. "press:here" is sponsored in part by barracuda network and storage solutions, the simplified idea city national bank to help northern california businesses grow. >> good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. i'm always excited to bring you interesting guests each week. silicon valley game changers. my line-up this week will be particularly good. clips of our most influential and interesting guests so that we can give the crew who brings you this show time off with their family over the holidays.

let's start with a san francisco company that got a round of new funding which raised its valuation to $3.5 billion. not bad for a 24-year-old kid from ireland. co-founder at stripe he took a pause from harvard to concentrate on the company, an interesting bit of trivia. john's certificate leaving score, which is like the s.a.t. score was the highest in the country. i think i got that right. let's introduce him from financial times john schwartz from "usa today." let's start with the leaving certificate. it's like the s.a.t.? >> yes. >> highest in ireland in all of irish history? >> i'm not sure. >> if i were close, i would have checked. >> was it a perfect score? is that possible? >> yeah you can get perfect score. >> and did you get it? >> yes. >> that would be the highest ever. >> anyway it was so long ago. >> yes it was, what three

years ago? >> we started stripe 4 1/2 years ago now and so you know we -- it was in 2009 and we've been in the bay area since 2010. >> okay. so let's start -- there are all kinds of things i want to talk about. i want to start with the basic friction point. i have been buying stuff online for many many years. we all have. we buy airline tickets, book hotels we use paypal all the time. it pops up on all kinds of websites. i'm having no trouble buying things online. but apparently the vendors are having trouble buying things online or you wouldn't be worth anything. >> i think that's right. you know i think there is this old-school way of people selling things online where you go on your desktop and checkout. people have been doing that for a long time. but if you look at the past five years, what all of the interesting companies are doing, it's this new kind of

commercial. you have subscription services like drop box, global e-commerce companies like go pro just went public. you have interesting mobile marketplaces like the postmates of the world doing it through your phone. so for those companies, they have pretty complex specific payment needs and that's what stripe handles. >> so this problem that they are having is it in consume mating their transactions or what is it that they have to be solved? >> if you're building -- you need to not only accept payments easily from people on android and ios devices but you need to accept payments from people and then pay out the vendors on the other end. it very quickly gets very complicated. if you want to go international you're doing all of this other work to handle payments. >> but it's like mastercard -- some of them have experimented

like american express did. they are trying or are they not? >> they are. it's a complex problem and let's not forget that it's not even all within the purview of the visas and mastercards of the world. one thing we learned, the thing that everyone forgets about the online world, a minority of internet users have a credit card. >> chinese, right? that's the huge huge market. >> yeah. and so it's a profile for how successful they are but the largest payment network in china and have thousands of users. up until now, people with these accounts have been buying mostly from sites in china. >> what makes that hard? can the chinese before what you did you did, could the chinese citizen buy something from an

american store? >> yes, if you have an international credit card which is pretty rare in china. >> i see. >> go ahead. >> i was going do ask you, there's one other equation. you're getting into bitcoin. >> yes. >> i went into a conference and i felt as if i was on the set of "the munster" television show. they are very passionate about what they do and it's growing in terms of acceptance. >> i think that is cool about bitcoin, it solves a similar problem. we spent a ton of time letting merchants globally because in 2014 -- you know as you say, we've all been shopping online for a long time. if you're in the u.s. a u.s. consumer buying from a u.s. merchant it's not the most broken thing ever. if you're a consumer in china or germany or south africa it's pretty tricky. and so bitcoin is one way of addressing that.

>> it's more fluid and faster? >> specifically, nobody needs to give you permission to buy bitcoin. >> right. >> one of the things i don't understand about bitcoin is why we've got to spend it -- there are lots of stores coming out saying that we're going to -- overstock was one and i can't help but think it's a bit of a pr stunt because if i had bitcoin, it was going up in value very, very fast. i would want to keep it. >> sometimes it can be a chicken and egg problem. that is me as a consumer why should i buy bitcoin when the sites that i can spend it on no consumers have it so you're starting to see a lot of sites saying, okay even though the consumer base is not giant now, we think it will possibly be a big thing in the future and we want to get out ahead of it. >> john collison of stripe. we're showing our guests of the past year influential people changing the world are the dna

of this show and this is ann from the genetics company. >> she's a graduate from yale. her mother is legendary teacher at palo alto high school her father a famous physicist, her sister won a scholarship. her other sister runs youtube. joined by "the new york times," sarah lacy. >> your kids are just artists, you drop out and -- >> that's a tremendous amount of pressure on kids when they come from a family like that. >> yeah. you know i don't really -- i mean we kind of encourage our kids to follow -- to have passions and to follow their passions. like i wasn't raised with any kind of pressure. i grew up on a different campus and i was surrounded by all of these famous people and i didn't know they were famous until i

got to college. >> if it's not weird, it's just what you know, that's okay. >> everyone that was surrounding me were people that were passionate about what they did. >> and you thought that was normal? >> have you genetically tested your kids? >> of course i have. >> and what did you find? >> to me it was like i tested my daughter when i got the amnio back and i sent the cells off for testing. it was important for me to get this information right away because i do believe that the more information you have early, the more i could engage with a pediatrician and think about, are they higher risk for anything and are there any types of things i want to do? and it was really cool. it was cool to look at the grandparents, me and sergey and the children to see which child got more dna from which grandparent and we could kind of assign percentages to each grandparent. you don't get as much time with this child because you didn't contribute to the dna. >> it turns into a biological

scrapbook and people love that stuff. >> yeah. >> and they go on roots trips, they assemble scrapbooks. >> we have a debate in my house now where i'm like my son looks 100% like me. my husband is like maybe 10%? and i'm like no. >> in the beginning i mentioned that the fda sent you a letter saying that you can't send health information specifically. what was the objective? that the person reading the mail wouldn't be able to understand it? >> the fda came to us and said that we're a medical device and we need to submit a medical device. we're the only direct to consumer company so part of what we've been doing is we've been doing something that was very new. we're direct to the consumer meaning that you have the ability to order 23andme online. we send you the kit and it doesn't require a physician. >> we'll continue to look at

some of our favorite guests of 2014 when "press:here" continues.

that was important for the city of richmond whose infrastructure supports over 30 sites. >> if any of these pieces of equipment go down it can affect services to the public. >> with so much riding on the reliability of their network, 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 accessible and managed data. and richmond has the tools in place to do that. >> find out more about barracuda networks at barracuda.com. welcome back to "press:here." we're looking back on some of our guests from this past year. peter teal is a tough one to introduce. founder of paypal pays kids to leave school, venture capitalist, first outside investor in facebook, even works with the cia. peter teal has been involved in

just about everything in silicon valley. he's a venture capitalist an entrepreneur and a libertarian activist. he's the first outside investor in facebook and sits on the board there. he's invested in yelp and linkedin and helps the cia use big data to fight terrorists. he's begged college students to drop out of college, funded gay marriage initiatives and republican campaign at the same time. he warned of a financial bubble and crash five years before it happened. >> hey, guys. >> he's been depicked inted in movies and satired on silicon valley. his book, "zero to one" is

number one on the new york's best-sellers list. when peter teal pushed a button and sent money from one palm pilot to another and paypal was born. peter was one of the main three founders of paypal. he has 68,000 followers on twitter but tweeted just once and i almost forgot he's one of the best chess players in the united states. i think i've summed up all the things you are. before we start -- and this is laura and sarah. before we start, normally i would have the first question for you. i want it to be to you and that is you've been very straightforward about pandodaily and it's been funded by venture capital, one of which is peter. >> actually, founder's fund through peter. >> so to the viewer, money has passed from him to you?

>> it has. it has. he's probably bought me more in wine at dinners over the years. >> no problem with the confidential of interest as long as you disclose it. >> knowing sarah lacy, she'll be more harsh because you have funded her just to prove that she is that much more -- >> to prove her objectivity? >> yes. >> peter, the first question maybe should be what do you think of national public radio. should the government be involved in public radio? >> it's better than most of the things that the government does. on a relative basis, it would be higher on my priority list. >> very well. there was a paypal breakup from ebay. you founded paypal. what did you think when they announced it? >> well the company is in a different place than 2002. 75% of the payment volume that paypal processed was on ebay. that went down to 50% by '08 and

it's down to 25% today. the company has diversed over the last 12 years. >> is that because we are actually at a moment where apple announced apple pay where you think we're going to start to move towards a different payment system which i think you anticipated early on with paypal, correct? >> there was a lot of innovation around payments when we started paypal and i think there's a second wave of innovation in the last four or five years. so i think it is going to be critical for paypal to be focused on these product questions in the years ahead. there's going to be more competition than they've had in a number of years. having a sort of stand-alone company that is focused on payments is good from a product perspective. >> peter teal with sarah lacy and laura seidel. for instance selling a good cup of coffee on a saturday morning,

here's founder james freeman in conversation with reporters martin giles and colleen taylor. he serves each and every day at blue bottle coffee coffee so fine and carefully crafted, some would say so fussy. it's drawn all kinds of attention and money from some of san francisco's most rich and powerful. recently a who's who poured their money into blue bottle including founders of instagram and twitter. $25 million in all. and to think blue bottle's founder, james freeman, didn't go to business school. his formal training is playing the clarinet. thank you for joining us. what you going to do with all of that money? >> we're going to build some shops. >> how many shops? >> i don't know. we're going to build some

facilities and the goal is not to be bigger but to be better. >> you've anticipated one of my biggest questions. i've asked this of virgin airlines hampton hotel. you take any quality brand, i think you can only get so big before you can't get better. >> i think that might be true. but -- so the question is how big is that? i mean embedded in all of those questions is when are you going to start to suck james? that's sort of the -- >> when are you going to start to suck james? >> hopefully not for a very very long time. maybe never. i'm going to try to make it never. i get asked that a lot. how are you going to maintain quality. >> right. >> there is no maintain. the moment you start trying to grab onto something, it's gone. it's vanished already. what we have to do is we have to build quality. every year the coffee has to be better every year the hospitality in our shops has to be better measurably and

demonstratively better. that's my task and that's what our investors are excited about, having me not to stay the same not to get worse. >> one thing i liked about this latest venture capital round, as scott mentioned, a lot of technology investors participated. i like how tony conrad of true ventures told tech crunch listen, i could lie and pretend like this has a tech angle but it really doesn't. it's just coffee. >> yeah. >> why are so many technology people and people who traditionally invest in technology companies so excited about blue bottle? >> i think about that and i'm not sure. i have some leading theories. one is that -- well actually, a friend of mine who has been in tech for a long time said that people in tech in their form formative years are coding and then bond with coffee which is

fueling many of their careers or which got them started. that's one plausible scenario. another plausible scenario is in coffee, one of our battles is to tell people who made the same coffee the same way for 20 years that maybe there could stand a little improvement and that's hard. it's a tough hospitality issue for us and something that we try very hard to be good at and gracious at. >> our look back at 2014 will continue in just a moment. >> city national came in at a strategic time to make investments we otherwise would not have made. our business doubled. we found city national to be incredibly flexible and to engage in the kind of business that we want to engage in. our hope is that we have people creating music together on these mobile devices.

city national is the way up for my business. >> welcome back. the unique thing about this tv show is the reporters who do the interviews. they are incredibly infewluential in their own right and they are competitors with me and with their competitor but one day a week we work together. reporters from "wall street journal" and npr and usa today, syndicated columnist, a pullitzer price winner and sarah lacy and reporter from "the new york times." >> you may have noticed earlier that sarah and i were fussing about when it's time to go to break. sarah helped invent this television show and was on the very early pilot and on the very first one. you've since gone on to found a

tech blog. one of the projects on there that just did not seem like it could be real and yet people poured a lot of money into it. >> in modern day snake oil campaign at the best. at the worst it was out-right fraud. this would be the holy grail, every scientist told us -- >> it's phenomenal. >> -- first of all, we would have seen papers proving this along the way and it would be massive. you put a bracelet on and it would know about everything you eat how many calories you ingested without you manually entering anything. >> which would be great. >> yeah. and people were so captivated by it. they funded it up to $1 million. before the campaign was closed we did all of this research and we found basic lies on their

profile page. they are based in russia. they said they had patents pending and were very vague about what those were and it took us a while to chase those down. there were all these things that were shady about their profile and the science made no sense. one of the scientists said it was out of ghost busters. there's no way this work. and yet indiegogo dug in their heals. they said on their site there would be no fraud there. kickstarter doesn't even say that. >> it's a big promise. >> yes. and so we pointed that out and they quietly went and pulled that rather than pulled the $1 million campaign. >> what is the end of that story? >> they paid it out. they paid it out. they paid out $1 million and to make things worse, they couldn't admit that they were wrong and their fraud algorithm did not work and one of their top engineers made the last contribution that put it over 1 million.

>> ah. >> and the guy came from russia and took a picture posing with the ceo. as a mother if i can impart one skill in my children, it would be apologize when you do something wrong. >> but the beauty of this is somebody's going to be wrong. you're going to be horribly horribly wrong or -- >> no, we're not. >> i know. but somebody has to come up with a bracelet that does this. >> they said june. >> that's next month. >> i guarantee it's not. >> i said during one of our first calls, look, you and i both know how this ends. this bracelet is not shipping in june so why are you okay with that? >> well it's crowd sourcing. not everything ships. i said there's a difference between the vaguery of products and fraud. >> you so liked a hoodie -- and this is the power that this man

has, by the way. >> it's a great hoodie. >> somebody wrote about you. i wrote it down. he occupies the tallest purchase in mainstream journalism. did you see that quote? >> i did. >> did you send it to your mom? you should be very proud. you wrote about a hoodie you loved so much. the company is now desperate to get back on track to make these hoodies. >> they are far behind. >> and that's an improvement. >> right. >> i mean the reason i wrote about them is they were doing this thing that at the time was novel. they were selling directly to consumers. >> american giant? >> american giant is the name of the company and because they were selling directly to consumers and not using stores they were saving a whole bunch in distribution costs and thereby producing a better hoodie pouring it into the product than spending it the way gap does on stores and the problem was they couldn't produce at scale. they have been telling me that

they are ironing it out. >> you did an interview with one of the foreman or president who said on the assembly line or the production, they didn't know what was going on. 50 orders a minute. >> right. i think it changed this sort of the scale of the company. >> what have they learned from it? i read your articles and immediately went to try to get my husband a hoodie for christmas and i was so annoyed with how they handled it. they didn't get back to me. >> they were too busy. >> it's an auto e-mail. it's not that hard. >> they were just completely overwhelmed. i think what they did was get a lot more money and they got more employees and, you know over time i think it got better but they have been telling me that they've been trying to catch up to the point where there would be no backorders. i don't think they are there yet you about they have expanded more product. i think they are better. >> have they sent a gold-plated hoodie or anything? >> no. but i have the same hoodie that

i had before i wrote the article. i still have it and it's great. big fan. >> you read about jay hillburn suits? >> yeah. >> you heard about it because you wrote about it. so the power of farhoud. >> and you have amazing pants on. >> what pants are you wearing? >> it's from an internet company called frank and oak. >> frank and oak, ladies and gentlemen. the company is going to say what happened to our store? >> he likes frank and oak. "press:here" will be right back.

that's our show for this weekend. my thanks to our guests over the past year. there were dozens you didn't hear from today but you can see them all at pressheretv.com. i'm scott mcgrew. thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.

sponsored by city national bank, providing lines of credit to help california businesses grow.

hello and welcome to "comunidad del valle." i'm damian trujillo. plus, we embark on the city of san jose. this is your "comunidad del valle." nbc bay area presents "comunidad del valle" with damian trujillo. >> we begin today with the last visit of the year from the office of the mexican consulate right here in san jose. with me on "comunidad del valle" is my guest. >> thank you very much for inviting me. >> we wanted to talk about the deadline maybe and maybe some safety concerns. tell us first of all, for those who don't know what it