Transcripts For KNTV Press Here 20140803

Dont fare much better. Of the 20 companies which spend the most on lobbying in washington according to figures by opensecrets. Org, only google is on the list, spending 50 million on influence in washington much the nation a association of realtors spends twice that. And kind of pretty sure that Julie Samuels is a lobbyist though. Her organization, engine, prefers to say it supports the growth of technology, entrepreneurship through economic research, policy analysis is and an advocacy. Let me introduce John Schwartz of usa today, mick hall efram of fortune. Are you or are you not a lobbyist . For starters there is a Legal Definition of lobbyist and i am not one. Okay. Register as a lobbyist. You have to say i am a lobbyist. Correct. We will get to why an undocumented lobbyist . Well, i work in at vo cassie. I work in at vo cassie. We will get to the difference in a second. When one registers as lobbyist, what does that mean that youre not . What is the difference that my understanding, not an expert in election laws. To be fair, my understanding is how much time you spend interacting with members of congress a matter of time . It has to do with time, it has to do with how much money you put into things. My organization, we have a couple different form two nonprofits, 501 c 3, 501 c 4, half of what we do is research, usually economic in nature, a lot of data, areal try to dig in and understand. The charity part of it . 501 c 3, traditional not for profit and 501 c 4, one is technically called enenergy research foundation,ed advocacy. You get paid to influence politici politicians . With no more than 20 of our time. There are a lot of things i dont understand in life, one thats really near the top for me, the top to me is the fact that only google among the Tech Companies and only 15 million for this multibillion dollar company. What has been the case, why given h 1 v visas, all these other events and issues, why are they the only one not so low . I think gonna start already starting to see more. Peoples d. C. Offices, gr government relation offices, really starting to staff up. Google was first. Google is doing the most. Still like i said not that high. A couple things at play. Number one, you have got a community that the tech community, im gonna use quotes, such an amorphous phrase. But generally, theres this kind of disconnect . Disconnect. Kneejerk reaction that we dont want to be to be involved in that, want to grow our business. Naivete. Like we can solve the problem, like bill gates would say this about education. Create ride sharing. We can do better. Most of these entrepreneurs and they all like to talk about how all these systems are broken, Education System and the engage. Yeah. Thats that is really puzzling. It is interesting. First of all, we actually see, im gonna draw some generalities here. We love we love generalalities. Okay. What we see, we see more of this in the bay area, with the bay area companies. We see more of a hesitance to get involved in policy, to engage out here. We are seeing, like i said earlier, thats picking up a bit. But putting that aside, in other pockets, you see a lot of tech company growth, new york city is a good exarm, those are much more engaged, tend to be, has to do with the culture in new york city, closer to d. C. And all that stuff plays together. Now, what i think is changing, a little bit here. I mean, starting to see change here is that these issues that are happening in d. C. Are directly impacting the companies, you brought up immigration, h 1 v visas, the fact immigration is broken is making these companies lives harder. Another issue ive worked a lot on patten reform. Sued by patent trolls, making the lives harder, starting to remember the hard way, it took banging them over the head, right, but they are starting to learn the hard way that youve got to engage. You have you have no choice. Heres the thing. So i was gonna mention this about facebook in particular. Mark zuckerberg gives nearly 1 billion to some local community funds, he gives the new york schools, yet he has to go to d. C. To personally lobby, im wondering why isnt some of this facebook money, they are doing well, isnt going to lobbying efforts about it is. Forward. U. S. , but thats not my understan standing that comes from the individual, from mark. But facebook does not have a huge presence. They dont have a tower in washington, d. C. Other than google, which companies are kind of stepping up now . Um, so you know, twitters got a new office there, some of the more Traditional Companies like cisco, do a ton of work out there, but those i think that people dont think of them as rapidly as these other ones we are talking about. Cisco seems obvious, have some sort of the twitters are being affected twitter has a newer office in d. C. Amazon is starting to hire more people in their d. C. Office. You know, they are bulking on this drones thing. They hired a new drone lobbyist, full. I dont know what the title is. 21st century. Probably like one person in the country that is still on staff now. One of the more important things they are doing not only trying to influence, they are trying to educate. I realize you dont influence or lobby the Supreme Court, but you remember they were talking about aero and then one of the Supreme Court justices basically didnt understand hbo, didnt understand how hbo was sent to homes. The United States Supreme Court. But if thats an issue, about what, like, the airbnbs and ubers . I was about to say that that really important piece, you talk about the airbnbs, the ubers, the lifts, highly regulated companies, they have no choice, they are involved in regulatory proceedings, a lot of times at the state levels for those particular companies, out the door, from day one, but they have to be. They dont have a choice. I think that those companies, as they grow up, you will see that they have more robust policy teams because they grew with that kind of culture. I want to ask you a couple questions about the resistance to getting involved in lobbying, but i got to take a quick commercial break. We will be back with talking about lobbying and of course, not a lobbyist, in washington in just a minute. Welcome back to press here. Earlier, i said one does not lobby the United States Supreme Court but in a way, one does if you file briefs and you filed briefs with the United States Supreme Court. So, you, not being a lobbyist, also have tried to influence a United States Supreme Court. I am a lawyer. So this i can do. Thats right. I think we tend to spend a lot of time talking about inflew wednesdaying d. C. , thinking about legislation. Did you pass this bill . Did we pass Immigration Reform . Did we pass at that time tent reform . It is not that simple. Not a zero sum game. Tons of ways in this country we make laws, make policies, make regulation and many different places, many different power points, if you will, pressure points, i guess, where you can influence. Take for instance patent reform. You guys have talked about this on the show. Myself included. Definitely hard to get legislation going, far with this congress, it stalled. Wheels came off. Some people might say died, i say stalled in the senate. What we did make happen, the Supreme Court took six patent cases last term. That was essentially unheard of. Decided each one unanimously and decided each of those unanimous cases pretty much in line with the reformers vision of where the law should go, which i would argue has as much if not more, an impact than legislation. They went farther than congress is going to go . In the meantime, we had this robust conversation in the country about patent law. Not only did the Supreme Court do what it did, but the federal trade commission the president talk about at the state of the union, right . Thats really important real estate, political real estate. We have Something Like 20something states taking action against patent control. This is why im not just a lobbyist, right . The definition of a lobbyist those go with capitol hill and meeting with members of congress, not what we did here, we were able to affect change and all these different avenues, and i think that the world is better for it i think patent law is better for it. Something that touches all Technology Companies . The patent problem . Particular . Yeah. These days, it is. Unfortunately. I think the larger text, san francisco, cares a lot about that. That changed everything. What happened there, a patent problem for a long time, the apples and the googles felt the pain, no one really cared that much. The viewer maybe a patent troll, i have some obscure patent that may or may not describe what youre doing it is cheaper for me, i say, hey, youre violating my patent, as a small company, cheaper for you to say heres some money rather than me take you to court. Briefly, patent trolls, companies that traditionally dont make anything, dont sell anything, just use patents to kind of the president used the word extortion, extort some money. I would almost think a startup for a larger company, because they can afford to defend themselves legally. The patent trolls i think armed with two weapons, right, armed with a lot of lowquality patents, Something Like hundreds of thousands of Software Patents floating around and with the ballooning, outrageous cost of patent litigation, one of the most expensive kinds of litigation, costs millions per side. Even if you win, you get nothing back. So someone says, okay, im gonna sue you. This patent is super confusing, i think that you do this, pay me 100 grand, pay me 50 grand, pay me 10 grand, i will go away or were gonna go to court. Do you give the bully the lunch money or beat up . You go away, think lunch money would be cheaper. Cheaper. I have to let you go, before you do i want you to tell me what your title was before you joined engine, speaking of patent patents, the greatest job title. Before i joined engine, used to be on the board of engine, at the Electronic Frontier foundation, i was the mark cuban share to eliminate stupid patents. A new mark cuban chair now, the title lives on and the work lives on. Jurily samuels of engine. Thank you so much. Well up next, if you had to reinvent email all over again, you just wouldnt. The founder of flickr takes on the future of communication when we continue. Welcome back to press here. History is murky but think engineer Ray Tomlinson is the first to send an email. Tomlinson says he doesnt recall what the message said, rather, but think it is might have been the letters across the top of the keyboard. And in many ways, email has been down hill ever since. Many teams are now finding that email are not very well suited to the 21st century, dozens or hundreds of messages sent back and forth to a growing list of recipients all chiming in at the same time, it turns into a big mess a number of very smart people have tried to solve this problem. Sales force, asan nah, jive, yaller and this company, slack. Slack is led by stuart butterfield, best known for cofounding the photo sharing site flickr. Hes cambridgeeducated, listed as one of time magazines most influential and one of business weeks top leaders. One of them was for being the top 40 under 40 or top 35 under 35 for which you no longer qualify. I no longer qualify . No matter how awesome you are, you will never qualify again. You want to whip out the credentials, you missed one, which is i think forbes or fortune, best beard in silicon valley. Fortune. Yeah. There you go. To the viewer who says, wait a minute, the founder of the the cofounder of flickr was on a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. The other cofounder of flickr was on, with whom you have a daughter . Yep. In case anybody was confused. Tell me about slack. What is it about email that doesnt work that you are trying to solve . I want to be clear that the he is email inside of an organization. So, email in general is never gonna go away, or at least not gonna go away in the next couple of decades, the lowest common denominator, i want to get in touch with someone i dont work with regularly, call or email, i will send an email. Inside of an organization, there is a lot of advantages you can get from centralizing communication. All of the communication, the history, the archives scattered into different email box, which will be shut down when someone leaves the company, you hire someone today and have access the last two years, if you centralize it if i have a team of 20 and hire somebody and he has no access to that thread, he has no idea what weve been talking about, which is one problem number one. What else . The second one is by organizing in slack terminology, channels, marketing, sales, Something Like that specific projects, features youre gonna launch. You get an ambien awareness, an example, slack on irc, an old protocol, use very old, very old. Even predates the web that we use wend we were working on a massive multiplayer game called glitch. In that case, people working in Customer Support would get help tickets and those people would be heads down, ticketing system, get a report, see people getting reports on log in, bring that up, discuss it multiple people would be seeing that now the people on the technical operations team, totally separate, would see that they are talking about this and say, oh, crud, we just changed the load balance here. I wonder if thats whats causing it, rather than this being an issue that bubbles up to management of the support team and the next morning, gets told to the manager of the technical operations team, goes back to the people working in the field and ask them whats going on and then back and forth like this. So, this kind of ambien awareness of whats going on across the organization, do you get that with email sometimes but this constant pressure of i want to be kept in the loop, please cc me and also way too much email. Single greatest deterrent to any Work Productivity where i am is email. There are literally over 200 messages among 20 people about three stories. And to a point where youve lost track of whos saying what and then called out for not then one guy doesnt reply, all he does is reply to you. And not realizing its not going to everyone else. So, i guess are you seeing a trend toward maybe instant messaging . That happens quite a bit now, or even group email discussions on an iphone or Something Like that . I think so. Theres maybe a little too philosophical, over the last decade or more, more and more the last five years, Facebook Messages, maybe because of twitter, the rise of sms, because of the iphone, a lot of people dont use email, a lot of younger people and a lot of older people who grew one email are more willing to use other systems. One of the questions i have is, like, i feel i waste just as much time on im and Facebook Messages and some i use for work now and we use hip chat, which is another tool. And theres a lot of chatter and knowing, like, which threads i should be paying attention to and what i should follow and i constantly have this worry im going to miss something, if its in my inbox, i email it, im used to it. Does it save people time because its not the ultimate goal . I think it does. Ideally save some time. Ideally save some stress. There are some advantages that sound a little bit weird. You go to your phone, you swipe through your apps, you have one icon in this case, slack, that means work. And inside of that app is just the people you work with. Whereas i tap on email, i have the people i work with, i have people i work with outside of my company, i have family, i have friends. Expedia. Yes. Receipts and this is an interesting one, we dont think about this normally. I bet any of you open up your email to stroll xroel through it, 80 from computers, not people, marketing messages, receipts, off new follower on twitter, someone commented on the task you created. Actually, ours are 80 pr. You said you discovered this idea for slack when working on glitch, a game. Flickr was not an original idea. You were working on Something Else as well. Another game as well. Another game as well. Maybe you are just bad at making games. Just a game, all right . For the entrepreneur who is watching this morning, saying this is not going the way, we will use overused word, pivot, how did you know, you know, what and twitter was the same way, thinking no, no, no, no this we ought to be working on, whats the sign where you know you need to pivot . For me, i just woke up one morning i think okay, raise 17 million bucks, vc financing, clear it was never going to be the kind of company to have as 17. 5 million investment, couldnt have achieved that scale, a sign we needed to change something. We kick it around the team, all of us agreed we would never work without a system like the one we had developed for internal communication there, whatever we were gonna do and realized, oh, huh, if that worked so well for us, probably work well for other people. Remember, an old story, i dont know if its true, tell it anyway, the origins of hot mail two guys who didnt want to commit to work email about their project, their side project, they essentially built webbased secret email so they could talk about this other project and realize that the actual product was hot mail, which they, of course, then sold. The same thing that happened with flickr, right . Why do you call it slack . Um, good question. I should say we are good social media friends with hager, the pants brand now. It was short, people rashlgs you didnt have to tell anyone how to spell it i have a thing against those names where its unclear how youre supposed to pronounce it and then have to tell someone how to write it down. We wouldnt be embarrassed when we had to tell people what the name was, obviously, connotations that dont work for many people, slacking off and being a slacker. But not a des advantage necessarily that cause it is to stick a little bit more. Also has, and is post fact attorney general not the reason we called it had this, but a lot of tension around communication in most organizations and at the same time, a lot of organizations are very rigid and not inflexible, having a bit of slack gives people room to police, explore, grow, stuff like that we can say that. Not sure if that was really there in the beginning. Okay. Fair enough. Now, flickr, tell the story about why flickr the First Company to drop the e . We were definitely the First Company to drop the e . Thank you so much for starting that trend. I think twitter wanted to drop the e . They were originally twttr. So they dropped all the vowels. Its well documented but why did you get rid of the e . Um, well, let me be clear, that wasnt my decision. I resisted it i thought it was a terrible idea. That was actually katerinas idea. Someone else came up with the name flickr, nice con know nation takes, flickering candle. And we couldnt get the domain, the guy wouldnt sell it. And he did five years later for a lot more money. Smart him. Yeah. And we were trying to figure out what to do about that,cality rena came up with dropping the e, i thought thats terrible idea. And in retrospect, it was a great idea, cause it was very distinctive. Got the domain, no problem. And there was this a funny moment where for a long time, would you search for flick we are no e and google would say did you mean flick we are an e and then it stopped doing that and then at one point, and im sure today if you search on flick we are an e, did you mean did you mean without the e . How much did you pay for . A little over 20 million. 20, 25. So, when you look at like some of the crazy, crazy valuations today in social media. Snapchat, 10 billion. If you started have to make it quick, but what what would flickr have sold for in this environment . In this environment, certainly in the millions. A different time. 2004 was it was a wasteland, still post dot com crash and 9 11, worldcom, enron, markets down 80 . Hard to explain to people who are younger. Stuart butterfield, thank you for being with us. Good luck with slack. Thank you very much. Press here will be back in just a minute. You both have been writing about diversity, reading yours, talking about twitter, the latest company to issue these kind of new reports and say, here are the kinds of people that are working in our company. Yeah, started with google and some others fell in line, think apples coming up next, ebay might be the end of this week. Intel doing it a long time. To its credit. One thing i do want to throw out is this idea that none of the bigname tech ceos said a word about this topic, they are willing to talk about every product, every acquisition, even bad news when it comes around. They are willing to talk about everything. They are almost like the president or the head of their country, which these companies are we see or hear nothing. Somebody issues the report, but the ceo wont talk about it. The hr department, usually some person who you are not familiar with, in charge of diversity at a company, but we theres no person actually no figurehead who has actually said or addressed this. I thank you lot of individual smaller efforts, square has these code camps for women and girls and running and a lot of companies do this and get behind various organizations, i dont think any of these, you know, largely male ceos are really stepping up and becoming a spokesperson or showing that this is a really strategic priority. Yeah, answer. Yeah. I havent seen that. In fairness to these guys they do a lot of good philanthropic work, with youth groups and people of different colors and gender. They do a good job but no one i think almost a taboo subject. Im not sure what the reason is. Ceos ought to be talking about it. Their credit they are issuing the reports at all, largely volunteer, give them grief over what we find. At those reports are coming. Every company should be doing this and definitely the public companies, its Good Governance and you had a guest on a few weeks ago talking about women on boards and how that has been shown a direct correlation, right . We have to no time left, but thank you. We will talk more about that. Thats our show for this week. My thanks to my guests. Thank you for joining us as well. Hello and welcome to comunidad del valle. Today the lieu west valez Leadership Academy here in our studio. Plus, a new book about company e in world war ii. This is your comunidad del valle. We begin today with a glowing need right here in the bay area. With me are pauline sack ka motto and lourdes chichas with the Mothers Milk Bank. Welcome to the show thank you. With dough have some video to show on what we are basically talking about here, but talk about what the food what the milk bank does and who it serves. The Mothers Milk Bank has been in operation for 40 years in santa clara county. And very