would disagree with elon musk on that one. although i may be a fan of his space exploration and, of course, tesla. but here i disagree, and the reason is that i do not believe that artificial intelligence is going to develop the way that he thinks it will develop. that robots will completely dominate humans and we will be chasing them and getting rid of them ultimately. i think that what we see very

clearly is that there is a convergence between human brains and computers. so google is a good example of that. when you have 1 million people feeding the machine, all the content on google is created by human brain, and then there are bunch of servers that are analyzing this data and feeding it back into the human brain. so that is a very peaceful coexistence between us and google. and our brains are slowly adjusting to google being around. the same thing with facebook. around a billion people are answering information -- entering information into facebook and been servers analyzing this data. so that's why i think artificial intelligence will develop. essentially a combination of computers and the human brains. another interesting example is chess. it is very obvious that beginning in 1990s, computers

are better at playing chess than humans. but all the tests that have been done so far show that if the computer is assisting human to play, then maybe it's another computer. so human brains -- a human brain plus the computer is always better. if that is evidence of how it will play out in the future i think that is what will happen. >> rest assured, everyone, we are going to be safe with ai. let's talk about your $100 million investment in breaks you -- breakthrough initiatives. we are going to hunt for intelligence extraterrestrial life. why go for this very liberal and shot now? why is the timing right? >> well, other than it was my childhood dream, actually many factors have converged to launching this project now. one is that we now have a scientific evidence that emerged

in the last few years due to massive telescopes that have been launched, especially the kepler telescope. so that became clear now with scientific rigor that there are probably 20-40 billion earthlike planets just in our galaxy. what i think earthlike planets companies pretty much, you know, what you see when you look outside. they would be liquid water. there will be all the conditions that life can use to proliferate. a few years ago we had no clue. maybe it would be a few plants like ours, maybe there will be many. but now we know that just in our galaxy the number is more than 20 billion. pretty much every second star which is the size of the sun has a planet similar to earth in a

habitable zone. so now we have two options. one is to ignore the scientific data and decide let's continue business as usual, and the second is, let's try to do something about it, assuming a given so many possibilities, somewhere life has emerged. there's also additional evidence that life on earth emerged very early after the earth cooled down. we have 3.5 billion to go between -- and other possibilities existing around the world have many more billions of years. we know the universe is 4 billion years old. the second is that no -- as much

as any previous effort in a year, just because of the software and hardware. and also something which is routinely not appreciate is that to communicate between civilization is actually very cheap. i've prepared a couple of flights to demonstrate that. if you just call the first slide. >> bring up the first slide. >> actually the previous slide. this is the largest telescope on earth. it in puerto rico. it is 1000 feet wide and we've been using it for many years. the next slide, please. if you can imagine another civilization is no more

developed than us and they have exactly the same telescope, somewhat in the middle of the milky way, then they will be able to communicate with us just using the same equipment. next slide. so it is extremely cheap to send a signal across 150 quadrillion miles just using the equipment that we have. the transmitters that are routinely used. next slide, please. now this is a more challenging task, how taking a cake between galaxies. this is a nearby galaxy called andromeda. let's assume the civilization exactly like ours is sitting there. this is much further out. it takes 2.5 million years to send a signal one way. what would it take to send a signal? the next slide. so this is the biggest energy

generating facility that we have on earth. it's located in china. if you go to the next slide him it takes only two of those to connect to the same kind of transmitter to communicate between the galaxies across enormous differences of 15 quintillion miles. is a cheap endeavor to communicate between even the galaxies. so making the bet that somebody should be sending something out of their, this is our responsibility to keep looking. >> part of the breakthrough does not just looking, but decide how we communicate when it's done. i know that you open source that asked people to submit their own ideas, but i'm curious what you would do if you were in charge. what would you say to the intelligent life that we find? >> it's actually a nontrivial,

complicated question. because not only you need to come up with the content but also you need to come up with the coding. that's why we think maybe a few people in this room will even participate. we announced a $1 million prize for the best message that if we hear from them, we will be able to send over. so this competition is ongoing and we will announce the rules very shortly. >> about what would you say? >> i don't know. i didn't think enough about it. >> fair enough. last question. what do you want your legacy to be? >> well, this is not for me to answer that question and hopefully i am not done yet so we will see in the next years. >> i am sure you're not done. if you so much. appreciate it. [applause] >> he is so cool. i kind of have it crushed on him, and i'm gay. next guest. not a soul in your has not used

dropbox, another one of our battlefield companies. please welcome to the stage drew from dropbox at our moderator matthew panzarino. [applause] >> excellent. i have to say these chairs are fantastic. is a much better than the ones in new york. you sat in them and they swallow do. pretty awkward. dropbox has been criticized recently for kind of a lack of focus narrative about where it's going anywhere it's been. i'm sure you have a different idea internally but externally it seems there's been a bit of the entry as far as product placement. do you think that's fair, that assessment? >> with dropbox and the product would solve a lot of problems into instruments. if anything hard part for us is

like choosing between all these interesting challenges that we can take on. maybe some of the confusion arises from, when we launched here like seven years ago, or at one called techie, company started with his believe that everybody should have his home in the cloud for the stuff. we would be much better off if the stuff was a stock on the phone at our computers. fast forward to today, mission accomplished. everybody lives in the clouds. now you have new problems where now my stuff lives in one of the places in the cloud. like how do i get to come how to sort through all of it? the direction we've been told in those by our customers is they are like help us work better together. like someone please make this very complicated world simple. now we have 400 million people on the platform. what we are building is really this way for people to

collaborate with that connects every person, every company, every ecosystem in the world. world. >> what shape does that take? does that take the shape a tool where people can make an of access to the files and documents alongside that were something like quip? what you do and don't take advantage of that opportunity to? >> the way we think about it is we started by just getting, paper putting the most important information in dropbox. i think there's a lot of moving parts. first of having a place for that. and then second when you think about what collaboration is. like storage, communication, i count you coordinate people. you can see some of that reflected in the products. always enjoyed how to remove friction from these everyday things you're doing, and how do we make it easier for you to work with other people? things like a badge, kind of like cloud enabling office or

versions of office people have on the computer so you can share and eventually communicate from top box -- dropbox. so for sure bringing forward the factor of the people around and moving from just a place to put stuff to a place where you can work with other people that is the big thing. >> from a passive repository to an active workplace. is dropbox growing at a sustainable rate? >> yes. if anything it's like we're struggling to keep up your we have 500 people in the beginning of last year, we are not 1500 down. acting with four offices. now we have 11 and growing. this is a problem that everybody here has or every person in this room, every company in the world struggles with these challenges as potential not just to be a just dropbox at a paying

customer. i think it starts there. like the recipe, you can't have a huge market. you have to offic to have an ofm at a product people love. every year does get better for us. >> in terms of growth, when you strategic conversations internally to discuss what would happen if we have an implosion of sorts? we heard this morning they say they felt that wasn't the case. d. talk about what would happen to dropbox if it happened either lost access to easy forward-looking capital in terms of the private market to? >> we don't talk much about the broader market in far but. we started in 2007 and i was like the peak of the boom time. than 2008, market is down, back up again. i think that's certainly something you have to sort of plan four, things go well or not well in the markets generally but for us whether the economy

is good about, people saw these problems. our focus is more like how do we, we've only come into the we are leading in the space with only a small dent in the problem compared to what we can go. we think about our business model. since we launched in 2008, the business model we chose back then was kind of agreement approach we could use dropbox for free and subscribe if you use it a lot. that's been this incredibly powerful base. we have laid on additional businesses as those 400 people of dropbox have brought dropbox into millions of businesses. we found companies are buying dropbox at a faster rate. this is the year larger customers have kids. we have household name companies like under armour and news corp., nbc, all kinds of different larger companies spent

let's talk about the dropbox deduces thing. how many business customers deeper we have and how many of those are paying? >> we have about 130,000 paying business customers and as growing quickly. something like 8 million businesses using dropbox and maybe -- >> backdoor using? >> i think it depends. small company may be can use the free product for a while but we see that we had this conversation all the time to a company like a news corp. many thousands of people using dropbox in a mix of the free and pro accounts before they switched over to dropbox for business. 130,000 is, to put that in context, salesforce has often wondered 50,000 paying customers. it's a super efficient model. >> you mentioned that customers. is the kind of your goal right now to snipe those whales to say

hey, we need to compete these purple have a significant user base using dropbox inside of companies into paying business customers? >> is such a big opportunity. if anything, our customers have pulled us up into these bigger companies because we could actually and we are huge marker with other other stuff we are doing. but we've spent a lot of time growing our sales team and the channel. we hired an awesome new leader, thomas hansen, who helped spearhead the transition. spent he's working mostly international or local? >> there is opportunity everywhere. roughly evenly split. we have been opening up offices all over the world. >> how many people here use of dropbox? >> all right. >> seems like the majority. how many of you are actively transferring files in and out like once a month?

okay, a little bit less but -- how do you count those active users? do you counted as people of items their saving and dropbox or do you counted as people actively utilizing the product, transfer or share? >> enter what we do all kinds of segmentation on activity. will recall single player versus multiplayer cases and we really want, we'll focus on building out, helping people collaborate in dropbox. >> if you're to characterize your biggest user retention problem at the moment, what would it be? what is the hard bit about keeping people using dropbox? >> i don't think it's keeping people using dropbox isn't really a problem. sort of like of all the things that he is dropbox for, how to solve all the problems in a really big way, i really good way. because it's both kind of, it's

very horizontal products because people can share photos with dropbox. they can collaborate in dropbox. in which anything you have you can put in there. so supporting all those different cases as a interesting challenge. >> you said before you think that dropbox is fine with some of its own infrastructure and then essentially renting the rest from amazon. have you changed any thoughts about that? >> the hybrid approach has worked for us since the beginning. the only changes that would operate at a much bigger scale now. people saving a billion pounds a day in dropbox, billions of connections between users. that all takes a lot of attention. >> let's get a bit abstract for a second. some people have been talking

about a world in the future, and kind of apple tasted a bit but then rolled back. a world in the future where we don't have a filesystem, was it isn't the folder structure for files, that people just have access on the been estimated in context. this is sort of like the slack approach would if you need a file, it's in context with the conversation you are already having about it. are you preparing dropbox with the world would be initial concept which was strong and still is, just a simple folder to hold separate of you are, are you preparing for world for the folder the longer interest people's consciousness? >> whatever we do want to bring the future faster. we think about all the time we think about how mobile has changed and will continue to change all aspects about how we work and live. i think if you were t to start

with a blank slate is a bunch of things that you can design particularly. the challenge is while files may not be the center of the future, and things like e-mail. i hope we are not all shoveling out our in boxes every morning five years from now. the problem is that stuff doesn't go away. you might have a board and a cloud company can't even like us. when we use all these new tools and our foes over, we still use the fax machine. like every office is like this time capsule of like the last 50 years of tools like paper and bones. i think the challenge is not so much like what are the awesome new things we can build, and like we spent a lot of time working on that. how to type all this stuff

together. give all the social all these decades. none of which were designed to work together and that can we get that to a better place? >> so on the product front you talk about building things that utilize the dropbox all of people to collaborate with dropbox. let's go to the other side and talk about consumers. you guys, launched a carousel and it is about. what happened in? >> people love using carousel. obviously, we would like it to a billion users. it still has way to go but it's early. all these problems are big problems, and we go after them because they are hard and they are imported. if these things are easy or fast dissolve, like someone would have done them already. >> are you guys building an app for the apple tv? >> i'm sure that something, we will look at that. you have to start with like what is the problem people are

having? for sure, i mean, there's all kinds of things you can do with photos and other things. >> when are you goin going to i? windows i could have been? >> we don't have any plans right now. as you know we raised a bunch of money at the beginning of last year so we are really enjoying having the flexibility of not having to worry about that whole universe. >> how people are going to react to every little thing you do. >> yeah. we've been heads down for the last several months of just recruiting and building, think about our next generation of products. it's nice to focus just on that. >> you've done this period of kind of inward looking expansion and things like that. so what's next? how are you going to take that and pay that off the? >> the opportunity in front of us is like again, i think one of the biggest areas where we can help people is like connecting you to the information and to the people that really matter to you.

at our kind of skill, with hundreds of millions of people on the platform, what we really billed as the world's largest platform for collaboration. we want to get to a place where it's like any people come in a group of people in the world in any country in any company using whatever technology they want can work together without problems. it will be simple. and. >> what are you think the apps you need to build or the services you need to offer to be competitive in the enterprise against competitors like bach, microsoft, google, in that particular collaborative document spaces because i think it's already working. the kinds of things were improving is, there's a lot more we can do around communication. i think there's a lot we can do to kind of tie the fina file wod

and the post filed world together. one difference is we want you to be free to use whatever tools you want. or that you are familiar with. dropbox is baked into office. and vice versa. we partner with microsoft. we maven integration with gmail. that kind of thing will continue. a lot of it is just building a strong foundation. people of dropbox because it's reliable, simple. it just works faster. in many cases many times faster than competing products and people really appreciate that. >> are you worried about box? >> we are just, we're focused on, it's a huge market. we are focused on like how do we, wherever we are today, we will be paid -- 10 times bigger. >> pretty. i guess the last thing would be, if you are going to pitch i

guess they'll well, what ago to call a commitment to pitch an overlord, your service, coming to say this is why you have to convert your existing consumer users that are -- what is your pitch? how to go in there and say that? >> i think in our case it's often a lot easier than the typical kind of b-to-b feel. for most products you go in there, get him on the phone and like hey, let me tell you about our product. with dropbox it's like hey, as you know, thousands of people already using dropbox in your company. and we have all these awesome ways for you to manage that the way you manage all the other infrastructure in your company. these people have voted with their feet. that dropbox makes it way better, way more productive in the companies i do know how many employees they have at that say they have a thousand people, let's give the other couple

thousand on there to enjoy the same kind of benefits. i guess verizon is a lot bigger. let's give the other 100,000 of you to use dropbox. >> thank you very much. [applause] ♪ ♪ >> all right. that ended abruptly, and i'm not entirely sure if our next guest is ready to go, but i heard she -- but i sure hope she is but in the meantime, start up allie is happening all along this corridor here that i believe right there. my flight is up, so that's good. you should vote because what happens is the start up allie company that has the most votes is been plucked from the album becomes one of our battlefield companies against to present on stage, in the running just like

every other pre-vetted and rehearsed company. it's kind of exciting. they don't have as much time to get their pitch together. you can do that voting, there's a website somewhere. i think it's start up allie sf 2012015 techcrunch.com. so place your votes there. yes, i got it right. our next guest is ready. i keep getting promise robots. i don't count my roomba as one of those, but our next guest might be able to help with the. please welcome to the stage helen greiner of cyphy works and our moderator, frederic lardinois. [applause] ♪ ♪ >> all right. let's get a show of hands first. how many people here own a

roomba? all right. 25 maybe. how many of you own a drone? the same number. how many of you have mounted a drone to your roomba? [laughter] nobody get. we will get there. if you owned a roomba you can thank alan for that one. >> i appreciate it. >> you founded irobot in 1990 right out of mit. you left in 2008 after 18 years there. why did you leave the? things are going well at irobot i thought. >> it was going well. it was my dream come true. we got over 10 million roomba's out there and robots in the military that saved the lives of thousands, hundreds of soldiers and thousands of civilians. it was my dream come true but i didn't want it to be the only thing i did. after 18 years, the longest

overnight success you will ever see, but i thought i had another comp in the and that's the fun time when you're doing a starter. as many people in this room know. >> did you feel it was just time to go into something else? >> i think it was. 18 years is a long time to do one thing, but again, it was a wonderful, wonderful life experience. >> most startups don't last 18 years. when you left in 2008 did you know you wanted to do drones speak with yes. i knew because i was looking around at what's going on in robotics, and the place where you can make the most impact, the most capability is introspective look around this room, if you get around to the drones, much, much easier than with the chairs and a table in the people's -- the tables and the people and everything. over here it's almost free space. essay that doors. it's almost a superhighway just

waiting for the drones. >> at the time though drones were not really anything, right? it's only the last two, three years we're talking about. why did you think in 2008 drone were already possible? what did you see there? >> it's because those reasons i just mentioned. it's a way to cheat and get where you need to go, getting to easily. outdoors above the treetops, above the telephone polls. it's really free space. you have to avoid a pesky plane once in a while but in general it's a big space and very small drones. >> was the technology there in 2008 already? >> the technology had just come about when you started doing gbs stabilization. instead of getting a qualified pilot to fly, someone who really trained like a videogame, you know pace of the camp said it

ever did at the drone can stay in one place automatically. i saw that as the real key which is going to make things easy for everyone to fly, not just consumers for people in industry. companies don't like to train pilots and have to give them continuous training. they have their own employees to be able to easily find the drones and basically power them. >> couldn't you've done that at irobot? didn't irobot have a lot of resources? could you have done flying robots speak with we are having such success in the ground robots, the roomba and the robots that go into dangerous private on the ground that it would've been stretched to jump in and create a drone company. there's a lot of robotics technology and bringing to the drone industry but there's also a lot of, you know, that's really drone technology, the

aerodynamics, the control systems are very specific that it really is its own thing. >> let's talk about the drone tip on the market right now. they are different from most of the drones the people here are probably thinking about because they are tethered. what is that? >> we have to drones. what is the polar. it's reconnaissance thank you medication and one dr. kent is about the problems achieving the drone with adobe was a great but don't last like 20 minutes. the once very easy to fly. what we did was we put on the campus of the drone can go up and stay up and from that vantage point you get a birds idea of an entire facility. it's kind of like india earth satellite system except it's real-time, high definition, and it always stays exactly what you wanted rather than moving around. it doesn't get hit by cloud

cover and other things. >> how high can they go? >> 500 feet and stay there, you know, we have flown 100 hours. >> the other going up is the pocket flyer, a small one. it's also tethered, right? more agile. what's the thinking behind that? >> we started cyphy works to have larger drones to go into buildings first to help soldiers and police officers and people stay at a safer stand of business. the feedback was this is great, will take some. it if you may want to fit in our cargo pants pocket, we'll take it out of them. we want one for every police officer. that's what we decide, that's our pocket flyer drew big ideas it's on at the. into this big sort out the tethered it would last like 10 minutes. when it goes into building without a tether it would lose life inside so that tether is really an enabling technology,

not just a constraining technology. >> not every police officer has a drone just yet. how close are you to that? >> we have a great relationship with motorola public safety and they the guys who provide most of the police equipment. we are hoping to leverage that to get drones to all the police officers and firefighters and s.w.a.t. teams around not just the country but around the world. >> seems like the kind of enterprise the drone business is going well for you. you have raised about 12.5 million so far. you raised another round this year where, how much did you raised this year? >> we raised 35 million this year. >> you got a good amount of money in the bank at this point. what is your research focused on right now? >> we've been looking at the consumer drone space. we've been looking, a lot of the

drones that are out there, they killed to fly and then they have a -- underneath that takes out the tilt. we think that's a little backwards. if we could just fly level that we could put a camera into the system and make it a much simpler, simplicity in mechanical design is really, really good. complexity is the enemy. so we've been looking at a whole different drone designed that makes it much more portable i think we are really onto something or i think this is the way drones will be built into future. >> i think we have one of those here. and hope we can get what onto the stage. just one moment. we're going to try to not get killed by the drone in the next five minutes. speed and you can see how it's flying completely level instead of tilting into the motion. at any time you can replace

mechanical complexity with competition. we consider that a really good thing. so that's our level one drone. >> very nice. [applause] >> don't i get some benefit from what hangs underneath that? >> you can. we still have to use the electronic image stabilization in the camera, because we still do get some but those large microscopic motions, there is no need to take them out. we believe that simplicity of flight is the key. without drones you're just blind the camera and you have to be able to control the shot. you don't want to set up like a moviemaker we've got every shot plant injected script everything. you may want to see something

and get that shot immediately and that's the kind of thing we agreed with the level one. >> look at these consumer drones, there's quite a few competitors on the market already. fair to say i think. at all have a lot of money. do you think that's enough of a distinguishing feature to compete with these guys speak with i believe it is because i think, what are consumers tell us they want the small size. they want the less mechanical complexity. complexity. we talked a lot of people who fix the drones and it's always a gamble system that goes back. they are very complex system because they are tilting the camera and all the wiring for the cam has to go through this complex multiple degrees of freedom. anytime you can replace mechanical complexity with math and competition and electronic image stimulation we believe that's a good thinker i put the

drones will morph into designs like this over time. it is proprietary but you can -- >> right. there's one side of the business. there's another side that comes to flying drones is the software side. this one is controlled through an iphone if i remember right. it's hard to fought a drone usually. i've crashed many of them and i know what i'm talking about. what are you doing to make it easier? if you want everybody to be able to fly it. >> would let people fly from the iphones and that's a workflow. that's a workflow that people are used to these days. they are used to just trying to positioning yourself, your field of view and a picture. you are used to swipe to fly type of interface and that's what we have on the level one. so instead of learning how to fly with these fairly complex

joysticks, we are making it easier for people to understand how to fly right from their cell phones. it also goes to the portability. you probably have your cell phone with you when you leave the house. you have a smaller drone with you when you leave the house. in fact, we're going to make it a little smaller with six-inch props, not seven-inch props. put it right in your backpack, head of an could ago. i like to say the best drone is the one you have with you, this'll be a really fully functional, capable drone. high resolution camera, full frame rate, but in a small very, very rocket package. >> one of the coolest features i saw was the geo- fencing future you. you haven't talked about that debt but i think it's -- what is that? >> one of the features we put on the drone we call geofence them. instead of having to figure out how to put a fence up in a nappy

basically just walk the area where you want the drone to stay. would you do that first flight, some people we found a little intimidated might end up in a tree or might end up in the neighbors yard. if you want a geofence first, the drone will always stay in that boundary. and then we will also be connecting it to keep out the zones like another startup company that is making a database of where you cannot fly. for example, the white house. you are not allowed to fly on the white house. although i took my drone to the white house spin you didn't flight onto the long ago, right to? >> or over the fence. you're not allowed to do that. by interfacing will be able to help users understand what you're not allowed to fly. the faa also put out alerts, like for the forest fires. i think many people didn't know

that it was dangerous to flying air force buyers, and they were flying the drones and they were entering the rescue operation because the fire helicopters could not fly because we were afraid they might hit a drone. so notifying users that they should be flying in that area. that will not catch the rogue user but i think most people understand they don't want things to burn down. >> the good news was a was one of your drones because we do talk about this as if it's on the market, but it's not quite ready yet to be released. >> you will be on the market next year. we did a kickstarter which was very successful and build a community of people giving us advice and information about what they wanted to do with her drone, and how they would use it which i think is a very great benefit to the company. >> was that the main reason you

did a kickstarter? because you are a pretty well-funded company. you don't need presale visibility. >> we only do things, what we did with the roomba can we build it in the back for many years and we did some focus groups. and then a few years later your throat on the market and hope for the best. the more fun way to do things is put it out there, say hey, we have a new idea, see if there's an interest. it turns out that was, and then solicit what else you want in your drones and we've been able to do that through building a kickstarter community. >> how many presales did you have a? >> it was like 1500. >> a good number. this drone is called the level one. what happens when you reach level two? >> we are really hard at work building the level one right now. kickstarter, this is a prototype. to get something into production does take some time.

it takes a lot of work. there's a big difference. i like to say robot videos are a dime a dozen. maybe robot demos are a dime a dozen but real produce robots they are very infrequent in the world. it does take a great effort to get better, and that's what we are really focused on right now. >> all right, you've been doing this for seven years now. you at irobot for 18. you've got a few more years left. where do you see cyphy works in 10 years from now? >> definitely in the drone space because it is so powerful and so impactful. i believe in delivery drones. you will be getting your packages delivered. you be getting your pizza delivered with the drones but i believe they will be cyphy works drones. >> cyphy pizza delivery drones because we want to be at the

boeing of the drones. rather than the people that run the services. >> do you believe in the idea of the drone of delivered? >> idea. from a technical point of view we can do it. it would take some regulatory and some cultural changes. i believe the faa is right not to allow it today, but if they would allow more experimentation towards getting there, that would be of great benefit to the community. but they will, over time. they have signaled they are very open to changing the rules. for example, not needing line of sight operation once you prove that it's a pity really should have to prevent it safe when you're carrying a five-pound of payload over a populated area. .. joins us by

phone now. guest: good morning. host: bill clinton has stood on the sidelines or at least behind the scenes so far. here he comes, campaigning for hillary clinton. how was the decision made to bring him out at this point to campaign for his wife? guest: i think he always planned on coming out to campaign for his wife. he certainly did in two dozen eight and he remained pretty popular. the interesting thing is he is going to start off doing this in new hampshire. the only primary started doing this in new hampshire. this is the only primary state where there is even remotelytata contest between bernie sanders and hillary clinton. it is a major price but he has been that way for about three or four months now and have times

hillary clinton has closed the gap, but strategically she understands that if she still has a double-digit lead in iowa, if she's somehow able to win new hampshire, the nomination is winning iowa and new hampshire. so they are going to bring in bill clinton and fortunately for hillary she is able to get oakland ten -- bill clinton on and bringing him back. what's interesting is. bill clinton became the comeback kid and is the place hillary clinton said she found her voice

in 2008 when sheep off the remarkable victory in the 2008 new hampshire primary that led to that protracted primary season that wouldn't have happened but with bernie sanders in the lead in the state. >> host: what campaigns will he be campaigning out and what about the message coordinator. >> guest: i'm not sure that anybody can tell bill clinton what to say except maybe hillary clinton. the republicans can see this in terms of how good he is and these are two really key areas and there is a core of democrats

particularly blue-collar democrats and then a different type of democrats that's more white collar based on the seacoast. both of them are aimed at rallying the grassroots. the one major advantage during his sanders has over hillary clinton in the state is enthusiasm among his supporters. they love him and want to volunteer for him, they feel passionate and they are part of a cause. she has the best oiled machine but lacks the passion with a number and hillary clinton herself was in the states twice in the last week including a bunch of stops yesterday in new hampshire is to try to reignite the passion among her supporters as we get to the final weeks before the primary. >> here's another theme in the campaign. donald trump says the family

passed is fair game in the campaign. how do you see this playing out? >> it will play out in a huge way if you want to quote donald trump. he will be in massachusetts which is 20 miles away from where they will be in nashua. this is where the pairing office meant to bring a lot of headlines and they've been going back and forth over the last week or so about how much he wants to make this an issue and of course this all started with hillary clinton she started with "the des moines register" saying donald trump has said some sexist things and they flooded back by using her husband. when he started to flip this package remained silent and people were waiting for a response on the campaign trail though you know reporters want to ask about it. >> host: what else should we be looking at here?

>> guest: we have a number of candidates in the state, we will have john kasich returning back in the state. i think the interesting dynamic is that they want to go for the maverick candidates and we head into the new year -- weeks before the primary and the two front-runners are bernie sanders and then donald trump and i think that's the interesting thing is whether or not that continues with the maverick style campaign or if not, will the campaign make this flip as it traditionally does closer to election day about electability and will they say look i get donald trump and his anger but we need someone who is elected and i'm that person. every single poll shows i am more electable in terms of what

republicans say. then on the democratic side i think what we are going to hear from hillary clinton as well as we get down to it but maybe it along with the base that both parties are very angry right now. >> host: political reporter for the "boston globe" thinks for your time and insight on the story.

i'm donald trump and i approved this message. >> its radical islamic terrorism, that's what he called for a temporary shutdown of muslims entering the united states until we could figure out what's going on. he will stop illegal immigration by building a wall on the southern border and mexico will pay for it. >> we will make america great again.

he's joined by tony, the politicos technology reporter. >> over 3600 exhibiting companies and over 2.4 million net square from 2.24. more excitement, more categories, and it's the future where solving problems, real life problems not just an entertainment education information from its about healthcare and transportation, clean food, greater food production comes often big problems in technology we have more from the technical trends

including a demonstration crunch including a demonstration of the artificial intelligence computer systems and the founder of the instant message service used in the conversation with rapper snoop dogg about the cannabis media culture platform. thank you for that unenthusiastic welcome back. [laughter] appreciate that. it's monday so you will only go downhill from here. the next guest, it's very exciting to have him join us on the stage. we talked a little bit about ai. either way the future is here. please welcome the moderator alice wilhelm. >> we are going to do something

different today we will do a live demo. what are we about to see and why do we care. >> it's something of an office overseen except people in the research labs. many of you under the artificial intelligence machine on the game of jeopardy. it was an open and answer system at the forefront of artificial intelligence. what you are going to see is boxing has ingested all of wikipedia and not only answers questions the reasons over that and can form opinions on every subject. >> i believe there is an introduction going on first.

>> welcome to the demonstration today we will demonstrate the capabilities and generating arguments for and against a specific topic. please select the topic. >> what's to wikipedia reliable speech. >> returning the ten most relevant articles. scanned all 3,000 sentences in the top ten articles to grow in the candidate claims ready to deliver. thank you for the opportunity to share my view about this interesting topic. it's always good to start with some background. the reliability compared to other encyclopedias that more specialized sources have been in many ways including statistically through the

comparative review and analysis into strengths and weaknesses in the editing process used. my opinion is that it's reliable and i would like to state a few reasons for that if senators can provide identification another reason is a provided better coverage and longer articles they are supported by the scientific director. for example, an early study conducted by ibm researchers in 2003, two years following the establishment found that vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly but most users will never see its effect and concluded that wikipedia has the self-healing capabilities and i assure that my time here is not wasted and i hope that i have convinced you to support my view. thank you for listening.

how do you train it to understand the questions and answers do you say i want you to answer this answer the santa this and the train it or is it automatically understanding? hispanic all you do is give it a topic. what you just saw about watson wasn't trained in that domain. we gave the information in wikipedia we give it a topic acid form an opinion on this topic. it went through and organize all the information and understood the context of all the passages in wikipedia and reassembled it and then machine generated the language. how does one understand the concepts like authenticity or accuracy or hell doesn't understand those concepts to pick out to argue that

supposition? i was surprised to hear in reference the research working in that area. so what it did is it found some passage and then it went off and validated that that was a legitimate scientist from the research before it would say it's so it's constantly looking for verification of what it's about to say is correct. >> and a piece of technology -- is that something people can use in the market or is it a thing of the actual release clack >> it is forward thinking which will be available as a service with me remind you all at the time of jeopardy, watson was a large computer system in a room and since that time we have taken watson apart if you will. it's available so everybody in the room can go out and start to compose their own if you will.

>> this is totally 12 to 18 months or so away from being in the market. now imagine though that is a sort of trivial example of wikipedia. remember the area of healthcare watson has ingested almost all of the world's medical domain so it will go into all published medical journals and form opinions on the diagnosis or drug discoveries. >> i was doing some research today and i found a fun little story they rigged up a computer to ask questions back in 67 so if you have one question and topic for decades and decades

and are you still making progress on the issue? >> that is a great question. prior to watson everyone in the artificial indigence community tried to solve all of the domain questions and answers by writing a bunch of rules were organizing the information for the search. that had very limited success and it wasn't until we took a full open domain statistical approach and talked the natural language that it was able to answer questions and open domain's. >> so on the point i have heard more of the computing in the last six months into the last six years and it seems to be able to technology going on in this space. why are we seeing innovation growing so quickly right now what has changed in our approach here in a sort of perfect storm here march here much can you come out of the information is digitized including natural language in areas like health

care law etc. so that computers can access it. we have the capacity to do what you just saw. what has changed in the area of artificial intelligence is areas like machine learning, statistical analysis are now advanced at the point we can do things like you saw. that wasn't the case a few years ago. >> the machine learning is one of the things they can't use in the technology. it's one of the building blocks themselves. >> think of watson as a whole series of statistical learning engines. it's not one thing and it's constantly computing and trying to learn all the information. we do not program watson. we give data but we do not go in and give it -- we do not add more. we do not reprogram how it

operates. >> so you don't tell it was to pick. >> we don't tell it what to think. it learns all of the information. >> so, not just for your self and the company but the developer community at large. i brought some with us here today. when you go after the developers what do you start with and what do you tell them? >> they immediately go into how can i use this. >> they've been working in the machine learning for decades and they are just using the services now that are coming out of this. we have opened up as i said at the platform, and there are hundreds of startup companies. they start to bring additional players onto the platform.

i'm curious there's been a lot of progress the last 18 months in the outreach push so how has the development and so far, it's been a slow, about what you expected? >> it's been exponential to keep it in the demand not just the developer community but the investor community. and even large enterprises are using it to transform many areas of their business. there's big history and a lot of work. >> do you think you have the mind share that you need here in silicon valley to attract more developers that you accompany or are you still fighting off that song she image?

>> we do not have time to share. it's growing exponentially but if you listen carefully later this week you're going to hear something from us that are going to reinforce our commitment to the community. when you think about that computing the first area was tabulating machines that lasted for roughly the 40s then we started the program systems in every system today whether it is your laptop or mobile phone every device is programmable. watson is not a programmable system. it's a learning system and it's the third air of computing and i will just remind you that they played a pretty important: the first and second areas of computing and we will play a third. >> who is the main competition?

>> first, there's a lot of great people working in the areas. most of them are developing single algorithms or solutions to improve search. we are the only company that's developed a complete platform. if i had to make a prediction for for fbi vision going forward out of ibm and research and development tabs over the 100 or thousands of pieces of information that would occur on the platform and that's what we want because we are all all a company that we think in terms of the computing we don't think in terms of tomorrow afternoon. >> we do a value share on the platform.

>> why the pickup model? the >> we still could sell lots of boxes but we decided we wanted to open the platform and make it as a service. those are very strategic decisions for us and then it is just a matter of to do charge by the click or not, and because this is a learning system. it's very important that we share the value of the customers and therefore the value share of the model area they come on for free to develop the business end of you start to earn the revenue than we will share that. but we want an easy on-ramp and we want to get going and we think that it's very fair.

>> is blocked in going to be a key revenue driver for ibm? >> we have a set of strategic initiatives in the company which is the highest growth area three of watson as part of the analytic business which is a 17 billion-dollar double-digit high growth rate business and watson is the fastest growing component of the analytics business. >> i'm going to go ahead and presume that you don't think they will have the healing time as we noted. >> there's been a lot about what this looks like it should we be worried, but we talked about the benign and more industrial than aggressive. >> with any new technology that comes along, of course technology can always degrade things were not great things depending on how we use it and control it and whether that was the steam engine locomotives and automobiles and x-ray, you name

it. this is a brand-new technology that's going to change the world there is no question in my mind. but when you think about what it can do fundamentally if you look at the decisions that human beings make, we make decisions with a bias and on incomplete information. ideally that's nearly or perhaps every decision that we will make of any importance in the future will be made with watson by our side. >> that it's giving us option to select from some with more in addition. >> the technology around wikipedia, think about watson where it's ingested all of the world information on drug therapy, cocktails and oncology for cancer. i don't know about you, but if i had cancer or god forbid into the cancer cancer board was meeting to decide