call it the concierge economy. new businesses like task rabbit and redbeacon allow homeowners to get things done on demand. and the original online butler, askjeeves, now ask.com, improvises new ways of doing business based on improv. our reporters, "forbes" bureau chief eric savitz and john swartz of "usa today," this week on "press: here." good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. yelp certainly made a lot of news this past week. it and angie's list, great places to find a plumber or a

painter. but there is a competitor hot on their tail. it's called redbeacon. founded by a group of google alums. it won't be ipo-ing because redbeacon was just snapped up by home improvement chain the home depot. financial terms were not disclosed. redbeacon allows homeowners to post potential jobs on a website or mobile app. jobs like house painting. then take bids from home contractors and handymen. >> and the kids from google brought in experienced help to run the company. he's anthony rodio, ceo of redbeacon. not his first -- this is his first ceo job. he has many years of experience, though, at stub hub, amazon, microsoft, joined by eric savitz and john swartz. ubs said about the acquisition by the home depot they liked it because of the strong management, the analysts said, aredbeacon. that must have made you feel

pretty good. >> it's better than being the other way around, anyway, better than being despite management. so yeah, it made me feel good. >> redbeacon got a lot of attention. home depot is -- or the home depot. >> yes. >> is enormous. redbeacon is very small. but it got a lot of attention considering how small it is compared to the company that bought it. why do you think that is? >> well, i think the way that we do home services is different than what's in the market today. i believe that's what drove the attention. plus i think ubs and other analysts that cover home depot can understand the fit. if we can help pros find jobs, then those pros may become more loyal to home depot over time, and then they can help consumers solve a problem. more and more people these days want what they call difm, do it for me, versus do it yourself. and home depot was based on do is it yourself. as we get more compressed in our schedules, we look for more people to help us, and the more people to help us the more opportunity for home depot to meet that need. >> could they have not done this

on their own, created a network of service providers and created something similar without buying you? >> i believe that you could certainly -- they already have a network of service providers. there's 3 million pros that shop at home depot every month. the issue i think for them was building the technology platform from scratch. there's a lot in our technology that's different than what's on the market today. and the way that they -- i think for them getting a startup and then having a presence in silicon valley makes sense for them long term as well. people say software's eating the world. and a big retailer like home depot it's going to be more and more complex, and having technology talent matters. so i believe for them beyond the fit with redbeacon there's also a beachhead now in silicon valley for them to potentially acquire more development talent over time. >> so how are you different than a service master or an angie's list? what's your wow factor? >> sure. i think those are two very different things as well. if you look at an angie's list, what that is, is, well, first of all, the consumer has to pay a subscription fee to get in

there. i find it fascinating that a consumer would pay to contribute content that would make angie's list more valuable. you would think angie's list would be paying the consumer not the other way around. but then the consumer still has to do all the work. you get a list and what that is is like a yellow pages with reviews. if you're a consumer trying to find somebody who's going to be in your house, i don't know if you want to just rely on a list, randomly call people and see who's available to come to your house. we're different than that. if i think of service magic or service master, what they are is a legion type company and the pros don't really like that because they pay money for the lead. before they actually win the job. and consumers don't like that because they're going to get four or five phone calls like right away. >> so in your case they're not paying for the lead. they're paying if they get the job. >> we don't charge the consumer anything. unlike angie's list it's free to consumers. and for the pros we don't charge them until the consumer schedules the job. and also what's really different about us is we try to bring the three best pros to the consumer. so our goal is to get you three quotes and those three quotes

from the best three pros for your job based on a bunch of technology that works in the background. >> i'm getting an known entity when you give me my three recommendations? >> yeah, we have our own reviews. we also go out and get yelp reviews, yahoo reviews, and we check to see if they're licensed and bonded -- >> do you think yell subpoena going to ke yelp going to keep working with you? you're not a direct threat but -- i found my electrician. volt electric, by the way. >> you'll get a discount. >> hope so. >> i think it's in yelp's interest for their reviews because that's the value of yelp. and so i don't think -- and mainly, yelp is not fundamentally a plumber company. you know, people use yelp for restaurants more than anything else. >> they're not screening their -- >> no, they're not. and we weight our reviews more than yelp. we want to give the consumer everything possible. if your best friend on facebook used that plumber and you let us access that, we will score that

plumber higher because someone in your network used them as well. >> i break a lot of things at home. so we have this kindly older gentleman from the local church comes in and fixes everything that i destroy. but i'm wondering, i'm kind of wedded to keeping him, you know, and using him. why would i abandon him for something like your service? >> well, if he can do everything -- it's like i have a handyman that my wife is fond of as well, but there are certain things he can't do. and if there's something he can't do we go out and find that. or at some point he may decide he no longer can lift that hammer or whatever it is because he's a kindly older gentleman. and the next time you need something we can help you the way i think about it is i went and spoke to my kids' first-grade class and i asked them, how many of you have a lawn service? every kid raised their hand. how many of you have a house cleaner? every kid raised their hand. it's a nice neighborhood. how many of you have a pool man?

in that neighborhood there are four home service people in their house every single sxweek some of those have a lot of turnover. >> and john, i think the other answer to that question could be you are of the generation in which you are a established homeowner. i think there is a younger generation coming up into the homes that you talk about, what is it do it for me? >> yes. >> the concierge economy. like task rabbit, other companies. in which, listen, folks, i just want this done. >> if you're going to hire someone to do something like put an ad on the web that says could someone pick up my dry cleaning this afternoon? >> you're certainly willing to do it to paint your house. but i think that's an interesting new development, is you know, we went from looking on yelp for a good restaurant, that kind of thing, to here for some fee will somebody please just get this done for me and send and done? and there's some interesting things happening in that space. >> i really think that craigslist sort of started that.

i ran the marketplace business for amazon. stubhub was kind of a marketplace business. i used to have a belief that services don't work because you have to hold a service provider accountable. but craigslist changed all that. craigslist is kind of a jungle. if you're willing to go on kragz lus and take a risk and let that person come in your house or do whatever, then a service like ours that provides a higher level of service or something like task rabbit for picking up your dry cleaning it's a higher level of filtering of who the provider's going to be. that bar's been lowered so much by craigslist that for everybody else now it created a market. so i do think the consumers have found, boy, if i work three more hours i can make more money than if i go pick up my dry cleaning and paint my house. >> how much does this cost? give me an example of say, somebody, hypothetically speaking, throws a baseball, it goes through a window. how much would something -- i mean, does it depend on the person you're put in contact with or is there a certain range -- >> no, our goal is to get you three quotes for that window, let's say -- >> you have a picture of it,

right? >> ideally -- our best way to work is we have a great iphone app. you can take a video or a photo of your window and speak over that app and say look, this baseball just flew through my window, i want it repaired on tuesday, help me out. we will send quotes to the web or to your iphone, and we try to provide you three quotes with actual pricing. let's say it's a plumbing job. we can get you two, say, licensed plumbers and maybe one handyman who will do it for half as much and you can decide am i willing to take a risk on a handyman? >> the dreaded estimate, to have three appointments in person before you actually chose somebody. that was always -- >> that's the lead model. we have three guys come to your house and those three guys are going to try to sell you -- and if you're a consumer and have that pro in your house now, you don't like it when they get up and get on the phone, but they have to get right up and get on the phone and take that lead because if they don't then they know someone else is going to take that lead. so they stop the work they're doing in your house as well. >> eric, go ahead.

>> i'm curious about the interaction between -- with home depot. what are they going to do to drive customers to your site, or are they going to feature you to the home depot site? is there going to be an ad for redbeacon when you get your receipt, when you buy your new window in home depot, go on our website and we can have somebody install it for you? >> we're still sort of working through all the different touchpoints, but you can imagine anywhere on home depot it makes sense. in the aisles it's going to be the most powerful place. i'll use myself as an example. a lot of times if i'm doing a project i go down to home depot and i look for a tool and i ask the associate in the store how hard is this? and walk me through what i have to do. and if he says it's too hard, i'm like forget that, i'm just going to go call somebody. we want home depot associates to say we can help you right now found somebody on redbeacon. >> it's kind of a geek squad analogy. >> there is that, yes. >> how many how is home depot going to help you? how is home depot going to leave aw loan? that may be a concern being

taken over by a large corporation, we've got a good thing going and we don't need your help. >> i would say it's a logical question and it's one i raised quite a few times throughout the process of figure out if we were going to work together or get married would be the way i describe it. and they have very much an interest in not disrupting what we're doing. so i still am the ceo of redbeacon, i still run our business, and they want our business to be at arm's length because what we do is different than what home depot does. we bring people together, and they don't want a consumer to think of it the same way as getting a kitchen installed where they guarantee it 100%. in our business we have a guarantee on our site, but it's not the same as what home depot's brand provides. so they actually want it to be arm's length. and it's early days. it's only been a month. but so far we're left alone. >> and you're keeping the brand. >> we're keeping the brand. at this point, again, it's early days. and we're staying anywhere silicon valley. i'm not moving to atlanta. >> we'll cut you off there. anthony, thank you so much for being with us. >> a pleasure. >> thank you. up next, the ceo who went to the bookstore looking for a buzz

book somehow ended up in the wrong aisle. when "press: here" continues.

welcome back to "press: here." in the movie "wall street," the character bud fox uses sun tsu's ancient book "the art of war" to guide his business decisions. if your enemy's superior evade him. that kind of thing. my next guest follows a very different book. >> we won't lie. we were a bit alarmed when ceo doug leeds said he had discovered business guidance in tina fey's book "bossypants." >> good god. >> what? >> you won. >> i did? >> reporter: as best we can tell, neither fey nor her alter ego liz lemon have any business sense whatsoever. >> yes! i won! nobody beats the liz! in your face. >> reporter: but leeds, the ceo at ask.com, says the book taught

him the importance of improvisation. the most important rule of improv, fey writes, is to always agree. when one person has an idea, build on it. don't tear it down. it's an idea leeds has brought to the entire workforce at ask.com through a series of workshops. doug leeds says this is more than just the ceo following the latest trend. the ideas in "bossypants" will steer the company from here on out. joined by eric savitz, "forbes," and john swartz of "usa today." all right. we're going to tease you for about eight minutes here now. one moment of seriousness, and that is i'll tell you, you know, especially having had a corporate parent of general electric, the same one that liz lemon had, it was 6 sigma and all the other stuff, it makes about as much sense. as an employee we get all kinds of things like seriously? that's what you want us to learn? >> that's right.

and that's where it started to us, too. when i decided to roll this out to the whole company, i had a lot of those looks, we're going to do what? you're going to have me do what? but it started from a different place. it was really solving a business problem for us. and that problem was how to innovate. we just came out of our best year ever at ask.com. sort of everything was going right for us. but looking down in the future, what are we going to do in the future, we didn't really have those skill sets to do something new. everything was about habit for us. and what we were doing right. but what about the new tough and how do we get creative, how do we get innovative? and we were very stuck in some of our habits. and improv is a great way to both break you out of that and make you feel comfortable doing that. and that's what it's all about. >> it's not about hairy arms? >> well, it can be about hairy arms. but can i snuggle up in them? i mean, you've got to go with it. and the point is being flexible and being open with it. >> that's not the first time somebody said that on the show, by the way. >> hairy arms? >> yeah, and the snuggling. >> this is an exercise that i use sometimes. so put your hands together like

this. >> i have no idea. >> you know where this is going? >> no, no. >> now take your hands apart and put them with the other thumb on top. right? you can do this at home. now, how does that feel? kind of uncomfortable, right? >> right. it's naturally the other way. >> it's not natural. and also you're looking and noticing your thumbs and feeling uncomfortable. it's just you won't even think about your thumbs like this. but this way you're thinking about your hands. and that was what we had to do, we had to mix stuff up, so people had to start thinking about the stuff they didn't think about. and improv both does that and makes you feel comfortable doing that. >> you know who hates this i would think is engineers. software engineers would not be the kind of people who'd like this. >> you wouldn't think at first. go ahead. >> sorry. but i actually think in a certain place at a place like google where they have people moving around in different small teams on projects and then if there's something they see with team a and -- >> yeah. >> there's a lot of

improvisation there. i would argue maybe there wasn't enough at places like yahoo or microsoft to an extent. >> i think there's something to it. i think what we're doing at ask is taking it beyond what even at google they talk about their engineering-driven culture. and they talk about how engineers do all these great things. what we've found is when we bring in the accountants, interesting enough, when we bring in the lawyers and we bring -- and we put them with the engineers then you start really going to crazy places and going to those crazy places and feeling safe about doing it is what gets you to a really good idea. and that was the key. >> this reminds me a little of google used to talk about 20% time, right? so you could spend one day a week working on your favorite project that might have nothing to do with -- >> and we'll benefit in the end. >> we'll benefit. maybe, maybe not, but we'll try things out. and supposedly some of the services that google have grown out of that kind of thinking. have you seen the fruits of this? >> absolutely. in everything we do. we had a hack-a-thon at the

company where we allowed people to participate and just hack something together using these skills. and we had -- like i said, we have all the engineers and the product people but we also have the accountants and the finance people, and they're teaming up. and out of that we came up with a new process for deploying software to the site which we've never had before, which is fantastic, and a new mobile app that we're rolling out next week at south by southwest which we're really excited about. all came out of this improvisational techniques. what i'll saying about google is google says go ahead and do what you want for 20% of the time. what we're doing is we're trying to give you skills to use during that time. right? that's the difference between this. we've been very focused on sort of narrowing skills, how to problem solve, how to find the wheat, you know, from the chaff. what we didn't do is sort of how to plant seeds. and this is a skill that lets you plant seeds so that you can then harvest. you need both. and we were very harvesting and not a lot of planning. >> so as a member of the mainstream press i can attest to

risk-averse cultures. and what i like about what you're doing is it's from the bottom up as well as from the top down. i mean, the secretary or whomever, administrative assistant -- >> right. >> -- could be a major driver behind an idea. that's not always the case in most places. and i think that's actually one of the underlying problems with some silicon valley companies right now. >> i think that -- >> they're terrified of doing something that might fail. >> so it's the terror that's at the heart of why this -- what we're trying to get away from. right? i've had an opportunity in doing all this to talk to some really interesting people. one is this woman janet crawford who's a science and does cognitive neuroscience and social neuroscience. and she talks a lot about how the big threats to the current -- to humans today in the workforce is not a lion in the tree. it's being ridiculed by your peers. like that's the big threat, when you sit around a conference room table and you don't want to raise your hand and say something stupid. because not the lion's going to get you but your peer or your boss or someone's going to make fun of you. if you take that out, then all of a sudden your mind is free to do whatever you want. >> you're encouraged --

>> you're encouraged. >> that's interesting because it really means there are two things you have to do. you have to get people willing to take a risk. but then you have to train everyone else not to go, wow, that's a really dumb idea. >> that's right. and that's what improv does. so getting back to "bossypants," it's in that book. and it's on the best-seller list for a reason. i don't think it's because of the business insight. but there is real business insight in there, which is how to create the culture, which she did when she took over as an executive of this show, how to create a culture of being safe with risk and being safe with doing something different, which you have to be if you're a creative show. >> doug leeds is ceo of ask.com and is pushing "bossypants" today. thank you for being with us. >> thanks so much, guys. >> "press: here" will be back in just a minute.

welcome back to "press: here." i'm scott mcgrew. eric savitz of "forbes" and john

swartz of "usa today." eric, you wrote recently about the facebook valuation, that it's yet to ipo. how is there any way to even calculate what facebook is supposed to be worth? >> well, it's value is in the eye of the beholder, right? >> are you high or low -- >> pretty darn high. the expectations have been that the valuation range will be somewhere in the 75 to 100 billion dollar range. let's assume that it's going to be at the high end, which i think is a reasonable guess. that's the way it's been trading in the private market. $100 billion. and clearly, this is an unbelievably successful company. 850 million users, close to $4 billion in revenues last year. a billion dollars in process. but on $100 billion you've really got to believe in a big way that this is going to be one of the biggest companies ever. i mean, you're talking about a company that would be trading at 100 times last year's earnings, something like 27 times revenues. and while obviously the growth

continues if you put that -- compare that to a company like apple, it's trading at a valuation of about 10 times what apple's valuation is. in other words, the market will basically saying a dollar of apple's profits is worth a tenth of a dollar of facebook's profits. and i just have a hard time believing that. it's not that much -- >> the revenue projections, there's no way i can match -- >> it's really hard to get that. >> barring some miracle in mobile -- >> if you're going to buy a $100 billion valuation you have to make an assumption that three or four years down the road it doubles. to get to $200 billion you're not talking about one of the 15 biggest largest cap companies in the -- >> it makes it a big gorilla. and they have their fingers in lots of things. but you just mentioned mobile, and that's going to be a huge problem for them. as i go farther and farther away from my laptop and my desktop, and onto my phone, if you can't serve me ads constantly the way you did when i was on the

desktop -- >> the real magic for them i think is going to be to -- there's a key statistic. if you look at how much revenue did they generate per user in 2011, it was a little over $4. okay? something like 37 cents a month. something like that. that's not a whole lot. so people are -- they're serving up a lot of ads. almost no one clicks on them. if they can figure out a way to get that number, you know, $10 a year instead of $4, $12 a year, if that number continues to grow and they can continue to add subscribers, they can grow substantially over time, but it's not going to be easy. there are a lot of people reaching for those ad dollars, and as you say there are a lot of people using it on the, we your mobile device -- >> nobody's really figured out how to do yet. >> yeah. >> john swartz, you have how many covers in the next month? >> three. >> right. for people who don't write newspapers, that's a lot. >> well, i haven't had anything in the paper for like a month.

so it compensates for it. but yeah, we're doing a story on dropbox and box. they're two different companies. they have sound a lot alike, they have the same type of ambitions. they're different cultures. that's monday. tuesday there's social media and polling story, how twitter, facebook, and others are being used by candidates. for super tuesday. >> super tuesday. >> which is march 6th. and then friday south by southwest, which i'm going to actually delve into innovation and ideas. so i've been talking to the people at google and facebook and some other places about this whole idea, you know, this whole hand wringing over how there may not be enough innovation or ideas going on, which i think is poppycock. >> well, they ought to read "bossypants." >> i think they've been busy burning the midnight oil reading those books, yeah. >> going back to the box and dropbox, the box ceo is going to be on the show -- >> in a couple weeks. >> in a couple weeks.

these are companies that have a lot of confusion. dropbox is the one i really know. >> they're the consumer product -- >> where i can store a file and -- >> right. store your pictures. store your personal stuff. >> it's basically hot. i mean, they've been talking about oh, who's going to grab them, who's going to ipo with them? >> it's got like a multibillion-dollar valuation already. i know apple and google had tried to buy them according to a story that just ran in the l.a. times, i think it ran earlier. >> actually ran on the cover of "forbes." >> i'm so sorry. >> we've got to leave it there. we'll leave it with eric with the picture. "press: here" will be back after the break.

that's our show for this week. my thanks to my guests, anthony rodio of redbeacon and doug leeds, ceo of ask. doug's been on the show on a previous episode. and you can see that interview and hundreds of other interviews in their entirety on

pressheretv.com. i'm scott mcgrew. thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.