good morning, everyone. i'm each week on the show we bring you silicon valley news makers partnered up with the absolute best tech reporters in the nation. but those newmakers and reporters have families with whom they like to spend the new year's weekend, so this week i offer you a best of. let's start with a clip from the interview we did with san francisco giants' president larry bear before the 2010 season got under way. we wondered if the giants would be able to get any attention if they kept losing. little did we know. "the san francisco chronicle" once said of las vegas, every

major decision the club has made from signing bear bonds to the price of garlic fries has his fingerprints all over it. john schwartz of "usa today." normally we just launch into it but i want to give a couple quick things here. number one, kntv, this television station, is the broadcast home of the giants on division. i also work for knbr, which is the radio home of the giants. that said, you're not at at home stadium. this is going to be any question we want. we request love the giant, hate the giants but it will be standard journalism questions. wanted to get that ahead. >> you can even boo the giants. >> we won't do that. >> i will also add we invited the a's to come out. they politely declined. let's start with the a's, they would like to move down to the south bay. you would prefer they didn't. >> well, santa clara county, san mateo county, huge part of the

giants fan base. we have right to santa clara, have since 1990. you know, it's a -- the territorial rights as the commissioner has talked about over the years are important. it's important. it's part of the governing organization of major league baseball. it's an important right. we understand the a's need a new stadium and we believe they should have a new stadium. it's going to be up to everybody to figure out how they get a new stadium. >> john and i are not as big baseball fans as john schwartz is. from the nonbaseball fan point of view, the agreement the giants have the territorial rights to santa clara county seem fairly obvious. i mean, it's not as if it were a fuzzy issue. in major league baseball that's been the understanding from the get go. >> that's buy teams don't move that often. the last time there was a significant move, the expos

moved to washington, d.c. only because the orioles gave it their blessing. is that -- >> yeah. and that move the orioles actually did not have territorial rights in washington, d.c. but there was a move for them and the team was owned by major league baseball. it was possibly a different kind of structure. again, i think that if you look at it, you want to try to promote stability in baseball. the san francisco giants twice looked like they couldn't make it in san francisco. once in 1976 and they were saved by bob lurie and once in 1992. the group that now owns the team, saved the team. you want to try to keep teams in their territories. >> wasn't part of the agreement in '92 sale that you would solidify your right to the south bay as well? >> well, we inherited those territorial rights, yes. >> but you went into that purchase with that understanding. >> right.

>> oftentimes people think of things as a he said/she said. >> it's difficult and frustrating because the a's are so mum so often. it's difficult to get a reading for them so you have to reach for the back channels. a lot of friends of mine that are a's fans say, look, the giants wanted to build a stadium in the south bay. it didn't work out. why not let the a's do that? >> yeah. but in 18 years a loz has changed as well. and a lot of decisions were made based on those territorial rights that were in place, starting in 1992. >> as scott said, i am not a baseball guy. ping pong is -- >> call you a casual fan. >> i've been to several giants games. love the park. from a business perspective, explain to me and the viewers how the giant make their money. i think a lot of people don't understand. my basic understanding is that its ticket sales, merchandising, stuff like that, but i also see broadcast. i also see video games out there. how much of that ends up in the

giant' pockets? how important is, you know, the ticket sale, the territorial rights? >> that's a great question. about 60% of our revenue, 60% to 65% comes from ticket-related revenue. that's not just ticket sales but it's merchandise at the park, food and beverage sales, parking. 60% to 65%. the other 40%, 35% is divided up between local broadcast rights, which may be 20%, 25%, from we get from major league baseball and the national rights and then some odds and ends, merchandising and other. it's -- ticket sales are very important. in our model, it's more than 50%. most teams are -- have at least 50% ticket generated refer new that's 50% of their -- >> so, you're a little on the high end there? >> maybe a little on the high end. we've been fortunate, as scott said, you know, we've averaged over 3 million fans in the tone years we've been in existence. when i was in baseball, briefly after college, i spent a couple

years working for the lurie -- bob lurie's ownership, enjoyed it a lot. in 1980 the gold standard was a million fans. if you got to a million, you were golden. you were really -- you know, you were doing a good job. now just to show how the ante, the business of baseball has changed with salaries, have you to be in 3 million for us. 3 million is where we need to be in order to get to the financial results we need. >> so, we're not normally a sports-focused show but we talked to the giants before the baseball season, why not talk to the 49ers before the football season. with team ceo jed york. >> coach singletary is under a lot of pressure. are you going to hold onto coach singletary throughout the season? >> absolutely. >> what's your threshold? >> the threshold is, let's win against philadelphia. >> the team you're playing this sunday. >> that's how you have to look at this. you need to look at this one game at a time. you know, when i look at the 49ers, super bowl xxiii, that

season, we were 5-6 at one point. we ended up being 10e-6 that season and going on and winning the super bowl. >> let me make sure. kim said what's your threshold and you said we need to beat the eagles. that was not the answer to that question, though, is it? is coach singletary's job rely on whether you beat the eagles? >> his job is not. >> i wanted to clarify. >> the goal, you know, when you're losing football games, when you're winning football games, it doesn't matter what happened the week before. it matters what's coming up. what we have to stay focused on. we're two games out of first place with 12 games to go. so, you know, we just need to keep playing well and not shoot ourselves in the foot and we'll give ourselves a chance to be in the playoffs. >> at this point you think you're in contentious? a few weeks ago you said, we're definitely in contentious, so you're not going back to using this as a season of building? >> absolutely not. >> you really think you are -- >> we're two games out with 12 to go. we're absolutely in contentious. when you look at the games we've lost, we've beaten ours. don't want to take anything away

from the teams that beat us because it's not easy to win a game in the nfl. it's very, very difficult. you know, everybody's talent level is very, very equal. so, you need to make sure that you minimize your mistakes, but have you to go out and take it one game, one practice, one play at a time. >> you look at it mathematically, 0-4. that looks terrible. you came close against the world champion new orleans saints. it was close. >> and i think that's -- that's wri know our team can play. we can play at that level. and i believe that. and i think coach singletary can get those guys to that level. we just need to limit our mistakes and we'll be all right. >> are you factoring in the last aelt games of the year which are pretty favorable in terms of playoff opportunity? i mean, is that something that kind of gives him some rope? >> it's very hard to look for it and say, well, this is a win, this isn't a win. the only thing that is on our minds is philadelphia and how do we put together a game plan to go out and stop the eagles. that's the only way you can look at it. when you start looking past that, that's when you get into a lot of trouble. and knowing that we're two games

back, we still have to play five division games. we still have to play a lot of gachlsz at home. we need to make sure we take it one game at a time. >> you did not have a lot of alumni coming -- the giant, the san francisco giants, you can't wave your arms and say, oh, my goodness, look who it is. you do not have a lot of great alumni from the 49ers coming and firing up your troops. why not? >> well, we have several alumni that are on staff right now. we have a lot -- >> who are they? >> tom rathbun, ray brown, mike se sellari, who didn't play -- >> i was thinking montana, young -- >> joe was at practice two weeks ago. there's a lot of guys -- >> i think the reason why scott brings that up is the whole ronny lott flap, speaking to the saints before the game, when they played you. i mean, that kind of pronounced this idea we're not seeing the legend around the 49ders like we say mays or mccovey who are

beibe ing bally-hooed. >> i spoke to ronny. pu know why he spoke to the saints, the 49ers had a lot of trouble after our '81 super bowl team. there's a lot of young guys that couldn't handle the success. and their lives spun out of control. ronny spoke to the saints a lot last year. he comes very regularly to the 49ers. i have a great relationship with ronny. so, those guys are around. we don't necessarily publicize it. if you saw the guys that were there -- >> should you? >> should we publicize it? you know, it's really a personal relationship with those guys. and if those guys want to be part of the team, it's got to be how they want the relationship to be. i'm not going to try to publicize joe coming down to the 49ers so we can sell a couple extra tickets. that, to me, isn't as important as having joe come down whenever he wants. having ronny come down whenever he wants. making sure those guys know they really feel part of the family,

but we're not trying to sell the fact that they're here. >> but i think it's important, especially right now when you're 0-4, and to keep the importance on it necessarily about selling tickets but it's about showing that they're even in support of their team and some of these guys that were a part of the super bowl days, part of the championship team, it's important to see them out there supporting you guys. >> and they are. i mean, if you watched the monday night game, how many super bowl champions did you see on the field there celebrating with jerry and honoring the 49ers and honoring jerry rice? all those guys you are talking about were on the field monday night. >> is alex smith, again if you don't follow football, he's a quarterback -- well, you'd be surprised. is he doing what you need him to do? >> we're 0-4 and nobody is doing what we need them to do right now. we all need to get better. and it starts with me. and then -- >> that's my next question, by the way. i want to go singletary, smith and then york. >> but it starts with me. you know, we need to make sure

that twhaewhatever we can do to eliminate distractions, make our guys understand we're 100% behind them. >> if you're a raiders fan or an oakland a's fan, you may wonder why we favor the 49 evers or giants? we don't. we invited the oakland teams to join and they both turned us down. next up, youtube is great fun but it's never been a big moneymaker. we talk about that with the head of montization at youtube. and serial entra practice newer making money over and over and over.

welcome back to "press

here." if you're a regular viewer, you know we normally have a team of reporters each week and a guest. none of that this week as we give everyone the weekend off for the new year. instead, a look at some of our interviews in 2010. we continue with git in charge of turning youtube into a profit center. so, how much does it cost you to send a video out? have you ever figured out per video what it ends up costing? >> we don't break out our bandwidth figures. we could say we have a lot of scale and the bandwidth we use across youtube and google since we share a lot of infrastructure and there's economy -- >> are you the biggest bandwidth use other the internet? you have to be pretty close? >> i'm sure we're a large one. >> does this cost go down materially just when the acquisition happened? just being part of google, did that shove down the cost? the economy to scale? >> well, i'm sure there's some agreements we were able to

negotiate together. i dwoent know if it went down instantly. i think probably the bigger factor, as you scale the amount of video you stream across the internet you're able to find better efficiencies. it's not just about paying less for bandwidth, it's about using less, so we have some smart engineers that take videos and push them as close to the edge as possible and try to get it so the individual your seeing is coming as close to as what you're seeing with the least band width. like youtube, we spend a lot of time making sure that works. >> you're spending a lot of time compressing video down to take advantage of that. at the same time, you are expanding the quality. recently moving up to a more hd appearance, which is going to take more bandwidth. >> certainly. we recently announced support for 1080p video, which i think we're the first video website to be doing that. certainly takes more bandwidth. certainly cases where there's still appropriate. a lot of consumers whose

bandwidth into their home can't handle that so they like to see the fast response time so we take every video and put it in multiple formats and deliver the best one for your particular setup. >> let's ask the question that everyone wants to know. are you guys actually going to be profitable this year? >> unfortunately, i can't say much about that. >> without going to jail. >> or at least getting -- >> the former, the former. >> i think we're very happy with how we've been doing at youtube. revenue is the right direction. we feel the model is working. we feel like we crossed the point where every playback is good for us and growing traffic is priority. >> we have mary schmidt, maybe three, six months ago, that you're at least on track to be profitable. that means a lot. that the cost lines and revenue lines are no longer diverging, heading to the same point, so that's at least a tipping point.

>> i can't say much more than that. >> let me try to ask this from another direction. so, is it -- youtube is pretty much always, best case scenario, break even, be a little profitable or will this ever be a big dollar revenue-generating machine for google? by its very nature can it be the next strong revenue line, or something that generates a lot of traffic, has other benefits for google but isn't going to be a profit center ever? >> oh, we couldn't be in this business if we didn't see it as a profitable business long-term. we think it is a very profitable. >> mike cassidy is making lots of money. the serial entrepreneur recently sold his fourth startup. each time he does, it he makes millions. he's one of silicon valley's biggest success stories. >> let me start by saying, there is a fantastic tech reporter at the mercury news by the name of mike cassidy. are you not him. so, if anyone's confused of all

the wonderful things you do, that's the one thing, perhaps, you don't. but you have managed to sell four for four, right? >> yep. >> vastly diverse startups. you didn't do the same thing again and again and again and again, which is kind of what people do. >> right. one was in computer, one was internet search, one was pc online gamers and last one was sort of recommendations based on friends and travel. >> do you know all those things or how -- i mean, how did you -- i mean, are those the four things you know? >> i like going into new spaces for a couple reasons. one, sometimes it's easier to actually come up with new ideas because you're not stuck in the -- that won't work paradigm. and it's also fun to go to that phase where when you're first in the new industry, nobody returns your calls for months and months and months. and then after a on it while you get some traction and they start calling you back. that's kind of fun to go through that. >> i have a feeling your calls get returned quite a lot now that you've got four for four.

>> not when i start the new ones. it's still painful and nobody calls me back for a while. >> even now? >> even now. >> you're four for four, hundreds of millions of dollars. >> yes. >> nothing? >> when i start a new one, i'm dirt. >> what blt next one? what is the next big thing for you? >> i'm at google now, which is a blast. i try focus on where i am and don't think ahead. >> what's that like working for another guy, given you've worked for yourself, you've done your own thing for so many years? >> you know, google is crazy. it's very entrepreneurial. you don't feel like you're working for someone up. feel like have you big projects to go on, tackle them and people supposedly on my team they don'tically ask me what to do. >> at google you could probably create something on your own and build a team without necessarily having to start from scratch, right and you have the resources behind you? >> that's exactly right. >> what are you doing at doing snl can you talk about it? >> yeah. i'm the project manager for

research. my second company, direct hits, wasn't a search engine, so -- >> do you know what you're doing? and i mean that in the sense that you've not known what you're doing in the past. are you learning as you go or have you got a pretty good idea as to how this works? >> the fire hose analogy is very true. like, for the first five weeks i probably didn't know half of all acronyms thrown everyone, but you do learn fast and by osmosis you learn it. >> excuse me. of the four cups started and sold, was there any of them that you wanted to take public or were you just approached and blown away by the offer? >> well, we filed our s-1 on direct hit, and we were supposed to go on the road show. but that was a crazy time. that was, you know, december of 1999. and when they came along with the $500 million, it was like, that sounds like a good offer. the grass is always greener because now i wish -- oh, maybe stayed the course -- >> yeah. let me ask you, this is just a

personal curiouses onty, and you're probably not going to understand the question at first. when somebody buys your company for $500 million, how does that work? i mean, i know you sign a bunch of papers ---ing this never done this -- you sign a bunch of papers and do they print a check out and do you go to wells fargo and say -- >> that's a good question. >> yeah. >> how does that work? >> i mean, it's all wire transfer. although there was one check that had whatever 10 million plus digits that we carried to the bank, which was fun and my founders -- >> and you went to a teller. >> yes. which was great. >> that's cool. that's so cool. >> it is great. it's amusing to watch their faces. >> you should document that. >> have you checked your bank statement where it says, off the charts balance? >> one of the most amusing things is i get my social security statement every year and it looks like this year your total salary was 11,000, this year was 6,000.

every startup i make dirt and then i have the big payout and then i make dirt again. up next, a bare-chested ceo places a picture of himself in a tutu on facebook. the fast naturing chip conley when "press here" continues.

welcome back to "press here." as we look back on some of the more than 50 newsmakers featured on the show in 2010, including hotel pioneer and business book guru chip conley, who is unlike any other ceo we know. chip conley, hospitality business he started at age 26 and which he sold a majority stake just recently. joined by my colleagues. let's start with that deal. this is very recent where you had the chain of hotels and you

made a major, major deal. >> yeah. you know, it's in bad times you can -- there's two sides of the coin. there's the opportunity side of the coin and the adversity side of the coin. what we saw is we've had two once in a lifetime downturns in the last decade with the dot-com bust here in the bay opportunity but i can see there's an awful lot of opportunity ahead and we wanted to connect with a big capital source that would allow us to grow nationally and acquire bilk big hotels over a big discount over the next two or three years. >> what does that mean for you personally? still the head? >> the head and ceo. i've been the ceo for 23 1/2 years. >> so it's just a lot of capital? >> it is a lot of capital. i will probably at some point take -- i'll go a little higher and elevate to, you know, a chairman role at some point. mainly it allows us as a company to just build out our infrastructure and grow

nationally. >> you're going to keep that capital and keep reinvesting it into more boutique hotels across the united states? >> absolutely. i've been disciplined saying we're only, first a san francisco company and then a bay area company and now a california company. we operate more hotels independent hotels in the state of california than anybody else, by far. there's not even a close second. but now with 33 hotels, we're going to actually move beyond that and say, let's export the california hospitality experience elsewhere. >> why did you go into this business? i mean, most -- >> good question. >> most people don't say, i want to open up a hotel chain. >> i grew up in southern california near disneyland and i was always fascinated as the entertainment/hospitality experience there. i went to stanford undergrad, stanford business school. a couple years out of business school, i was a real estate developer, i was not very happy. each of us have a job, a career or a calling.

i had a job. and i didn't want to have a job. i figured that i worked that many hours, i wanted a calling. what i liked about real estate was it was entrepreneurial but i wanted to do something more creative. at age 26 i wrote a business plan to create a boutique hotel company in mid-1980s. i had no hotel experience at all but i loved hotels. i found a motel in the tenderloin that was in bad shape. pay by the hour place. >> it would be amazing if you found one in good shape. >> exactly. long story short, that's how i got started. it was the creativity of the business that really excited me. >> as you expand, and i asked the same question of the head of virgin american airlines, he said, i have this boutique, really cool airline, but the bigger you get, the more keep you keem in, the more diluted the idea because. that you can't be a tiny family doing exactly the same way across the world. >> yes and no.

in the airline business, one of the best examples of a company that created a stronger culture as they got bigger was southwest airlines. as southwest -- if southwest knew they would have been a national company they would have never called themselves southwest airlines. the reality is, as they got bigger, their culture got stronger. apple has a strong culture. for some people say it's not exactly, you know, right, but the reality is that there's still a really great sense of -- >> you know that's a big risk, though. that has to be one of your biggest challenges. >> this is the biggest risk of any company that grows, is that intangible of culture actually gets diluted with time. and it actually -- what was that spark and that magic that brought people? i call it the mojo of the company. that gets lost. >> so, where do you retain that? do you retain it at the hiring stage? do you kind of enforce the culture as people have more experience?

do you do it at every stage? >> first of all, have you to manage around it. here's one of the biggest problems about leadership and management, business management, in the 21st century, is in the 20th century we were taught to manage what we can measure. and that's a good -- that's good advice. you manage what you can measure. you create metrics to determine whether you're getting it right.

that's our show for this week, a look back on the year. we leave a enough room at the end of each show to run credit. for good reason. without our crew, this show would not be possible. my thanks to them. back next week and throughout the year with interviews of people changing the world.