friendship and popularity here life will be better in many will be popular. that is very powerful if you understand that. >> thinks so much to the three of you oat >> former secretary of state, henry kissinger, was a featured guest hosted by bbc parliament where he sat down with john major. the two men discussed how foreign-policy challenges have changed since the nixon era. the former secretary compares nuclear threat during the cold war to today's threats and new technology. >> now we are dealing with extraordinary -- going far beyond what we experienced. period,eo -- in our about the catastrophic impact of nuclear weapons. [indiscernible] essentially confined to countries and the exemption was it turned out to be morally correct. the damage they would do to each other was so huge, that they would not resort to nuclear weapons. but now nuclear technology has proliferated to many countries. new forms of technology have cyber orlike artificial intelligence which creates totally new vistas. [indiscernible] locations. -- havelly dominant countries not militarily defined what their role is in these new circumstances. >> you can see the entire discussion between henry kissinger and former british prime minister, john major, tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span. >> every weekend, book tv brings you 48 hours of authors and books. saturday at the 6:45 p.m. eastern, david baron provides a history of the debate between the executive and legislative branch over the constitutional right to declare war. in his book, waging war. 1776 to isis. joining us at the national constitution center, dean of the year -- of the prince of -- >> the two are in a dance with each other all the time. congress checking the president, backing down. the president pushing congress and being worried about taking it too far. >> sunday at 9:00 p.m. eastern on afterwards, guardian journalist speaks about gun deaths in america in his book another day in the death of america. he has interviewed a staff writer for the atlantic. possible to only talk about guns. it is a broader societal thing which humanizes them and that means when their life is taken, well, that has already been accounted for. i think there's a problem, once you start saying he was in a student. there is a suggestion that there is a great that you can get where you will be worry -- will be worthy to be killed. >> go to book tv.org for the complete tv schedule. >> now federal government officers about their role in the future government and what they will hand off to the next administration from the annual techcrunch disrupt conference in san francisco. this is 90 minutes. >> first of all, congratulations on the new product. and apparently, you got three customers before even announcing. announced that about three minutes ago. so people have are to come on and purchased licenses. people are excited about what we are doing here. >> fantastic. >> i'm getting adjusted. >> that's good. on-the-fly. so this is the first monetization of the crunchbase product. it's been around for a long time. >> almost nine years. >> why now? the start of this change of us becoming an independent company, that means a business model. we realized, with 25 million users, let's see what they want. this is the culmination of all that effort. all were initially the first to market with this low-end version of a data set covering venture capital, tracking your startup up companies. --the instagram, you've got a hundred other companies that have launched around this thesis of doing data and analysis. do you feel like you have lost competitive advantage by letting these guys take market share? jager: i don't think so. i believe we have by f do you feel like you have lost competitive advantage by letting these guys take market share? jager: i don't think so. i believe we have by far more users than any of them. that alone lets us have -- the reason people come to us is that our data is exceptional. and people expect to see it. we've democratized of the data set and all that anyone who is interested to get access to it. now we've given tools on top of that to analyze the data and extract the value you are looking for from the data set. jonathan: you have a number of users, but you have three customers right now. jager: as of right now. we can check. jonathan: from a customer acquisition standpoint, they have customers and they are a little bit ahead. jager: we do have other revenue streams. we have a licensing business in where we have almost a hundred customers who are pay for feedback on our apis. we have advertising as well. this is our next foray into a new revenue stream. jonathan: if you had been the ceo years ago, when crunchbase was developing, would you have done anything differently? jager: i don't think so. the cool thing about what we have done is we have built up all this data, all of these sco's -- we are one of the first companies when you search and see a emerging company. that is hard to do when you are focusing on renue. i think this is the right focus. we have the right focus for now. jonathan: i seen -- i see a lot of other names of companies that are doing data stuff get referenced in the press. so if i look at clips about crunchbase in the way that crunchbase is used just by journalists, it is pretty minimal compared to some others who hit a lot more regularly. is that something that you think is going to change with this new product? are you looking to open it up more to -- will you -- will it be more accessible? are you looking to partner with more customers? jager: you can make any sort of search our list and have a complicated and that's great. but you go and share it. you can do a mega search and say drone companies that are emerging that are really cool. you can take that same search and post it on twitter and people can access it, see the results, and see what wary you used. journalists may decide to make those searches or their lists and trade an article. we are going to use that on crunchbase and people ought to be able to use that as well. jonathan: i played around a little bit. you have preset searches that are critical. -- that are pretty cool. what are you most proud of in this new version? jager: once you start playing with it and try it out, you will see that it is extremely fast. when you're doing these quarries, things that you would take many seconds are almost instantaneous. competitors will let you look at just the top layer and see companies in a certain area or a certain amount of funding. those are top-level questions. we let you navigate the entire graph so you can ask ridiculous questions. you can ask nine joins, if you want to nerd out for a second. you get asked this or disco lists -- you can ask of this or ask ridiculous questions and get answers back in seconds. jonathan: how may have used crunchbase? raise your hands. all right, you are engaged. and my twitter is sadly empty. come on guys. they are buying it right now. problems that i had with the data set is that it was, when i first played around with it, continually actually, consistently, really dirty. i mean really dirty, fuzzy data. what are you doing to clean that up and what sort of confidence should people have in the searches they are getting now? are they getting a picture in aggregate of what can happen? >> a good question. in the last year, we changed completely how we do data and how we get data into crunchbase. way back, the community was going in and putting in the data and there were few checks and balances to see if the data was any good. as of a year ago, we have a new strategy. we now have four pillars of what is a good data set. the first one is community. we have 300,000 contributors adding data to crunchbase. it is usually the entrepreneurs themselves. we have an amazing partner network. we have 2700 vcs. that is hard for anyone to replicate. we get this primary stream of data from vc's which is the check and balance already between the community and the vcs. the fourth is automation, machine learning, ai, all of that, to sort of figure out what is happening in the ecosystem that might or should be in crunchbase. and we see that makes sense to have that be there. the people doing that is our research team. it is probably much larger than most people expect, looking and double checking, and seeing what data should and should not go in. this looks spamming or this look suspicious and the way we do that is really complicated. say that is not right, this is a representation of how they look to investors. you want it to look right and you want it to look good. if you start lying investors will figure that out and then you lose all credit ability. jonathan: i don't want to be a killjoy, but i noticed a couple of companies in crunchbase that i might not have expected to see. like pied piper. jager: sure. let's call those easter eggs. there is some fun data in there. a lot of that has come through. jonathan: by the way, they are very cool companies. what have you done to clean up the data set? walk-through that a little bit. it is a low-cost product, $29. you want to have a sense of accuracy. so how is that working? jager: when we are that we were -- building crunchbase pro, we allowed people to analyze our data set on mass. so we had to make it look good. a large part of our funding went towards making sure the data looks good. we have spent a decent amount of cash on the process. we have something like 8 million edits on our data over the last year. we have spent a decent amount of cash on the process. we have something like 8 million edits on our data over the last year. one third of that came from the community. one third came from automation. one third came from our own research team. at of all those edits across the data set, you can tell we have been doing a lot of work. jonathan: yes. for sure. and it shows. it is a much nicer looking product than the one i was forced to work with years ago. [laughter] totally not bitter. one of the things people like is that it was open. there's more of an ability for people to build on top of the data. that seems to have gone away. are you worried at all that this move from free to premium, what that may mean for the user base? jager: thank you for the opportunity to -- what that may mean for the user base? jager: thank you for the opportunity to answer that. yes, the data is still there. not all of it. some of the premium data we do not put behind a pay wall. that is part of doing the business year. on the functionality side, crunchbase.com, other free stuff you had and how you use crunchbase, all of that is exactly the same. the original starting point, what is crunchbase pro -- what it can't be is taking crunchbase and putting pay walls in front of it. let's build something supplemental, add features on top of crunchbase and charge for those. either way, we also give some of those away. so anyone without a trial or a credit card, you can go on the left side and click on them and try the search. we let you do your first filter and up to one joined. how many companies have female founders in crunchbase? you can do that search. jordan: i'm super lazy, but one of the things you are describing is a functionality that seems to be a little awkward. like, i remember at another company i used to work at previously, i had access to a database. those queries were a little smoother. is there a way to refine that process? is that something that you all want to do? jager: we are going to listen to what our users say. we are in a world where we can iterate on weekly releases now. we have been in stealth mode for a year. what has crunchbase done lately? it looks like nothing. now that it is out there, we can release new features, make changes, and streamline it pretty quickly. what we have is a tool that is pretty powerful. you need to play around with it and learn how it works, but once you have done that, we think he will be happy with the questions and answers you can get. jonathan: i have been beating you up a little bit about my problems that i have with the product, but what do you see as some of the things that need to get done to improve? jager: i think right now, we challenge our users to say, hey, do you think the company you are looking for is in crunchbase? often times the answer is yes, but sometimes the answer is no. one of the challenges we have is how do we go and expand the breadth of the data. a lot of companies will talk about how many hundreds of thousands of companies they have on their data set, but you need to have a level of quality that is up to our standards before we consider it acceptable to import into our system. we want a large number of companies that have that high-quality bar. alaska airlines in crunchbase? yes. weird. we don't want that to be an expectation. we just want every company to be there. jonathan: so how do you get every company in there? jager: we have a series of partnerships. we are improving our machine learning. side, it lets us go wide and deep. just today, we were announcing that we won some great partnerships. the data is not in crunchbase yet, but we are getting it in there. companies like glassdoor, all these different sort of data sets. we are going to bring in huge amounts of their data into our system, analyze it along with the other data sets. really trying to get people thinking about crunchbase as the master record on the internet of companies. let's bring these different data sets into one place. jonathan: is the idea to become the linkedin of companies? do you want to be a linkedin killer? jager: i think linkedin for people is really cool. if we can become a linkedin, facebook for companies that help companies connect with one another, i think it's an interesting challenge that can take us into the long-term. jonathan: what does that long-term look like? five years from now, what does the crunchbase product look like? what is on offer? jager: if you think about every company being in crunchbase at that point, we are focused on having companies care more and more about what their profile looks like. we are only going to have that community aspect, but allowing companies to go and put on applications, parts of crunchbase that allow users to access different parts. like imagine if there was a press release section that a company was controlling, or an rfp section that only certain types of companies can have access to. those are ways companies connect with other companies, and you need to have a lot of users using their stuff before you can roll features out because adoption become so critical. jonathan: one question that i got that i would love to hear the answer to, when are y'all going to do mobile apps? jager: three weeks ago we launched our ios app, so if you have not tried out our mobile ios app -- that's a great question, thank you. a lot of people don't know. we did launch it. that shows we continue to iterate on the free stuff. it is available for everyone. note login. login. just download it. we have a new version where you will be able to do all sorts of cool stuff. crunchbase pro, we will probably have a mobile version of that in the next few months. jonathan: crunchbase tracks a lot of companies, almost every company that raises money. when is crunchbase going to be on crunchbase again? jager: right now we are not in the position where we really need to raise. let's just find the best partners who can see our vision and get excited with us. when i meet those people and have those conversations, we might raise them, but there is no pressure. jonathan: among the features that you have on crunchbase am a there stuff about who has raised what, and -- crunchbase, there is a lot of stuff about who has raised what. not to be a killjoy, but i want to learn about companies that have shut down. we are in a bubble that is collapsing. can you give me a list of companies that have closed in the last month? how much time do we have? only 30 seconds. we will wrap it up. jager: all right. there are a bunch of feature lists on crunchbase right now. one of the ones we thought about doing that we did not do was the list of companies that have closed in the last 90 days, and you would see some interesting stuff. jonathan: and on that debbie downer of a note, i think we are done. thank you for being here. [applause] >> thanks for dressing up, jager, by the way. like i said, we have an incredible lineup for you, and our next panel is an amazing reminder of that. before we get started, i want to remind you that we have alex right here, he goes by a-mac, so if you hear that, that's him. my duty is done. please welcome to the stage megan smith, alexander, and our moderator kate. ♪ >> i am really excited to be here today with megan and a-mac. we have a ton of stuff to get through from tech policy to open government to expanding access to technology. let's get right to it. i want to get to everything. megan, when you first started in government, you talked about it feeling like the early days of the internet when no one really knew what it was going to be, but there was excitement about the potential. you said it felt like 1997, 1990 8, we are sticking with that timeline. where is government at today? >> it's interesting. alex and i were talking about where we worked all the way back in 2008 as an industry and the government itself. the cto office, our team, our job is to create data, innovation, and technology on behalf of the people. it is a broad mandate. we are working on tech policy, working on modernizing government. you see things like united states digital service. also, how do we solve harder problems? we are working on all those pieces, but what has been really exciting is that neither of us had planned to go to government until they came and collected us. it has been incredible. it is an honor to do this job. i really wanted to come and encourage people to come and join. enjoy. it is really the beginning of digital government. we were in south africa for the open government partnership, which is something the president started with seven countries a bunch of years ago, and now it is 70 countries. we have a digital tech track. people are sharing codes. u.k., kenya, chile, others are starting to move into this space with service delivery and date -- data science and data driven government, and the quality of what we can use with incredible governmental budget and access is really going to be realized, and it does feel like that 1997, 1998 time around here, maybe 1996, where it feels really early and we are really behind, but we are on that path, and we've got to ipo this thing and get what the american people really deserve. >> there is still a lot of work to be done when it comes to bringing technology in the government. you guys have 3.5, four months left. a-mac, what are some of the projects you are finishing before you leave government? >> it is not just government projects, but the things we has the american people are trying to get done, making sure we are tackling inequality, making sure we are working on longer-range things like artificial intelligence. all of it is stuff that we are rushing to get done. we are now in the implementation phase. the federal source code policy is an example where we really need help with the audience, to make sure that the pilot program we have in terms of open sourcing more federally funded software is successful as we do that pilot program in the next three years. kate: are there projects that are going to be less than finished for the next administration to take and move forward? megan: that is the history of our country, the handouts. that the handoffs. the use of technology and tech innovation is at the core of -- i mean, president washington started the army corps of engineers before the country was founded. i was in boston, we were at john and abigail adams' house. he started the surgeon general. there is so much of a long history with fdr, president obama gets the internet and has been doing an extraordinary job of pulling in what we call teach you -- tq, like iq and eq. tech skills. the presidential innovation -- entrepreneurs, a whole set of things. great work. another one of my favorite things going on is the social security administration doing coding boot camps with the team. we have 110 feds going through boot camps this fall. new employees are doing 12 weeks and current employees are doing four weeks. how do we upgrade everyone's skills? it's a work in progress. we have setup a love of amazing things that will grow. the head of the u.s. digital service was talking about how this navy seal-like team that works together with all the cio and other leadership teams in the agencies now feels like a real thing, and it scaling. how do we now set it up to live for a very long time? that's what we are up to it. alex: that brings up the three parts of the cto's job. part one is, as megan was saying, building the capacity within government and taking a lot of the building blocks that are already there and trying to get them to scale. step two, the second part is attacking other policy issues that come up in government which are really important, and number three is making sure that we are capacity building throughout the nation to make sure that more and more people have the opportunities that this crowd really enjoys. megan: one of the things in the policy arena worth touching on with this community is something that the president gave us as a resource, a new american resource. within the -- there are policy councils like the national security council, national economic council, credible colleagues. we are in the office of science and technology policy. they added an extra policy convening called a tech policy task force. i am the vice chair, people like jason goldman, david gordon, the white house i.t. teams, the ds, federal cio, all the tech folks are on this counsel with our colleagues. that lets us lead a technical driven conversation like open source, ai, other topics, so we can really drive the best tech quality we need and have real engineers of that quality in the room as we decide policy. if we want to make sure the policy is incurred by the best technical skills that we have, and we can reach out to our communities and really drive what the american people deserve. we have americans in our country, let's have been our -- them in our government. kate: you have all these projects you are working on, open source, developing tech policy, international collaboration. we are in the middle of an election. are there any of these projects you worry about being undone by a future administration, or things that might not see it through to completion? megan: it is the fourth quarter. they say great things happen in the fourth quarter. we have the baton, so we are running as fast as we can. we are not involved in the election. these topics are so bipartisan, operating more effectively, higher-quality service delivery, the kinds of things that the u.s. digital service team is doing together within the veterans administration, for example. now it has gone from 45 minutes to 10 minutes to sign up for health care on a beautiful web app that is not impossible for people to use. congress has recently been doing sdsk about expansion and u and others. we are confident that there is an executive order for the presidential innovation fellows that are doing amazing work on child welfare, the department of transportation, across the board. the idea whose time has come. it is the beginning of digital government. that's just going to accelerate. we are pretty confident that whatever happens will continue. kate: that's great to hear. i wanted to ask you about the office of personnel management. that happened last year. 21.5 million records of government employees like yourselves were lost. what did you learn? >> this is not unique to government. we have had more and more problems with cyber security across our government, and it am -- it is something the president has been focused on, how do we get to the next level here? we rolled out a cyber security national action plan and take concrete steps. one of those was proposing in the 2017 budget to make up a huge funds to help the federal government get rid of some of the oldest legacy services and move them into more modern, more secure services. the thing i would stress, another thing we really need to do as a country is grow many more cyber security folks, because if i were to say, come join government, that would be good for government, but the private sector would not have this talent. we also need for that talent group to be more diverse. we find that the most diverse teams are the best teams. cyber security is one of those places where it is important to have diverse perspectives to tackle the problem and move forward. kate: i think cyber security is one of those issues where technologists feel a little bit of distance with the government. they think the government is on the opposite side of the table when it comes to encryption. president obama was at sxsw. he talked about finding a way to make a compromise on encryption and engineer a safe backdoor for encryptions that law enforcement could have access. this is an issue that technologists have struggled with. obama said it was not something that he had the expertise to design. you have a little more engineering expertise. do you think it is possible to design secure encryption? alexander: the premise of the question that we are on opposite sides is a little bit wrong. the government and techies believe that encryption is one of these 21st century marvles. task marvels. -- marvels. it's one of these things that gives a defender and asymmetric ability to be better than an attacker. that's great. it's something that even the folks who have spoken out about this leave in, the important foundational building blocks for what we do every day online. the law enforcement community has had many challenges with encryption, and as a government, our stance is that we don't take legislation is appropriate, but the issue of what are we doing to go after the bad guys, to make sure that we can still protect the country, that's something where there is no disagreement between the tech and government. that's something we all think is a good idea. i think that's how i would, the problem, as opposed to -- megan: one of the things that is great, the work that is going on with integrating the community. the accelerator. the defense department had put in silicon valley has a lot of national security and military leadership team, talents together with venture capital. there is so many topics in the security area. cyber encryption and many others. we need to keep advancing the skills and the quality and implementation skills across the whole federal government, across law enforcement, across our private sector. having meeting points like that, very important. he will probably talk more about that. the other area, i know you have some young women part of the let girls learn, the first ladies' let girls build initiative, and they have been working on hack-a-thon. more young men and women will be good computer science for all. nine out of 10 parents want coding taught at school. the more our kids are in active learning, coding experiences in k-12 and a college as we adapt our college curriculums to have much more balanced computer science departments. this is 21st century literacy. we want to make sure that all americans are doing that. it will deeply affect cyber security. we want to make sure all americans are doing that. it will deeply affect all. kate: do you think that collaboration between technology and government is the way to go, and true to that collaboration we will find a solution to law enforcement and encryption? megan: this idea of a tour of duty, generally, is really important. for example, if we were at a legal conference and we were talking to colleagues, and everyone was working in the industry of law, a very large number of this community would have been clerks or have been pro bono and the nonprofit sector. one of the things that is interesting to us -- like i said, we are in the early days of digital government, but to see how far behind we were and where we are coming from in terms of recent tech in the nonprofit sector, and state and local, as well as federal. and how did we get our community to have a tour of duty? we have law, science fellows who rotate in government. let's have the tech folks rotate. not to take everyone in and build inside, but more like the surgeon general. the surgeon general's not doing surgery when they are doing policy. we get the best people to rotate that. that's what we want to do. we think it will have the best effect on modern service delivery that we are starting to see with the quality of products coming from that approach, policy choices, having tech folks, economists, almost like a faculty of a university deciding policy together, not leaving tech for implementation later, but as part of the architecture. this third area is capacity for building -- capacity building for the american people. also, solving hard problems together, having our community a part of the conversation as part of our career tracks. alexander: this is something the president has been great at, bringing strong tech people into government. i work with one of the experts on cyber security and encryption in general. it is the right way to think about these problems, with a real grounding in the technical realities. kate: you mentioned how important diversity is to this, bringing diverse people into government, bringing diverse students into tech said that -- into tech so they are ready for that path when the time comes. you are the first emailed cto. -- you are the first female cto. what can you tell about improving diversity and companies? megan: this is one of the great moon shots of the 21st century. how are we going to get all of our teams playing, all of our talent? the greatest asset of our company -- of our country is the people. also, a lot of times when people look at diversity and inclusion they are thinking almost a charity agenda. it's actually a deep prosperity -- not only is it right, but it's prosperity. we are seeing companies like intel and slack and others really step up and put it in the short list of their priority is -- priorities and talk about it at every executive meeting, and really get out there. it comes from leadership deciding this is on the short list. of course everyone in the industry is pushing on diversity inclusion as something to do, but if you notice in your company that all of the leadership has outsourced into the diversity team, you are not going to get anywhere. those people are incredible, but they are your coach, and it is your job. one of the things we also know is that much of our challenge is unconscious and institutional bias. what are we going to do to change our system and also train on ourselves and build technology to help us mitigate? today if you watch children's television or family television it is 6:1 boys to girls on screen. how do we give our hollywood teammates the tools to see the biases may have? i was lucky to work with the team that built the macintosh with steve jobs. that team, if you look at those photos, seven men and for women. all the women in the photo -- are not in the movies -- all the men have speaking roles. the only recent one was joanna hoffman who won the golden globe in the jobs movie. she is from eastern europe. supertough. she is the only one that would really challenge steve and move things forward. her son said mom, did you really iron steve jobs' shirt? she said, jeremy, i have never ironed a shirt, except one for you when we were late for something. this unconscious biases all -- bias is all around us. we need to fix the public record of the truth. we need to know that black women calculated the trajectories for john glenn in the apollo mission. we need help from hollywood, for media, for wikipedia records that are not correct. grace hopper invented coding. most people have not heard of hopper, but they have heard of edison or the white brothers -- wright brothers. kate: yeah, i think that's great. a-mac, you came to the government from twitter, where you championed free speech as a core value of the platform. now we have hillary clinton talking about twitter being a birthplace for the alt-right movement. how do you balance free speech with encouraging diversity, with supporting minority candidates who might experience harassment as they enter the industry? alexander: that's a great question for the five minutes we have left. i can completely tackle it. i think it is one of the hardest things we have to deal with as an internet community. we want many different voices online. we want to hear from lots of diversity points. there is this worry that the internet has become weaponize. it is definitely not something that as a government there is a lot for us to do, but it is a fascinating problem, one that we in the industry have to tackle and one that i have a ready solution on. there are lots of people doing good work in this space, but it is a really important thing for us to focus on. megan: the vice president has done an extraordinary amount of work on it's on us and culture change. and campus sexual assault. he was on the oscar stage talking about how we need to change our culture. it is interesting to juxtapose that with the meeting today in the white house on next-generation high schools. that included everything from active learning to emotional intelligence. the work people are doing in this country to help our young people get the kind of tools they need to live 100 years. what are the tools they need to be adaptive learners, creative, etc. for the possibilities of the future that include getting along? these are the things we are very mindful of, and we are driving hard. a lot of times, the message we use is not unlike venture capital, scout and scale. you are trying to look for people with solutions to problems. in justice and technology, we found that there are several jurisdictions who are already doing very interesting work with data. a data scientists have been driving this. on criminal justice reform. an example would be miami-dade. they went from 7000 people in prison to 4900. they closed the prison and changed how they were doing with substance abuse challenges, and opened a 12 bed unit in the hospital. our incredible police officers, they have a choice when they have someone in that state to take them to jail or take them to the emergency room. now they have an option. of 50,000 calls that 911 and the police are trained on, only 109 arrests. camden, new jersey is doing interesting things that requires all of these tech skills and policy skills. we now have different ways to do it, and we have a data-driven justice initiative. over 25% of the jurisdictions in the country are now are biweeklyting in a learning conference call. whatever it is, whether it is diversity inclusion, justice, learning, we can use these new internet network messages to try to bring the different people to the table to solve things faster by scaling the stuff that is working. alexander: is great for the skills, of the folks in this room, who can be working on these social problems. we need more technologists to come in on the area they are passionate about. not everybody is passionate about criminal justice, but figuring out what your passion is and making a difference. kate: i'm glad you brought up open data. we are running short on time, but one of the data sets i think americans have really craved over the last two years has been data on police killings and uses of force. you mentioned the data justice initiative. i think when we are looking for this data right now, we are having to look to news outlets like the guardian, who are trying to count these incidences. can you explain some of the challenges you have had in releasing the data at the that theeleasing the data at federal level? megan: there are leadership, the leadership in dallas, in los angeles, already releasing use of force data, officer-involved shooting, sets of data. we have over 60 jurisdictions in the police data initiative. this is in the open data transparency initiative that goes with data-driven justice. it more of an enterprise internal leaving. -- internal data clustering. now the jurisdictions are committing to opening the data and engaging in the community, which will include tech people, as well as those in the community practice nationally. it started by fellows noticing the work going on in the country, and having police leadership meet each other, and realize they could do it as well. they can build a movement around transparency, and the kind of data science that helps us see where the real challenges are. we hope to do that across every topic. of course, we have amazing weather and mapping data on our phones. we want to think about every agency as we release the opportunity project. opportunity. census.gov, and great companies like redfin and zillow are stepping up. they have opportunity scores. it lets you know if you should live in a place. what are the jobs there? if an bring the most -- tech company could have solved it on our own, it would have. we need the policy in other places. boston just had an opioid hack a thon this weekend with medical tech, so we can dive in with our new message. kate: i would love to stay here and chat with you all day. but i wanted to ask you one more question. you have spoken about government as a second act, for all these amazing technologists who have entered the white house. what is the third act? what happens in january? alexander: we have no idea. we are heads down, completing this last focus on the fourth quarter. it is hard to think about anything else. i will take a breath, see my kids more. megan: there was a recent piece written about triathletes, and this idea of techies flowing into the commercial private sector, and then flow into the government, state, local, federal, the u.n. and then the nonprofit sector. how do we get people flowing into those areas? i have always loved working on technology that can improve people's lives, and technology that can reduce our impact on the planet. very in line with the president and climate work. i think anything we can do around accelerating all the sectors, as well as making sure that all people -- back to the missing history, when the film "hidden figures," comes out, taraji p. henson is playing the main character. she grew up in a poor community. she said, had she known this woman existed, she might have been a scientist. let's make sure we are tapping everyone in, like the cans, everything we can do to reach out to everyone to make them creators. that is the president's great hope. it changes the future for our country and the world. kate: thank you so much for being here. i think it is almost an impossible task, but you make me feel hopeful about government. thank you very much. [applause] >> i hope that was as exciting for you guys as it was for me. i have had a crush on megan smith forever, but please don't tell her. i am sure she cannot hear me now. we will keep it moving along. please welcome to the stage megan rose dickey and morgan debaun from blavity. ♪ megan: thank you for joining us today. morgan: thanks for having me. megan: the stats are pretty harrowing. 2014, the12 and amount of funding that went to black women was less than 1%. i am excited to talk to you today. i think you are a true unicorn, of black female startup founders and ceos. tell me about the last time you tried to come to hear -- to this? morgan: great question. two years ago, blavity is about two years ago. when we first started blavity, i applied to get a scholarship to come to techcrunch disrupt. i was declined. i'm excited to be here for the first time. megan: give her a round of applause for sure. [applause] let's talk about visibility. how important is it that you are up here as a black female startup founder? morgan: i think being visible is part of any startup life. you want to get press, you want people to know what you're working on. you want to be a leader and you want to be seen. i think for blavity specifically, part of what we do is inform as a media company. it is important that people know who i am and what we are working on. thinking of diversity in general and startup diversity, a lot of my messages from people, they are inspired by seeing an all-black startup team, and me as a black female ceo. i think it means a lot. megan: definitely. i'm going to keep talking about how you are black for a little longer, but we will move on. you are on the verge of closing a pretty significant seed round. what was that experience like for you? morgan: it has been a journey. media is hot, and also not hot at the same time. when i first raised the fee, it was tough. i started, and i realized i was not emotionally ready to go through that mental process. 20 meetings a week. we stopped. we really made sure the metrics were aggressively overachieving for the stage we were in. we had almost one million monthly unique visitors with no funding. once we got to that stage, i spent a lot of time trying to find partners and investors that aligned with our mission. boardught great people on like media ventures, macro ventures. now, as we go into our speed -- seed round, they are looking for a more strategic partners. it has been an interesting run. i just finished 500 startups the last batch. megan: what do you look for in investors, especially in terms of remaining authentic to the black community? morgan: i look for people who get it. right? you can tell the first five minutes of the conversation with an investor, if they understand and agree with the premise that blavity is on, which is that black people influence culture, that they are underrepresented in tech and consumer tech, and therefore we have a blue ocean opportunity to build something interesting for the audience that is incredibly influential. megan: you mentioned black people are underrepresented in the tech industry, across startups, and big tech companies, and even moreso in venture capital. do you have any black investors? morgan: absolutely. charles king, a black investor. it is part of how we designed the team, and nature it is reflective of what we care about. megan: you previously mentioned that you do receive some criticism, even from the black community. what is that about? morgan: i think because we are so visible. blavity is a media company. it is our job to be creating content, and pushing things out there. we also have user generated content platform so a lot of the content is submitted from the user base. not everything that goes up is going to be completely aligned with me personally, or with other people in the communities. there is conflict. there was an article that happened this summer, and we started trending on twitter, because people were upset -- megan: which article? morgan: it was about a netflix documentary. "hidden colors." the guy behind it, a lot of people don't agree with his personal statements. it was a tough day. megan: how do you handle that? morgan: i listened to what people were saying. we spoke to the writer and ultimately decided to take the article down. i explained what the process was, and a little bit more about blavity as a whole. we are a media company, and we have user very content, there will be things not always aligned. megan: was that the first time something like that happen, where you took down an article based on feedback from the community? morgan: it was. it was a tough editorial decision. megan: do you envision you might have to do things like that in the future? what's your process? morgan: i'm sure we will. we make so much content every day. as we grow, we will continue to put out a kind of content every day. i think it is about having a strong editorial team, and having community guidelines about what is ok and not ok. if something is flagged, it is not a surprise. megan: blavity is about creating relevant content for black millennials. how do you determine what is relevant to them, or to us? to me? [laughter] morgan: that's a great question. i think it is really about listening to what people are saying, and enabling them to speak for themselves. for example, a lot of our writers are from all over the country. they are remote, they can write on any frequency. anyone can sign up for an account. that is something new we launched today, it enables anyone to create content and put it up on blavity. it helps us stay relevant. it's not just what happens in the newsroom this morning. we will move to the editorial team, doing a lot of high-quality pieces of content, that you can't necessarily just write off. you need research, and needs to be validated, etc. the majority of the content you, see will be from the users and will be relevant. megan: what percentage of your content is from full-time staffers versus user generated? morgan: 40% is from the staff. megan: in terms of relevance, what have you found is relevant to black millennials? are you just trolling black twitter, or what have you found? morgan: black twitter is amazing. i think our content ranges from essays, a lot of thought pieces, reactions to what is going on, if beyoncé comes out with an amazing album. all the way to serious topics. for example, one of our community members was a law student at harvard. they woke up one morning and saw tape on all the black law professors' faces. instead of reporting it to cnn. she actually decided to write an essay and put it on the website. that is how the story got out to the entire country. megan: maybe not a lot of the content, but if someone goes to blavity.com, depending on the day or what is happening, they might see content about police shootings of unarmed black people. what is your editorial strategy around those really terrible events? morgan: we know those are rough days. usually, what we try to do is find people on the ground in that city who are participating as activists, protesters, and we try to give them the tools to tell the story from their perspective. we spend a lot of time working closely with different activists, making sure we are supporting and that we can help distribute messages that need to get out. megan: in the event that there is a video associated with a shooting, or a murder, do you run those videos? morgan: we used to. we stopped. we usually do some sort of trigger warning, and then link out to the video. i think as a community, the black community as a whole, i don't think it is helpful anymore. we know what it looks like. we don't need to see it again and again. megan: personally, i actively avoid those videos, because i feel i cannot emotionally handle that sort of thing. although blavity aims to reach black millennials, i know some people who are white who read this site. my boss, i won't mention his name right now, but he loves it. what do you want white readers to get out of blavity? morgan: i think that blavity's mission is to portray and create opportunities for the diversity of the black diaspora,, and energy and creativity to shine. to put the power back into our hands to decide what we want to talk about, and how we want to talk about things. my hope with anyone that is engaging with the platform is that they are open to perhaps changing their perception of what the black world and black interests, and black news, and black creativity looks like. we have a daily email that goes out. megan: i love it. morgan: super funny. you should all sign up. it is automated. a typical startup thing, but most people don't know that it is automated, so they respond. i get a lot of white women, in like kansas city, who say, am i allowed to be here? i have a black child or grandchild, or i'm a teacher. i think it is fantastic. those are great emails to receive. i think it speaks to the power that black culture is mainstream culture, and it is accessible, and blavity is something for everyone. megan: i imagine that the white woman from tennessee, you told her that yes, you are allowed to read the site. morgan: absolutely. glad you're here, what is up? megan: you mentioned earlier that today you have actually launched a new version of blavity. what is so special about this version? morgan: blavity was originally on wordpress. what we have seen in the last few years is that the blavity audience likes, comments, and shares about four times more than the average user online. not only that, they like to talk to each other. the comment section is ridiculous, like essays on essays. megan: is it productive? morgan: i think we have created this cool space for people to feel comfortable, and they feel like it is an invitation to have a discussion. we wanted to take that a step forward and build a platform that allows people to do that better, and also most of the users were on a mobile device. about 80% are visiting on a mobile web version of the site, so we needed to update it, so it was a cleaner and smarter version on mobile. also, enabling people to create content themselves, and not have to go through the editorial team to get on the site. megan: right. you mentioned earlier that you felt like you needed to first launch a media platform before even really building your own platform. why is that? morgan: to be honest, i think it is true, i think i had to be exceptional before someone was going to take an investment perspective and say, they want to build this mega-platform social network media company hybrid, and i'm a non-technical ceo -- i have ceos and other cofounders that are fantastic -- but we needed to build an audience that was incredibly engaged, in order to tell a compelling investment story. megan: got it. also, with what is happening in also, with what is happening in the next couple of months, you are launching afro tech. i will actually be there at the conference. what should i expect? how will it be different from this disrupt? morgan: part of blavity's strategy is events. a lot of companies have a strategy of creating conferences. last spring, we had a conference called empower her which is for black millennial female tech people. it was fantastic. it sold out in new york. we were thinking about how we want to build subculture communities, and the startup culture is growing quily in the black community. there weren't any real moments where we could all come together. there are some fantastic startup ceos. there are some fantastic venture capitalists that are raising funds, black and latino funds. we wanted to create a space where they had a platform. we had blavity's distribution. the energy in san francisco and create this cool experience. what you can expect is discussions, fireside chats about success, and its people have used to get to where they are. we will not have a diversity in tech panel. megan: you will not. morgan: we will not. we will talk about tangible tips and tools to get to the next level. megan: ok, nice. we talked about this before. you are about to close a speed -- seed round. about how much money are you thinking you will get? morgan: the total amount raised will be over $1 million. we are super excited. that will be to fund more engineers to build the platform, and make more video content. megan: blavity has great video content. i have been really impressed with it. in terms of the future of blavity, you have launched this new version of the site, you are having these tech conferences, you are doing original video. what else do you envision for the company? morgan: i think as we grow, we are going to learn a lot more about how black millennials specifically engage online, and that will give us access to a lot of data. we are basing the company off of a premise that black people influence culture. if i can get a large enough population of people engaging with this content across the ecosystem, whether it is web, mobile, and real-life, we create interesting insights about what might be happening, what are the people talking about, what is the pulse of the culture, which will allow us to create a compelling marketing and content story in the future. megan: blavity reaches about 7 million millennials a month. what does that mean, exactly? where are you reaching them? on the website, social media? morgan: it's about one million people on the website a month, unique visitors. then we have five instagram accounts, three twitter accounts, facebook page. those are unique engagements of users. the total reaches around 30,000,000-40,000,000, in any given month. the uniques are around 7 million people reached. megan: i know you have a good number of partnerships. i believe google is a partner? morgan: not google. [laughter] megan: not yet. who are your partners? morgan: we have content partners, like teen vogue. we have worked with change.org. those partnerships are usually around, what is an interesting demographic that may not have access to blavity's content, may be looking for an authentic black voice for their content. we have worked with the white house on different things. megan: what have you done with the white house? morgan: whenever they are doing black specific announcements, we will make sure we have access to that, like when obama pardoned a bunch of prisoners this summer. we had original statements and thank you letters from some of them that were released on the site. megan: got it. in your experience with blavity, what has been the hardest challenge? you've gone from bootstrap, to now being funded by investors. morgan: the hardest challenge is building in public. it is a very intimate company. we are building something that is a direct reflection of problems that i face, my team faces, that you face, my audience faces. there's a lot of emotions in everything we do and create. it's a beautiful thing, because that is why we have grown so quickly. i think it also is very difficult, because i open myself up to criticism, any time you release anything. people can come up with a very valid arguments. i think it has made us stronger and more resilient. it has personally made myself more resilient, and open to feedback. it is tough sometimes. megan: right. blavity covers a lot of heavy topics. how do you ensure, or foster the emotional stability of yourself, and your writers? morgan: i think self-care, and being really flexible. people can work from home if something is happening. you are welcome to work from home, just check in if you can't come to work today. personally, i have amazing cofounders. i have known them for seven plus years. some of them are in the crowd. if there are days where i can't deal with it today, i will call them, and we support each other that way. i think for any startup, you are going through this process, it is emotionally draining and difficult. you have to be proactive and take care of yourself. megan: i appreciate your work, and i'm looking forward to the afro tech conference in november. i will be there. morgan: thank you for having me. [applause] >> all right, who's having fun? [applause] you are. i appreciate the techcrunch staff. can we get a big round of applause? we worked through the weekend, which bloggers are not used to. [applause] they are the real heroes. a couple of reminders. follow me on twitter. you can also follow along with all the action on our snapchat and instagram. i think people forget we have that. it is just techcrunch, both of the accounts. #tcdisrupt. please welcome to the stage from twilio, and our moderator, frederic lardinois. ♪ frederic: it feels like we have done this before. jeff: deja vu. frederic: the last time we did this was at disrupt london last december. at the end of that conversation, we talked about how you might ipo at some point in the future, when the time is right. since then, you have. what led up to that? why was the time right at that point? jeff: it is interesting. for us, we always said going public was, job number one is to build a company that is capable of going public, and is worthy of going public. that means great customers, great product, predictability, dot your i's. all of the governance. we had been doing those things. really because building those things helps you become a great company. that was step one. the other thing i would say, is i think we made a lot of decisions along the way, and as entrepreneurs, it allowed us to have a lot of flexibility in when we decided to go out. that is one of the pieces of advice i have given to some entrepreneurs since, is that when you make decisions, for example about the kinds of investors you bring in, that you really want to maximize for future flexibility. for us, that meant not raising money at crazy valuations that did not seem like they were in line with historical norms, or raising money that could limit you down the line, if your execution is anything but absolutely perfect. we always optimized decision-making around what is going to give us the most future optionality. this is a case where it worked in our favor, because in years when companies have not wanted to go public, because reality had to catch up with previous fundraising rounds, we had the ability to go out. at this point, it is neat that we are able to do that. frederic: you were the first of the unicorn companies this year, at least, a silicon valley tech company to ipo. that's a lot of guts maybe. why did you feel you were the right company at that time to go out. saying whyl start by we go public in the first place. it is not really exclusively a matter of why go this year, but why go at all, and you can ask why this year versus the future. ,f you raise a bunch of capital you are making a commitment to your investors you're going to give them a return if the business works out. did you have the option to get acquired? jeff: we wanted to focus on building business for the long term. >> nonanswer. jeff: you go public because you raise money and you have signed up to give your investors a return. the second thing for us, which is why now, we have always built in the company this notion that trust is the number one thing you sell as a cloud company. i can be software as a service or even more importantly as a developer platform. you are saying, customers, trust us with your application. build on top of us and know that we will keep delivering for you. the best way to deliver on trust is to show that customers should trust you. one of the great things you can do is become a public company. first of all your business is right there everyone can see the details of your business and know that you are committed and healthy and all these great things. people know that public companies are run as tighter ships than private companies as a general rule. you have to be. that should also help engender trust with your customers those two things. going out at a time when not a lot of companies are going out is a fine thing to do because that will also continue to accelerate our trust with our customers and our leadership in this market. did you get any pushback? >> they were fantastic. >> talk about the timing of this. it was june 23. the day before the brexit. did that have any influence on your decision-making? jeff: you look at the timing windows, all of these windows of when you can go public, when investors are available. you cannot go public on the fourth of july. there are windows with the timing works out between the market and the company. when we looked at this window, we had not taken brexit into account. i'm not even sure if it is like we didn't notice it -- i don't remember the details. but there was a moment where we basically take this timeline and somebody said, oh shit, brexit vote is the day we are pricing. we just started saying that can't be good. you want stability. you want things to be normal as possible when you ipo. day.ved our ipo up a we priced the day before brexit. the whole time leading up to it we said it is not an issue. and then the day of, oh my god, glad we moved it up a day, because the whole world turned upside down. it turns out for like two days than it was back to normal. who knew that was going to happen? frederic: worked out all right for you guys. the stock was up 90% the first day. what changed for you as a company now that you are public? how do you go about your business differently? jeff: nothing changes. if you let the existence of a visible stock price change how you think about building the company, you are destined for problems. that is the short answer. that is what we say internally all the time. our business is to control the things we can control -- customers, product, revenue. the market does what it is going to, but that is noise. let's say you are playing basketball -- i don't know why i picked basketball. i just did. running up and down the court, the scoreboard is rapidly changing numbers -- you lose interest in the game. that is essentially what being public is. frederic: you're not looking at the stock price every day? jeff: no, because that is noise. over the long term, revenue, customers, products, those things create value. in the short term, there is so much noise in that that has nothing to do with the company that you can't focus on it. you can't believe that when the stock price doubles, you are twice as good as you were yesterday. and when the stock price cuts in half, you are half as good. on the way up, if you drink the kool-aid and be like, you are amazing, the danger there is that eventually, everything has gravity. it will go down, too. you will believe suddenly that you are horrible, that you can't have people in the company thinking that way. that is too much of an emotional roller coaster. what you really have to recognize is that in a sufficiently short-term span of time, it is noise, and it is out of our control. >> has that changed anything for you personally? you have made a few dollars out of this at this point. you still own a large part of the company. jeff: no, i mean, first of all, when you go public, you don't generally sell anything there. nothing has changed for me. again, this is another pitfall and if you look at the stock price and are constantly trying to ascertain the personal impact of that, again, you will go crazy and you will focus on the wrong things. again, that is not reality. you focus on business and you focus on what matters -- customers, revenue, employees, products. those are the things over the long period of time that may matter. that is the thing that will impact in the long term. frederic: all right. one thing i love about companies going public is they do have to disclose some numbers. jeff: 200 pages. frederic: i read through all of those. one number that stood out for me was how important a very small number of companies are for your revenue. like whatsapp alone accounted for about 17%. of your revenue in 2015. 10 companies alone make up about 30% or 31% of your revenue. does that worry you? you are dependent on a small number of customers. jeff: that is common for b2b companies. that has been very consistent through the years, about 30% of revenue coming from our top 10. and that has been consistent. whatsapp, we don't put them in that category as much. they're what we call a variable customer. their usage goes up and it can go down. the way we do business with whatsapp is very different than the way we do business with nearly every other customer. we have nearly 30,000 active customers, and nine who exhibit this variable behavior. their usage goes up and down very rapidly. we are focused on our team and the business and our employees. the base customers, they're the reason why we wake up in the morning. then we have this gravy over here, which is our variable customer base. frederic: very lucrative gravy. you must want to get a few more of these big whales on your board. jeff: let's separate whales from gravy metaphors. of course, we want big customers and happy customers and customers who have a lot of predictability to how they do business with us. we don't go out of our way to find more customers who are going to be large and unpredictable. that is the distinction that we make between the variable customers, wherein their usage of us essentially can vacillate pretty big, pretty large. and customers for whom we have a very nice use case that consistently gross with their business. we focus more on the latter. frederic: but still, you did release the enterprise plan earlier this month. you are going after the bigger enterprise customers, too, which is different from your regular model of selling directly to developers. jeff: well, i don't think it is. what we are already seeing in our customer base is that focus on developers pays off in a wide variety of companies. developers are becoming influential in every kind of organization. every company is having to now build software to differentiate in the market. software has moved from the back office to the business model of nearly every company. when is the last time you walked into a bank retail branch? no, the mobile app is the bank to you now. in every company. nike employs more software developers than shoe designers. goldman sachs employs more software developers than facebook. the stats keep going on where every company is becoming a software company. as they do, developers are so influential in those companies. the fact that we focus on developers allows us to get into these companies that 15 years ago might have had a waited top-down sales process. it is now being influenced by developers, bringing in a tool that they used to sell the job. but what you still need to clear are some hurdles, and that is what an enterprise product does for us, it makes sure the developer in large bank wants to use the platform but there is a security or compliance team that says that we need these - audit ability, single sign-on, all these different things in place. the enterprise allows the organization to say that we have all the things we need so that we can go into production and be successful at scale. frederic: are you increasing your enterprise sales force? are you trying to sell directly to the enterprise? jeff: we have had a sales force for a long time. it has helped customers to adopt twilio. what we are seeing in a large enterprise is a developer will bring us in and oftentimes you need a salesperson to cause had. -- that. what is interesting is this isn't your typical enterprise like heavyweight and a lot of golf and shenanigans. it is not that kind of traditional enterprise sales process. it is a relatively light-touch, developer-led approach. when a developer builds the prototype without asking anybody on their own credit card and , then they show it off internally saying let me play around with ideas and show you, the business says, wow, it is great. let's put it in front of customers, now you have some compliance or security conversations to have. instead of saying let me walk in , with purely sales collateral, put me up against five other competitors who are all going to do our few responses and this whole thing. the one where the developers have shown that it works and adds value. that is the lowest risk approach for the business at our sales team is there just to help the developer in many cases navigate their own organization and how they buy in order to get that prototype turned into a trial, turned into a full production rollout. frederic: we talked about enterprise. let's talk about the long tail as well, the other 30,000 paying users on the platform. how can you keep growing, how do you get more of those guys onto your platform? jeff: yeah, well, we announced back in may that we have over one million developer accounts on twilio, which is a metric we are really proud of. you also have to realize there are 20 million developers in the world. we have 5% of the world 's developers, and that number is growing. i think the number will be 25 million by 2018. you have a very large number of developers in the world, so we are focused on continuing our developer outreach, getting into new communities and developer communities arranged geographically. so getting into me and aipac and last them. and also investing into communities not around geography, but around languages, and getting deeper into the java community, deeper into the microsoft community, deeper into a bunch of the different ways that developers identify and learn from each other while they embed and become part of those communities. let those developers know about twilio. while we have one million accounts today we obviously have , a lot of headroom, because there is a lot of software developers in the world and that number is growing as more and more of the world is dependent on software. we are there to arm them. frederic: you talked about geography. what about the chinese market, which is exploding? you don't do a lot of business there right now. jeff: we don't do a lot of business in china, particularly on the domestic target. that is a really tough decision, because there is a lot of polls, there is a lot of reasons to say there is a large market, a lot of money to be made. at the same time, you look at what happens to uber going into china. amazon retail is not in china. 20-plus years after they have founded the company. and there is a reason for those things. it is very hard market. it is not like a lot of the markets where you can just run your playbook, hire locally, and figure it out. you have to be very deliberate or it will be a huge time and investment sink that you may not see any return on. so being very deliberate in your decisions to enter china is important. very few success stories of technology companies going to china that people point to. i think linkedin and evernote are the two that people can point to. that is it. there are not a lot of success stories. frederic: let's switch gears and talk about the product. the one hot topic in messaging is lots. i know you have an opinion on bots. developers wants to use them. what is your take on it? jeff: it is best summarized by something we made in our conference back in may which basically went "bots! bots!" there's a lot been said about bots. we're not sure what the substance is behind a lot of it. you can just say the word "bots" a lot and it gets people's attention. the killer app for messaging is not likely to be bots. i believe. i believe there is a much better killer app for messaging, and that is content. the early experience people have with bots is really an ivr-like experience, just over text. when we talk to customers, we find that is frustrating. ai is not quite there yet to make it not frustrating. we may get there. but content is an amazing app. frederic: when you say content? what do you mean? jeff: messaging is a great way to consume content. "the new york times" coverage of the olympics over sms was really cool. this was an app that was powered by twilio. "the new york times" covered the olympics over sms. you got pushed a story a day. another example here is purple, a company that is doing a daily news story initially about the election, pushed to you via messaging. neat about meet -- it is two things. one is it is very personal. the "times" coverage wasn't "the new york times," it was sam at the news desk, giving you his experience being in rio. that is a really cool experience, which is different from just a publication telling you stories. messaging is allowing you to feel like it is texting with a friend who happens to be at the olympics, rather than consuming coverage from a major publication. i think that intimacy is a very cool, natural part of the channel. another thing purple does a great job of is it is "choose your own adventure." they give you the headline of the day -- what happened with the election today? if you want to learn more, reply with a keyword. you can keep going further and further, or back out and say the story is of no interest to me, so never mind. that "choose your own adventure" style of content is really very engaging. i think that this coupled with more corporate use cases -- that is the olympics, but imagine you sign up for a product, and the company sends you a message that says thank you for signing up for a product. if you want to learn more about this, reply with this. if you want to learn more about this feature, reply with that. you can sell select into learning more about a product or service, that is an engaging form of content. that is better than just getting a bland email or retargeted advertisements. it is an engaging way for brands to interact with a customer using content, but also in a "choose your own adventure" way where people self-select how they want that experience, and that is killer and available today. frederic: we're out of time. the next time we sit down, we will talk about what twilio did in the last 12 months to make bots better. jeff: thank you. [applause] newsmakers, u.s. surgeon general dr. beck murphy talks about addiction. newsmakers is on c-span. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] >> if james madison is the architect of the constitution, then -- is the general contractor. you know it looks a lot more like what the general contractor has in mind than the architect has in mind. >> talking about george washington's role in unifying the country and ratifying the first federal document in his book, george washington, nationalist. >> hamilton had already talked to washington before about this to my first up -- democracy stuff is never going to work. washington was a true republican. he believed republican government was going to work. november is national adoption awareness month. the cofounder of fostering change for children talked at the city club of the went about adoption policies in the united states. this is an hour. [bell] and welcome toon the city club of cleveland very it is my pleasure to welcome you and introduce our speaker today. chief executive of the donaldson adoption institute. before i get into this, it may seem strange