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tv   Press Here  NBC  September 4, 2016 9:00am-9:31am PDT

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"press here" is sponsored in part by barracuda. city national bank, providing loans and lines of credit to help northern california businesses grow. >> this week, the security company that caused a dangerous flaw on your iphone used by spies and tyrants. ed odd relationship between founder and ceo. and behind the scenes at one of the best tech ipos of the year. sarah lacey joining us here this week on "press: here." good morning, everyone, i'm
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scott mcgrew. my first guest is going to ci cringe, but i will distantly compare him to a character on "silicon valley." no disrespect, i just love "silicon valley." >> i appreciate your opinion, but i guess we just won't do it. it shows the tension between the young man's founder and the ceo. the tension between founders and ceo brought in to make that company better is a attention experienced over and over and sometimes it goes very poorly. sometimes it goes very, very well. this is a real life ceo and founder. founder of lookout security on the left, the outsider bright in on the right.
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together they managed to build a very successful company. they were the company that pulled the alarm on a recent iphone security problem. so yes, i did compare you to action jack barker. >> i think the founder comparison is more cringe worthy. if your found sere watching this -- i'm not richard. >> john is not richard. it was the best example i could get of what we see in silicon valley. younger founders, voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily, they get a ceo who knows what they're doing with wall street and that can be an awkward transition. you have been ceo for about two years. how did you manage that transition to make sure the guys who started the company stayed in charge of the company. >> first, i have been the
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founder of four other companies, so i have been at this for 30 years now and i can appreciate where he is coming from, but the success is that the founder needs to want to do this, and he has to buy into it. i think a lot of times what you see on the tape is when they're forced. the company started off with a consumer dominated project. john knew that he did the not have the background and spooers to do that. so he wanted to bring the
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company in. o it's like when i want to brigk a nanny in. he just left the country for a month. everyone was clear who the boss was. people want founders still involved at the level because of the moral authority they carry in their company. it's like being a job, you never lose. you also have to assert you're the boss. did anyone leave the country? >> no, however, again, it has to be you're very right it has to be very clear to all employees who the boss is. you skraent a situation where you ask mom, and mom says no, so you ask dad and dad says it's okay. that was an arrangement between john and i. it took discipline, but that is something we had to work out. and i have been a founder
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several times. i also understand his per spectispect ti -- perspective and that helps me a little bit. >> did you say no to any practices -- you said it started in a dorm room. some start-ups get into a frat culture and that doesn't work well as they scale up and try to become bigger and more public. >> there is a very difficult culture in san francisco than on the east coast. i come from tech in boston. this is my first tech job in silicon valley. i moved here for this opportunity 2 1/2 years ago. it's not so much of a culture inside of lookout, but the difference in culture between the east coast and the west coast. that is something they needed to balance and figure out. one of the things ta we did is put a development center on the east coast. we expanded our development into
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boston, and we balanced our development organization now between two coasts. and that helped to create more of a level set between the two cultures. >> you have been a founder, you have been ceo several times, which do you like better? >> i actually like them better. the truth is, i just like being in the business. this is really, what is going on in tech and silicon valley is a lot of fun and i just enjoy doing it. a lot of people say that -- some people work to live, other people live to work, and i live to work. >> i'm curious about the difference between east coast and silicon valley. on the show "silicon valley" they're lampooned sometimes. when you came out were you like okay, this is ridiculous, or can you say i can kind of see why
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silicon valley took over boston's original top spot for company formation. >> two topic there is, yes, it is very different. when i came out 2 1/2 years ago, it was the peak of irrational exuberance. a lot of money was being pumped in. a very high valuation. the whole unicorn concept came from there. and the situation where you have too much money chasing opportunities, it is what creating the culture here in san francisco. that has since subsided. money tightened up. and companies have started to focus on becoming profitable and real businesses. a think a lot of it self corrected. you ask about the difference between the east and west coast. what is you sneak a lot of the successful companies have been
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category creators, right? so who would have thought we would be getting our taxi from an app. who would have thought we would rent a room in somebody's house, airbnb. these are new categories that never existed. on the east coast we tend to make existing categories better, optimizing them, on the west coast i find having been here for a few years now, the focus is more on creating brand new categories and they have done a great job in creating in categories. >> i want to squeeze in one more question, and that is lookout was able to find the critical apple zero day flaw that we got patched. why wouldn't apple find that. i know that is such a basic question, but why wouldn't apple find it? >> it was a very sophisticated piece of vulnerability.
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it's in a category of threats that we call vulnerabilities. it was done by a well done, sophisticated actor. it is an example of how sophisticated things are getting these years. when we found it, we worked very closely with apple in collaboration. they patched it and got it out to market very quickly. >> jim dolce, the ceo of "lookout." thank you for putting up with my comparison of you and "silicon valley."
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welcome back to press here. no company has had a more peculiar opening. they were very high, then it dropped low, and now it is restarting again. i'm not looking for an explanation, but it wasn't your
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fault. it was a misunderstanding by the media, right? you must have gotten a phone call at some point that said what happens, right? >> you basically got robbed, sflie right? >> yes, it was a misunderstanding. it recovered and did just find, but you were gracious in the media about the media. >> thank you for saying that. i think we could potentially add something to the ipo play book. we went public in the first month of the quarter, most go public in the second or third month where they already finished their previous quarter and it is published in the s 1. >> this is where the mistake occurred. that's where it came from. there is something we could have done, something they could have done, but it was a relatively
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unique situation. what we thought would be an uneventful earnings call. >> so many friends of mine have taken companies public, and there is no process about what that process is like, but people are still taken aback by exactly what it is like running a public company. and frequently how horrible it is. when that moment happened, were you like -- this is what it is? this is baptism by fire? did you have any of those moments where it is like -- people can prepare you, but until do you it, you don't know. >> in the moment, we were reacting, right? let's see if we can figure out where the misunderstanding is, get it fixed. get the headlines changed and so on. afterwards, reflecting on it, the conclusion we came to was that wall street will be up and down in the near term, they get it right in the long-term,
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right? the opportunity is to just do what we need to do, we'll get it right, and it was a great chance to talk about the company. just don't worry about the near term, you're driving down the road, it's raining, the wipers are going, will you watch the wipers or the road? watch the road. >> how about, for instance uber. the ceo just said if he could he would push off an ipo until 2030. he doesn't his hit employees clicking google finance every day. so, i mean, were you pressured by some of your investors, if in an ideal world, could you, if you had cash and i will quliqui.
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>> more people have heard about talend in the last month than in ten years before that. it is also just a great -- it has been a, in our case, for our company, a dream and an as p aspirati aspiration. we see it as like ra changing of the guard happening. for us going public, and then in the leader squadrant in a week or two after that. >> a lot of founders said it made them a better ceo. mark zuckerberg thinks holding off may have been a mistake. aaron levy just reported, he had a real trial by earnings.
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do you think it has positive attributes. >> what it does it is makes me rely on my team, more. i'm spending more time outside of the company. so i really need to rely on that team to be strong, cohesive. it's not about the ceo, it's not the entire company becoming a better company. >> let me say, using open source, anyone says i could start a talend, couldn't i, using the same software you're using? >> not exactly.
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there is open source companies where all of the companies are free. there is no commercial software at all. we are a combination of open source and proprietarproprietar. it is called open core. so the real key question in that scenario becomes what part of it is free, what does that solve, and what part is paid? >> let me hog the question, you chose nasdaq over nyse, is there one particular reason? >> there wasn't one, no. it is, for anyone in that situation, you should talk to both. there is reasons to go for one, reasons to go for another. we felt like it was a better fit for what we wanted to do. >> thank you for being with us. "press here" will be right back.
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welcome back to "press here." this first version was written for kids. the european union is a group of 28 countries in europe created 50 years ago to prevent war. soon the eu will have just 27 countries, the united kingdom voted to leave the eu nap is from a company that makes the
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news accessible to kids can understand what is going on. here is the high school verse. britain voted to leave the european union after a bitterly divisive campaign. dividing continuity. it is being used as one of the few companies making money. matt gross is ceo of newszella. he is a former teacher. you have one, too, will you read the melania trump one? >> if she were a student, she would be in big trouble. teachers say she would have gotten an f. she might even have been kicked out of school. >> are these written by computer or by people?
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>> a combination of the two, we start with great content from great sources. scientific american, lots of great content. we load it into our system that gives recommendations about how to alter the tact to meet the need for readers at various levels. it's not for just kids, but it's up to high school and beyond because we have english language learners and people with disables. so we have a network of about 150 journalists around the globe that take that text and turn it over. >> and teachers really bought into this? >> yes, we have about nine million registered users today, more than double the previous year. >> you must have been following
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the context, word journalists were taking from reliable sources, and then facebook is back to algorithm with the engineers fiddling with the controls, what's your take on that? can an algorithm, could they get smart enough and learn from the journalist and take that job over? >> i don't think so. it is just a great sense of story. when we first -- we wanted articles to be high quality for any single reader. i doubt it came from my own personal experience as a parent. my son, curtis is a great kid and he is hilarious. in second grade he struggled in reading, in new york city, he
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was a two, four is knock it out of the park, and he was a two which meant he was not on track. so he was being assigned entirely different reading material than his friends. they were reading chapter books like judy bloom and great books. he was getting dr. seuss. so he felt demoralized and left out of the conversation. the challenge is to make a text that they could access together. and i think journalists think it is important to make a text strong. >> how do you stay out of the bias that facebook wants to. there is always a view of bias.
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it is a great story when everyone is mad at you. do you have to tailor for different audiences in different ways. >> no, we take the news most talked about in the press. we try to expose parents to a broad range including opinion pieces. but when we do opinion, we do pro and con articles. two commentaries on the same piece. i don't want to say that's fair and balanced, but that balance gives students the ability to think critically. >> and you don't shy away from things that might be tough. it's up to the teachers whether or not to introduce that into the classroom.
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it seems teacher driven. schools have to pay for this, or they can choose to pay for this. >> yeah, teachers have driven the trend. there is one amazing trend that is happening in education today. very quietly, there is a technology revolution happening in schools. half of the tablets were purchased by schools. that is a 30% increase. so we're reaching the point where a student with a laptop in front of them, accessible to them at all times will be the dominant paradigm in schools. so we're building it towards a world where students have access to the content they need, and teachers have -- >> i wonder if administrators will become nervous about this. the teachers are able to
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introduce whatever they want and that is great, and power to the teachers. but at some point the curriculum administrator says wait, what are you doing? >> yes, they're talking about it as a replacement for textbooks, and a distlaupgs large can make people nervous. most importantly what teachers want is information about what their students are reading. there was an eighth grade student reading a printed article. an english-language learner. his eyes were not moving at all. he was just making himself disappear. never saying "i don't understand this article." the teacher had no insight into it. she was just plowing through,
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assuming everyone understood what was being read, but they weren't. >> we'll be back in just a minute.
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my thanks to my guests. . if you missed any interviews, you can watch them on "press here" or on itunes. thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.
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damian trujillo: hello and welcome
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to "comunidad del valle." i'm damian trujillo, and today, a new local band called "the cisco kid." it has some local legends on it. they'll be here on your "comunidad del valle." male announcer: nbc bay area presents "comunidad del valle" with damian trujillo. damian: we begin today with the monthly visit by the mexican consulate of san jose. with me here on "comunidad del valle" is consul de comunidades, martha gutierrez is my guest on the show. bienvenida al programa. martha gutierrez: hi, damian. thank you. damian: thank you for coming on the show. now, you have something that's coming up here called gourmex. talk about what gourmexsv is and who can participate. martha: that's right. our main event for the september month it's going to be gourmexsv. it is a special event that we are going to organize it-- we are going--we are working--sorry.

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