this week, brad garling house is full of advice, so why isn't anybody taking it? dillon field takes $100,000 to drop out of school and a robot with an ipad brain. our reporters, dow jones and the economists martin giant, this week on press: here. >> good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. lots of people have suggestions for marissa meyer. find a focus. what does the company do? find accountability. the sad fact is, that advice has been around for years. back in 2006, a young yahoo!

vice president wrote a memo to the company which will forever be known as the peanut butter manifesto, spelling out just what yahoo! should do. its author didn't stick around. back at yahoo! six different coes all cried to follow the manifesto's advice or more often, ignored it altogether. >> good morning. i'm joined by laura kalodney. martin giels of the economy. >> there are few people who are qualified to take a look at how yahoo! is going now and comment on it. lots of people do. goodness knows, lots of people

do. but i would be interested in your comments now that you're away from yahoo! and made many of the suggestions that are being implemented now how you think things are going. >> yeah. i think it's too early to make any bold statements about how it's going to turn out. but i will say i think the decision to bring in marissa as ceo is a bold and potentially brilliant decision. i think we could have predicted the path that yoo-hoo is on. it certainly is a very successful company, despite some of the descriptions of it. >> forget that. it makes money. >> a lot of money. and i think we forget, when you make a lot of money and you have a lot of resources, you can do bold things. it's to some degree a reflection of is the culture able to reflect that risk and tolerate to change the trajectory of the company? >> this and bring you google culture, as well. culture is much of what you wrote about in the manifesto was this lack of accountability, this lack of imagination.

>> i think for all of us, we see how the culture of entrepreneurship exists and man fasts itself throughout what we do. you can walk into an organization and feel energy and mojo. i think yahoo! lost sight of that somewhere along the way. but i think people are too quick to write off yahoo! and i think marissa has a huge opportunity. 700 million people still go to yahoo! every month. >> the problem with the company, is it that it's sort of flip-flopped more often than the peers in san francisco. one moment, it's a mead kra company. the next it wants to be a technology company. it's never really sort of stuck to a north star. can marissa find a north star? and what should it be? >> there's no doubt when you have six ceos in a period of -- i haven't really kept track -- maybe three years, it's hard to have consistency with a leadership team.

hopefully we'll start to see that. i think what is interesting about marissa coming in is unlike some of the previous leaders dating back to terry st stemmel, she had much more of a product and application person. i think if you look at the great success stories on the internet, they almost all emanate from a product century. media tends to be more fleeting than the relationship to the consumer. and i think marissa, so far i would bet, will bet on the application layer as opposed to, hey, we're going to be a big media company. whether it's twitter or facebook, these are applications. >> there was a point when we were talking about being known for one thing. the media loves it, the jerry mcguire, get the manifesto. do you ever wish you could say, yeah, but i do other things, as well sfp. >> i think certainly all of us, as we have discussed, get

categorized into a bite snippet. if i could go back and rename it other than the manifesto, probably, yes. >> you could keep the peanut butter. you were spreading yourself he ever where, but never quite concentrating on one thing. and you compared that to peanut butter, which you hate. >> yes. actually, i truly like peanut butter, but not if you spread it around too much. >> you don't like thin peanut butter. >> people have encouraged me to write a jelly manifesto, but i'm going to leave that to other people. i think yahoo! has potential to be a great company. >> what features or what parts did you love that they have now? >> that is a fabulous question. i kill off might not be the words that i would use, but sell off frequently. it comes back to something i articulated many years ago, is

either go long and go big, it's like go big or go home. and i applaud the history of a general electric. if we're not going to be number one or two two in the category, we shouldn't be in it. small business, it generates a lot of money, a lot of cash flow, but it has not been the focus of what yahoo! is doing. obviously, if they focused on that, you're seeing very large organizations focus on small business services and do very well. but you're not seeing that as something they invest in. if they're going to invest in it, fabulous, go long. if not, sell it. >> one of the great things about being a ceo is you can say, i'm going to go for it. and you make it happen. this is your first ceoship, correct? >> i did a stint in '99 through 2001 with dial pad. it was before skype. >> this is a recent

promodificatipromotion for you. are you finding that you can make your vision happen in a company that pre-existed you? the founder did a heck of a job growing it. can you tweak it to your vision? >> i think so. it has grown remarkably quickly and has a steady source of recurring revenue. we grew roughly 50% last year to off a base just sort of $40 million. and a team about 200. so there's enough infrastructure there to rearticulate what is our true north? and there is a huge opportunity on the internet and how it is changing the way people collaborate online. and i think that's going to continue to happen. you send it as one of the leaders in that space. >> go ahead. >> you just mentioned

corroboratation. are you -- is your vision, as you send it, more about collaboration than about storage? >> you send it as solving a simple problem. you can't send a 100 megabyte file. as time as gone by, we found if you're sending that 100 megabyte file, let's storage file it for you. we have a 20,000 feet license or a fortune 50 company, actually, with nbc, interestingly, nbc, you send it to share 54,000 files for terabytes of information. >> you send it to send one of your guys a previous interview you had done with one of the founders. and it was, of course, that's what's i was going to use. would the nightmare be that as

it gets bigger and bigger, the file i want to send you isn't on my pc, either. right now, i'm sending you something i have you to. but if it's up there, we could both point at it and why do i need to send it? >> to laura's point, i look at where we are around storage. storage is a commodity. google is doing storage. in the consumer segment, storage is not going to be a differentiator. i think the issue is how do you add intelligence around that? when you're files are stored and available in one places, we enable things like signs. >> that's a value add. >> correct. and i think a lot of people use this, there's a segment you use and spend it they want to read receipt, password protect that file, they want to know that the

offer or settlement or whatever, that's the time they should reach out, if you will. 54,000 accounts? >> 54,000 files in the last 30 days. and that's 12,000 active users of you send it inside nbz. >> how many of those were humerus olympic out takes? >> we never copy anything without the express written permission something, something. greg is the ceo of incentive and he's always very patient with that. >> great to be back. thank you. double robotics has a great imagination.

frumble will i in your pajamas. david cam is the inventor and founder of double robotics joined by laura colodley, martin giels of the economy. david, first of all, somebody described it as a segue for your ipad. i think that's probably the best description there is. it reminds me of that very much. >> yeah. it's very, very simple. everybody understands that concept. everybody comes up with these great ideas on how to use it. >> yeah. you can take a core of a vacation home that you want to rent in hawaii from the robot from your pajamas. >> the rental home can provide an access. you can drive around and say,

oh, this looks good. the pictures online don't look quite right. and other kinds of use cases, too. say you're in a hospital and the doctor wants to visit you while he's across the country and that kind of thing or kids with autism, what if they could visit their classroom through a controlled environment? it would be very difficult to do this if the person -- all of us didn't already have that. that opens up so much to any start up, to anybody. when i say, you know what? i'll bring the technology, the ipad, i just need you to help me with the hardware. >> yeah. this is a whole revolution around ipads, accessories. they have this blood pressure cuff, it's broad and all those things are coming together to

form a revolution of new hardware things. we're a team of just two or three people but we're growing now. but we've been able to build this in just a year. >> what was the original inspiration to do this? >> well, we were actually working on another product previously, working with a manufacturer in china because it had to be really, really cheap. it was a terrible experience. >> what was that product? >> it was a kids' toy for your iphone. we collect over iphone. but we couldn't -- we had to work with china and it was very, very difficult to communicate and we couldn't see what they were working on. we have to have more control over the relationship. these robots were so expensive. we said $10,000, $5,000, these suck, we can do better. and we did. we built the best robot, it's europe light, anybody can carry it around and not hurt anybody. >> and you're manufacturing in

the united states of america? >> yes. maybe that's because it's the last week to do that. if you do it very fast, we're sampling everything at our facilities so we can make sure it's top notch before it goes out the door. >> i've been hearing about we're all going to have our personal robots for decades. and, you know, we're still not quite here. i'm wondering, what are the kinds of things like battery life? it's great having a personal robot, but if it breaks down, who is going to plug it in for me? and what about connectivity? it's great to have my own pad, i lose all control of the robot. so how near are we to getting our personal i robot or whatever? >> this is the first step, but it's a very, very big step. we can last all day on one battery charge here. we can add a second battery

charge. and your connectivity on the ipad, we can run over wie fee or the 4g connection. that stuff is great because apple is going to keep yaeting. so we don't have to worry about handling point and the space. right now is the time for this rather than five or six years ago. >> when you talk about robotics, there are millions of examples like precrime and minority report or the omni droid that roems around and incredible. how are you dealing with the software or other aspects of this device to make sure that our privacy is protected but some citizen can't just roll up into my best and figure out some

secret formulary or something? >> yeah. right now, it's all controlled by a closed system. it's a secure system. we don't need to worry about that right now. the amount they can do is very limited. >> you're saying the closest between my myself. >> if you were going to invite somebody into your office, you might want to invite them on the robot. but if you weren't going to invite somebody in, you probably wouldn't use the robot in the first place. >> are we getting to the point where robots will be smarter than us if not smarter? >> that's apple on you. >> and cookie cutter.

>> we are actually -- have you seen the ibm robot? that's amazing what they're doing with those kinds of things. it's tons of those kind of things. the types of technology being developed, but we're taking the next step. >> i will be a bit of a robot fan. we have a nieto robotics vacuum cleaner. it's similar to rumba. in fact, we've had the ceo on the show before. and it works all the time and works intelligently. i still marvel to the day when it goes on by. i think it's sort of for kids. you've looked at this from a communications point of view. we all imagine the jetson's

robot. communication is obviously there. >> what is great is you see the potential where it could go. eventually, we could get to the autonomous stage where you could be able to do a closed falling robot that's very fast or a dishwasher that could do the disher from a sink instead of having to put them all in a machine. but that's the ultimate goal, eventually, but right now we're starting with what is possible today. >> that's a good place to stop. david can is the founder of double robotics. sold out krntly, right? >> no new units to 2013? >> no. i've seen that. up next, you meet the guy that was paid $100,000 to quick college.

welcome back to press here. silicone valley is full of college dropouts. now, to be clear, dillon has not dropped out of college, not yet. his parents wanted you to know that. >> i wasn't ready for that to happen. >> what we're trying to do is make it so that anyone can be creative. >> he is, though, taking a break from the prestigious brown university to build his own company. paid to leave school, in fact, by billionaire peter geele who famously offered students money not to go to college. while dillon is being paid

$100,000 not to go to college, his parents estimate they spend about $130,000 sending him to the same place. let's get it out of the way. are you headed back to college? do you know at this point? >> i don't know. that's the honest answer. >> it's a completely fair answer, as well. >> yeah. >> to be fair, in many ways, you have already taken a break at brown to work at clipboard, a fantastic company. so peter is paying you something to do that you're probably going to do, anyway? >> in the process of buying, we started working on ideaes and making sure that we had something to be passionate about. we had decided about a week after we did the finalist round that we were going to, regardless of what happened, take time off and work on this company. >> my hats off to you to get a guy to pay you $100,000 for something you were going to do anyway. >> it's an amazing community and

they're great to be around and work with. >> i look, you're an incredible bunch. i think if you were dropped in the middle of africa with no money, probably no clothes, you would still come out in five years time with multi national brands. is this genuine experimentation in education or not? >> i don't know. you would have to ask peter gill that. for me, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity and a way to work on my idea. so i'm really excited about that. that's the reason i took the grant. i know everyone has different reasons. there is a concern and, laura, i know you have some statistics about it. college in general tends to be good for people. and that's kind of the old school way of thinking. >> i am interested in the results of what peter is doing. and encouraging other younger

entrepreneurs. i don't judge, but it is true that college is good for well being and, you know, you're more employable, live longer, generally happier. when you have a college degree in the u.s., that's what -- it's a key economic indicator. this has been written about extensively. i wonder, if you, the costing foundation that studies entrepreneurship and small business ownership found that 20 to 34-year-olds make up 29% of first time founders in the u.s. at this point. that's not a small minority, actually. you know, they steaded up through 64-year-olds. so i guess they're not looking at teen or senior citizen entrepreneurship, but still, it's the largest slice for a demographic. i'm wondering, what do you why do young people guarder this kind of support and attention? is there something actually, you

know, special about your class of kids, like, what draws this money to you rather than, say, someone with ten years in the industry striking out for the first time? >> again, i can't answer why peter made it 20 over 20 instead of 20 over 40. i don't know. i know there's a lot of mis-nomers around young entrepreneurs in silicone valley. for example, scott brown earlier. >> god gave zuckerberg, elison, michael dell. >> you're exceptional, you know? >> thanks. >> do you and your peers -- or am i -- >> at brown, everyone is exceptional. i think everyone i went to school with at brown were just incredible human beings. the 2 1/2 years i spent there was among the best of my life. and i think the only thing that is different is different people have different tolerances and

starti i am starting to find it starting a company. but it's not an issue for me. >> dillon, we have less than a minute left. the press was tracking you as early as high school. are you on the court you expected to be on? >> that's a good question. i'm not sure. in high school, i don't think i was -- in high school, it was all about going to a good school and learning as much as possible. in many ways, it still is. i view this as a learning experience. as i continue to work on this company, i think i'll learn a lot. >> dillon field, good luck. >> dillonfield.com to find us onlielg. >> thank you. we'll have you many, many times. we'll be back.

silicone valley entrepreneur david sacks made news this week when he declared the age of the start-up is over. we have an interview with david in our archive, one of hundreds of interviews. i hope you'll take a look. in the meantime, that's our show. thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.