internet pioneer jonathan abrams launches his newest venture, silicon valley scientists work on a real-life thinking machine, and later, how to keep idiots off your board of directors. our reporters from business blog pandodaily kym mcnicholas, and eric savitz, san francisco bureau chief for "forbes." this week on "press: here." good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. there is no logical way to introduce my first guest, a successful entrepreneur without the context of his biggest failure. jonathan abrams built friendster, the first real social network, already online and working when mark zuckerberg

was waiting to hear if he'd get into harvard. >> and each person on friendster has a personal network, which are all the people you're connected to through your friends and their friends and their friends and so on. >> we first caught up to jonathan in 2003 in this news report, nearly ten years ago, tape hits and all, where he tried to explain social networking. >> immediately connected to all that, friends, and other friends and people through them, and then you can invite any friends that you want to be on friendster with you. >> friendster, then in beta, would eventually flame out for reasons so complex there are actually business classes about its failure. lesser people might go into hiding after that, but not abrams, who went on to open a nightclub -- ♪ and helped create founders den, the hippest place to start a company in san francisco. jonathan abrams' newest project is called nuzzle. we'll get to that in a minute. but to give you an idea how

early and important jonathan abrams was to the internet, he was one of the very first people to suggest we use our actual names online, which definitely was a revolution at the time. joined by kym mcnicholas of pando daily, eric savitz of "forbes" as well. i don't want to have this be o'about friendster nonstop. >> despite that ibt roe. >> despite that intro. but there's that contextual thing of you're the friendster guy. on your personal website you have a copy of that "inc." magazine cover that shows -- i forget what it says. but it's brutal. the death of whatever. you're willing to say yes, that happened and it was -- it didn't work out. >> well, there's a lot people can learn from friendster. article was a little sense sayinglist tic as other stuff that's been said about friendster. and thanks for showing ten-year-old pictures of me. >> notice we didn't see me ten years ago.

>> we can see how much i've aged. i've learned a lot from friendster, and then i've done since then socializer and founders den and nuzzle. and you know, you keep going. >> what is that greatest lesson that you learned from what happened at friendster that you're applying with your new company, nuzzle, today? >> well, i think one of the interesting lessons from friendster that hopefully they're covering in those business school classes is the founder keeping control or not. one of the other guests is talking about board stuff, right? >> mm-hmm. >> so maybe i should have gotten his advice ten years ago. but i think that's an interesting difference between friendster and facebook, that they should be studying at business school. >> you're saying you lost control too early? >> back then it wasn't even considered proper for an entrepreneur to try to retain control. >> isn't that strange? it's almost hard to -- there are young entrepreneurs watching that -- the context of what was it, 2003? >> it was 2003. so it's almost ten years ago. >> how different things were back then than they are today. >> but was that a reflection of something that was going on at that time or was it just a fact

that, you know, this was like your first big project and you just didn't know? >> i think it was considered pretty normal that good founders were willing to not try to retain full control but bring in elite venture capital firms and that was the right thing to do for your company. when ben horwitz from adrese & horwitz in recent years blogged that they like to keep the founders as ceos, that was considered sort of a new take on things. so that sort of tells you something. >> is it -- go ahead. >> i was going to say that it's almost -- it's gone far beyond that, right? look at facebook. mark not only has remained ceo but has dominant voting control of the board. i mean, we'll talk about boards later. but whoever else is on the board of facebook effectively doesn't matter. it's mark's business. he controls it. does that super voting stock approach to keep control a good thing? >> the super

interesting thing for public companies and that's a different thing than founders taking capital. i haven't run a public company. that second issue of whether there should be the dual class voting in public companies is a different thing, outside my thing. but if founders don't control the board they really are probably going to get fired very typically. so that's sort of putting it bluntly, but that's pretty common. >> is 18 months still that timeline from -- i mean, 18 months ceos typically -- >> sooner often. >> really? >> yeah. >> and that's still the case today? >> no, i think things have changed a lot. i think there are a lot of venture capital firms that are promoting the idea of trying to help the founders with the companies that have helped them remain ceo. >> so what percentage do you think of founders actually remain as ceo beyond two years? >> i think in the recent years it's changed a lot. noam wasserman at harvard has studied this. and he used to say three to four founders were replaced after maybe the second venture capital

round. that was something he wrote several years ago. i think things have changed in the last couple years. so i'm not sure what the statistic is today. but it's changing. i mean, i think people are recognizing now that bringing in different ceos is not necessariry a great thing. if you look at friend ter, and i know you don't want to only talk about friendster, but from 2003 when the company was institutionally founded to when it was sold in 2009 that was six years. so how many ceos did the company have in six years? >> five. >> yeah. >> six. six in six years. >> what -- when you were talking to young founders, which you do at founders den, how much of what you learned at friendster are things that you're passing on? what is the primary lesson you want them to know? >> there's a lot. i think that there were things we did right at friendster because i started the company in sort of the dotcom crash period. we did some of the things that now people call sort of lean out of necessity. not because of brilliance. >> and your nuzzle is incredibly

lean. you are nuzzle, right? >> well, i think that friendster i learned that me having an idea and building a prototype before deciding if this is something that should have outside funding and a whole team, that made sense, and that is sort of the lean approach. the big lesson of what sort of was done maybe wrong at friendster really relates i think to control and the board and ceos and i try to share those with young entrepreneurs. but i think sometimes you have to just go through these things yourself. >> but you also, you have a little bit of an advantage, you know, as compared to some of the other founders that are out there. you can actually code. so if you're a founder and you can't code you have to of course get a technical co-founder or someone else who can code for you. for the most part. well, i code. a lot of famous companies were started by people who code. as an angel investor i prefer to invest in companies where at least one of the founders is technical and they're building something before they're tries to raise money. >> but it is also, if you compare what's available to you as an entrepreneur now in terms of resources that you can reach out to third parties that you can bring in versus 10 or 15 years ago, it's a little easier

now to start with -- to go lean, outsource everything, and start with one or two people and still get the company off the ground. >> sure. you have e-lance and o-desk and angel list and cloud computing and a lot of things that didn't exist ten years ago. i think people -- it's well documented that in some ways it is easier to do a lot with less, which is interesting because most internet start-ups now probably take less money to start and yet the venture capital industry is still very, very big. >> you're based out of san francisco. there's been this explosion of tech once again in san francisco. because we've been through this. the pets.com. this explosion in san francisco that has been largely great stuff. i mean, uber and twitter and -- there has been a bit of a backlash now. there was something in "san francisco" magazine a couple of weeks ago saying hey, maybe we're getting -- where do you stand on? san francisco versus silicon valley. >> well, i used to live in

silicon valley. i started my career here at netscape and i started my first do companies including friendster at mountain view. and then i moved up to san francisco and i started four businesses in san francisco and i really love living in the city. things have shifted. a lot more start-ups are in san francisco. a lot of the entrepreneurs really want to be up in the city. so that really has shifted. that's why we started founders den in soma, not mountain view or palo alto. the backlash against the generality riff kaigs stuff, we went through that ten years ago. >> i read that story. david talbot. it's an irritating story. for all kinds of reasons. including the fact that it's almost kind of like some kind of odd anti-capitalist argument that wow, we're creating all these jobs in san francisco -- >> i think it's also what we do in the media. we say hey, look, new big trend and then we wait about a couple of months and we say this trend has gone too far and this is enough of that. >> we're creating too many jobs in san francisco. >> also when the trend gets written about for a few years. you can read articles about hey,

san francisco things are shifting up there, you know, you can read an article about that in 2012. you can read an article about that in 2011. you can read an article about that in 2010. and there's some truth to it obviously. but yeah, people like to sensationalize it. the city is not very big, right? seven by seven. so taking it -- you know, the tech money aside, you know, it's not a big city. so it's always going to be expensive to live there. >> jonathan, we've got about 30 seconds before we've got to go to commercial. but for goodness sake pitch us nuzzel. n-u-z-z-e-l. 30 seconds. >> n-u-z-z-e-l is a simple and easy and fun way to read news stories your friends are sharing on twitter. >> they send out an e-mail and you have it all listed right there for you. >> nuzzel desktop or e-mail. >> nuzzel.com. jonathan abrams, founder of nuzzel.com. forever to be known that way. thank you for being with us. >> thank you. >> coming up in just a little

bit, the most intelligent man in artificial intelligence. when "press: here" continues.

welcome back to "press: here." a lot of attention is paid to the engineer working on making your phone a little bit thinner or the entrepreneur with the new photo sharing app. and those things are fine. my next guest, though, is creating the thinking computer. >> the h.a.l. 9000 computer, which can reproduce, though some experts still prefer to use the word mimic, most of the activities of the human brain. and with the -- >> the idea of a computer which thinks like a human is a science fiction staple, but it's entirely fictional. computers in the real world may be smart, but they're not intelligent. the same computer, for instance, capable of managing millions of netflix accounts still has a

devil of a time recommending a movie that you would like. >> aa hachlt! >> scientists at silicon valley's vicarious systems are working on computers which mimic the human brain, starting with one of the most basic human abilities, the ability to see the world around you. dileep george is a long-time researcher in artificial intelligence. he's authored 22 patents and is co-founder of vicarious systems. just got millions of dollars in funding from facebook founder dustin moskovitz. thank you for being with us this morning. when is the right time to start artificial intelligence? because i think it's ten years from now when computers are better. do you follow my logic there? if you have an apple ii plus back in 1980 -- somebody help me. '81, let's say. you can say i'm going to write an artificial intelligence program that would look silly five years later. >> that's right. so it's always better to start

later because if the problem is not solved already by somebody else. because later computers will be faster, there will be better tools, there will be more -- you can learn a lot from the mistakes that people have made before you. >> right. >> so it's always good to start later. but i think if you wait now somebody else will do it or -- right now is the time to start because we have learned quite a lot from the past approaches for building a.i. and we have learned a lot from the researchers in the field. we know a lot more about the brain now than we used to -- >> that's key, right? how can you make an electronic brain if you don't understand a human brain? >> yeah so, this was one of the mistakes that we made earlier. earlier when we got computers we got really excited. we thought, oh, we have computers, now we can make them do anything, so we can just program intelligence onto the computers. >> so is the opportunity here more about having general-purpose kinds of

intelligence, the hal 9000 example -- >> without killing. >> without the killing part would be good. or is it about experts and stuff? we're going to create software that's going to be really, really good at solving this particular problem. >> it is more about having this general-purpose intelligence. intelligence like us. we are not -- expert systems, they are very brittle. they take a lot of effort from programmers to keep them up to date when things change. and they don't cope very well with changing situations. and they don't do common sense reasoning very well. for example, there are no good algorithms available to look at an image and say what is in that image and interpret the contents of the image. these are subtle things that we do very well. >> that setup i can see you want to ask but i want to clarify. he's talked about that teaching a computer to see may be one of the best ways of teaching a computer a.i. >> that's right. yeah. understanding the visual world and understanding the auditory world, these are all things that

the are the basics of intelligence. one of the mistakes that we made earlier was going to the higher-level thinking first without solving perception problems first. but all the higher-level thinking is built up on our common sense knowledge that we acquire from the visual world and auditory world. >> so in all of your research what is something that you've learned thus far that would shock people at home, that would make them care about the research and development that you're doing right now? >> okay. so we understand a lot more about the codex now. and how much we understand about the cortex and how it can be -- operating principles can be built on a computer. and in the next few years, in the next ten years we will start seeing applications of real intelligence. >> so how do you see this being applied? how are we going to experience this and how far -- is it commercial applications or consumer applications? and how will we see it? >> this is a core technology.

it will be everywhere. starting with improved siri, for example. something which understands my accent well and something that you can give a very high-level command, book my tickets, and it will handle it all for you. >> it will take siri to a whole new level. >> so that is one example. in a more near-term application. things that will understand. for example, in medical diagnosis you can give an image of a tissue and the computer will be able to tell us whether that is cancerous or not. further out applications would be systems that can just understand data. that is what fundamentally humans do. our cortex does. you know, we are bombarded with information, and we make a model of the world from all that information. and that's what eventually a.i. will be able to help us. >> is this sort of the ultimate manifestation of this whole big data phenomenon that we're talking about, is being able to take huge volumes of data, find

for instance that as a human you may not -- >> that's right. this will be the culmination of that because now it is all about collecting the data and tabulating the data. and we have to come to a stage where we have to understand the data. and to understand the data we need some core algorithms like how the human brain does it. >> let's talk about dustin mo mosskovitz. and i'm going to give you millions of dollars. when do i get my money back? when do we sell google? this is a long-term play, right? >> this is a long-term play. we're not planning to sell the company to google. >> we have about a minute left, by the way. >> so our goal is to build the core technology first. and in about five years we'll have something very good. so we are building a visual system first. and that intermediate system itself can be commercialized if we want to. one of the mistakes that previous a.i. companies made is going a product very fast before

solving the fundamental problems. we don't want to do that mistake. so if you wait longer there will be a bigger payoff. >> we'll wait longer. dileep george is involved with vicarious systems, one of the founders. thank you for being with us. >> my pleasure. >> when "press: here" continues we will talk about how to pick just the right board that's idiot-free. back in a minute.

welcome back to "press: here." we talk a great deal about ceos on this show. but for a moment i'd like to discuss some boards of directors. in most cases in silicon valley they're largely invisible. occasionally, like in hewlett-packard's case, they're in the news for all the wrong reasons. mark rogers is a board recruiter, a headhunter out of boston where he runs a firm that helps companies find board directors. thanks for being with us this morning. >> thanks for having me. >> what if i'm a young entrepreneur with a brand new company? what's the biggest piece of advice i need to know?

>> it really depends on where you are in the evolution of your company. but if you are a startup and you're in the process of this is now your full-time job, you really want to pursue an advisory board. and that's the key. most people say, okay, well, i need a board of directors. and yes, you'll get a board of directors. that'll come. >> whether you want it or not. >> that's exactly it. and that comes with incorporation really. but the advisory board is an integral part of taking that next step. >> should i be thinking these are going to be my board? my board of directors when i'm putting together my advisory board? >> how should they differ between your -- who's on your board of advisers and who would be on your board of directors? >> well, that's exactly it. it's really -- if you look at the board, the board is going to be for the most part -- and again, it depends where you are in the evolution of your company, but the board is going to depend upon your investors. so as you go further along, if you get to a series a, the board's going to -- the investors are going to determine who's on the board. >> the board of directors is basically the ceo's boss making

decisions about major structural decisions about the company. but your advisers, these are people you're leaning to to get advice on the ongoing -- >> it's a shame it can't be the same thing. >> exactly. >> they do sort of different function ppz. >> it really is. and i think what i always tell entrepreneurs looking for an advisory board, i say look, take a step back, and first think of who do you need? who do you have? look at the talent and skill sets around you. the diversity, the background. and then look at what are the holes? what are you missing? is it technology? is it legal? is it marketing? whatever it may be. and use that as a guide for finding those advisory board members. and how the advisory board interacts with you is for the most part, to your point, eric, is going to be much more intimate than you would have with a typical board of directors. >> right. well, they don't have the same formal role. board of directors are the particular sort of legally mandated kind of role that they fill. and the advisory board is not like that. >> that's right. >> how hard should i work to get

a wozniak on my -- either one but my board of directors. someone i can say look, al gore's on my board too. it can be done. >> it can be done. you know, i caution going after the big names. i think it can oftentimes for a young entrepreneur be a distraction from what you're trying to do with the company. >> how so? >> well, you spend a lot of skill -- you'll have talent and resources looking for that individual as opposed to focusing on the core of your company. and it's not -- i always caution that it can be great to have a big name on your board, particularly in terms of fund-raising and customer recognition, but you've got to be very careful. and this is something that is a problem not just at the startup level but really for public companies and non-profits. if you chase that big name and the big name agrees to be on the board, oftentimes that big name, their time is stretched thin, and their -- what you find is they can oftentimes serve to be a distraction for you. >> i also think it's a question of what you want from your board

members. so if you're a very large public company, there are -- there's a lot time when it's fine to have what you're describing, right? someone who can fly in, swoop in for the board meeting, hang around, chat for five minutes, and swoop out until the next board meeting. but if you're a small conditioner you're a startup company, you need board members that are going to roll up their sleeves and really help you out. so it's less about having some marquee value than it is about having real advice, real value that they bring to the company beyond just having them. >> that's exactly it. it's sitting back and looking at what you need and then making sure does that person fit and what are they going to bring to the table. >> and making sure they don't fire you after 18 months. >> well, that comes with the territory, unfortunately, sometimes. >> now, "forbes" and pando daily and nbc would all laugh if we wanted to go beyond some board of some commercial enterprise. they would not permit that. but let's pretend for a minute.

how do i get on a board? how do i say to the world i'm smart enough to be on the board of directors and i'd like to be? >> i suggest you go to boardprospects.com and -- >> i didn't mean to set you up quite that well. >> i love it, though. it's great. >> how do i legitimately -- first of all, how do i know i'm board qualified? i can sit on a board and give good advice and i'm worthy of this. >> no, that's a great question. oftentimes when i'm speaking to a room about this i always say, you know, almost anyone in a particular room has some sort of value or skill set or experience that would make them a valuable asset to a board, whether it's a board of directors, an advisory board, or maybe a board-related committee. but really it comes down to unfortunately -- and this is one of the things that goes back to the problems having with a board of governance is it's the who do you know conversation. oftentimes i think it's an okay place to start because it lays the groundwork, but all too often the who do you know conversation is the beginning and end of board recruitment for

a particular company. >> the easiest way to be on a board of directors is be on some other board of directors. >> you can't be on a board unless you're on a board. >> exactly. i was just playing with that you know, you look at the relationship between apple and tim cook is on nike and then you look at nike and eric schmidt was at apple. they're a tightly woven board of directors. it's amazing. >> it is. and the problem that really is happening, we're starting to see the roots of this right now, you know, in the post-enron era we had sarbanes-oxley come out and all these corporate governance reforms. but what they didn't do -- they increased accountability and transparency, no question, but what they didn't do was improve the candidate pool. and we haven't done anything to really -- the problem that happens at the public company level is most people think, well, we're looking for board members, we're going to keep the pool to existing public company directors and existing public company officers. >> mark rogers, i have to stop you there.

all good show stuff on sarbanes-oxley. thank you for being here. "press: here" will be back in just a minute. good morning. thanks for joining us. i'm mike inouye, traffic anchor here ought nbc bay area. folks coming into the city for the bay area's big weengd. we have all this activity scheduled today including the music festival at golden gate. but the sufrks streets okay. right now we're focusing on the area right around candlestick. 101 expected to get crowded with tailgater activity from now until that 1:30 game time. so keep that in mind. how is the day shaping up? >> the day's looking pretty good. we are talking about some sunshine. the fog has started to move in through the golden gate but as we move to noon 66 for a daytime high today. by 4:00 fog will start to move back into the city as temperatures cool back into the lower 60s. and of course we will keep you posted with all things happening on nbc bay area.com. log on there. you can find us on facebook and twitter. use the hashtag baybigwknd.

we will be back with more updates throughout the day. that's our show for this week. we've had an irregular schedule lately but i'm glad to say we're back to normal. so we'll see you next week. i'm scott mcgrew. thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.