Transcripts For BLOOMBERG Street Smart With Trish Regan And

BLOOMBERG Street Smart With Trish Regan And Adam Johnson January 16, 2014

I never go to the movies. I did see a couple of movies. I know kate won the golden globe, but Sandra Bullock was spectacular. Am also watching bankers. Theyre getting paid less over at Goldman Sachs. I have to point this out, 12. 6 billion. That means every single one of their employees could make 384,000 a year. However, Goldman Sachs is doing pretty well compared to the other banks. Sanve in san cisco francisco, where everybody wants to work at a startup and nobody wants to work at a bank. How is Goldman Sachs going to get the best talent . Jpmorgan also has a lower top rate. All the six major firms are paying less. The question is, what industry do you want to go into . Microsoft has been going through a lot lately. They are looking for a new ceo. Our next guest will be with us for the hour. He is the cofounder and serial entrekin entrepreneur who used to work for ibm. You have been following this whole thing. What do you think . I think it is time for a new leader at microsoft. Microsoft should have bought amazon and put steve bezos in charge. About five years ago the had enough cash. It looks like they would have it would have worked. They would never have sold. It would have been a good match. What do you think of the candidates who have been thrown out there . I have not paid any attention. This sort of handicapping of candidates is not terribly relevant because microsoft is not terribly relevant. Yahoo ,hing google, facebook and twitter. But im not watching microsoft. Erlichman, you can tell us about all those candidates, but the real issue is, is anyone going to want to go out on this . We were talking about that today on bloomberg west. Out know they are kind of of the picture, they are really not at all. Do you really have the flexibility to do something transformational . You talked about the possibility s, whichg a bezo probably isnt a reality right now. Is there somebody who can think differently coming from isrosoft who can say this what were going to do, when Steve Ballmer said here is the restructure of microsoft, here is the game plan for us to stay relevant for the next 510 years. Are you in a position to move away from that . Then to get to this candidate we have uncovered over the last 24 it suggestericsson, this is somebody who is able to live within the world of Steve Ballmer and bill gates. I just think that is marginalizing your candidate from the start saying he have to this structure, which is not particularly relevant anymore. I wouldnt want to be put in charge of everything right now. It looks like a mess. Do you think it can be fixed . Parts of it can. What should be fixed, and what should be let go . They should get a lot more aggressive with search. They had some great opportunities a couple of years ago to improve search, and they missed those. I think they could do a lot more with mobile and with location. And just get the idea that they are going to be unable to sell and start making products again. A more optimistic view comes from Matthew Klein of bloomberg view. He basically writes that microsoft is an extraordinarily successful company. Holds 77 billion in cash and shortterm investments. Do you ever hear those positive comments when you are looking at ceo replacement . Sure, absolutely. They are a Massive Company and they do have a lot of cash. Of technology, which him only as every day, it moves so quickly that there is the question about what you are doing to be at the head of the table. Nobody really mentions microsoft in those conversations right now. That is the question, how do you stay relevant longerterm while you are making a lot of money . Tied to that you are so those legacy businesses that have been so profitable can sometimes make it harder to make that move. Lets talk about a company that is spending a lot of money on acquisitions, and that is yahoo yahoo Ceo Marissa Mayer made made 114on, he million just in those four months. Salary, bonus, stocks. What gives . Thats a lot of money. It is a good years work. I love about what marissa is doing at yahoo is she has modernized the company. She is focused on product. She is brilliant at that. But the numbers arent working. Is turning it around. I love what she is doing at yahoo , and i love the direction the company is going in. They are working harder. Parking garagehe and it is not empty at 4 00 in the afternoon. What she also has, im not kidding, she is hot thomas and that helps. There was a study by the university of wisconsin that said that goodlooking ceos help the Stock Performance over the shortterm. Ballmer,ook at steve he was sweating and jumping all over the stage. He was hot. You are talking about microsoft having all this cash. You are doing a set up where you my friend is overweight and boring, but he is rich. What about buying all these companies. Is that the right move . Small companies have great ideas and they are going to be putting in the extra hours. Theou plug them into resources of yahoo are facebook or google, then they can really take off. Here foro have you this hour. Thank you for your perspectives. We appreciate it. Welcome back to street smart. We want to talk about security now. There has been new information on the target breach of Customer Data and how it might of been done. Blogger that has broken all this new said that malware was used that captured the data stored on the Magnetic Stripe and it is still in the systems memory. He is saying it appears there were intrusions into target systems dating back to june. We are talking about 110 million potential customers affected here. I shop there. Must be following this. The Security Breach at target was unfortunate, but it is really not that big a deal for any individual. Wait a second. All of a sudden they are getting my bank account. It is peoples names, phone numbers, addresses. Identity theft is serious. It depends on what they have stolen. We dont quite know yet. You dont have your full identity if you just have the main medic strike. Magnetic stripe. Its a pain in the neck, you might have to get a new target card. Its going to cost them 10 to send you a new card. Its actually a good thing in some ways that this comes up, because the feds have been trying to move away from the mag stripe, so that is probably a good thing. Overall, security is not a big problem. It tends to make news when things like this happen, but the effect of any individual breach, its not that bad. 11 billion, half of that in Security Breaches and fraud losses per year. That is pretty substantial. You are talking fraud. , but it tendsblem to be laid back onto the merchants and not onto the individual. If the u. S. Was on a chip and pin system, would have prevented this . Yes. There has been the technology in the United States for the past 10 years that would have prevented this from the get go. What is magnetic fingerprinting . You take the iron particles on the strip and record those. Every time you lay down a the ironstrip, particles align themselves and they have a certain pattern which is random. It is like a fingerprint. If you read that pattern, you know which piece of plastic, which card it belongs to. Steall youre not your number, it wont match because my random particles dont match your random particles. Why dont we change to that technology . Its expensive. It would have been a lot cheaper to switch to that than to do these new meters. Market offered a solution, the Credit Card Companies and banks never adopted the solution. We could make the system much more secure if we needed to. We really dont need to. Where does this leave square . Have a reader under development. How long is that going to take . It will come out when it is needed. But countries around the world use chip and pin. But we are not processing there. It is not a Difficult Technology to do. Is that a huge overhaul if you had to go to chip and pin . Not really. I lived in china for a month trying to build the first ones, so i know it very intimately. It, but of proud of its not really what square is about. We are more about the back end of commerce and making things had beenof target using square, with the same thing have happened . No, it would not. Who knows . It is a breach. We dont even know who did it. It could have been an inside job. We just dont know. Even if you are safeguarding your home, the criminal can still get in. It is just a game. If you are moving money around, people are going to try to steal it from you. Its cool that everyone has my email address but it takes the driver four times to swipe my card and it doesnt work. The swipe. Orking on there is a little issue on permissions and doing offline payments where we cannot do payments unless they are connected. We have the technology to do it, but we have to get permission from all the banks and card networks, and its just not quite there yet. 5 billion, what does that mean to you . That means more than 4 billion. Its a lot of money. Square is holding an offer with a 5 billion valuation. We have people screaming bubble. Those are Good Companies to be associated with. We are one of the top firms. We didnt set that value. It is a market value. People wanted to buy some stock. What are you going to use the money for . This is mostly an internal thing. It gives some lip liquidity to internal employees. Has been a question that because you are now raising this money, does that mean an ipo is farther out . I dont know anything about that. What kind of chatter is there on the valuation of companies in general . We are talking about the technology. Thatalue is this thing they think of here in new york. It is great to float a number like 5 billion or whatever. Honestly it is not on our radar screen. Its just not part of the culture. Yorkers. Greedy new [laughter] we will be back with you in just a moment. Welcome back to street smart. Outlook, welobal have heard about the horrible conditions because of smog in china. It is so nasty. They figured out a way to actually watch the sunrise. It is called a tv screen. I moved to beijing right before the olympics, covered the olympics, and during the olympics they shut down all the manufacturing and all the factories. When i moved to there, i was like, this is beautiful, what are people talking about . A few months later, the pollution came back, and it was awful. I cannot imagine living there right now. You have been to china. That was back in 2010, or 2009 when we were building the early square reader. In the to build them u. S. And i couldnt find the manufacturing expertise here anymore. What does it take to get it right . Every Hardware Manufacturing Company it wasnt about labor cost, it was just about the expertise. I was trying to get a very specific look to the plastic. The people who knew how to build these things were all in china. I visited china about eight years ago and there were no trees at all. For the olympics, they actually had to plant trees. There are no birds because there are no trees. China and iceland, you have been traveling the world. What were you doing there . We were freezing. My wife is swedish and we went to visit the family over christmas. I am from hawaii, so this sounds really awful to me. It is an insane project they built every year. They cut up the river and take these gigantic blocks and make the most fantastic sculptures. They are swedish and they respect Building Codes. The Building Code say you have to have a fire extinguisher even if you entire building is made of ice. Sleepingasically inside a fire extinguisher if you are inside the ice hotel. You have been traveling a lot. What do you do when you are traveling . I came back from rome. The Italian Government was trying to build entrepreneurship and i was giving them an opinion. She invited us to come out and just ask for opinions. My opinion was italy would do well to build hightech companies. You are successful, you move your business overseas, and it is a great place expensive, but it is a great country to live in. You are sticking with us. We appreciate you telling us about your travels. Welcome back to street smart. We have some headlines coming in. Skin is not anew pyramid scheme. He said hes not yet met with the Chinese Government. They are saying the china team has handled all government inquiry. Skin will ensure that the Chinese Government is satisfied with the operation. After awn about 26 chinese newspaper published allegations saying it was suspected of being an illegal pyramid scheme. The Chinese Government came out today and said they were going to investigate it. Of herbalife falling perhaps in sympathy because it has also been accused of operating a pyramid scheme. Is ino saying nu skin fact not a pyramid scheme and the stock is climbing back a little bit. We are back with the cofounder of square. Time for my favorite segment of the day, word association. I want to play, too. I will go first. Trader. Been betterd have if he had done it a different way . I think he could have leaked a couple of documents but stayed in the country. Cowardicethink it is that he is staying in russia . What would happen if he came back . A think he would be tried. I have one for you, double baby. This is baked the basically a created a babyey that was remote controlled around new york city and it would scare the daylights out of people. It is basically about a devil baby, basically. I cannot even watch it. Another word, snapchat. Fun with no consequences. Goodnk theyre having a time, it is a young team, theyve got some great technology. Go for it. What is the best strategy for these kind of guys . They are in a cuttingedge area of the market. Everyone accused twitter of not having a revenue model for ever and then they pulled it off. What do you think of evan spiegel . He is a young guy, 23 years old. He has been doing things lately like not apologizing for stuff and revealing Mark Zuckerberg private messages. That you come from being a nobody and being on these news programs and getting hammered. He is growing into it. Hes going to do some crazy stuff. That is good, it is entertainment. We make some mistakes. Come on. Tea party. Senator, someone say was responsible for shutting down the government. I am a liberal. I love the fact that we have a functioning government when we have a functioning government. I think the tea party has been sort of responsible and i am happy to see the republicans are swinging more to the center and supporting the compromise. How about elon musk . Love him. Risk taker, aggressive, a history of great companies, and dreaming big. Are you going to buy a tesla . I dont have one yet. Have a couple of old volvos i dont know how to drive, so its not a secret. Becomes mainstream and a little cheaper, this would be huge motivation for me to buy a car. I dont have a license. It would be good to get out of the city and all that. They are gorgeous cars, i have driven them. They are fantastic. I love them. Legere. I am drawing a blank. Tmobile. He is very charismatic, crashed the at t party. I love that. Im glad i used his service. Jack dorsey. I love jack. He was your summer intern. It is hard to not just want to hug jack. He came to work with me when he was 15 years old. He is less shy now. He is a wonderful guy. He is hardworking and brilliant and i love him. When he was 15 years old, was there anything about him that ade you think he could be billionaire founder of multiple companies, famous . Did he seem special . We called him jack the genius of round the office. He always did his work great. That is one of the reasons we stayed friends for 20 years, and one of the reasons we started square. Marissa mayer. Successful. Also blonde hair. Very blonde. Im very interested in what she is doing. When you talk about people who work at yahoo now, they are so much more excited to work there than they were before marissa mayer. I think the story has yet to be told. We just dont know yet if what she is doing is working. I think they are getting a lot of attention. She has put out some new products, but nothing revolutionary yet. I think the jury is still out. That was a long word association. [laughter] that was fun. Thanks for playing along with us. We will be right back. Welcome back to street smart. We are here with the cofounder of square. Launch codeed found that helps employers change their hiring practices to get the right people into the right jobs. What does that mean . It means jobs. People inore technology. We had a real problem in st. Louis, not enough engineers. Employers had a requirement where you had to have a four year degree or two Years Experience before they would let you in the door. The irony is some of the best programmers dont have credentials. But we did was we made a deal toh the top 100 companies change their hiring practices and basically allow us to credential people who didnt have traditional paper and put them in these jobs. We have placed 42 people so far. Nobody has gotten fired. We are 100 success, which means we are not trying hard enough. They have been there about 90 days. You are quite the underachiever. You did graduate from college in two different peschel tees. You wrote a book in college that was a bestseller. To know thathave much to be successful in programming. There are bill gates and others who are encouraging not going to college. Education is super valuable, but we are talking about an acute deficit in the market. We need coders and people who can fill these jobs quickly. You dont need a fouryear degree to be competent as a code or. We have a program that started two days ago. Feeling that we can train somebody from a standing start to competent in six months. What do they need to know before they enter your program . Have a mind that likes word games and number games. Come to us and sit and code. Im serious in terms of what the demographic is of people who are interested in this kind of career. On monday night we had a guy who was 15 years old, we had a guy who was 62. It was about 15 girls. It was low. I am really upset with the female population right now. How do we get more women into these programming and engineering jobs . Everybody says it starts young. I have nieces and nephews and as someone who covers technology, when i was giving them things for christmas, i wanted to give them something to help them thi

© 2025 Vimarsana