up our first guest. please welcome david marcus from facebook messenger and our moderator. ♪ >> thank you for joining us today. >> thanks for having me. >> messenger is always strived to be different from sms. first group texting and embraced stickers, animated gifts, what you see as the next big differentiator? >> we really, really like a real-time communications. as you have seen recently, we just announced and opened up to everyone this new thing we call instant video that enables you to have video. it is like you unmute your video for the other press to see while you type in you can start streaming while the other person had the honor a bus or a meeting and type and see you or see what you want to show them. we're going to continue investing in real-time communications. one of the things we have not talked about is we have over 300 million active users of video. that makes message or one of the biggest real-time apps in the world. jason: your not had video calling for very long, about a year ago. tell me, how does video get messenger to one million users but many feel like it was because you forced people to download messenger. does that ever feel at the hollow victory? david: we do not feel like it is a victory or not a victory. this is not downloads pretty it is people using the app on a monthly basis and the vast majority of them on a daily basis. it is actually people communicating with one another and using the app to stay in touch and build groups and do a bunch of different things. it does not feel that way to us. it feels like well such a great opportunity to serve one billion people and with come to work in her jive by the notion -- energized by the notion we can build things as then the 4 billion people on the platform will get to use it. jason: there is surely benefits from having a messenger be is on app, more room for extra features. you're cramming conversation into one-size-fits-all and recently you started to remove the ability to message from the mobile website. don't users deserve more choice about how they communicate? david: deal -- and you know any other mobile apps that have video? jason: that is a good point. you are the biggest so you must be held to a different point. david: messaging apps do not work if notifications are not enabled for everyone. on facebook, not everybody has push notifications. an messenger, everybody has push notifications. if you use messenger, you can get people to respond faster and it works. when we survey our users, they tell us they feel like people will respond faster on messenger than text. that is great because the first and you want messaging app to do is be reliable, fast and no people will respond quickly. just think there has to be situations where people might be and do use a mobile app and not have the time or bandwidth to download an app, would you say to those users? david: we have been careful not to remove access to people who are on older android devices that may not have memory to downloaded the app or network additions to download the app at a certain point in time. the actual -- we stop serving high-end -- jason: sometimes had to make decisions that users may not like and also typically benefit facebook as well. being a fact an efficient and reliable messenger is good for people and also good for facebook. how do you guys balance facebook's agenda with user benefits? david: i do not think we ever think about it that way. when you build a product like no matter if you're a startup or a startup or large company, when you build a product, you want the vast majority of people out there to use it, to like it and engage with it. that is why you come to work and you build things that are actually solving real problems in daily lives of people. we do not think about, oh yeah, let's do that because we think we will make a bunch of money on the other side. jason: facebook mostly makes money from the newsfeed. still, you must make decisions thinking about the long road and data you are pulling from users or boxing out other competitors in terms of the newest capabilities. when you work with mark zuckerberg on these features, how do you guys make top level, strategic decisions about where to go with messenger? is that your job or his? david: we're doing that together. it is great to work with mark because it can execute really well in the short and medium-term and has a really bold long-term vision as well. it is great to work with a mark on messenger. the way where thinking about things is pretty simple. what are the fundamental things people want to do when they talk to one another? they have one-on-one conversations, group conversations. we needed to make sure we built the right experiences so that people use the product and find more utility in the product. we invested in a lot of things we have not talked about. for instance, in the last six months, we have invested massively in performance. while we've added a ton of features, we made messenger way faster. aggregate startup time on ios is out there. on android, it is 1.38 seconds. it is really fast. we cut the latency by 30%. all of those things we do not talk about are things we continue investing in because we want to made messenger the best messaging app out there. jason: you talk about wanting to be useful for people. you launched a messenger bot platform. it seemed half-baked. what was missing from it? david: what we want to do here is build an ecosystem. when you want to build an ecosystem and bring developers and bring up and discover new types of experiences and at the same time, reinvent the experience and interaction model on that scale, it is not easy and it takes time. what we wanted to do was put to the stake in the ground and enable all of the enablers, all of the companies to come in and build capabilities. from that standpoint, it has been successful. we have over 34,000 developers on the platform and they are building either capabilities for third parties or actual experiences. the problem was it got really overhyped very, very quickly. the basic capabilities we provided at that time were not good enough to replace traditional apps and interfaces and experiences and so what we have done in the past couple of months is we have invested and built more capabilities and provided a lot guidance on how to build a successful experience. what we have seen as a number of verticals working really, really well. like news is working really well. engagement on news boxes is really good and techcrunch is one of the best ones. cnn is another good one, a bunch of others. what we have seen is that other companies are able to build experiences that covert users to paid users for their services in -- with a much higher conversion then redirecting to a mobile website or app. match.com in europe has a dating experience in messenger and they are converting to pay subscribers 2x the rate redirecting to a mobile site. there are other experiences like -- in india that does bill pay and all of these things. they are converting 10x the directing to mobile sites. we are seeing more and more of these things. we are releasing a brand-new update to the platform. messenger platform 1.2. it brings a whole lot of new capabilities, even more engaging experience. jason: one of the things i thought was the most lacking from the platform at the time of launch was to make a native payments. i was going to grill you about that. you built that now, right? david: yes. jason: you are working with payment networks to build that, right? it is not all facebook infrastructure. you used to work with paypal. is paypal who you're working with? david: we are working with almost everyone on the solution. we are working with paypal, mastercard, visa, american express. what we have done, the two main announcements we have on this new update to the platform is one, we are releasing a new enhanced web view capability. you can basically draw ui inside of the thread and determine the height of the window so you could have the proper ui in context of the thread. and native payments. those are the two main updates. more to this new platform release. we think we have the best of both worlds. inside the thread, you have identity, transactional capability, the ability to draw ui, ability to draw native buttons and interfaces and basically different physics to those different spaces. imagine you are trying to book an airline ticket. you go into a thread, the actual intent capture is great in a conversational way. i want to go to paris tomorrow. and then you basically have results that can come up in web view, it is really fast. you have native payments and then you can get it reposted back in the thread which is meant to stay. you can check in and do all of these things have customer support. we believe bringing all of these type of mobile experiences together is what ultimately is going to make a platform successful. jason: you cited the critical aspects, but many of those were not there when you first launched. what happened is a lot of developers do not feel like that enough time for the final functionality to build a good bot. facebook will always be in the news. there are so many users. but for some developers, they may only got that one chance to make a splash and they do not necessarily have the functionality. how long ahead of the launch did you give developers? david: a couple of weeks only. jason: is that enough time? david: probably not. jason: i thought it seemed a little short. in the end you were focusing more on the set launch date. did you guys end up prioritizing secrecy and making a big splash about putting that stake in the ground over being able to launch? david: i think the problem is you can look at this in different ways. i choose to look at it is a long journey. you need to start somewhere. a great opportunity to get developers' atttention. we have a lot of developers coming to the conference and starting to build. it has been six months-ish since we launched and welfare to 4000 developers on the platform. we have a lot a middleware that built conductivity. -- connectivity to our api's and platforms that allows big brands to start building great experiences. today, there is a really good bot that is launching. it will actually get you a free drink in new york and other cities -- it is probably too early. and the way it works is really cool. you get from news feed to messenger, which is something we are releasing today, which is destination ads. you can get people straight to messenger and connect with people directly. you combined intent creation and completion, and with the case, it tells you where to go to get a free drink on absolut. you get a code and you give the codd to the bartender and he gives you your free drink. you get a notification inside a thread that offers a lyft ride back home. when you think about it in the sense of an app, that is not an app. it is such a great opportunity for brands to engage their users in a brand-new way in those type of things are really working well. jason: i am sure bartenders will love me showing my code to them on their own in figure out how to make that work. when you think about the platform, a lot of people are saying bots are a fad, what you think we are going to end up using them for? david: it is not about bots but how can you get an experience -- like, so, we interact with people and with services and we interact with brands and with businesses. there are a bunch of different things that the capabilities we have opened up that are really selling. at the basic, basic stage like customer service on messenger based on the api we released in april is really flourishing and a number of large companies. rogers in canada, which is the largest carrier in canada, providing customer support on messenger and seeing a lift in customer satisfaction. news also a messenger and is working really well and has all of these different experiences which brands are building that enables them to connect directly to their customers. if you are a cpg company, like the ability for you to target a demographic and then get one on one with your customer is brand-new. you would never been to do that before. lastly, when you combine all of these capabilities that we are announcing today, you see companies that are going to launch soon an updated version of their bots where you will be able to book airline tickets and hotels in a really fast, really easy way that i think will be pretty close to having a native app. definitely better than mobile web. jason: i'm definitely excited not having to talk to humans on the phone to get a flight. where do you see the future of the navigation and dictation and voice for facebook messenger? david: this is not something we are actively working on now. we have the ability if you want to use voice, you can leverage voice clips and process these. it is an ok experience. i do not feel like it is great. at some point, it is obvious as we develop more capabilities and interactions within messenger, we will work with voice exchanges and interfaces. jason: i would love to be the crash be able to switch between -- i would love to be able to switch between threads and switch around especially if i am to use hands-free while i am working. not necessarily while i am driving. you can imagine that would be a big deal with amazon echo and alexa a big hit. do you think you are waiting to long? it seems like a huge opportunity. david: maybe. jason: ok, then maybe looking further in the future, you guys have bots, you got it working more with businesses. what does messenger look like five years from now? david: when you look at all of these entities that you interact with, bringing it all together. can you bring your daily life onto messenger in a more organized way and actually have the best high-quality, high-fidelity interactions with people and businesses? and get an opportunity for developers to get distribution. we are driving -- not only has messenger got over to one billion monthly users that engagement as measured has grown tremendously in the last couple of years. we want to continue accelerating that trend and making it a more essential part of daily life. jason: is group video going to be a part of it? that is what i really want. david: if you look at what we launched to date, have nothing to announce, it is a pretty logical thing to build at some point. jason: i feel a little smile. ok. but thinking about this, what is messenger going to do to kill off the final foe, which is sms? david: it is a question of reach in messaging. messaging is all about the ability for you to reach all of the people you want to reach. not like 95% of the people you want to reach. we are increasing our reach and penetration in smartphone users and we just need to grow it. as we grow it, people will continue using it. if you look at sms of android versus messenger, no-brainer to use messenger on android because experience is so much better, you can do so much more. now with the ability to also get your text messages inside messenger, you get all-in-one messaging in one place. gradually building more and more capabilities is the way we're going to make this happen. jason: you're making great strides. you have 300 million people using audio and video messaging, bringing mobile payments for you admit it maybe you would of light to a given messenger developers more time to make something more great. you could do your whole day life and messenger. thank you. awesome, thanks. [applause] >> unlike josh, who looks dapper, i decided to dress down. i call this look start-up chic. if you know but i have this on the sweatshirt, which is for sale up front. if you think i am standing up in hawking t-shirts, you're wrong, this is the sweatshirt. so go and buy one of those, but not right now. we have an amazing panel. please welcome our next guest, jason robins from draftkings. and our moderator. [applause] >> thank you for coming. are you excited talk about sports in a roomful of nerds, including myself? >> as i've said many times, i am a nerd. i am at home here. >> we all are. let's start with who has played on draftkings before? draftkings is a daily fantasy sports app. what is daily fantasy sports? >> a segment on the overall game where basically instead of playing for an entire season, you play for a day or in the case of football, a weekend. otherwise, it is pretty much the same of what typical sports fans are accustomed to. you pick a player as if you are the general manager and those players get fantasy points and then you play against people. wherever scores the most wins. fitz: and it is over. jason: you can play again if you want. fitz: why do people like it more? jason: brings season-long fantasy sports and bring and eliminate some the things people do not like. people love the draft and picking players for it you get to do it everyday or soften as -- as often as you like. people love the scoring and playing with their friends. what sometimes people, including me, complain about you get an , injury and you are out of it. some of the daily sports, especially -- it is more engaging. you do not have the baggage of carrying players that maybe you thought they were good when you drafted them and then they got injured. also for some of the daily sports, it is important to have flexibility. if you do not want to play every single day, you cannot play season-long. you can play when you want. fitz: yesterday was the first-ever nfl season. big day for you guys. espn fantasy was down all day. jason: yes. fitz: how many people use your product? jason: what was most exciting is we had a big push the last two months about moving more towards getting people who like to play with their friends and social play and that was the focus of we rallied the whole company around and driving that. social play was up 3x year over year. which is really exciting and exceeded what we were hoping for. fitz: a ballpark number to get people an idea. millions of people playing? jason: on a given sunday, we usually have millions of people across free and paid play. it depends on what is going on. yesterday, we ran a huge free contest and we had about 500,000 people enter. fitz: what was the price? -- the prize? jason: $100,000 total. the top prize was 15k. we ran a three dollar game that was almost 2 million entrants. ended up going to 1.5 million. fitz: what did the winner win? jason: $1 million. fitz: why isn't this gambling? jason: there is a distinction in the law between games of skill and games of chance. anyone who played what a test -- would attest it is a game of skill. it is really the way the law distinguishes between games of skill and games of chance. fitz: if there is chance in there, if it rains, my team is going to be affected. jason: that is every game. if you're playing golf, the wind can pick up. the weather can change between when the opponent tees off in the morning and you tee off in the afternoon. there is a lot of things in any game of skill some chance. but overall, it is a game of fitz: i have tried a few times and i come in the last. i attest to it being a game of skill. four years ago, you worked at the vistaprint as a marketing manager. four years later, you are the ceo of a billion dollar company. how? how does it happen? jason: i've always had a passion for sports, fantasy sports. i used to play chess and played in tournaments. it was the dream for me to start something. and it worked in the tech industry before and i had a lot of friends interested in this really have the entrepreneurial spirit. i always wanted to do it. right after the bubble burst the traditional route -- fitz: i was not slimed you it is amazing. you did not invent the daily fantasy sports. what was your official pitch to vc's? jason: emphasizing our backgrounds. we came from analytic backgrounds. we love to the game. we felt that that was born be where we could differentiate a look of the general market at the time and no one was really putting it all together with tech products and analytics. we felt we could bring it to the table in our history would allow us to be advantaged in this space. in the beginning, fundraising was brutal. we ended up raising from an investor in boston, and it was really hard. we brought in a board member who was here, san francisco-based, helping on the west coast. also, i have to give two more shout outs. one is to my wife, whose birthday it is today who let me come to this, which i appreciate. secondly, is to jeremy who over the last eight months, helped us go from a tech company that did not know a lot about regulation to really being sophisticated there. david: we will talk all about that. so it was hard to raise money. jason: probably around 50-60 people said no until i got to my first yes. for series a probably another 50 , said no before i got to yes. i mentioned, bring on the new board member. i knew a little more by then. i had never done this before. i was just taking a shots on goal of approach. one big piece of advice i have for people, is look for your target. what really made a difference is i prequalified investors. i said, is this something that will ever be of interest to you? a lot of people do not tell you up front. it ends up being a waste of your time. i did it thinking i was traveling and wanted to limit my meetings. i should have done that on the east coast fundraising. by the time i got out here, i had a great qualified pipeline. from there, the round b happened very quickly as a result. >> you have raised a lot since then. is that the number? over 600 million. you have some really impressive investors now. major league baseball, major league soccer as a league, the nhl as a league, carmelo anthony, and the patriots -- >> jerry jones, the yankees, president. david: any entrepreneur would kill to have one of those people invest in the company. jason: the most recent round was revolution, ted lyons, one of the founding members, owns the washington wizards. and the washington capitals. we are fortunate. what is cool is people in the sports world get it. it is almost easier. it is part of what is fun about having a sports company. those are the people who understand what the product is and what it means and they are the people who can help us get introduced to the right relationships and help us understand how to continue to make the product better. >> how does it help you guys? jason: it brings credibility to our brand, belief in our brand and our company is huge. there is also a lot we have done with them on the integration side. you can seamlessly integrate. if your player comes up to bat, siri will announce to you tap a button. it takes you over to majorly baseball, and if you are a subscriber, you can watch that at bat.at that -- if you are a subscriber, you watch that and can seamlessly link back to draft things. david: when you got that investment, that was the first major league, were you like wow? jason: i thought it would take more time. something small and cool to follow but we will see how it goes. the fact that major league baseball took interest and many other sports leagues followed suit, it showed me they were ready for this and they knew it was something that would be transformational for their content. david: what benefit do you bring to them? jason: when people play this, they significantly increase their consumption of content. something like 80% report they consume more content. almost half of our customers say they started following a new sport since they started playing draft kings. those are powerful effects that drive other industries. draft kings is a cool industry. we are lifting these other industries. it is different when you are trying to take something from someone then when you are posting industries. it allows you to create unique partnerships and alliances you otherwise could not create. david: i want to get into the legislative stuff. so far it seems like it has been , smooth sailing. start a company and raise a half million dollars in profit. but it was not really like that. the series of events that guys come up with in the course of a month or two, the first thing was one of your employees one $350,000 on a competitor's site, and in the next day or two, the department of justice opened an investigation. then the nevada gaming control board said it was gambling and ned you in the state and then that new york attorney general issued a cease and desist. were you like, holy --, this is over? jason: it was a tough time and a lot was coming at once. we were prepared for it mentally. i think we were required to get a crash course in understanding how to navigate those things. mentally, we were prepared. i remember the earliest days, when we could not raise capital and we were running out of money and it felt like it would be the end, i remember an amazing run where it seemed like every major sports league and team owner, everyone wanted to invest in draft kings. this was before. i remember i stood up in front of the company and said that the numbers were skyrocketing, over 10x in user growth year after year. everything was through the roof. it was like we were a darling, really. it was all good. i remember feeling like, just 2.5 years ago, i was not sure we would be able to raise this to get to the next level. that was the most stressful i have ever felt. i spoke with the company in september of last year and i said, this feels great right now. we should celebrate and enjoy it. but building a big company is about ups and downs. you cannot get too high, you cannot get too low. it will not always be this way. it can go to either extreme. everything you described happened and i remember thinking back to that and thinking back to the early days and all right, this will be challenging and i think we have the right people here and the right mental makeup to get through it. i am geared up. let's address the issues out there. let us try to continue building what we are building. no one ever took their eyes off the ball. the mission was always central. the passion we felt for it, in some ways it helped rally the company, like it is us against the world and i think that helped a lot in terms of pulling everyone together. we had below average attrition in the next 12 months. the metrics are remarkable for a company that went through a trying time. it rallied everyone together because people are so passionate about the product and the mission and what we were doing. david: you had some help. you hired lobbyists and world-class expensive lawyers. i do now want to see your legal bills. jason: did a fantastic job. we had an unprecedented run in state legislatures in the last few months. bills in eight states bringing it to a total of 10. it was amazing to see the response. listening to their constituents. in new york alone, there were 100,000 posts and calls. that alone is just one state. if you look across the country, it was close to one million plus and i think that lets legislators know. when i was in new york, a legislator walked up to me and they were dealing with the heroin epidemic and other tough things. he said to me, i have never gotten in my entire 25 years, as much outreach and support of something as i did for this. that meant a ton to me that people cared enough and wanted enough and that is the difference. that is the difference as to why we have been successful. a great team in support of our customers and everyone wants to see us successful. david: the media was having a field day and there were rumors of you merging with the biggest competitor, if anyone does not know. were there talks between you? jason: there have always been talks. i have gone on record saying it is an interesting discussion. mergers are always tough. it has to be something that you think is better than just an idea that can be executed on. there are always talks. where that leads and when, we will see. we have been talking on and off for the last year and a half or so. >> is there a reason it did not happen when you were talking last? >> the devil is in the details. it is complicated to put two companies together. when the time is right, there is potential for something like that, but it has to be right. i think everyone knows right now, it is a really important time of year for us. it is important to focus on the nfl season. we will see if those talks ever go anywhere. david: what would the benefit of these two that merger? jason: we would have a company with more liquidity in our marketplace, which is the most important value to customer. i also think the fact that there is a lot of synergy on the legislative side and the legal side, everything you just talked about we were double paying for for the most part. there is a lot of synergy there. david: you got the mlb to invest in you. was there a rush to stake your claim in the sports world between you and them? jason: you know, i think maybe there is some of that but i also think for us at least, it is more focused on we are creating a new industry, we are trying to grow that industry, we are trying to expand markets. it is important to have relationships with the league. they control the content. if they do not have a good relationship with us, it limits what they can do with the content. for example, we just launched an app.n apt -- i know i will be showing later on the facebook live feed and a lot of people ask me how you get video highlights and stuff like that in there. if we want to be able to get those things in there, it is important we have a close relationship. david: let's talk about dk life. the app. you are launching today. a lot of people say it is like a stab at espn and you are trying to become a media company. are you? jason: i do not think anyone does anything as a stab at espn. i love espn. stab is the wrong word. for us we think of things less , about who the competition might he and more about what is our customer want and what do we need and what is a natural expansion for us. we looked at it and we said, there are a lot of scoring apps out there and espn is one of them. nothing really caters specifically to the sports -- the fantasy sports fan the way the red zone channel caters to that. the red zone channel it shows , just highlights of key place plays and it is so clearly , designed for a fantasy audience. a lot of scoring apps are out there and they are useful for anyone but how do we create an experience for the fantasy fan that is every bit as good as the red zone channel, digitally as the scoring at and that was the goal. i think no one has really done that. it is not about trying to compete as trying to provide for customers that we are well situated to provide. david: if you could create an app for people who are not in the fantasy but huge sport fans, would you? jason: eventually, yes. right now, that is not the focus. but the focus is fantasy fans and we have about 7 million customers there 50,000 people in -- there is about 57 million people in north america alone play fantasy sports. our current customers are a natural point to promote to for us, it is about reaching that audience. then we will see if it makes sense to expand. if there is no other at out there the way this is. david: thank you for sitting down with us. we are excited to see where you go next. jason: thank you so much. [applause] here are some of our featured programs coming up this weekend on c-span. saturday night at 8:00, the state of the black world. panelists include julianne malveaux. melanie campbell, executive director of the national coalition for blacks to the participation and moderator mark thompson, host of sirius xm radio, make a plane. and the mayor of newark, new jersey. get together as black folks in this country. we have an agenda. the object is to win. we don't want to struggle for struggles sake. there are thousands of people in our community that are in jail, that have been be, that are dead. not activists and revolutionaries because it is fun. my mother and father did not participate in the movement for metals or award for twitter or for instagram. they did this because it was necessary. >> at 10:00, nebraska senator thesasse on families and foundation of government. >> the meaning of america is love and persuasion and tilting a better product or creating a better service or persuading someone to marry you or join your church or synagogue. mindednesshuge civic in american history. gingrich, van jones, and patrick kennedy discuss opioid addiction and treatment. >> it is true that people have to change their mind and they have to have some willpower but also, because of the way opioids work, they have to change their brain back. this is a biological thing. your brain is an organ and once these doctors can do these pills and say -- we took out a molar, take these pills, for a lot of people, those pills damage that organ. watch on c-span and c-span.org and listen on the free c-span radio app. every weekend, book tv brings you 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors. here is what is coming up this weekend. p.m., circuit judge for the u.s. court of appeals for the first circuit provides a history of the debate between the executive and legislative branch over the constitutional right to declare war in his book open -- "waging war." joining him at the national constitution center in or ruger,ia is the it the dean of the university of pennsylvania law school. in ae two branches are dance with one another all of the time. the congress checking the president, backing down from the president, the president is pushing congress, and worrying they are taking it too far. afterwards, 9:00 on gary young looks at gun deaths in america. theis book "another day in deaths of america: a chronicle of 10 short lives." he is interviewed by a staff writer for the atlantic. about aave to talk broader, societal thing which dehumanizes people and that means that when their life is taken, that has already been accounted for. once is a real problem -- you start saying, he was in a student, there is a suggestion that you can get a grade and then you would be worthy to be killed. >> go to book tv.org for a complete schedule. >> next, to supreme court justices talk about their careers and life on the court. we will hear first from justice elena kagan and then from justice clarence thomas. after that, discussion on the effect of food marketing and children. now, supreme court justice elena