[inaudible conversations] >> and now live from the texas book festival a look at silicon valley. [inaudible conversations] .. .. very honored to be the moderator today and i'm here with isaac from "the news york times." unfortunately as many of you may have guessed, ben mezrich is not here today the author of

"bitcoin billionaires." i know. he got really sick this morning and just absolutely couldn't make it so we will talk a little bit about his book just for those of you who are wondering. [applause] >> we are going to leadtime at the end for audience q&a as well so please be thinking about your questions for mike. we would love to have an interactive conversation with you. let me just start, actually i'm going to start by saying a couple of words about ben's book before we dive into mike in his book. for any of you that haven't checked it out yet it's called "bitcoin billionaires" and it's the story of the winkle lost twins. [applause] you may remember them from the facebook story. they were the two brothers at harvard who actually hired mark zuckerberg to help them build

out their social network platform at harvard. mark was a software developer and coder and engineer who helped them build their platform but then he actually ended up spending away from them and creating his own platform so they made a claim that they were entitled to some ownership for facebook because of the role that they played in seating the original idea and they said mark stole their ideas so they were vilified in the social network. they were made to look kind of snooty and arrogant and kind of a pain in the but in this book, the book starts with them getting their $63 million settlement from mark zuckerberg and then goes on to talk about how they use that money to invest and become some of the first investors in bitcoin. the end result is that they become the first two

billionaires from bitcoin and they sort of narrowly escaped getting involved with some of the underworld with bitcoin and the silk road. it's a really exciting and pretty cool adventure. it says a story of genius betrayal and redemption. there are few layers of betrayal in this book and they end up having the last laugh. it's a royally quick read. it will completely change your view of the winklevoss twin cities of the social network. he talks about that in the forward have been felt that he had something to do with it because the social network was based on his previous book so he said in some ways he wanted to show them in a new light after he learned more about them. if you haven't picked it up i highly recommend it. it's a really great read and we are sorry then that you aren't here and hopefully you are watching on tv. now we are going to do it deep

dive into "super pumped" the battle for uber in before we get into that i want to share a little bit about mike isaac with you. he's a technology reporter for "the news york times". he's based in san francisco where he covers facebook twitter uber and a lot of the silicon valley giant as they are sometimes known. his uber coverage won him the gerald loeb award for business reporting. so a rock star business reporter here with us. we are really excited to have you so please join me in welcoming mike here today. [applause] my plan with this conversation is to kind of tease out of mike for a little bit of an overview of this book how interesting it is and then we can talk a little bit about the applications for what he found for the story for the rest of the world.

maybe mike if we could just start off if you could just orient everybody for some people that may not know what the story is and what uber is if you could give the arc of it and we will take a deep dive into the pieces. what is the story and how did you get involved in even writing this book? >> yeah so i think by now 2019 everyone has some knowledge of uber or how it operates in the world but back when i started covering the company in 2014 "the news york times" and i think it was this moment where ridesharing was quickly becoming a thing but there were no laws or real framework around it for people to know what to do with it. entrepreneur travis kalanick was in some ways and archetype for the brash, think you would call him like mark zuckerberg meets the cam of -- very sort of

aggressive but he found essentially a loophole in how people got around or didn't get around. several weeks ago in 2010 and 2011 i was working at liars magazine and i had to leave 45 minutes early because i wouldn't know if the taxi would come and get me in the public infrastructure was really crumbling. pushing a button on your phone to get a car didn't exist and this was a pretty revolutionary idea. for me when i decided to ride this it was wanting to sketch out how entrepreneurs know about ideas and maybe the limits of worshiping founders that rate the rules, the break norms and how it can be maybe a positive thing for change but also how it can go really really badly.

>> can you give us that basic arc. the uber launched as a ridesharing app kind of like everything is going awesome and then what happens? >> yeah i mean there were periods where i think most people, they kind of know the uber went through a weird time so maybe they found some nebulous level are people i talk to her like i know it happened and i don't really know why and it's very convenient for a lot of folks have gotten into it over the years. i think the arc of the company was they created an uber cat when the iphone was just coming out and when smartphones were suddenly becoming something that everyone could use and there were single-purpose apps to do all sorts of stuff that were becoming popular.

i think it immediately resonated with people because they were so easy to call a car to get to. the idea for travis the ceo was essentially pour as much money into the ideas possible because we need to be in every city not just in the united states but around the world because there is no real barrier to entry. other people could do the same thing. they don't have what is called a moat so to speak which is the ability to protect your business that was what they did. they ran literally billions of dollars and just started pushing in every city as quickly as they could. i think normal folks for the most part were charmed with the idea that you could call a car really easily but they also pushed completely past regulators and brought in a lot of markets.

>> this is the story of the rise in the epic fall. uber came out and they raise billions of dollars but then the story and with travis kalanick being ousted as ceo. it's pretty dramatic. it's not like a mark zuckerberg tale where he still the ceo. he is still the hero. this thing has a dark side. >> i think the book, it's an uber book but it's really about the state of tech right now where we are with technology coverage and how text impacts our world. i think probably from the late 90s up until a few years ago tech coverage, tech reporting was largely revering young founders who are coding the next billion dollar app like eating a bowl of rahm and in college dorm room.

the mythology around the next billionaire entrepreneur is a very popular story itself. i think that has changed. i think you could probably tell me but it's changed a lot and it's some of how the dark side can operate. whether uber getting assaulted or murdered in a vehicle or foreign manipulation of information on facebook and twitter and social networks. i think it's worth exploring the secondary effects that are not positive to understanding it. >> i want to dive a little bit deeper into that conversation and i want to start by having you paid a little bit more of the picture of travis kalanick for everyone. there are a few things out of the book that help to anchor the conversation. in the book mike mike right even when founders were bending the rules and even laws they were

treated as iconic philosopher kings. many believe the founders were made -- remaking the world making them smarter and more logical meritocratic efficient and beautiful delivering it much improved version of an upgrade on life and elsewhere in the book you talk about travis any say in kalanick's you entrepreneurs were worried of the praise they received. can you just start the story for everybody. who is this guy and what was his worldview and how did he see himself? it was the person that created the culture of the company? >> he really did fit a lot of the stereotypes. right now there was this i would say aggressively libertarian view of just sort of way where in a pure meritocracy and a

lanky build themselves up and you too can create the next big company. he has kind of like a similar pass to some other entrepreneurs he was doing coding early on with serial entrepreneurs with different startups and one of them was like a proto-version of the napster's where you can download all the stuff. he got sued by the record industry and the movie industry for cordoba billion dollars and that did not end well. then he did another company that was like he only made a million dollars on that which made him like middle-class in silicon valley i guess. so by the time he got to uber i think you have a little bit of a chip on the shoulder. he had been betrayed by some of his investors with this started but still he wanted to prove that he could build his next

great thing. it was also opposed financial crisis right around that time so anxious traits were dropping. capitol was flowing into the valley a lot more in startups were becoming somewhat more easy to build. i think a lot of things had to happen at once to make uber happened when it did and there were a lot of different startups at that time. the iphone was on web services which made it easy for startups to get up and go on their own and then just insane amounts of money given out. >> we are going to talk more about that in a second. you portrayed him as someone who has a lot of ambition. he certainly had a competitive side but what you haven't touched on is the immaturity that he exemplified as the 40 plus-year-old woman reading this book i'm mike oh my gosh this is like a man boy.

the parties in the inappropriate behavior. one of the things that exemplify that mean the book was where you contrasted amazon's leadership and suppose with the company values created for uber. >> i think like most companies have principles are guiding philosophies. amazon was something that travis was obsessed with what he was obsessed with jeff bezos and he wanted to create uber and amazons image. yet these 14 corporate values like fairly benign stuff. travis' version of that was to run it through a roast the translation engine, right? some of them were always be hustling was one of them.

always be hustling, be an owner not a renter, and make magic, champion mindset #winning which was a charlie sheen think that he adopted for himself. my favorite one was super pumped >> as a company value. >> not only a company value but something they use to evaluate their employees on and hire employees. h.r. people would mark off your level of super pumped sadness. to see if you are doing a good job. i don't know exactly how you measure that. he was just kind of a grown man child with billions of dollars to build the company and its image and i try to be fair but i do think there is value that was delivered their antique creates this enormous company that

changed how transportation works entirely but also there were no real boundaries around how he did that or what his behavior was like. everyone that was even attached in the first place was ready to get rich when they went public and sold the company or whatever >> let's talk about that. here's another "from the book. travis kalanick and his executive team created a corporate environment that looks like a mixture of animal house and the -- of wall street to. this toxic start culture was the result of the young leader surrounded by yes men and accolades given nearly unlimited financial resources and operating without serious ethical or legal oversight. the company engaged in spying backbiting and litigiousness is a struggle for power and supremacy over multibillion dollar empire. concepts like breaking the law worked up applicable they

believed when the laws were in the first place. can you give a couple of examples? i was really shocked by the things they were doing with the police and the public servants. they were actually messing with apps on their phones so law enforcement officials couldn't actually catch uber driver's. can you talk about that? >> one of my favorite interesting parts of the book is does anyone know what the word gray balmy and? did you ever hear about that? you remember back in 2013, uber is kind of a given. people can get off the plane and look for an uber or whatever. when they are expanding the city there was no legal framework for any of this. cities didn't know what to do. often in particular there was a

knock-down drag-out battle here. folks were kind of put off by uber in the way they came in aggressively and had to put a lot of billboards up posturing that they knew better and we should be here or whatever. they have these battles with local transportation officials and law enforcement they were trying to stop uber from coming in. in portland the transportation folks are like if you come in here we are going to start calling the cars and pulling your drivers over impounding cars and giving your you tickets in stopping this. we are messing around. uber's a response that was a they hired a very large corporate espionage contractors to follow transportation officials around and sort of figure out in some cases where they lived and what their credit card numbers were or different

ways to tag them to their uber app. what they did was tag them with the code-named gray ball. if you are a gray ball, let's say if you are transportation official trying to call an uber you hit the button and the car might be on the way and it may immediately cancel and stop working or it shows the service is too busy and no one can actually come. so basically they are trying to shut the service down when it's coming in and they aren't able to catch any of the officers. the plan worked so well the city had no idea this was happening to them. uber decided to create an internal playbook and an internal wikipedia web site to teach the rest of their employees how to do this. when we reported on this in 2017 a lot of engineers in the valley were like that's a really

creative solution to a problem. a lot of lawyers i talk to work that's probably obstruction of justice. they believe and i really believe they believe this. they believe that the laws were written unjustly or lobbyists were mobilized to benefit the incumbents in transportation. they were acting out of value number six which was principles. there were principles behind it even if he didn't agree with what they were. >> it was very clear that travis.to me means would be justified by the ends but the end of the day uber was spearheading a revolution in transportation in an industry that was dominated by the cat mafia and he would ultimately be the hero with all the shady stuff that would be brushed under the rug. >> with that finally see this is a better way. there is a legitimate argument

to some people in the industry that this was true. this is here now and a lot of people really enjoy the experience and there are a lot of people who in silicon valley will say sometimes you have to push through to get to a better place. i don't know if i agree with all that. >> that's certainly one of the big questions for all of us. just in business any time you have a major business innovation that could be in a gray zone that's what the financial crisis revealed. kind of the ugly stuff that uber and that's really around how women were treated and sexism. it wasn't just the employees it was the entire company culture.

in one party they were brought in as an auction in the interesting thing is it's a turning point for uber when things start going down. it's an open letter written by former female engineer about her experience at uber. can you talk a little bit about the role of sexism in this culture and how in that letter and what was the tipping point into uber starting to freefall? >> i think uber was on the leading edge of a lot of social movements that were going to materialize. 2017 was a nightmare year where things started coming out. the culture from the beginning was again they were giving unlimited money. they raised $3.5 billion from the saudi investment fund and

they continued raising mutual funds and were ready to give them as much money as they could that resulted in in 2015 they spent $25 million flying everyone out to have a huge party in las vegas in the desert where they hired beyoncé to perform privately for $6 million inequity which quickly dove and value. one performance which was an hour for life so beyoncé do the all right. i think that made it into song on her last album. if you look at the one of the last song she did on her album is something about equity and that was that uber deal. but it was very much this culture like we just want you to get your numbers and we want you to grow your office or whatever and then we can turn a blind eye to everything else with it that's throwing coffee mugs are

systematically treating women unfairly throughout the company. one woman employer talking about was proposition on the first day player engineering team manager. was just a real, i think the culture of harassment but ignored largely because it didn't matter what you did as long as you made your numbers. it might be messy getting their and a lot of that was by design. the corporate challenge is how do you maintain a scrappy startup mentality while sailing into a big tech company? facebook is going through that now privy of 35,000 people working there and they have a lot of internal struggles going on right now. travis and coal's philosophy was

we aren't going to build things that make it a little too corporate and maybe that was positive in was positive in some eyes but also played out in a lot of negative ways. >> you have a funny quote about that. two kalanick the frame h.r. meant to hate your code sensitivity training sexual harassment policy misconduct reporting procedures, all things that are hardcharging -- all things that make a hardcharging young man rolled his eyes. that was definitely evident that i want to shift a little bit to the grown-ups who are supposed to be providing oversight to what's going on here which would be the board and the investors who put millions of dollars into this company you know and actually ended up being very significant players. they are the ones who ousted them but for a long time they let this stuff go on. maybe we can start by talking about but that mindset was in

silicon valley and why they would tolerate this kind of behavior and turn a blind eye. >> ideally it's a non- dysfunctional company and you have members who support the ceo, might challenge the ceo. the board is supposed to maximize value and not violate their fiduciary duty. that means oversight of the company. the way travis designed uber was to to have a server at his pleasure and he was unable to be removed from the ceo seat and basically threw slowed change in how he raised money to the terms of financing and how the structure of the company worked. i think for a long time people on the board and investors didn't really want to look too hard at how things were going because if you can remember the

uber in 2012 or 2013 was valued at $3 billion and just like two or three years later was valued at $40 billion then into, into 2016 it was valued at almost $70 billion which is insane. >> and not profitable. >> burning billions of dollars every quarter and if anyone is interested in a train wreck business studies look where we work right now. the most insane story i've ever seen her this book is a precursor to all of that too. but i think their incentive was as travis said look i'm going to make you rich. >> is a bill gurley? he's from benchmark capitol and it's a profile of him in this book that he's trying to make his mark so from a venture

capitalist perspective they want to be the one that finds the next unicorn, the next facebook, the next snapchat. he is actually egging him on in the beginning and later on it's like oh no what if i created. he also is the one that starts leaving the syndicate to oust her travis because he's afraid this thing is going to blow up and it's all going to look bad on me. >> that's right and the d.c. culture and trying to pick the winners in the next, the whole thing about venture capitalist is you have to find the small companies that are going to grow into a huge thing and you don't just want to double esmond you want to 10 times or 20 times. once you get that and uber used to be a very sure bet and

enormous fully lucrative for a lot of people it's hard to suddenly come in and intervene in the like wow stop what you are doing but i 2015 and internal letter by jim fowler that described the culture internally they had investigations by the department of justice based on some of our reporting. the vice president is getting kicked out for harassing employees or a really problematic history. they had a lawsuit that sued uber for trade secrets. it was a total nightmare compressed into three months. all of a sudden the board members including gurley who is a texan who was like the legendary venture capitalist at this point is like we have to do something. >> one of the things that i found super weird about being

uber story was arianna huffington was in the mix. what is she doing in there? you talk about her a little bit in the book but what was the relationship between travis kalanick and arianna huffington? why was she such a pivotal person in that moment? >> she was one of my favorite people to ride about because she has, arianna huffington reinvented her career multiple times. she was a political commentator at the posts to a medial mogul -- media mogul. charlie's wanted to find the next little thing and a little bit of time and make a lot of money in off of it. she became a board member and one of his only allies later on in the book when everyone starts to turn on travis anton uber and saying we want this guy out of

here. she essentially i think your motivation i think she liked being in the seat of power and uber was a powerful company. and very much wrapped up in it. we were writing stories about this company everyday through most of 2017 and she was right in the mix in some people are just attracted to it. >> it was a little weird and one of the moments in the book at the turning point as travis' mother gets tragically killed in a boat accident he is emotionally taken out. as a reader i had to wonder are you taking a arianna huffington as a surrogate mother? he wanted to play that it was just a really weird relationship woven into all this other stuff that's going on. >> is very dramatic and very strange and an awful thing that happened at the worst possible time in the skies life and he has no allies left in his board

is turning on him. i think eventually he is ousted from the company that he founded and it was a big public war. i don't think he would have stepped down voluntarily if it weren't for his mother passing and him being this really gnarly headspace. >> there's this one scene where all the stuff is coming up in the news and he's writing about lying on the floor writhing around for an extended period of time and the executive team is all sitting there watching like oh my god this is their ceo. >> that's right. they were beholden to this guy throwing himself on the floor saying i'm a terrible person, and i'm a terrible person. someone said to him you are not at terrible person, you just do terrible things.

i don't know exact to what that distinction is. >> we are going to questions in just a minute but i want to lift up a little bit out of uber and think about what are some of the lessons that we can take from this as we move forward. one of the things i was struck by is there's a new ceo at the uber a very respectable man who was brought in and you ride about, you said for some there remains a lingering concern, is uber under derek shover koski going to swing under the fences or is uber lost its fight for world domination? is uber turning into a boring faceless mega-corp. and will become complacently inefficient? is there really this view that in order for company to grow really big and disrupt an industry and transform it has to have this rogue the answer

justified by the means culture and if it doesn't going to become boring and lazy. >> i have talked to more than 200 current and former employees for this and all of them are plagued by this thought. if we had built this company any other way by literally breaking laws are having a ceo that was the most aggressive fighter that anyone had ever met could any other ceo other than travis have done this? a lot of people don't know the answer to this and the people believe no, this was the only way. >> there's not just one example. if we look at facebook which we have done a lot of reporting on facebook it's not that different there some ugly stuff going on there too. is that how you're going to go if you're going to change the world? >> i'd like to think you don't have to be a jerk to build a great company and you do things ethically.

i think that's the flipside of a lot of this. i am not the most beloved person by uber employees but a lot of them were surprised that i was pretty fair on this and asked questions like is this required to build a great company? do you have to be endlessly optimistic and a cheerleader for yourself and very aggressive in every way or are you just going to be the next whatever mega-corp. that maybe it's big but it's not really going after the moon shots of self-driving cars or flying cars or whatever. >> their member the book they talked about is uber going to be the next amazon or is it going to end up being an e-bay? i'm like, what? like e-bay is some small insignificant thing.

>> even that is e-bay is a fine company that employs many people but they want to be there. they want just days as to build rocketships and send people to mars and be a part of that or a dome inside of downtown seattle that he wants to be the next place that humans live. part of that insanity needs to be baked into some of this. you have to be a little crazier optimistic but i think again the whole book is talking about the downside and now we are seeing a reckoning around the limits of that mentality like purely worshiping founders and progress in the name of progress and only positive is just not true. there are downside that we should think about.

>> how about we open it up friday in its questions to ask i think we have microphones in the middle of the aisle if someone would like to come and share question. i will certainly have more if you don't. >> this is a little question of moving to the issue that you made earlier and that you were just making about what does it take to build what you call a great company? it's more of a cultural question i think this is something we should as a society ask a society asked and i'm just wondering your opinion on this. churro k. it has a large net value but do we really need in uber? just the awesome experience and we went through here locally not sure if we would have been better off if we had stuck to her guns and not allowed that the company's backend. i'm just wondering whether this all made sense or is this just

another rockefeller kind of thing that will being meeting to be broken up of the future anyway? >> i think defining what a great company mean to send really great point. it doesn't just have to mean a crazy big market cat. as nafta main the s&p 500. could mean you are doing positive things for the world or he you're affecting change. one of the things i'm seeing now as i'm on this book tour and meeting young founders who are looking at the uber and really facebook so the world now because facebook is interesting because it went through a very long period of being beloved and now it's going through a real rough patch. they are coming in saying what i want to build a company the right way and do it ethically and work on things that can actually help people and not

just worry about being a unicorn or going to the club or buying an awesome car or something like that. think there's more consciousness which is a good thing. >> those are really -- there's a really great article by the ceo of self force in "the new york times" last week with the headline we need to fix capitalism. we need a new capitalism so even the most powerful ceos in the world are starting to ask these questions and have a conversation about what should business be accountable to? is a jet shareholders or is it a broader group of stakeholders that includes employees the community and the environment? i think that's happening. next question please. >> hey mike is a great hook. a few years ago i asked --

>> oh man she's my old boss. >> and can you speak into the mic a little bit? >> i think it was three or four years ago that i assess but are we still in terms of regulation and government response and are we still in the wild west and she said yes, we are. i'm curious if you think that we are and what would it take to get us to a point where when uber rolls out we are to have a very thoughtful response to how to regulate a company like that? >> is a great question and i think we are in a different time than we were three or four years ago. if you look at the ftc. the ftc has been asleep for a very long time and facebook was able to buy companies like

instagram or whatsapp and google was able to amass this the normans amount of mapping companies or whatever. i feel like a lot of acquisitions that would have happened 10 years ago are probably not getting through today just because of anti-competitive reasons. the entire thesis of this startup is we are going to build to a point and then go to facebook will amazon. that's where your exit strategy is which is not really innovation. it's just flipping a company to one of four big tech companies. a breeding ground for fostering an innovative environment is changing and i also see some more willingness than that the curious if you run a startup your perspective. but the willingness of ftc doing regulations and a company that

forgets to this crazy point. >> it seems the definition of size going to be the regulators are going to be behind them. after reading ben's book you see that about bitcoin. they even went and the winklevoss brothers asked about bitcoin before they start investing up bunch of money to pay the regulars like oh that's just a thing. we don't know. we aren't worried about it. they were just completely lowing it off and i think they were about facebook and i'm sure in the early days of regular spot is just a social network for kids. we don't really need to regulate this. this is really like a business. i think when you have a eye in cryptocurrency and all the things that are on the frontier i think for a while the regulators don't even know what to do with assad a pretty hard to have them preemptively regulating stuff. >> you don't know if it's a

thing. also they have learned some lessons and i see a lot of peers everywhere. >> there were no scooters and then there were thousands of scooters everywhere. everyone so mad and they were throwing them into the lake and stuff. so i'm very curious that people like them or hate them. i personally don't like them. >> the wind knows what to do with them. should they go on a trailer should they go on the sidewalk or should they go on a car lay in? >> i will say there was some stored memory of uber coming in and hammering it in san francisco so they quickly shut down the scooter thing because that in one of the uber all over again. >> how about in the back? i can't quite see you. >> thank you so much. i have a question in that i

wanted to know if during a reporting you report on why they are such resistance to the fingerprinting issue? also if you did any reporting on competitors? >> that's a great question. just for folks who don't know the uber and lyft and ridesharing companies and gave the economy companies to have to a rudimentary background check to do that. if you are a taxi driver there's a much more strict process. that means fingerprinting and some would argue a more thorough background check process. that takes time and back in the day and even now when we need it essentially as many bodies behind willis possible they

needed a faster way of doing that and they ended up, these startups would be created that did faster background checks through fingerprinting. when uber and lyft did was essentially dispatch teams of lobbyists to courthouses around the country and outside of the country to lobby for laws that did not require the fingerprinting background checks. we did reporting on this and it shows they were outspending at least for five years ago outspending most of the tech companies just fun-loving alone. they have managed to be really successful. in most markets you still don't need a fingerprint-based background checked to driver of burr uber would argue that figure. background checks know better. i don't think that's necessarily true but they've been on boarding people as quickly as possible. i still think the stories are

really damaging when someone gets assaulted as the driver was not properly vetted or one thing happened and that tends to be a really big deal. at this scale they are willing to accept that because they need to keep as many drivers on the road as possible. >> can you talk about the competitors? i've always wondered if lyft is in a better or is lyft just uber with the pink mustachioed? >> i think lyft is genius at marketing because they were able to create the uber is the bad guy. if people like ridesharing they may not like uber so they can feel okay using lyft. >> at least uber was the #. >> half of the people deleted their accounts in three or four days. internally the corporate culture at lyft is nowhere near the way

it was at the uber so you can feel slightly better about yourself or that. as far as driver conditions and if you care about wages and labor conditions for drivers like some would say the erosion of labor rights on how gig workers are not employed than if the same thing basically. >> i would like to ask you what is the current status of uber and the question comes, and from chicago and they are opening up a big office in chicago. if i was a techie, and i have a son who's a techie and all things being equal what i really want to go to work for uber with the technical support role? it seems very high-risk. >> there's this weird position where last earnings they lost five oh yeah dollars which is a lot of money and they have a lot

of employees so they are laying people off. at the same time they are trying to expand into different areas like truck inc. is one thing they are doing this one thing called the uber freight which is i guess automating targeting logistic stuff and i think that's the chicago offices they are hiring there. they have committed to multiple years there so there's some job security there but a lot of the layoffs are happening right now. it's really interesting under the new ceo. they are essentially admitting that they can afford to compete with the engineering talent with the facebook's and google's of the world that make a lot of money so they are doing outsourcing for less competitive markets to rehire at a lower cost. that's a strategy. they are some people i've talked to incite who are grumbling about that and saying our engineering department is going to help because we don't have

good people. it's a difficult time there right now because everyone worries that the ceo doesn't have the proper strategy in place and it's mostly about cost-cutting and stuff. >> i heard something interesting this past week that with a troubled that the uber i guess somebody said the whole millennial lifestyle has been underwritten by venture capitalists and private equity who are funding all these companies to operate at a loss and now the economy is changing and those investors are shoring back a little bit. these companies are falling apart and it's just going to all tumble. >> my favorite example of that was you can take your free uber home and buy your free uber meal at the end of the day and live entirely on the subsidized lifestyle. i do think that is coming true

and i think people are starting to think that profits are good thing which is a revolutionary idea but it's starting to matter to wall street. it's different. it's very different. >> there was another new york "times" article that silicon valley has a new mantra on profit. next question. >> speaking on that when did they raise prices and is that something they can do and how is the gig economy law in california that canceled gig workers how does that affect uber? >> thanks for that. as far as prices go they basically have two levers. like you can't charge $5 for a 10-dollar wright for uber which is basically been their model to under charge and subsidize their venture capitol.

raising prices for customers which is hurtful to your business or cut into driver's earnings more. i think i'm starting to hear that they are cutting into drivers earnings more. lyft is taking more and it's really hard to get any visibility as reporter unless you drive with them and trying to collect data over time from different receipts but it's really hard. so i think that's going to continue happening because it means you have to squeeze a profit. the other actor is that their food delivery business is the thing that they really doing. uber eats is their main growth area because their ride hailing business is leveling off and they are spending crazy amounts of money burning money going into that. it's hard to see where their profitability comes in.

this bill called a beehive in california talking about basically could change the standard to determine the employee versus the contractor. they just signed that into law in california. i do think governor gavin newsom is probably going to figure out some way to compromise and not make them full-time employees because their number folks pushing back on it and the effect it would have on freelance writers that people are very upset about. my guess is they will end up with a hybrid model where perhaps more worker protections are not quite employees. its core to their business model to put as many costs as possible onto the driver. >> how about an back? the mac drivers aren't making a livable wage especially when you factor in the car use. i just don't understand.

is there an endgame here? the only thing about rideshare is that supposed to be old worker supported her driver support organization? it does seem like it's a techie idea that if uber is successful and people did love it and it's convenient why shouldn't it be something that's totally driver once? >> first of all you are completely -- in your thinking is rational. and that's the thing. i'm very curious what that's profitability is going to look like. i think the nature of the funded entities require a sort of payday or exit. the uber could never have been the way it was designed a worker owned thing just because i think there are so many many people holding onto shares and waiting for their exit.

towards the end i don't think, and all of that money. travis cali is also a billionaire three or four times over now and anyone who is the first 100 employee made an insane amount of money and benchmark, they took a hit but that was her greatest venture investment of all time. i think there are a lot of things making workers share on those profits particularly because that's how these businesses work that i've heard of some different types of companies. there's one in new york, and blanking on it but it was a similar worker owned cooperative where essentially they said look we are going to give you shares of the company and our financial health means your financial health and you have a stake in this. i think it was called juno. didn't really have the happy

ending because i believe they got lot and they ended up not giving you the equity to the workers so the founders and the funders ended up taking all the money. they are really clinical versions where co-ops -- i think it did great and it might drive incentive for a lasting service but it's hard to compete with uber if they are undercutting your service by charging $5. sara that's all the time we have for questions. thank you all for joining us. mike is going to be doing a signing. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> you have an american citizen who they want to say is operating as an agent of russia. the only due process that americans are ever going to get is if the justice department and the fbi play it straight with the court and the court forces

them to comply with their own regulations which includes making sure you bring verified information only to the court. and if they don't follow their own rules and the judge doesn't make them all of their own rules then you basically have a dragnet. you have surveillance going on against people who are presumed innocent and who have a full array of constitutional rights and they never find out about it and what we found out in this investigation was that's precisely what they did but they did it for the purpose of monitoring the political campaign. that's what this is about through and through. when i started to ride what became ball of collusion ultimately i had a different idea about what it was going to be. i thought the way to do this is

to compare the hillary clinton e-mail investigation with the trump russia investigation and asked whether any objective person could look at those of them and say the same degree of justice was afforded to both sides. to take the case where they bend over backwards not to make the case, where they had a mountain of evidence of criminal activity in the mueller investigation you lie to the fbi it's a crime. the clinton investigation you lie to the fbi they gave your metal and immunity. no grand jury to speak of. make all kinds of arrangements. the mueller investigation they showed up at 6:00 in the morning they broke into your house but they grab the evidence they wanted. they clinton investigation they said.

please and if the person said no they would make a deal to get the evidence but not look at it. or not look at big sections of it. you are talking about a situation where they bend over backwards to not take the case when they actually had real criminal evidence versus scorching the earth to try to find a case where there wasn't one. after two years they still weren't able to do it. so my idea was to try to compare these two investigations and just pose that question. whether you are liberal or conservative, whether you are democrat or republicans can you honestly look at these two investigations and say by the way these two investigations which were conducted by the same agent, the same investigator, the same justice department personnel and say that they did blind justice? there is not a chance.

.. screaming i've always been an active part of her father's campaign. all talk about how long ago, 1998. jackie graduated from presbyterian college in clinton, south carolina. her mba from atlanta. and she's a charter analyst designation. having campaign twice before her father won that first congressional race, jackie understands and can convey the importance of dreaming big. and working hard through failure. in his founder is the learning makes a difference