press here is sponsored by barracuda solution, city national bank providing loans and lines of credit to help northern california businesses grow. this week how to invest in silicon valley startups before everyone else does. dna databases are the ultimate big data and deep inside technology labs as they try to predict the future. our reporters quiten hardy of the new york times and fast companies christina this week on "pre "press:here." good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew.

we have known for quite sometime dna would unlock mysteries of the human condition. scientists have gotten really good at the mechanics of dna sequencing. we know how to do this. what's changed is not the skill but the scape. scientists have a lot more dna to work with. hundreds of thousands of samples poured into places like 23 and me giving scientists there an unprecedented number of dna profiles to work. thanks to the big sample sizes, dna researchers are finding markers to diseases like depression. the company ancestry.com is using dna to find people's ancestors. no searching through records, no family trees, just dna. tim sullivan is ceo of ancestry.com. his great, great grandfather worked with thomas edison. this dna using dna to find

ancest ancestors is a change because you've always been a content company. you would collect together census records and what not. this is more science and a lot less searching through data bases. >> it's a combination of both. an ze ancestry was historic and now identity. we're the largest dna -- >> even bigger than 23 and me. >> our data base is well over 2 million people have taken one of the ancestry dna test and that network effect is incredibly powerful because it's allowing us to understand a lot more about how all of us are related where we come from and driving pretty amazing discoveries. >> is there a point in which -- there is a critical mass in which you'll have enough samples in which to be able to come -- figure out how quinton and i will related by some distant

ancest ancestor? >> yes, when the next person takes the test we compare the dna to everybody else in the database and determine how closely they are related. and clearly, as the network and the community gets larger and larger, we're finding more cousin relationship. >> this relates people living now that contribute their dna to the test. do you walk this back up into ancestors, as well. >> that's part -- >> then they share their ancestry? >> we have a -- for 20 years we've built a graph of related or sort of historical people. almost 2 billion people most of them dead in our data set and so a lot of people have family t e trees tre trees tre trees to triangulate to say this guy here is maebl your great, great grandfather. >> my question is more about kind of living relatives. what if you discovered that the person that i think is my father is not actually my father?

how would you make sure that you don't share that sensitive information with people? >> well, we give consumer's total ability to make their information public or not. there are a lot of family connections both near and far that are being made every day. >> what percent do not make their information public? >> i know in the core answers, about 80% of people make their trees public. >> yeah, they think that will be fun. >> it's also a great -- they are there to make connections with people that can on the ancestry side help them learn about family history but in the dna world, it's far more about living connections, understanding who i'm related to, where i come from, maybe finding close relatives that i didn't know existed. >> that's a hell of a good point. you must have had situations in the past before dna where the person doing their family history discovered their family

history was not the family history they were told. >> absolutely. and these are moments of real emotional, mostly positive, revelation. what we're trying to do is set norms for how people searching for instance for a birth parent for all these years, what are the right ways to reach out to that person with sensitivity if you think how emotional making a discovery like that would be, imagine for the other person and have empathy. >> we were saying before, you're sort of destroying certain myths having to deal with your family and generally, race is a complete genetic construct. you can't say where it begins and ends and there is more variation between me and the guy next door than the average african american but are you creating new myths about what dna can and can't do? do you think people's sense of themselves will change from this? >> we hope so. i think the reality is our dna is so individual.

it's our personal fingerprint. it's also shared with the rest of the species. >> uh-huh. >> if we -- our long-term goal is to essentially build a map for those that want to be part of it of how we're one family and that really will. we're finding this is breaking down people's sense of who they are and where they come from and building new bits of identity they may not have known existed. >> in this current political climate when people feel further apart than ever, what do you hope the psychological society impact will be? >> yeah, we're already seeing it. we're finding people who have always had some perhaps ethnicity, they find perhaps that's part of who they are, as well. >> it's great reminder as we talk about immigration as politics we're all immigrants unless you're native american. >> we're all wondering everywhere all the time, likewise native americans. >> right. >> going out for a pack of

smokes, be right back, the story of humanity. >> not just ameriamerica. they just moved around for a longer period of time. >> speaking of sharing broadly,ly would bet marketers would love to get their hands on a lot of this stuff. what is your position on sharing this data base or vending it anonymously. >> no, look, this is very private personal information. we take pry ivate -- >> if you strip it and anone mince it. >> what if you combined your stuff anonymously with 23 and me and a number of other company sboos into a super data base. >> can you do that with dna? >> for instance, we have a relationship with one of the alphabet companies and what we're doing is together researching data, finding family

clusters where people may be living a little longer than average and then digging in and looking at some of the gino types with the consent of the consumer and all anonymous. >> understood. tim sullivan is the ceo of ancest ancestry.com. it's a spit test, right? >> yes. getting in an silicon valley deals early when "press:here" continues. p blah

capitales capitalests, we'll make 100 investments and 999 will glblow, one is uber. >> one of the hardest businesses to execute well, right? it's very glamorous, attractive sounding and fund the next apple or uber or google but like you said -- >> or cosmo.com. >> but you are more likely to actually strike out than you are to strike a grand slam or home run and that literally that analogy describes it. >> sell me on what you're doing. you're basically offering -- [ laughter ] >> i mean, i came at this, my personal story feeds right into that was as an entrepreneur and teaming up with my business partner and what we realized together is you have to be actually kind of a little crazy to sit down at the table as an angel investor and think you'll do well. the odds are really stacked

against you. there are thousands of companies raising capital most of whom all will take your money and most of which won't be successful. it's an awesome thing and great ideas get tested and reality not every idea is being executed and tested and ultimately will become super successful. nine in ten will fail and one in ten is less likely that one in ten will make up -- >> i'm sure -- >> you're checking the boxes to not send you money. why should i send you money? >> right. right. so -- >> let's pretend i'm trying to give you money. >> i wish that more people in our industry would just sort of lay it out there as far as what are the actual numbers? do the statistics say when you have investing in the asset class. it's hard to get access once you have access, it's hard to put enough capital so you referenced one investment. if you put one investment, you might as well buy a lottery

ticket. they are constructing professionally managed portfolios not just in a moment in time but typically over years, right, and a series of funds. they are getting diversification. >> you are duplicating that on funder's club. you got a fund that's going to fund several different things. >> we realize it's difficult to have individual, even if you're a millionaire, it's difficult to replicate the strategy of selective yet diversification to construct a portfolio. when you partner with the founder, you and them together assume it's going to work out but the math like you mentioned is -- >> the successful angels and vcs are inside a network. they know people talented and put together teams they can do introductions. what area do you have that kind of expertise in in your network? >> sure. that's another -- that's a great point and we realized a lot of venture capital, a lot about who you know and not necessarily what you know. on the one hand you can say

that's about business as well and who you know. >> old boy's club. >> 93% of partners are male over the age of 50. >> this is the most greed conversation what do you have that makes this attractive? >> we looked at this picture and say we don't just want to build the tenth best friend in the world. if we do this, my business partner and i could have gone off and done the model again and went through the 500 startups but we wanted to do something different. what you're talking about, we looked at the model of venture capital and if you're a startup investor, it's about knowing everything out there and getting access and investing and about being able to know what's happening with the companies and help them out. we said can you take that venture model that's been practiced offline for decades and can you scale those components and ideally gain an advantage over the traditional

model by attaching a network, a community and software around discovery, right? so having, we have 17,000 people globally in 63 countries part of our community and identify as members of funders club and can those people not just help us discover great entrepreneur. >> can they? >> we've been around for four years now. >> what's your biggest success? >> sort of like your children, you don't want to pick favorites. >> not like my children. >> names -- >> the top earner child may not be -- >> names you would be familiar with here in the bay area, instacart, a asian market, fast growing commerce company, slacks actually in the portfolio, as well. the company and acquisition. >> are these like vcs or making things familiar them for finding

they are funding female pounded companies and may look at health and education and areas harder to get money in? >> we found actually sort of an interesting mix. we found that roughly half of the companies we fund are the same company as everybody in silicon valley, everybody is fighting for the same companies and the other half often times we'll find there are deserving entrepreneurs that our investors want to back for whatever reason the traditional vcs are not excited about and maybe that changes over time, right? we actually seen maybe not so much excitement. they make a little progress and suddenly everybody is interested. >> i'll have to cut you off for time. in order to be somebody and have to be an credited investor, if i have to ask i probably am not one. >> it's a government regulation. >> right. >> and for million dollars net worth excludeing primary income or over $200,000 of income or

$300,000 combined with a spouse. >> maybe if we tape ourselves. >> we would never agree who got the first name. thanks for being with us this morning. >> thank you. up next, how can you predict the future when day to day events are so unexpected when "press:here" continues.

welcome back to "press:here." one of the things smart people are surprisingly bad at is predicting the future. what's obvious in retro spect is not obvious at the time. a whole team in the silicon valley think tank trying to figure out who is next. they are looking closely at automation and what it means for the future of employment. michael is in charge of the lab. thanks for being with us this morning. i read a piece in the new york times that talked about the death of futurism as related to alvin toffler, i accused you of writing it. it said futurism is not trendy anymore. how do we convince futurest is somebody we want to talk to? >> it's looking how far into the future you're looking because yeah, if you're looking ten, 15 years out to the future, the

idea you're going to come up with anything relevant today is just unrealistic. >> impossible. >> it is. if you start looking closer talking three to five years, these are the investments that you're making today that will pay out in a short term. >> predict the end of futurism. >> if things are coming faster and information is coming from more directions and globalization, you're going to get events coming out of left field so hard to don't plan. >> the difference is when you start to plan what is going to happen in the future, most companies today you don't have to plan for what's happening in laboratories or other industries because people are doing incredible things. they are siloed so the easiest

way to figure out is to look at the other industries around you and figure out how to use the tools. you look at something like artificial intelligence. we're seeing huge advances being pushed, you know, within automotive because they are very, very public about it. >> sure. >> but the reality is there's not a single industry that that's not going to affect that should be figuring out how to use it for them and whether that's education, trying to figure out how to teach people individually or whether that's health care looking to use something that should be a jeopardy champion in watson to diagnose people and medical illnesses. >> take me -- let's do a thought experiment. things that are true. i got kids between 5 and 15 years old, say, what should they study. what is going to be a really good field to be in? >> i think technology is always one of it but the interesting thing is just that where we really see this going is not about the specific things you

know, it's rather going to be how adaptable you're going to be over the course of your career. thinking you're going to spend five, ten, 15 or 30 years doing the same thing over and over again is completely unrealistic. our challenge is how do we get individuals, companies and our countries to a point where we start figuring out how we train and retrain the work force over and over again as an expectation versus exception. >> you talked about a future that doesn't sound terrifying. we mentioned robots taking our job but immediately comes to mind for me, at least. how do you separate that or are you scared of what is to come? >> there is always things that will potentially happen but the reality is when we historically look how technology changed our country and economy is that over the long term is that

unemployment does not go up with these introductions and new technologies so i don't expect it to in the future. rather it's a matter of saying that our lives are very different now because new technology is being introduced. >> the technology like mass migration or global warming? >> i think that all of these are factors. the reason we focus on technology is not because the economy or the presidential election or anything else aren't goi going to factor into things but rather technology now moves much faster than all of those things. we see most of these coming as the political climate change and global warming we've been talking about for a lot of years and affects are years out so we have time to react. what is different and why things are moving fast nowadays is we're just around the corner from another technology invasion that's going to cause people the rethink how they do things. >> what are the problems with looking at technology and you

mentioned other industries but unless you have a deep understanding of health care, very complex if we say the technology is here, that doesn't necessarily mean the technology will come. there are a lot of reasons why it wouldn't. how do you deal with that? do you have experts weighing in? >> it's a real power we're 400,000 employees almost now across over 100 countries, you know, in basically every industry. what we use is the combination of the fact we know technology what is happening and what is changing with experts internally and externally how it will change specific industries and whether agriculture moving, whether it's automotives starting to change the way we think about transportation or whether it's governments relooking fund mentally -- >> i want to squeeze in one more question. what is the best most interesting question one of your clients asked you or something they have shown you?

>> i love that. >> i think that the best question that they ask me is how am i going to fund mentally reset and reimagine my company? most of the time we're dealing with global 2,000 companies and if they built today, they would build it in a different way because tech untnol build it in a different way because tech untnoogy changed a doing it with systems dragging them down and holding back from taking advantage of artificial intelligence and augmented reality. >> michael tries to predict the future as best he can. we'll be back in just a moment.

welcome back. one of the most startling things to happen in tech in the past few days was the reappearance of elizabeth holms, the founder, scientific conference in philadelphia. this after months of silence

amidst accusations the company's mysterious blood testing machine doesn't work. everybody expected holms to explain the science of the company's mysterious suspicious box. instead, she introduced a new mystery box. christina farr specialty is medical reporting. you watched this speech. did you see this coming, that this would be a product launch and everybody thought she would say you're all wrong, my thing works and here is why. >> i thought she would say i acknowledge the controversy of the last six months and my role in it and what ended up happening she got banned from rating a lab for two years. she's facing private late case and you would think she would say something and share data, transparency we've been asking. >> apologize? have you been watching the 2016 election? you just keep going. you don't do that.

>> yeah -- >> you are in front of scientists about a science thing and don't present the science to prove s prove, disprove your critics. i'm speculating here, one reason might be the thing just doesn't work at all, period. >> she didn't mention edison, the technology they had -- >> the mystery box. >> the first mystery box they said would revolutionize blood testing. not a isingle minute. they rolled out something else, the mini lab. i haven't got a clear answer how that relates to the previous technology but claim it's a later it ration. >> she specializes in medicine and i i think it was richly rewarded. it had no timeline for production. complete white board idea. >> no regulatory approval. >> and contains christina's stuff. >> there are comparatives to the

products and a lot of scientists said what am i missing? why do we need this. >> fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice -- >> exactly. the price point. i have no idea the cost but the individual components can cost thousands of dollars. >> got to stop you there. that's our show for this week. my thanks to my guests and thank you for tuning in. we'll see you next week. >> "press:here" is sponsored by barracu barracuda, city national bank providing lines and lines of credit to help northern california businesses grow. p bl and welcome to

"comunidad del valle." i'm damian trujillo, and today, the dean of admissions at santa clara university, eva blanco, is on our show. how to get your kids prepared for college, on your "comunidad del valle." male announcer: nbc bay area presents "comunidad del valle" with damian trujillo. damian: well, we begin today with what's happened during the summer and how we've been able to keep, kind of, our kids out of danger and out of trouble, especially down in the south bay. my guest here on comunidad del valle is israel cangura who is with the mayor's gang prevention task force, also called san jose best, o como se llama ahora? israel cangura: the mayor's gang prevention task force, city of san jose. damian: well, you and i were talking off camera about how we haven't seen as much violence this year, compared to maybe last year, years before, out in the streets of san jose. israel: well, i think that in terms of, like, violence,