press:here" is sponsored in part by barracuda energy. >> a silicon valley company tries to turn natural gas into gasoline. a san francisco startup tries to find the best places to rent using big data. we'll find the next hot neighborhood. and the new face of the angel investor. with our reporter from "the financial times" and "san francisco chronicle's" david baker this week on "press:here. ." good morning, everyone.

i'm scott mcgrew. when it comes to american independence good news. lots of natural gas. bad news, natural gas is not the kind of gas you need for your car, not without significant modification to the car, but what if you could modify the natural gas? a san francisco-based startup sald siluria is turning natural gas into gasoline because natural gas is so inexpensive the company says it can manufacture gasoline for $1 a gallon. investors love the idea. the company has raised $100 million in funding. ed deneen is ceo of siluria. has 35 years of experience in the petro business joined by david baker of "the san francisco chronicle" and hanna kuchlor of "the financial times." considering i got a "c" in chemistry, is this chemistry or alchemy, something nobody else has done before or somebody that really knows petro chemicals knows what he's doing? >> well, the chemistry is

actually old. it's been around 40 years or so and the industry worked on it 10, 20 years, you know, so 20 years ago and was not successful in developing the technology, so we've succeeded by new innovations. nanotechnology, screening, applying existing technologies to that same problem, and as simple as it sounds, thoroughly defining the problem, so it's been around, but siluria has been successful in actually breaking through and developing the technology. >> oftentimes technology when it moves forward doesn't move forward with a eureka moment at a chalkboard so this is a step-by-step, we're just applying more modern technology to something somebody tried 20, 30 years ago. >> i think that's right. we've been at this for about five years. we've been adding innovations throughout this five years. the core invention is the catalyst that does the conversion of the gas to the

fueling or to chemicals, but there have been a host of incremental improvements that we've added to it over that time, and we'll continue to do that. >> now how soon could it be seen in gas stations across the country? >> we're starting up a demonstration unit in texas at the end of this year in terms of actual commercial production. i think you're looking at 2017 where we might start to see fuels or chemicals in the marketplace. >> you know, the same fracking boom that's giving us all this natural gas is also giving us a lot of oil that we didn't have before in the united states, a lot more domestic production. do the oil companies actually have an incentive to go ahead and make gasoline out of natural gas, or is the oil cheap enough that they would want this for something totally different? >> the oil companies i think have an incentive because they generally produce gas when they produce oil so having a technology that would allow you to upgrade the value of that gas is very attractive to them. often they are finding gas when

they are looking for oil, and one of the -- one of the problems we saw was roughly 50% of the world's natural gas either goes unused because you can't get it to market or it gets wasted in flaring and things of that nature. >> that's why the saudis -- the saudis are one of your biggest investors which seems counterintuitive, not making oil to make gasoline, they would hate that idea, but what you're saying is there is a tremendous amount of natural gas that's either a by-product or found at the same time where they could be monetizing that. >> exactly, and the saudis are also -- saudi aramco is also interested in the chemical side of what we do, so they are looking to diversify and expand their business into the chemical sector. we give them a way to turn natural gas into chemical products. >> let me just in, ahramco, the saudi state-owned oil company. >> that's correct. >> david? >> we've had a lot of efforts to develop fuels that would have lower greenhouse gas emissions overall, and some of those

efforts have done okay. we all drive on a fair amount of ethanol these days, blended gasoline, but others have really kind of sputtered out and died. this, what is the greenhouse gaspereau file of this compared to regular gasoline? does this process actually produce less carbon dioxide? >> exactly. whether you're talking about an oil-based fuel or oil-based chemical it's roughly half of what you would see from the oil-based processes. >> half, when you take the natural gas and make it into gasoline, then there's energy expended there, right? >> well, our process, and one of the reason it's lower in co2 emissions is we actually generation energy so our product is fuel, plus energy, plus water, and any process that i'm aware of to make a chemical or fuel actually need to put energy in. >> right, but what i'm asking is, and what i think david was also asking and maybe i just didn't understand it, this idea that if you're going to take

something to make something that is a fuel but expend energy at the same time, and corn is one of these things, by the time you turned it into gasoline you grew the corn and fertilized and drove the tractors and drove everything, yeah, it's about a wash, but obviously not a wash in this case. >> in our case you're apples to apples you're roughly half of the emotions profile. >> and would it reach the consumer as cheap as we were talking about earlier, or is it going to be sort of at the same prices as regular gas? >> well, trying to predict the pump price is very difficult, but the one thing that i know we will be doing is creating new competition in the marketplace, and any business that i've ever been in when you have more competition you're going to see lower prices for that particular industry or that particular marketplace, so i think it's good news for consumers. i can't tell you exactly what the pump price would be, but new competition should create better prices. >> we've heard a lot out of president obama in the last couple of weeks about wanting to

trap fugitive methane emissions, methane emissions coming from oil and gas operations and getting into the atmosphere. is that kind of government effort down the road something that could help your company? >> i think it could. i think most of it will be driven by pure economics, so if we go out and take a gas that's being flared and converted into a fuel, essentially our raw material cost is zero. same thing if we go to a landfill and take the methane coming off a landfill and convert it at zero so there's a very strong economic driver there, stronger environmental policies might encourage that, but we believe the economics will win out on its own. >> apologize if i'm coming out of your expertise level, but in the sense of trying to find green energy, we have natural gas. would it make more sense if we're trying to get that natural gas fuel into a car to power and electric plants which then powers electric cars. is that more efficient and more green than what you're doing?

and i realize you're not necessarily an expert on power plants. >> i think that's a viable use for natural gas, but often the problem is how do you get it there, so we bring a technology that allows you to get at that 50% of the gas that you can't bring to a power plant because of logistics, et cetera, so i think both will have a role in the marketplace. the fuels we make are cleaner than what you get out of conventional so there's a benefit there to the environment, and as we said the cost from co2 emissions are roughly head. >> ed deneen is the ceo of siluria. thanks for being with us and as you continue to grow your plants we'd like to have you be back with us. >> like to be back. >> okay. everybody agrees we need more women entrepreneurs but how exactly we get them, well, that's a bit more complicated. we'll dive into that when "press:here" continues. >> a lot of startups believe that most banks prefer to lend

to most businesses leaving early stage investments for angel investors and venture capitalists. citi national bank is working with firms like life speed to provide financing solutions that give startups the cash they need to grow at each stage of the business. >> there are relatively few people who really understand from a banking perspective in those cities how to partner with a startup. >> top partners like jeremy liu and others here in the vale and new york and boston and l.a. >> their combined support has proved invaluable. venture capital businesses like san francisco's smule and santa monica's the honest company. >> we want to come alongside with those great entrepreneurs and provide them process service and thoughtfulness to help them sale those businesses. >> it's a leap of faith for all involved, but if the trust and support are there, it's one worth taking. >> the people you partner with are going to be partners with

you for a real long time, investors, venture capitalists or a bank and thinking about who will be there for you who will understand the business and grow with you and who provides you support beyond the money. it's a really important factor. >> city national bank has the team and knowledge base to help your business grow and build a great company. call today to learn more. welcome back to "press:here. "a growing effort in schools to encourage girls to learn science and engineering. you know that. what you may not know is it's working, really well. science fairs report in many cases more than half of the entries are from female students, so that may be the solution from the bottom up. now an effort to work top down. an organization called the pipeline fellowship is work fog teach women, wealthy women, how to become angels. private investors who give start-up money in exchange for a piece of the action. here you see one of those boot

camps. according to one study, only 19% of angels are women, 4% are minorities. natalia nogaro is the head of pipeline fellowship where there's a list of more important people, i don't know where it is. you seem to be on the list of every sort of top 20 most powerful this or that, so thank you for joining us this morning. let me ask you about this gender thing. i saw a study, and i'm sorry i can't quote exactly where. the gist of it was a panel of men are more likely to give and invest money in a male presenter. a panel of women are more likely to invest money also in a male investor. so does creating a team of women investors solve anything? >> that study actually had tons of people involved, harvard, m.i.t. >> so a good study. thank you for putting an asterix on it. >> and it was really striking because we talk a lot about it in terms of pattern recognition,

that really sterile term that we hear a lot, and simply what that means is that people just invest in people who look like themselves and people who are friendly familiar, and so given that my thought was let's turn it on its head. this whole pattern recognition. if we invest in people who look like ourselves, let's get more women and people of color on the investing side. >> doesn't really necessarily explain why women investors invest in women and men in men. >> it's the stereotypes. >> this looks like a startup. >> creating the space where we're framing the conversation where we're getting more women to invest specifically in women entrepreneurs is that start. what is great we launched in april 2011 and have graduated over 80 women and then what happens after they have launched is they have continued to invest because that's what success. sure, they can go to our "shark tank" boot camp, and there are

tons of kevin o'learys in there. need more barbara corcoran and more women of color to become sharks, and what happens is they by investing in women entrepreneurs. some of them graduate. they are like this is what i'm really passionate about, going to continue to invest in women entrepreneurs, not just social ventures. some can be pure tech. others say my focus is pure tech. this is how we grab their attention and then they get activated. >> that's great and i'm all for having more women involved and does it mean that the male species is a little bit beyond hope? heard so many bad stories, not in terms of bad funding but stories of sexual harassment and making people feel really, really uncomfortable. surely we should be addressing that. >> so glad you brought that up. a report that recently came out that actually mentions that the stats of how many women bc

partners that exist have declined, you know. it's 2014 and there's fewer women vcs and it also mention that the vc firms with women vc partners actually invested in more women entrepreneurs, so we're having women vc partners decline, and that is actually one of the indicators that women entrepreneurs will get funded, we're at a loss. i will bring up a very dated study which is, unfortunately, still accurate, by illuminate ventures, a vc firm and a white paper from 2000, and what the white paper said is the assumption was it when there were women vc partners, those were the ones who would be shepherding, you know, the women entrepreneurs through the process, you know, like they were the ones having their back. turned out that the women vc partners were simply a symbol of the culture. >> and continued to invest in primarily male -- what we were talking about earlier. >> actually, no. >> there was an increase in the deal flow ant consideration of

women entrepreneurs because what the women vc partners showcased is that the culture of the firm had respect for women and enough respect to invite them to be vc partners, you know, at the firm and there's actually some guide partners at firms who were shepherding women entrepreneur deals. >> so who are the angels, the women who are coming to your boot camp to learn this? what kind of backgrounds are they coming from? >> so, there are at least two reasons why they are very diverse. the first one is to put out is an lgbt latina the diverse city really important and i'm the boss and get to set the agenda and the second reason it's super diverse and i'll give you all the stats on who it is is because the way that that program works is group learning. so i'm very interested in making sure people are coming from diverse perspectives. accountants are great but having a whole group of accountants is boring and i'm a huge believer when we talk about angel

investing and the definition being smart money, you know, so it's not just financial capital that an agnleling could eve eventually bring to the table, the human capital and the social capital, the skill sets that they can bring, relationships and contacts so the more diverse the group is the more of the skill sets, broader the skill sets and also the broader deeper networks that they can bring. so in terms of these over 80 women who have graduated from the program we've had tech startup employees, people working at pandora, sumant ex, ebay, women on the family foundation board. we've had women who have left the workforce to start a family, and they are still interested in being active, need something with a flexible schedule and being an angel investor is pretty flexible and we've had successful entrepreneurs who are now interested in getting on the other side of the table and learning how to be an angel themselves. >> natalia, have you tracked at all the success rate of your

investments or your angel investments keeping in mind that a 5% success rate would be phenomenal in silicon valley? >> that's a really great question. generally an exit in the angel world is five to seven to sen years down the launch. >> you're just too early. >> we are early. do i have to say when someone asks me, are any of the companies that have been funded, are they still running, i'm like actually yes. >> still running is not a bad metric, right. >> we forget that in the first six months four out of five companies fail. they forget that. >> what's the statistic on that? >> so we have the specific that i just quoted. >> i'm sorry, i missed it. >> that four out of five companies -- >> how many companies out of pipeline fellowship are still running? >> so we have reached a milestone recently. we have over ten companies that have been invested and they are all still running so i would say that's 100%. >> that is 100%. >> is there any other subsector of tech? not to be too cliche but i do

know there's a lot more female entrepreneurs in e-commerce, for example. >> have to make that the last question but go right ahead, please. >> i launched the partner fellowship and i grew it from 6 women to 1,200 women in two years and what happened is i realized how hard it was to secure funding for a for-profit venture and vanessa hertz asked shouldn't doing good be the only way to make a profit and instead these women social entrepreneurs, who are finding such a tough time securing the capital so what we look for specifically are women-led for-profit ventures. a couple of investors include day one response, based in the bay area, and they created a water bag that purifies water, and so they work with disaster relief organizations such as red cross to get this product out to places that have had disaster situations. >> natalia, i've got to break in

because my producer is telling me that's all the time we have but i'll still take some time. you would invest and your angels would invest in something that maybe was not necessarily socially beneficial, not socially negative, but that made money? >> it has to be both, doing well and doing good and it has to be mutually exclusionive. >> you're the boss. you can say what you want. >>nality yeah, thanks so much. >> thanks so much. >> up next we crunch a bunch of numbers and find out the best place to win -- to live in neighborhood. >> they saw a lot of solutions that were way too complex and built for large enterprises, and they saw an opportunity to build a solution specifically for the small and mid-market customer

that solved the problem in a very simple and easy way. >> with the advent of more than 15 security and storage solutions barracuda has become invaluable for resource-constrained customers. >> they don't have the human resources, the financial resources and/or time to deal with problems so at barracuda we make powerful yet easy-to-use solutions that help our customers solve these complex challenges. >> that was important for the city of richmond whose network infrastructure supports over 30 dikes. >> if any of these pieces of equipment go down, it can help the public including police. >> the city found themselves returning to the well many times investing in other barracuda products. >> what keeps me up at night is the need to have secure successful and managed date, and

richard monday has the tools in place to do that. >> find out more about barracuda networks at barracuda.com. >> a recent examination of rental prices nationwide shows san francisco is now the most expensive place to rent an apartment. san francisco even more expensive than manhattan when taken as a whole. new york still has a couple more expensive neighborhoods. the apartment-finding services says a one-bedroom apartment in san francisco is $3,100 and joining us is the ceo and asked him to crunch more data for us and tell us. the neighborhood in san francisco that's somewhat affordable that's going to be the next cool one. >> somewhat affordable may shock the viewers outside the bay area. if you look towards the west of the seven, the richmond district or after sunset, clearly as you

go west rents tend to drop. compared to now it's even $100 higher than when we ran the numbers last month. 3,200 median rent for a one-bedroom apartment across san francisco. look at the richmonds and the sunset, looking in the lower 2000s or the upper teens but it's still against the national average, significantly more expensive. >> right. what's the one that's going to pop? what's the one where i say i've already signed the lease, too late, and everybody else who moves in has to pay more? >> yeah. you're getting ahead of the game. recently it's the lower hait, super trend re, great bars and restaurants for millennials, still probably underrepresented on its rent, significantly cheaper than the previous hot place which was hayes vale, russian hill in san francisco still trends the highest. >> have a lot of new neighborhoods down around the mission bay neighborhood where housing has come in the last five years what. are you seeing there? are they making a lot of interest? >> absolutely. that's actually some of the

reason for the supply constraint that there's new developments of condos in mission bay haven't come to market as soon as people hoped which is why the supply side is a little constrain. they are going north of $3,000 for a standard one-bedroom apartment. i have friends who bought in mission bay two years ago getting 40% premiums on the condo in the for sale market. the demand continues. the tech boom creates a restricted supply and rent controls in many buildings have led for the unique world where for the first time san francisco trends above manhattan and new york city. >> what about oakland and the east bay? everybody i know has been moving over there. >> i think that's why. people have started, and that may terrify people in oakland and in berkeley, and people know you look at their rental prices, now trending up against the west village which five, ten years ago was unthinkable. that is now happening to the east bay.

it is not there. if you can face the commute which a lot of my own team do, it's a wonderful place to live with a lot more space for very cheaper. >> that's interesting. you're based in san francisco, your team is mostly living in -- >> well, mostly living in san francisco. some live in the mission. we are based in soma. some of my team meet in coming on the caltrains or east bay and there has to be a greater supply and until that happens it's a natural cause that people will move to the east bay. >> left me ask you about zumper for a minute. finding apartments on line, a fellow named craig, i don't know if you met him and he came up with a list so this idea is as old as the internet. so what are you bringing to the table that a craigslist is not bringing? >> apartment rentals have been a pain -- you asked u.s. represent theers what's one of the most fearful things to do, shifting apartments and they spend a third of their incomes on rent.

it's a need to have shelter so it's a big part of a consumer's life. data quality is just specks. before you talked about the experience and how the renters are mobile, there's data problems. we always want to be first, built the first b2b. >> you're not scraping. >> go direct. >> all the data is collected collected through zumper tools or listing fees we get. >> there's less spam, a lot of fake apartments and stuff on craigslist. >> yes. >> so what about the slight weirdos, do you screen for those? >> define slight weirdos? >> less than a major weirdo. >> we have a two-step authentication directive for people to go directly to our site, get a manuel onboarding and then have to use the credit experience process.

ultimately we're different because we're not interested in just search. the web 2.0 world, the classified search, search these neighborhoods and find the next place and how can you walk into an apartment that has a tech mark next to it, hey, if you pull out your iphone and make a binding contract, you can walk in and make a binding offer and close the lease, but i think as the next generation of technology companies like ourselves will take you from start through to close and that's where the competition will face a lot of competition. >> it's almost wonderful that yelp has a website as well though that's where they started with. the idea that everything will be done on your hand held or in this case the iphone plus, the hand held. >> the huge one. >> absolutely. 70% of our users come from mobile, either mobile web or native apps. 7 million users a year use us on

mobile. mobile it's a touchy-feely doing, not something you do watching "sunday night football" alone. you pull out the phone in the field and see what's near and how an open house is running and make an application. >> one last question. a tough one, went to both oxford and cambridge. which school is better? >> firstly, i'm in a lot of debt which is major point to know. >> 30 seconds, which school is better? >> oaksford. i'm expecting calls now. >> thanks for being with us this morning. back here in just a minute. >> i understand sometimes my questions make public officials, the powerful uncomfortable. power can be corrupting, and we've seen that. this is about making sure our community and our leaders are reaching the standards that we expect.

we're asking if something is broken, when are you going to fix it, and we show up to make sure it's fixed. that's our show for this week. thanks to my guests. i'm scott mcgrew, and thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.

the following is a presentation of nbc sports, super bowl xlix. >> usually we find the world's top mountain bikers competing in picturesque mountain settings. however, today we find ourselves in the imposing shadows of the medieval nuremberg castle in a one of a kind urban free ride park a that weaves itself through five districts of this franconian metropolis. as if that were not enough