Here. Good morning, everyone. My first guest this morning is one of the few Silicon Valley ceos to take his Company Public this year. They use state of the art flash memory inside making their products faster, more energy efficient, and far less likely to break down. Despite the obvious advantages, investors have been weary. Job number one is selling to businesses and that is going swimmingly. Let me ask you, first, about i have a lot of viewers who are prepublic, preipo. I think it is a tougher clima climate. We have competitive margins and some of the best growth in the industry. It was important to come out and there was several other issues. We had to make it out or were priced below range. Companies need to be really well prepared in this market to be successful. Let me ask you a question of nysd versus nasdaq. Why did you choose were very close to both exchanges. And i would say it was a very tough call. Each put together a really attractive package and it was a tough decision. Were very happy with the nysd. I think what people who are not public yet worry about being pushed around by rauns. Are you feeling that pressure . Are you getting a lot of calls . Do you worry about people amassing shares and doing stuff. I think you have to go in and think it is a marathon, not a sprint. And we have that messaginmessag told my team if i see a ticker on your desk top, i will delete it. Will it change . We should be thinking about our stock not in quarters, but in years. P the focus on for the team is to continue the best in class growth that we already have. What do you think about timing . Should you have gone earlier or later . You had some competitors go before you. Why at that point . We chose the timing basing on being ready. We had a trajectory. We got our board ready, we belt out the leadership team. We had all of the ingredients in place. I think the market continues to get tougher. Im certainly glad were public today. I dont mean to be a convert, yes, it is cheaper, faster, and more energy efficient, but it is more expensive. But you say youre getting it down towards the hard drive which means you could replace servers all around the world. Flash cost about four times as much a few years ago. But the cost has been dropping faster than disk and it is because of the mobile device industry. Okay, fine, flash falls to a ridiculously low price, then you have a product that isnt worth very much. Storage has always been differentiated by software. So there is data reduction technologies, there is protection of the data snaufring that it is resilient and it provides a rich set of services above and beyond the raw flash media. You put to the fire the feet of a lot of incumbents. And that is what innovators do, which is great, but coming up behind you is Cloud Companies that are coming up. Do you feel like theyre going to come at you and be hurting your sales . So we see cloud as a great opportunity along with flash. Were the two biggest disrupters to hit the tStorage Market. Cloud is an opportunity because the large, fast companies, six of the top 20, are using pure storage. The lashrge consumer Cloud Companies are not relying on an amazon or a microsoft cloud. There is a cloud, but ultimately there is a server running and making that cloud happen, and you can sell it is so much more efficient, that you will not sell as much storage boxes. I dont buy that. Storage prices tend to drop every year about 20 ish. And the Storage Market doesnt shrink because people seek to store more data. Were discusses costs more dramatically than they have been cut in ie while. We take a huge amount of the power and the Data Center Storage space. One was taking 5 racks down to five. You take all of that cost out of the system and they can buy more storage or do other things with it. Is anyone doing all flash . Is it still really for a specialized kind of storage . Certainly some of the largest are going all flash. Facebook has been talking about all flash data centers. We have customers, like shutterfly or linked in talking openly about moving to all flash data centers. I would say the Larger Data Centers it takes longer to get there, but it makes so much more sense, the costs have been dropping, its more reliable, and its much faster. And let me say, the tier one storage is the stuff you need all of the time, the stuff you need instantly. I have a question, six months ago, you had all of this make believe money, now you have real money, what are you doing with the money . This is all about continuing this best in class. Were growing faster than any other Storage Company has in history. The Market Opportunity is so large. We have the highest Customer Satisfaction of any b2b player that were aware of. So we want to continue this innovation. Are you building buildings . No, but we hire great people. And that is a challenge sometimes in the Silicon Valley. Thank you for being here. My pleasure. Up next, bringing japan to the Silicon Valley. Case in point, the japanese, the most famous billion dollar start up, there was sony in 1946, Prime Minister abe is part of that change. Meeting with Mark Zuckerberg last spring. He came to import some Silicon Valley swagger. To bring that entrepreneurial spirit back to japan. He has World Innovation lab to bring companies to Northern California and show them the Silicon Valley way. It is staffed with stop talent. Tell me some of the key differences if i know it is hard to fall into the key stereotype if is hard working, profit given, but not entrepreneurial risk taking. Is that an accurate stereotype . Yes, in the japanese culture, we focus on the interconnected relationship. And it is hard to change that culture, but there are some company thats are changing and risk taking. The yahoo Japan Management Team was known as a risk averse company. But with a new Management Team, they addressed that core corporate values. And it is very strange to the japanese people to be at the corporate setting. And theyre a great gadget culture. There are so many versions of technology being used and consumed all of the time. Exactly, what does it mean is that basically there are two options. If you childhood up with, choose the world one and a Management Team is there to support that assumes that failure is okay. Andda danger of stereotypical things. That Silicon Valley accepts failure . Yes, i think this is big things, accepting failure is part of the ecosystem of the Silicon Valley. People that tour here are amazed at the ecosystem built here. And people are very intrigued by the risk taking culture. In japan, people have a big fear not to fail because it is almost like a shift that if you fail, youre kind of going in the bottom of a shift, and if you are successful you can survival. Successful means you dont make mistakes. But like yahoo japan embracing risk taking that will kind of. Are you bringing over Small Japanese Companies and people that want to be entrepreneurials or those that want to transform . Both, but our mission is to bring the ultimate corporation platform. And creating a good Learning Space for the japanese companies. So when they come over here, who do they most want to see . We have a program to help them see a lot of big corporations like googles and those that have survived from the start ups to the large corporatio corporations. We also have them visit the accelerators and start ups to see what is really going on in Silicon Valley. We also pay a visit to stanford who invests in young entrepreneurials as a student, and help them take risks. One of the things that is a really necessary component in that ecosystem is the financing, so are you seeing more of that in japan. Until very recently, japan has been lacking the adventure financing. Last year, 260 million was invested in japan as opposed to 48 billion i thought you said million with a m. Thats like half a percent as much. Yes, and when it comes to so combine that, so it is 72 billion more americans and only 2 billion for japanese. Global start up . World innovation. I dont know where i got global start ups, but thank you. Coming up next, the gig economy. What the future holds for companies that rely on contracts. Welcome back to press here. Recently the judge in the uber class action. When congress wanted to understand more about the 21st century disruptions to the labor market, it turned to congressman john lieber. If he is smart enough for the white house, he is probably the guy we want answering our questions this morning. He is now the chief economist for thumb tack, an online help wanted board that helps gig workers get gig work. We have a handful of folks that were former white house staffers, hill staff, and with experience in washington dc. Bush white house and obama as well. How do you not waste time having more time with political discussions than anything else . We have fun, there is a lot of back and forth. We are always testing our ideas off of each other. The people that work on that you have on your flat form, what benefits do they have. The people that come to thumb tack to connect with new customers are largely going to be Small Businesses that have been in employment for themselves for quite some time. About 40 of the people have been working for five years. They are Small Micro Enterprises like plumbers and carpenters. It is not a gig economy that people may be used to. There have been independent contractors and Small Businesses fighting for work for hundreds of years. Yes, this is not new. They have had hearings on this back to the 90s. This is what Small Businesses have dealt with for a long time. Trying to find a flexible labor force for when they have work. It is like an accelerated version of help wanted. Its not like uber that has a service that is dialing up and dialing down talent as they need it. But youre an economist that knows a lot about this. How do we solve the idea of independent workers who dont have benefits. Should be a category . How do we make this work . The challenge here is that a rot of the laws in place were decided by courts going back to the 1930s. Have things changed since then . Quite a bit. It doesnt look a lot like it did in 1930. It is easier an ever to go online and find a job tomorrow. Easier and cheaper than ever to start a business. And people like that. They want to be an uber driver in the morning and they want a job, im not sure all of them do. I think some people appreciate the flexibility. Some people love a lot of people on thumbtack love working for themselves. They are able to go online, find new customers, and connect in this way and they really love it. Other people lost their job, theyre trying to find work to supplement their income in the meantime. But youre still not solving our nations problem. Have you projected how big the gig economy will be in five or ten workers. We dont know how many gig workers there are in the economy today. The estimates are a range of 3 million to 57 million. The government is behind in the regulatory structure and how they talk about it and count these kind of workers. But it is growing and Large Companies are hiring more and more parttime or 1099 employees, right . Yes, Companies Find that it is cheaper and easier for them to bring on contract workers. Part of it is because of the obligations that there are with bringing on a w 2 worker. A large cost is just in benefits alone. So the workers bring with them costs. Now youre a Bush White House guy, but how do you feel about obama care, and it makes it problem to help solve that problem. The trend to detach benefits from the workplace and to the worker is a positive trend in my work. It did make an effort to take that and make that shift. And we have tax benefits that have only gone to employed workers that are going to medicare. And it is a positive step forward in my opinion. What else do you think should happen . I the we need to look at the other parts of our benefit system and see what we detach from the employer and attach to the employee. There has been some effort around this at of tax free savings account. If im an independent contractor, i cant have tax preferred contribution to a independent workers retirement account. Is this a way that we are pivoting and we best get going on this, or is there another bottleneck where there is a fundamental political agreement. The workers and work er classification has been out there for awhile. I think for Small Businesses they could really use colorfulty here. And they want to provide their employees with benefits. And nobody has a great solution to that problem yet. There are a few smaller start ups around here that have transitioned to w2 and so near employees want that. Are you seeing that . I have heard from a few of these, it is a different mod from uber of course, but is that a trend . Something well see more of . I think as the threat of lawsuits gets more real, companies will make decisions for themselves based on their Workforce Needs about how they want to treat the workforce they rely on to deliver their service. And were also seeing the consumerization of a relationship to government. You used to have to sign on to Social Security or a plan, and now you have payroll that is personalized, and a individual can be part of the larger Resource Environments in a way they never could before. I think what technology is doing to workers in the workplace has a potential to be truly revolutionary. And to the extent that the lawsuits could slow it down it also means figuring these things out. But there is ways of doing so, right . The courts allow you, you fit one box or the other box. And people dont e dont fit in either of the boxes. Policy makers need to think deeply about these issues. John, before you go, jeb bush visited, pulled up in an uber, was that your idea taking the uber to thumb tack . That was their idea. They wanted to see cool new technology companies. I thought it was very clever of jeb. John lieber, we appreciate you being with us press here will be back in just a minute. That is our show for this week. My thanks to my guests. Next we created wee look back at our year of interviewing Silicon Valleys best and brightest. Im scott mcgrew. Thank you for making us part of your sunday morning. Press here is brought to you in part by Damian Trujillo hello, and welcome to comunidad del valle. Im Damian Trujillo, and today, Carmen Castellano of the castellano family foundation, find out about latinos in philanthropy on your comunidad del valle. Male announcer nbc bay area presents comunidad del valle with Damian Trujillo. Damian we begin today with the festive celebration el dia de Los Tres Reyes magos. Actually, were making 2 days out of it coming up here in january. Jessica torres is with the Childrens Discovery Museum here at san jose, and michael mu lea . Michael mu lea mu lea. Damian mu lea will be here to sing at the Childrens Discovery Museum during the festivities. Welcome to the show. Now, talk about the festivities. This is an annual event, and youre talking about tradition and culture. Jessica torres its a wonderful event. Its the 18th annual year that weve had the dia de los reyes event. Its 2 days on saturday, january 9th, and sunday, january 10th