. max levchin, chairman, billionaire and mathematician uses big data to help couples get pregnant. plus, blogger founder lisa stone on the next generation of women bloggers. our reporters pendo daily's sara lacy and martin giles from the economy this week on "press here." >> good morning, everyone. it says a great deal about any motorcycles guest is that most remarkable thing about max isn't that he's involved in getting thousands of women pregnant. his biggest claim to fame is right here in this now historical image dating way back

to the 1990s when max and a fellow named peter tieel tried transferring money between two mobile devices and they called their service paypal. their company was bought by elon musk. if you need me to sketch out the rest of that story for you, you are watching the wrong television show. if you're worried about the women getting pregnant part, there's an app called glow which helps women track their fertility. thousands of women have used know to help them become pregnant. so, i find it remarkable that there is an app, because there's huge criticism out there, particularly of men, particularly of young men, that they are making apps that only are important to young entrepreneurs in san francisco. and here you made an apps that is important to at least half of the world. >> might be because i'm not a

young entrepreneur in san francisco any more. younger. i've given you the benefit of the doubt. >> youthful looking. yeah, i think it's -- sara knows all too well, i have made it my most recent mission to solve meaningful problems, and solving the problem of on infer tillty is pretty meaningful. >> why are you trying to solve meaningful problems? and i mean that only with a certain amount of sarcasm because there are so many problems out there being solved that frankly aren't -- >> because we had a rough few years not solve ago meaningful problems. >> that could be. the other half is that life is too short to solve meaningless problems? no. the real reason is that i woke up one more and i said, i'm really good at data and there are many, many problems in the world. some are boring, some are cool, some are kiting and some are profound.

if i could just marry up the data part and problems, that will mean something. that's why. >> i will argue more than half of the world. >> i absolutely agree. and there are three father owes set and we would agree with you, as well. at least half. >> certainly would. so the idea, if i -- if i was a woman and i wanted to get pregnant, i would input loads of data into your app. >> and here is where i'm going to jump in and say this is a television program on public airways that runs on sunday mornings -- >> i was very careful. >> no, you were wonderful. you run a blog on the internet. you can say anything you want to. >> and i do. >> you run the economy, which means there's very little discussion of babies in the economy that you would. >> i would be extremely careful. >> i'm not a produced, but let's just continue in a clinical fashion, shall we?

>> i can't give you the clinical fashion. a database is a woman and her partners, they all both the male and female version which is very important. less than half, but more than 10% of infertility can be directly addressed to the man in the equation. so it's just as important that the man participates beyond the obvious. the data that we ask for is all kinds. and we don't require nor do we push the participants who put in all the data being a data driven company means we're ultimately using modeling to narrow down the opportunity to try naturally for a child and as women enter anything from their basil body temperature, taking it at a certain time or morning or their mood or their diets or their exercise level, some of the more biospecific signals of ovulation, anything from a kit result to other things, we build

out a profile and use a model that was built on top of or many, many, many users at this point to figure out how likely this person is to be ovulating in this eight-hour window, which is roughly where we try to narrow it. we are running one of the largest if not the largest fertility studies ever conducted. >> that's -- you get this feedback as to whether it's successful or not and it becomes a big data problem. >> exactly. that is the big data solution to a very big problem. so as we get this data, we can start providing really, really precise information. and we think you have 33% chance of competing if you try to conceive in the next eight hours. so it's profoundly impactful on at least 20,000 women. >> now, where you're at your best is with you're solving very complex mass oriented problems. at paypal, you were combatting a lot of the fraud that company the company in business while

peter added other things. with glow, this is obviously a data math issue. how similar is building the two companies? are they ultimately solving math problems that have different real world attributes or are they wildly different companies from your point of view? they're pretty different. it would be a little too much of a generalization to just -- they're all the same to me, i just see numbers and digits floating in the air. having said that, the part that excites me and the part that sort of gets me out of bed in the morning is the part where i know in the last 24 hours more data has been gathered from the sensors integrated from people with eventually the data and we'll learn just a little bit more. the thing that i love about it is that it's this gut wrenchingly interesting for lack of a better term incremental process. it will get a little better and a little better. there's never the oh, wow, we figured out a great gaming mechanic. it's never about that. it's now we're 5% smarter and

women will get to their goal of pregnancy. >> you're in this distrust of data and apps and i don't want google knowing or i don't want amazon knowing. and people are putting into your app really intimate details about their body. how did you create that trust? i mean, they're getting something out of it. they're getting a pregnancy that they want very much. and perhaps they're willing to just give the data for the goal. but it seems like you built trust almost right away. >> that's not necessarily exactly right. i do have a history of dealing with people very, very important, very personal data. and so far, i have been a reasonably good custodian of that data delivering value and/or keeping it as secret as it needs to be. having said that, i think the vast majority of the users have self-selected glow have a clear set of priority necessary their mind. they would like a baby and they

have fought been successful and that is why they're willing to -- >> you think the goal overweighs any sort of -- >> yeah. it's not like being on whatsapp and there's another way to chat and mistakes have so great. >> fundamentally, privacy and value are a tradeoff. you have to think about it that way. when you type in your social security number to get a credit card, you know you're a little bit exposing, putting yourself out there, giving up something that you're supposed to be keeping secret. but you do need access to capital and that's why that's a fair trade. you pretty much want a baby and nothing else. >> now, you then took it further and you've got glow nurture, which is brand new. you had them for nine months -- or i'm sorry, you had them at conception and now you're going to have them for nine months as they launch a new app, watching how their pregnancy is moving forward. >> so one of the things that we realized -- every time the entrepreneur you decide to start a company, we were sitting

around the room, a bunch of dudes, mind you, but a dude that had real problems. when we started talking about this, it was a little bit of oh, health care is messed up, we have to do something about it. it's all fun and games until i said is infer tillty a curable problem? and everyone looked around and said we don't know. mike side, well, i happen. we struggled for a year. so as soon as that became real, that's when the company was born and as we saw it work for the last -- just about a year since launch, it's amazing. you kind of go, wow, this whole math thing solves an extraordinarily important real world problem. the one thing we see every time, every woman we help gives us a five star review, two lines, pregnancy. what is it now? >> what do we expect when we're expecting. hold that thought and we'll come back.

welcome back to press here. we're talking to paypal founder and glow chairman max and martin is the economist. >> i love this his and hers aspect to the app. oh, it's monday night football. okay. so the man says, no, this is not

going to quite work today, but maybe on tuesday. the serious point i'm working is make money out of this. are you going to, like, layer in for movie tickets, restaurant nights out or is there some other model involved here? >> in my other life, i am still chairman of yelp. so it's not entirely out of the question, but i might find reason to -- not like a suggestion of the best restaurants for romance. but no, in all seriousness, the reason we started the company, sort of the business framework behind it, was health insurance, not just health care in the country being messed up. if you look at infertility, only nine states offer any or mandate any coverage at the employer levels. so we went into this with the clear eyes of we don't just want to help women conceive naturally, but help them depray the costs. very, very, very expensive treatments. ibf could go as far as $50,000.

>> fertility treatments. >> in vitro fertility. we have been running glow first which is a not for profit portion of glow so far where we let people pool money and as they become pregnant donate their cash. the ones that do not receive a payout proportionate to what's in a pool that we pay directly to their fertility specialist. over time, we're going to get to the scale where it will be able to turn this into a proper insurance program. >> so the idea is -- i mean, do i want my employer to know that i'm trying to get pregnant? >> or do i want my employer to know at all? >> number one, no one do not want your employer to know that you are trying. however, you want your employer to help you financially. and the reason as an employer you want to see your female -- especially your female xrves,

but your female workforce feel secure in their reproductive choices is because every time a woman says, i am in my late 30s. do i go for the big job or do i just drop out and go have a baby because then it's going to be difficult? do you want that smart executive to say i'm going to go for the big job because i feel very secure in the support that i'm going to get from the hr department when i have to go for that ioi? we are, in fact, now selling know first enterprise which is a commercial version, it's just beginning, but it is resinating currently with not just the employee base, but with the department because it's not very well insured condition, hr departments look like heros every time they say by the way, that really expensive infer tillty treatment, we will stand behind you when it's time. >> everyone wants to look more women friendly, regardless if it's genuine or tactic.

>> so far, most that we have been talking to are gebeginin. >> let me ask you this, max. when you moved here, you are an ambitious kid, you liked selling math problems. you wanted to do something big. how is being in your upper 20s entrepreneur changed you as a entrepreneur? are you better? >> i'm older. i -- i'm more aware of the passage of time. i think when i was younger, paypal was a little bit of an accident. i wanted to nerd out somewhere that solved math problems. it happened that i solved a bunch of math problems having to do with money which turned out to be a pretty good set of problems to solve. i spent my late 20s and early 30s solving math problems that weren't as important to me. >> growing sheep. >> growing sheep is one way to put it. >> amazing team, bunch of great

people. and the vast majority of glow is at slide. so the team we put together is tremendous. all these companies are ex sliders, which i'm very, very proud. having said that, it wasn't meaningful to me to develop games. so the resolution i made after sly -- from now i'm i'm going to solve problems that are personally important even though i had no infer tillty challenges, i could see among my friends how painful and important that was so solving that makes a lot of sense. >> max, i have to let you go, i want to stick around and ask you a couple of questions and perhaps you can put them on the internet briefly. but for our tv watchers, thanks for being here again. you're always a welcome guest. up next, lisa stone when "pretty here" continues.

welcome to "press here" this week, thousands of bloggerses will gather for the blog her conference. it's a conference celebrating ten years of success. they're calling it a selfie -- put altogether, these women reach collect i live 40 million of readers a month. lisa stone serves as its ceo. congratulations on your success. >> thank you. >> you started with a few dozen in a conference, right? now it's up to a hundred. >> so it's a crazy story. in 2005, the leading question coming out of my old news room in print and broadcast was where are the women who blog? and i was already in professional mroging, so we decided to answer the question by showing the world instead of just blogging about it. we put together a conference with an incredible diversity,

feminist bloggers, hip hop bloggers, the first ever mommy blogging panel i knew of. 305 women showed up from four continents. now we'll have about 4,000 people in santa fe. >> so are you now so successful that we don't need you? in other words, if someone women bloggers are practically household names, and your biggest competitor is a woman, cara swisher, if brit moran and heather armstrong is a story from years ago, if this is so commonplace now, have you just accomplished your mission? >> i am so happy to tell you that a funny thing happened on the way to the conference. social media platform. so today, it's changed from yes, here are the women, to here are the women and here's how they're changing the world across social media. so today's professional voice, whether she's a foeing the fer or a video writer or a blogger is diversifying what she says

not only on her blog, but she's using her smartphone to update every single successful social media platform. because what about has today is influence across the community. >> what's the commonality for the women who attend your conference? i feel like i would have more in common with scott than i would a mommy's blogger. just because you're a woman and you're writing into word press, what do we have to talk about? >> the primary reason that we find people coming to our conference, women and men, is because they want to learn how to better educate themselves on the latest tools and technology so that they can grow their community of followers and earn an income. we believe that when an -- should be paid to write and -- we'll have conversations on everything from our geek lab where people will talk about the latest word press module to a conversation led with carrie washington about how to be a professional woman in twitter who can represent your brand,

but also be an activist. >> but the point is, these are not women-centric issues. >> it's balance over and over examine over again. >> it's a community that built the conference based on a series of interests in technology. tech savvy early adopters who then began to develop a series of leadership positions in areas that haven't been covered. >> that's precisely what i think i would have much more in common with the mog mommy bloggers than with scott. some of them women have been exceptionally capable of building a massive audience. so i'm happy to learn from wherever, especially the ones that have been successful. but we pay or bloggers, right? sara, i don't know, she probably means -- >> i pay very well, actually. >> much to my chagrin. >> people, you know, do this for nothing? why pay them? >> so it turns out that the cream also rises in the

blogosphere. if you want a successful blog, number one, quality. supreme, gorgeous quality. number two, you have to develop a community. that requires trust which typically requires disclosure on of any advertising or sponsorship. and number three, if you're going to keep on producing and leading this community in the conversation, shouldn't you be compensated? let's talk blths bit about social need ya for a minute. it was massively disruptive to the traditional media companies i used to work for, as well as traditional bloggers websites. the communities and conversations that women were already having, whether it was on an infertility blog or it was on a blog about how to improve your work with photo shop. very naturally extended into social media. so while we hope this conference, larger business which reaches actually 100 million women every month -- >> oh, really? i googled. yeah. >> it's about developing a model

that is leveraging all of social media on behalf of a brand, your brand, the writer, without becoming dependent on anyone. don't just log on facebook. don't just use pintrest. you should bring everybody babb to a single entity. >> that's one of the critiques i've heard about bloggers. you let this lose, coke will come in and say we're more about wellness. everyone should discuss this being about wellness. >> and explain how that works. coke comes to blog her and says we want your bloggers to write about coke. how does that work? one of the proudest days of my life was when tim o'reiley and mr. wales came to a story in the "new york times" by brad stone, no relation, and said we believe that there need to be rules and guidelines for behavior and we're modeling our recommendation on blowighers. from the beginning, i took what

i learned about disclosier, quality of writing and about some kind of discourse that we're having here. so whether a brand, whether it's coca-cola or it's skype, who is a huge sponsor of the conference comes to us, we say here is how you can work with us to sponsor editorials or to develop ads, here are disclosure guidelines. they apply across every medium we work on and is we're very glad you're here because frankly, women control 83% of household spending. if you don't work with this community, you won't reach your customer. she expects you to come to her 37. >> so these women become paid by you? >> we have advertising but we do a growing amount of work for hire. this is the golden age of content development. isn't it a release as journalists to see it finally come back to the quality of what

we write? we develop editorial as well as advertorial. >> it's the value and content and our ability the be paid as a media plushier for content. >> that's what we're finding. >> in one of our maintainants is that you don't have to rewrite press res leases, but it is hard to do a big out of. you look like the at least like box and buzz worthy. i think the massive data points don't show that content is picking. a lot of people are taking the profits from kitten videoes and investigative reporting, but i don't know that i can be quite as optimistic as you. i think content is still getting the bulk of investment capital and the bulk of the money in this state. >> there is a difference.

that's the reason we developed our model to leverage the following that we found women of quality writing could develop on our new social media. for example, take someone like catherine stone, again, no relation. she started something called postpartum progress. she was very, very sick after she had her first child. this anxiety disorder is a huge problem. she started a blog, she helped drive laelgz and she's actually started a 5013 c and raised about $150,000 to help get the word out in online communities where it's much easier for women to share, and men and their teams, the true terror of postpartum anxiety. this is the kind of quality sponsors are seeking. increasingly, we find the long tail converts, interacts with and clicks on marketing better than the superficial.

>> lisa stone, we have 30 seconds more with you. if heather armstrong was five years ago and britain morin was two years ago, who is the woman blogger we should all be reading? >> oh. terrible question. well, here's -- >> 15 seconds. a name. >> today? >> yes. >> the leading thing to know about having your own personal printing press is the age of the single superstar is over. there is no one woman leading the blogosphere. >> many women lead. >> well handled. >> this coming week, i wish you the best. >> thank you. thank you.

>> that's our show for this week. thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.

hello and welcome. today, wine country visits the silicone valley. we return here on your comunidad del ps valle. >> we're back here. this is my kind of show. we're loaded up here because this is the annual event where the napa valley, sonoma valley and silicone valley which is rich in producing wine comes together in one location. with me here are the organizers of the event. ray and maria. welcome to the show. >> thank you. >> and ray, you've brought some great whines over the