tv Press Here NBC July 28, 2013 9:00am-9:31am PDT
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>> the biggest tech ipo since facebook, we will talk to the workday ceo about the future of the cloud and we will talk about reinventing nature's most simple food. our reporters from tech crunch, and anthony hardy from the "new york times," this week on press here. >> you may have started this morning with eggs and we are going to do the same. it's possibly the most important food in human history. it makes birthday cakes rise and
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thickens sauces and works as a binder in past a and of course, you have to break a few to make an omlett, or do you? science has been working on egg replacements for years and for good reason, eggs have too much cholesterol, they are hard to transport, they spoil and billion chickens they come from are damaging to the environment. the problem is, eggs are used in so many ways, it's proved impossible for scientists to find one solution. though san francisco's hampton creek foods may be close. the start up located in the heart of high tech south of market is working on plant-based replace manies. funded in part by microsoft's bill gates. >> josh, he is ceo of hampton creek foods, he is a teacher in
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kenya, and blogger who is now reinventing one of nature's most basic foods. in in my list things that you are good at, i do not see anything related to this. how do you feel you are qualified for this? >> i feel i'm smarter some -- >> so am i. one of the things we realized early on, this problem is not a food science problem, it's not a culinary problem, it's not a bio chemistry problem, it requires all the disciplines. we have biologyists, we have a chef that was on top chef season nine and all of them together will make it happen. the egg is spoken of as the perfect food, setting aside the
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cholesterol problem, it's a complete kind of food. so, chickens do a nice job laying them, why do you fwhenee change the system. how many eggs are layed in america and around the world? >> it's the system, not the egg that is really the issue. 1.8 trillion eggs are laid every year around the word. >> that means chickens are doing a fine job. >> but they are doing a dirty job. and it's a hard to transport job. >> it's massive. of the 1.8 million eggs that are laid globally, 99% of all the eggs, whether where i was rau d -- where i was raised, they are laid in the same place, industrial warehouses. imagine a warehouse, rows of cages, 9 to 10 female birds in each cage, they are left there for two years and here are
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problems, besides the obvious animal well tear issue, it's not safe. when you cram animals body to body, somebody is going to get sick, the prices rise and it's devastating to the environment, they are fed massive amounts of soy and corn and it requires all this land and water and fertilizer. >> okay, so i'm scared by that, and should we be scared about guys in labs cooking up eggs? >> we are not talking about that, we are talking about 92% of the world's plants have not been explored for their ability to be used in food. all we do is search the world's plant species and we screen them. asking ourselves, does it emulsify? does it bind? does it scramble up? we are not doing anything fancy. no synthetic engineer auto iing
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have found this can work better in an egg. >> you are not trying to replace the whole egg with one product, you are taking it one function at a time? >> you got it. who knew that the end of a hen's ovulation cycle could do all these different things. a scrambled egg does different things than a fried egg. it's a different type of texture, we select plants that explicitly nail the function. >> you made up 22 different solutions? >> we will not have that many, we have identified about 11 plants that more or less can achieve the function. >> the french cook is thinking, i'm out of eggs, surely somebody maybe before the microscope has
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tried this. >> right, thankfully for our business, they have not done it well enough, but the problem that have attempted it in the past, they have thought of it as a vegan side item. this is for vegans, it does not need to be as good. for someone like my dad. my dad does not care with greenhouse gases he wants a muffin or a scrambled egg. other products require it to taste good and be cheap. >> it's not building a round object with a yolk in the center of it. it's doing egg-like things. is your market big food markets or african development where they do not have eggs? >> we will make that the last answer. feel free to answer completely. >> it's two approaches, we are an ingredient to big food companies, and we also are really good at creating consumer facing products. we have a mayo called just mayo
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workday's leadership. the ceo seen here excepting award as entrepreneur of the year, and his co-ceo, neil works two jobs and thank you for being with us this morning. let me start with an insult, if i might, the new york times called your space unglamour us. it's a service, your company does hr software. that said, things happening in there are almost shakespearean, there's so much going on, with warfare and races and it's an exciting space. >> he said that too. >> he did. it's an exciting spot to be in. >> it is, it's a very exciting spot to be in, it's not glap ru -- glamorous.
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>> i will say hr software is not glamorous, you do not make the iphone. >> you feel like the glamour, you feel it has increased a bit? >> i think today's generation of enterprise is all about consumer, when you think of what workday does, it is for hr and accounting, but they are used by employees and managers to run the business. >> i do not doubt you have a tiger by the tail and that is what i'm trying to communicate to the viewer. and quinton can explain it better, this is the place to be. >> it seems to me, you have two jobs, you either have six or one, i will try to stay inside the one space. when you seem to be seeing and the world has kind of caught on to now, we are whole heartedly in the world where everyone has a laptop, a tablet, a smartphone, and they go to any
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shop and expect to be connect to the internet. so business and consumer software has to adjust kwukly. consumer software moved faster because it's free, the stuff you sell is, that is people's financials, that is their spine and their life blood. >> and those cycles is ten to 15 year cycles. once you buy an hr system or accounting system, you do not buy it every year. you change it every ten to 15 years, and you change it when the technology is so compelling and the offering is so different you have to do make your business run better. >> so you are building, at workday, you build that, but as a vc you are looking at people being in constant communication with big data computers and you are on the board of companies involved in this too. how conflicting is that for you? >> at this point, and it will
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continue to be the case, they are all complimenting and not overlapping in their spaces. the way we see the world at workday, there's innovation coming out of the internet, whether it's mobile or cloud, or big data, enterprise technology like workday get to pick and choose. >> you just follow behind and pick up what the problems are and fix that? >> yes, mobile, great for facebook and linkedin and it's good for workday, in terms of being the smartphone being the tool of the information worker. >> neil, you come up quickly with workday as a young quick start up. in a space that seems to favor young quick start ups over the big heavy oracles, or equal is still the big gorilla, it's the young quick start ups that is getting the attention and the funding. what happens when there's a
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young quick start up behind workday? >> how do you define young quick start up? >> i'm coming up with it as i go. >> we are eight years into it and that is about the time it takes to build these systems are huge systems. >> the barrier to entry is high. >> it's huge. >> and it must be said, you spent a lot of time at a company like this, at people soft and you tried to build it at peoplesoft. how did that turn out? >> we ran out of time with the oracle take over. we saw the shift toward the cloud. we started workday, these systems that we are talking about replacing, they are big honking systems. they run all the employee systems, and your information to the investors and the sec, we have raised $250 million to build that scale of system. in general, you will not see a lot of start ups tackle the
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space. it's a big space. >> would you have funded yourself? i mean, you get taken over, peoplesoft gets taken over by oracle in a not very pretty situation, but a lot of money comes out of it and you are able to use it to create workday. would venture capitol have funded you the way you funded you? >> i think they would if you are a consumer company? >> so the answer is no. you are not a consumer company. you are a one-off, in the sense that there's a bizarre set of circumstances that allow you to exist. >> a lot of the original funding comes from dave dufffield, these kind of businesses are built for the long run, they are not built for the quick three-year hit. we are eight years old, so we are not that young a company anymore. >> at the same time, it's over a long time scale, and the high barrier to entry, are you structuring the company to be a bigger company that you til have
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some of that kind of agilitiy? >> we are a little over 2,000 employees now, if you walk around the workday offices, feel like you are in a start up, and a consumer internet company. that is by design. >> what is in the science that fuels the internet company? >> they are working on the same technologies, they are working on ipads and all the open source components. so the engineers are working with the same technologies that they are working with at google, and facebook. >> even people that did not work at peoplesoft saw you and dave as the start-up leaders the people leader that make a good start-up good. >> and we brought that culture to workday. we really take care of our employees. we have been voted one of the best companies to work for in the bay area 3 of the last four years. that in today's really, really challenging job environment is a big competitive advantage? >> are there characteristics
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from people sosoft that you fee the culture did not need? >> we are applying it to a different technology base. >> there's a move to the cloud, and software is a service, and everybody is claiming now that they are in the cloud. they are either big data or they are in the cloud or the software is the service. you really are those things. should i as a business owner who let's say i have been doing this a long time, and i have my data on hard drives in my office, with the talk of the nsa, and the domestic spying and things, i know, if a federal agent knocks on my door and says, i have a search warrant to go in your left desk drawer and take the hard drive out, in the cloud, i don't. is that, do you have customers asking you about that? asking you about where is my data and is it safe? is it even in the united states? >> there's a big difference, yes, they ask.
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in our model, the data is their data. we do not have the right to give away the data. if someone subpoenas us for the data a, then it's a process. we are a data processor, when you look at some companies, they own the data, we don't. the customer owns a data. >> is that important? if i'm an fbi agent and i say, we need data. you demand a warrant? >> we would say, you have to go talk to the kmr. >> they would want to go -- talk to the customer. >> they would not go after you, the they would go after the server. >> you did well. all right. neil, thank you for being with us. stay right there. technology's landlord, duncan logan here when "press: here" continues.
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>> uber, spotify and zappos are three of the most intriguing companies. they are cool and got their start at the simple desks inside an organization called rocket space. rocket space is a spiezingly simple concept, it's supplies a start up with every thing it needs. office space, desks, a coffee maker and a receptionist, and it will supply a motivational speaker on a evening if you like. he calls rocket space the stanford of start ups. i thought stanford was the stanford of start ups. >> it's something we aspire to be. we are trying to bring the best of the technology community into one location. >> do you know when you get to know some of these companies,
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you know, a spotify or something, where you just say, yeah, those guys have got it? >> it's very hard to sfot the company with the company being hugely successful. the thing is the quality of people they are attracting, all the companies are growing and they are recruitment companies when they are within rocket space, when you see them pulling top talent out of apple, and google or whatever, you start to think, they are getting something. >> i'm sorry, i got this backwards. you are a real estate guy, and this is real estate, and we are treating you like you are a talent agent, you are renting space for people, what makes this so special above and beyond a building anyway? >> i come from a technology background. my last three companies have all been tech companies. we use the real estate as office as a service, it's a platform for us to do the more interesting things on top of it. we focus around access to
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capital, we have a relationship with all the vcs in the community. and we have talent business, that is putting people through boot camps, there's a huge shortage of talented people there, and then the corporate piece. british air ways and others have teams in rocket space, innovation teams working with the start-ups. there's more, the real estate is just the platform, stanford would not say their business is real estate, it's just a platform. >> do you feel you are doing something different from the landlord or doing the landlord job better? >> i think we are doing on the real estate platform, we are doing the real estate better. i think office as a service, there's other people out there doing that and it's proving to be hugely popular. >> what do people want when they have a business, they want office and desks and a motivational speaker or they want heavy internet connections, you are packaging all of it and saying inside this physical
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space, will be the things, rent with us. >> yeah, there's an element of collaborative consumption. >> right. we do due diligence on these guys. >> what makes you know they are on a tear. are they consuming more band width, how do you tell one is successful and one is bombing? >> they all have different metrics. we have super cell, that is in the gaming industry and they are killing it. and then we have another company that has a simple metric, at first, it was one document stored on their system per hour. >> for you, as the landlord, how do you say they are going to make it? >> it's hard, vcs are killing it every day if it was easy. >> earlier you talked about the idea that these people are
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bringing one of the signs that they were going to be great is they stole a guy from google. if i steal a guy from google, do i really want him next to everyone else in rocket space? in other words, how much of that has just become where now they -- >> right. i stole that guy from google. it's poaching. this is a great show. >> it was a concern when we started. and actually, i've been super surprised there's been none of that proper. >> is it a social, that is just not done? >> there's an element of that. and i think there's also, it also kind of provides a safety net in regards. when you are working with 130 different start-ups, if your start-up does not work -- >> you can push your chair back. >> you turn around and start working for the guy behind you. >> it's a technology cluster that provides a safety net for people in there. you are surrounded by some of the best people in tech. >> you are seeing trends early
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too. what are people after now? >> yeah, we see trends when people come through. we saw the daily deals when groupon came through. and mobile, is a trend across the base. some of the things i like is the companies going like, if this and then that. this is company to company. >> that is an actual company, if this, then that. >> these sort of companies that are working off the back of others, there's other companies building off the back of facebook at the moment, and other social graphs and pulling that data together. a move back into enterprise, without a doubt, has become sort of cooler. and we are seeing a lot of he education start ups. game-ification of education. >> the ones that move out the soonest, assuming they did not completely flame out, are the ones that grew too fast for you? >> yeah, we deliberately attract the best start-ups, but they
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grow quickly and when they get to 50 people, we have to ask them to move on. >> spotify, you just kicked them out. >> they just moved to a new office, ubers, they are huge now. leap motion is another one. so, there's lots of companies that have come through. >> that is sort of an interesting metric in and of itself, is who left rocket space? >> there's a bubble of real estate agents that were taking effect and that got a strange reputation, do you take equity or is it straight cash? >> we do straight cash, because our focus is to get the best companies into rocket space, and we feel if we went to josh and said, you can come in but you have to give us 1%, he would be like what for? our entire focus is about building the most wonderful ecosystem for start ups, we have to attract the best companies in there. they are the vcs and they have
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questions about us taking equity. >> what is going on in downtown san francisco? >> i think san francisco will look back at this period and it's -- i mean, it's recreating the city. there's so many cranes around us. we had to move offices because it's getting flattened to be built into a 64-story tower. it's a great ecosystem. we have an expansion of tech. and san francisco is a cluster. but we will see them form in new york, and tel aviv and other locations. >> we only have a couple seconds left. last thought. the other cities will look back at this, palo alto and san ojos, you watch the move northward, palo alto and san jose, are going to look back and said, we could have done better. that is my last thought. thank you for being with us this
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you're watching nbc sports. >> in for the touchdown. >> championship over. >> the black hawks are stanley cup champions. >> the double. boy does he deliver. >> welcome to the u.s. bank nbc sports report. here's your host. >> hi, everyone. welcome in to our nbc sports studios in connecticut. coming up an exciting look back at the super bowl of cycling. the 100th edition of the tour de france completed last week in paris. but first some other sports news. beginning with baseball. three men will be inducted into the hall of fame in cooperstown today. hang o'day, jacob rupert and deacon white receiving honors all three passed away more than
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