All the news from Code Enterprise in San Francisco

A traditional college education is expensive. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner also thinks it might be overvalued.

“Historically here, there’s been a tremendous amount of weight that’s been given to four-year university degrees and not nearly enough weight in my opinion is given to vocational training facilities and vocational training certifications,” Weiner said Tuesday at Recode’s Code Enterprise conference in San Francisco.

By and large, workers no longer have to use the computers provided to them by their employers — but where they work has evolved less quickly.

NBBJ partner Ryan Mullenix and Fuseproject founder Yves Behar want to change that. Mullenix is working with companies like Amazon and Samsung to rethink corporate offices, while Behar is trying to launch co-working spaces, called Canopy, which will be located closer to where people live.

Google’s head of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, is known for espousing what’s known as the “technological singularity”: The idea that artificial intelligence will become so smart that it will take on a form that humans cannot foresee nor comprehend. It’s essentially the end of humanity as we know it.

Thankfully, at least one top Google exec doesn’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon.

The world we’re living in is changing and so is the way we work — or not work.

At the Code Enterprise conference Tuesday, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner shared a startling fact from the World Economic Forum: That by 2020, more than five million jobs will be displaced by new technology. That’s just four years from now.

Cloud storage service Dropbox has eight million business clients, 200,000 of whom pay for it. For COO Dennis Woodside, those numbers point clearly to the company’s future.

“Dropbox, when it was started, was all about keeping your files in sync, and it was a fairly single-player experience,” Woodside told Recode’s Dan Frommer Tuesday at the Code Enterprise conference in San Francisco. “People inherently wanted to share files in their Dropbox.”

Venture-backed companies often prioritize growth over profitability. But eight years in, TaskRabbit is trying to have it both ways.

The online marketplace, which connects independent handymen and house cleaners with people looking to hire help, is generating operating income in each of the 19 cities in which it operates, CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot said at the Code Enterprise conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Jeff Weiner joined LinkedIn as CEO nearly eight years ago. In June, LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft for $26 billion; Weiner described the unprecedented acquisition by invoking his company’s unofficial mantra: “Next play.”

Watch our livestream of Weiner’s interview with Kara Swisher and Kurt Wagner from our Code Enterprise conference in San Francisco starting at 3:30 pm PT/ 6:30 pm ET.

Gavin Newsom is currently climbing the political ladder in California, from San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors to the city mayor’s office to his current post as California’s lieutenant governor.

But the top top job? President of the United States? Newsom says that job sounds absolutely terrible.

If you still haven’t heard of Twilio, you are forgiven. Despite the fact they are a $2.7 billion public company, you can’t buy a Twilio, nor can you take one to work or stay at one on your next vacation.

That said, Twilio’s tools are running behind the scenes when you call your Uber driver or text with your Airbnb host. CEO Jeff Lawson says the easiest way to think of the company is “AWS for telecom.”

Gavin Newsom, who is running to be California’s governor in 2018, has championed innovative policies since he entered public office in 1997, first as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, then as mayor of San Francisco and now as lieutenant governor of California.

A longtime political visionary on issues of equality, the environment, homelessness and health care, today Newsom insists that tech companies need to take an active role in fixing socioeconomic problems caused by their success.

Facebook’s enterprise tool, Workplace, won’t have a fake news problem. At least, not one that Facebook has to worry about.

Facebook launched Workplace last month, and the product works exactly like its regular social network, but connects users to their co-workers instead of their friends and relatives. That means Workplace also has its own News Feed, a News Feed powered by the same algorithms and technology used in the main Facebook app.

Philz Coffee, the San Francisco-based company founded by Phil Jaber, is now run by his 29-year-old son Jacob.

The chain, which started out in 2002 as a coffee corner in Phil’s deli on Mission Street in San Francisco, now has 36 locations, with more than two dozen in the Bay Area including one in Facebook headquarters. By this time next year, Jaber expects to have somewhere around 50, with a planned expansion into Boston coming soon.

Slack still doesn’t see a problem with having Microsoft Teams as a competitor in the messaging market.

At our Code Enterprise conference Tuesday, April Underwood, VP of Product at Slack, said that Slack knew it wouldn’t be alone in the messaging category.

If you use Slack for work, you’ve likely had this overwhelming experience: You come back from a meeting to a dozen slack rooms waiting for you with unread messages. It’s the new-age email inbox, full of stuff from colleagues you may or may not even know.

Slack thinks it has the combination to solve this issue: Learning how you work, and mixing in a little artificial intelligence to pinpoint exactly where you should spend your time.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says U.S. regulators didn’t pay proper attention to Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn, which he sees as a grab for data, not an acquisition of a social network.

Salesforce entered Microsoft’s territory when it acquired Quip, a word processing app, earlier this year. “Microsoft wants to maintain their monopoly, and doesn’t want innovation in that area,” said Benioff in an interview Monday with Recode’s Kara Swisher at Code Enterprise in San Francisco. “So they’re going to say, ‘Now we’re going to integrate all this LinkedIn stuff into Office, so why would you want Quip?’”

While Microsoft and Salesforce have been partners — and at times considered being even more than that — Marc Benioff says the relationship has soured, in part because the new Microsoft is too much like the old one.

In particular, Benioff pointed to a meeting that was set up between him and Scott Guthrie, who was then running Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud-based operating system.

Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. You can thank Twitter for that, says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

“I think it’s a great company, I think it’s a great CEO. I think it has a huge vision and has a unique position in the world. As evidenced by this election, I think it’s more important than ever,” Benioff told Recode’s Kara Swisher at the Code Enterprise conference in San Francisco Tuesday night. “Without Twitter, I don’t think you would have President-elect Trump.”

Work is becoming increasingly automated thanks to the advancement of technology like machine learning and artificial intelligence, potentially to the detriment of laborers.

But not all service providers are being immediately affected by the robot revolution, says Thumbtack’s economist Lucas Puente. Thumbtack, which connects service providers with customers, says the company’s data shows people who list their services on Thumbtack have seen little negative impact.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is what you might call a “woke CEO”: He recently led a group of CEOs and business leaders in opposing state legislation that discriminated against LGBTQ communities, and instituted a company-wide salary assessment to ensure that men and women were being paid equally for comparable work.

He also reached the $10 billion mark faster than any other enterprise software company. A 35-year veteran of the software industry — he worked 13 years at Oracle, and before that, at Apple — Benioff is one of the pioneers of cloud computing, founding Salesforce in 1999 with a cloud-based technology model, a pay-as-you-go business model and an integrated corporate philanthropy model.