good morning, everyone. venture capital loves tech.

it pours money into all kinds of high tech ideas. as a result, every once in a while, companies that look like high tech sneak through with a few tech credentials. sweetgreen has raised $325 million in venture funding. wework founder insisted he ran a tech company. his company s1 used the word technology 110 times. but at the end of the day, sweetgreen makes salad. and i kid you not, there is a sweetgreen in a wework in downtown san jose. i'm telling you all this so you can see where i'm coming from. when i heard oliver space had raised $7 million in seed funding, do not get me wrong, oliver space is a cool company. you go online. you pick out furniture or even whole rooms of furniture and the company delivers it to your door

to rent. you were probably not expecting me to say wework in the same breath of your company. chan ran operations for uber in north asia. do you see where i'm coming from, that this seems to me to be -- we used to call them rent-a-centers. but not a high tech company. >> yes. >> and, yet, venture capital, which generally gives money to high tech gave you a lot of money. >> yeah. all i heard is that you thought we were a cool company. >> fair enough. >> but, you know, how i look at it is does the introduction of technology somehow make a big difference or make a big impact in the customer experience or the consumer experience? i used to work at uber. a lot of people used to say that this feels like a fancy taxi app that gets you a car within a

couple of minutes. the introduction of technology made what was otherwise a very unreliable experience a very reliable one and that's how the company took off. how i look at it is in the furnishing experience, there is a tremendous amount of stress and anxiety that goes into how do i make this place that i just moved into look like a home and feel like a home? that is very different from this, let's finance a refrigerator for you. let's finance a sofa for you simply because you can't afford it. from a business model perspective, segment and use case, the customer experience and even the style in the catalog, very different from -- >> do you think may field and abstract would have given you the money if you had opened up just a store front. if you said, i'm going to open up a rent -- is it okay to call it a rent-a-center? i'm calling it a rent-a-center.

it is my television show. >> probably not. that is not what i pitched. you know, what i will say is this company and the origins of the idea really comes from my personal experience. i moved around quite a bit in my life. i'm 33 years old. i have lived in 25 different places. it turns out when you are pursuing these career opportunities and adventures, it is really hard to set up a home for yourself. >> yeah. >> and when you kind of break down the problems and the issues that comes with trying to furnish a space, it's not just about the upfront costs and breaking it into more affordable monthly payments, it is also about the design process and how do these items come together and how will it visualize together and coordinate together. >> what is your target clientele? >> himself, right? >> yes. as cliche as that may be, i did build this product for people like myself. you know, you could be an urban

professional in your 20s and 30s. maybe you have put together a few years of struggling with the likes of ikea and trying to put your own furniture together and throwing it away at the end when you are moving to your next place or whatnot. when you are signing a 12 month lease on an apartment, it is hard to invest in that space unless it has flexibility, design help because the every day user or the average consumer doesn't quite know how to put a space together. >> you can rent the entire room. >> correct. >> you can just go, yep, i want everything in this thing. >> correct. >> so does that demographic -- i know we talk so much and hear so much about the death of ownership when it comes to cars and a lot of other things, but is that demographic that you are going after, are they already renting furniture or does that not really exist in like an attractive way for them as it is? >> yeah. i don't know a single customer that we have today that were

renting furniture. and, in fact, people ask me, are you a rental company, a remember-to-own company? we're both and neither. i say we're a flexibility company. the nuance here is that the point isn't to, oh, i want to rent for 12 months and eventually own the item. you don't have to decide today because you don't know where you are going to live next year. you don't know if you will get a job in l.a., out in chicago or whatever else or maybe you will move abroad or move across town. you start having a family, et cetera, and your situation and your life changes and for us to be able to give that flexibility back and if you do decide to own at the end, unlike the incumbents and the older models that you mentioned, we don't charge a penny above retail all-in. so all of your monthly payments count towards buying it at the end. but life may happen and say, you don't want to own everything that you have been renting. and, so, the long story short of

it is that we give the flexibility back to the consumer, which, by the way, across most consumer categories, whether it's movies and media, whether it is your clothing like rent the runway, et cetera, flexibility is the -- >> well, cars. there are a number which you just pay a monthly fee and they give you the car. >> yeah. >> what happens to the furniture when people do decide they don't want to keep it? you mention when people move, they throw things away. maybe they sell it on craig's list. are you recycling and reusing furniture? if not, how are you dealing with the potential waste outcome of this. >> when you look at the waste data in the u.s., the top two categories by fair, by fair margin are food and furnishings. you don't have to go further than the streets of san francisco, oakland, et cetera, to see sofas and chairs being laid on the side of the street when it is moving week or moving weekend, rather. we think that that is a big problem and we want to create

this circular economy, so to speak, in this category where if an item comes back to us, we quickly clean it up, inspect it and it's no different than the concept of a certified pre-owned in the car market. >> have you been doing this long enough that you know what percentages of couches will make it through more than one owner? >> we actually work directly with manufactures. >> yeah. >> to design and make sure the materials we use -- >> have you been going this long enough to know how long the couch is going to last? >> cover it. >> your aunt used to do that. that's a huge question of profitability, right? are you going to be able to get more than one use out of this product. >> yeah. >> have you been going it long enough to know? >> not to dig too deep into our financia financials, but we're in the money after the first customer. >> really? >> what is your inventory?

going back to venture backed companies and one of the things that d.c. is aimed for is scaleability, obviously. so in terms of your inventory, like, these companies have warehouses. >> yeah. >> you need to have, you know, be on the ground in multiple cities in order to scale. >> so you have to get really good and efficient at operating a logistics heavy business, which is something that i'm pre-backgrounded. but the other thing i will say is in the supply chain of furniture, there are massive inefficiencies that by going directly to the manufacturer and working with the manufacturer to make sure not only that you are getting a good deal on the supply chain but making sure that these are going to be durable materials, the way it's constructed i could tell you by just opening up the hood of a sofa how well it is constructed and we get really good at that. so to answer your question, yes, we are a young company, but how we invest into our inventory is with an eye to the future to

make sure it will last several years. and the customer also has to collaborate with us to make sure we take care of these items and they have the incentive to do that because they may own it at the end. >> i'm going to squeeze in one last question. oliver space, where did that come from? >> the pun is actually that we believe in furnishing all of your space. and that's how it came about. >> but the other thing that we -- we set out to do is that every consumer, every person has that design savvy friend they go to for design help. >> it had a bit of a warby parker to it. >> very artery. >> we want you to feel like we are not just like a company where you pay a bunch of company to get a sofa and whatnot. we want to be a design partner for your space. i think far too much consumers have been deprived of beautiful space in their home because of

the beautiful paint points that come with furnishings a space. >> we appreciate you being with us this morning. up next, veteran journalist michael malone warns about the future of machines. and it is not just jobs at risk. right here when press: here continues.

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welcome back to "press: here." somewhere around 10,000 b.c. somebody figured out if you took the seeds from plants and buried them, you got more plants. the agricultural revolution didn't just make more food, it led to the creation of the written language to keep track of all that extra food and the creation of money. the industrial revolution led to the concept of the workweek and weekly wages. one of the debates futurists engage in is this, are robots and artificial intelligence part of the industrial revolution or part of a third revolution? and if so, what changes are ahead. forget just job loss. true revolutions bring with them culture shattering new ideas. michael malone has been pondering that very question. he says robots and ai are indeed going to bring a third revolution. his new book co-written by bill davidow is called the autonomist

revolution. long-time journalist, the author of more than a dozen books. thanks for being with us this morning. >> good to be here. >> this is a heavy lift, right. >> yes. >> you are not talking about just the future of robots. you are talking about the third and only the third revolution in human history. >> yes. >> and none of us have lived through the industrial revolution. it came long before we were walking around. >> right. we have lived in the back wash of the industrial revolution. >> right. so we at this table would be one of the very few humans to live through a revolution. >> yes, yes. the whole point of this book was, we kept hearing everybody talking about the fourth industrial revolution, the fifth industrial revolution, like this was just a continuation. cranking along and now we have computers instead of mills. but bill and i are really technological determinists. i mean, 25 years ago we wrote

"the vir chutual corporation." we realized, no, it's going to change the whole nature of business. this time around, we started looking at all these claims and the developments that have been occurring and this increasing sense that the world is kind of crazy right now and unpredictable. and it struck us that something much more important was happening. that -- and it only happened a couple times in human history. the analogy we use is a phase shift. that comes from physics. if you lived only in a temporary climate and you had never been in freezing weather and you knew the properties of water. you understood hydraulics and all this stuff. all of a sudden, you've got ice. >> it's still water. >> it's still water. but you have no idea. you can't even tell that it's water. >> right. >> you don't know any of its properties. you don't have any tools to measure it or use it.

you know nothing. and, so, not only has there been a fundamental change, but even the rules governing that change are different. >> why are we so bad at predicting what future jobs can look like? i mean, even if this is an entirely new revolution. >> up until now, why have we failed? >> yeah. i used to go to the annual presentation of morse law back in the early '80s. he would draw that curve. you know? that curve went straight up in the early 2000s. that's really going to be something. we will have really cheep computers. human beings, i think, resist the idea that things will fundamentally change. and that when you have a technological revolution, you also have cultural and a social revolution, and it changes everything. it changes all the rules. and it happens kind of in a

weird behind the scenes way. we call it substitutionally equivalent. you have a black bell telephone. then suddenly you have a portable phone. suddenly you have a flip phone. now you have a smartphone and it is still a phone. >> uh-huh. >> but our relationship to that thing is so much different. that one had one app. this has 10,000 apps. you do all of these things with it. it changes your behavior. well, that's a phase shift. that's not just an evolution. what we're sensing is 10,000 b.c. up to 4,000, i would say, if you were a hunter, gatherer with your tribe and came up on the first city in the world, you have no idea what you are looking at. you wouldn't know how to behave. i mean, there is a story of gengus khan bursting through the straight wall and heading to modern beijing. and the warriors just ran down

the main street of the city. they had no idea the value of gold or machines or anything else. they were just stealing stuff, you know? animals. because they did not recognize. this was a new world. so the agriculture revolution gives us, as you said, it actually gives us mathematics, music, philosophy, democracy. >> what's good? >> well, this is the tricky part. >> right. >> because we know -- we know in the industrial revolution, 1740 to 1800 life expectancy leapt. >> right. >> literacy, modern medicine was created. >> we want to hear about what's coming. >> all that stuff is -- >> notice each time, once you get to the other side, pretty nice. >> yeah. >> you know? and just keep that in mind when i tell you about this, that the possibility is something very

close to paradise sitting on the far side. enormous life expectancy, machines helping us out. >> with a possible war in the middle. >> right. >> with a lot of adaptation in between. >> i have about a minute. i will hog the last question for myself. mike, one of the possibilities is something you call the zef. >> yes. >> zero economic value. people that cannot compete with value, think of an auto assembly, but now we're talking about radiologists. >> yes. >> who will have 0 economic value. doesn't mean they're not nice people. >> it will hurt ditch diggers and then eventually. >> we're talking about lawyerinlawyer ilawyers, doctors. >> what do we do with these people? >> we don't know. we're experiments with the idea

of guaranteed annual income, but we don't really know yet the psychological impact. we have all lived in a world where it was all about the good job and you defined yourself by your career and your career accomplishments or how much money you made or what kind of contribution you made to society. if jobs aren't available, if nobody can have -- if 50% of the population will no longer be employable, what do we replace that with? and this is -- this is one of the biggest questions we face. we can answer it. if we can find a way to live happy lives without being productive in that way, maybe there is through intangible ways, through volunteer work, i don't know. we have to find it. we have only a few decades here to get this right. >> michael malone is the author. i highly recommend it. thank you. >> i have been following you for 30 years. thank you for having me on. >> we'll be back in just a minute.

welcome back. all eyes will be on the san francisco 49ers this afternoon as they take on the kansas city chiefs in the super bowl. we will count on richard sherman to stop the passing attack. he is money. not only is he a good corner back, he's a pretty adventure

capital list. he joined the firm decemberabas investor. what is he investing in? >> well, he's already made a couple of investments and most of them have been centered around player health actually. for example, pharmaceutical company that this is all in clinical trials not out yet. >> sure. >> but the idea is it is a pill a player can take post concussion and it will mitigate some of the impact. another one is a company that is supposed to be a safer home. so that's kind of where his focus has been. he's put his money where his mouth is. but he's venturing outside of that with that. he's advising and investing. kind of a new chapter. >> i thought hfs interesting he said in terms of safety, a lot of the changes will need to come from the nfl. but when you look at what he's investing in, it's external changes. maybe he thinks the smart money

is external companies, pharmaceuticals that our safety companies will be where it's at. >> yeah. i think he sees the responsibility of the nfl maybe not to innovate themselves and, you know, put money -- although they could put money into some of these products but investigate and be on top of what's out there and bring those companies into the fold. they're starting to do that a little bit more. >> i saw he also invested in players tribune, which is a writing about sports and one of the complaints he had was that everybody writes about my altercations and not me helping out charities and things. i invested in player tribune to stop them. i thought to myself, or, you could just get involved in fewer altercations. >> yes. yeah. that is correct. it is partly like that's the nature of their world. there is some smack talking. i'm not excusing anything. >> athletes and venture capital, and this is not super carefully

researched, but seth curry, kobe bryant, magic johnson, these are all people who have been very successful. curry, brian james, johnson. mostly nba, not nfl. do you know why that is? >> yeah. so he has an interesting, you know, an interesting take on this because i asked him this question. and i didn't realize this. but or hadn't thought about it. but the way that the nfl contracts work is just so different, not only in their structure but also their size. they're shorter term and they're smaller. you know, the nba stars, you don't have to be an nba star. you can be mid-level and you have got a $150 million contract. and nfl players just don't make that much and they're also interchangeable. you have larger teams. careers tend to be shorter. they don't have that security of, hey, i'm going to put $1 million or whatever here and

there in silicon valley. >> laura, you have been writing about ring. i know there is a lawsuit. but is it safe to use ring? i know a lot of our viewers have ring. >> a lot of the privately concerns when there was a string of hacks around december where they were using pass words and user names to get into people's cameras and talk to them. they were harassing people and talking to kids and stuff. and really the reason this was happening is that, you know, pass words aren't really a great product. we re-use our pass words in a way that's not safe. if you have had another data breach, you can't use it on your ring camera. there are things that ring can do to make it so that you are not falling into that trap. it is just common. everyone does it. we have too many pass words to remember. >> so the two-factor a

authentication. security experts are saying it should be required. >> it does seem a company does have some responsibility even if your user is an idiot. they have some responsibility to make sure that the user uses it properly. >> especially when there are these known technological solutions and there is also tools that can tell users, hey, i saw you created your password. that's been breached a bunch of times. you shouldn't use it. >> just raising that awareness like, hey, you shouldn't use that password is another way to educate consumers. >> you write for cnn. i highly recommend you read both. thank you so much. >> thank you. we'll be back in just a minute.

earlier we were talking with michael malone about his new book about automation. i have also interviewed his co-author, the venture capital list about that very same book. that's going on our podcast in the next few weeks. you can find sand hill road wherever you find your very high quality podcasts. that's our show for this weekend. my thanks to my guests and thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.

this morning in punxsutawney, pennsylvania, ground hog phil said no shadow, early spring. capital one arena as the capitals lead the entire nhl. nine more weeks of great hockey. their fans want as many as 17 for another title. 15th season for capitals captain alexander ovechkin. no one in that time has more goals. for the 50th time he'll face penguins captain sidney crosby. 15th season as well. in that time no one in the league has put up points at a faster rate. both have stanley cups and are after another.