Code Conference, Day 2

Peter Kafka: We don’t need a warm-up for Senator Warner, right?

Kara Swisher: We don’t need a warm-up.

Kara Swisher: All right. So we’re going to talk about an issue, obviously, that’s really important to me and to Recode and to all of us, it should be, which is not just #MeToo, but diversity, women, people of color, all having a more inclusive tech community which I think we can all say — I can say since I can say these things — Silicon Valley gets an F. It still gets an F on this stuff.

So let’s come out and have a discussion of how we can make that happen and make it better and not just complain about it, but things that we can do.

Some of the biggest names in tech, media and even the agencies that regulate these industries took the stage at Recode’s Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. And Sunday, the third episode of MSNBC and Recode’s “Revolution” series featured five of the biggest interviews from Code this year: Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg and CTO Mike Schroepfer.

Want more? You can watch the full interviews of everyone featured on our MSNBC special as well as with leaders like Democratic Senator Mark Warner, Alibaba executive vice chairman Joe Tsai and Momofuku chef and “Ugly Delicious” host David Chang

Uber’s food delivery business is on pace to be the largest food delivery business outside of China.

“Eats is an exploding business in a good way,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said onstage at Code Conference at Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. “It’s now at a $6 billion bookings run rate, growing over 200 percent.”

Months after Uber and Alphabet settled their messy legal battle over self-driving trade secrets, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the companies are discussing working together on self-driving.

“[The relationship is] getting better,” Khosrowshahi said at the Code Conference at Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. “You build relationships slowly but surely. I have a long relationship with Google and we have a trust level. We’re having discussions with Waymo. If something happens, great.”

Kara Swisher: The next person I’m going to bring out — we have two more great interviews. I just want to say, I got this T-shirt, I do a podcast called “Recode Decode” and at the beginning of it, I ...

It’s an amazing experience to do a podcast because the fans are astonishing. I get stopped a lot by fans who love podcasts, I think it’s cause you’re in their ear and they think they know you, which they don’t. It’s really interesting.

Intel’s Shooting Star mini drones lit up Recode’s Code Conference sky on Wednesday night. If you watched the Olympics this year, you’re familiar with these cool, tiny balls of light.

Over 200 Shooting Star drones were at Code this year. The drones, which weigh less than a pound each, have “built-in LED lights that can create over four billion color combinations,” according to Intel.

Peter Kafka: You know when you’re telling the story of how Dara got his job, you’re sort of the key player in it?

Kara Swisher: No.

When Spotify listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange this February, it did so with a rare, daring, direct listing, which cut out much of the traditional banking infrastructure that powers most IPOs. And it worked!

Why did the Swedish music streaming service do it that way? As Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek explained tonight at Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., there were three main reasons:

Jason Del Rey: Alibaba is obviously one of the most powerful companies in the world, one of the most innovative, and I’m thrilled that we have one of the company’s leaders here today. Joseph Tsai, who’s the executive vice chairman, and one of the company’s co-founders. Joe, please join me onstage.

So Joe thought the good way to avoid hard questions today would be by wearing a Yale lacrosse shirt, and making me ask him about it, so, “Okay, Joe. Why are you wearing a Yale lacrosse shirt?”

Peter Kafka: Last fall, these stories are kind of similar for me. James Murdoch came on, and then his business getting sold, but he still showed up. Last fall, Randall Stephenson said he would come to Code, and then the DOJ sued him, but he’s still coming onstage. We’re very appreciative. Please welcome Randall Stephenson from AT&T.

Like I said, we don’t often have people come on while they’re being sued by the government, so I appreciate it.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., thinks that Chinese internet giants are too cozy with the country’s Communist government. Alibaba co-founder and Executive Vice Chairman Joe Tsai thinks Sen. Warner is trying to hold China back.

“Well, I’m sure in a lot of American companies there are Republicans,” Tsai said Wednesday at Recode’s annual Code Conference when asked about Warner’s comments. “The Communist party, per say, seems like a dirty word here. But, in China that’s the form of government.”

Three women trying to make Silicon Valley more diverse have some advice for the tech giants, venture capitalists and startup industry about how they can do better.

It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley has a diversity problem — all you have to do is look at the latest employment stats. But onstage at the Code Conference on Wednesday in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., these women were challenged to identify a single (okay, some offered a couple) solutions.

Kara Swisher: So we’ve had a lot of great interviews. This is someone I’ve known for a long time. I seem to know everyone for a long time, I’m really old. I brought out with me Dan Frommer, who is the editor in chief of Recode who is also a travel expert, too, and we’re going to interview Brian Chesky. He’s the co-founder, head of community and CEO of Airbnb. Come on out, Brian.

Brian Chesky: Hello.

What makes ’80s music sound like ’80s music? There’s one particular sound that stands out.

Vox.com’s senior video producer Estelle Caswell showed Recode’s Code Conference audience how a single chord, first created by Igor Stravinsky in the early 1900s, became a ubiquitous marker of ‘80s hip-hop music.

Why is Momofuku founder and chef David Chang launching a media empire instead of just more restaurants?

Over the past few months, Chang — who has been one of the world’s most influential chefs and restaurateurs over the past decade — launched a new Netflix show, “Ugly Delicious,” formalized a new media company, Majordomo Media, and started a podcast, the Dave Chang Show, in partnership with The Ringer.

Mary Meeker: Thank you, guys. Good to be here. Thank you all, I should say.

I’m going to run through this presentation and I want to say a couple things. First, I want to thank Ansel and Michael — and a lot of the folks at Kleiner Perkins — who really help put this together. This is certainly not a one-person show and a lot of people do a lot of heavy lifting. In addition, we have a section on China, compiled by the folks at Hillhouse Capital, specifically Liang Wu. This is a slide I’m not going to read. As those of you who have seen this before, this is a presentation that is meant to be read, not presented. This provides a lot of context on what we’re doing and the presentation is available at KleinerPerkins.com. I encourage you to read it because I will go through this stuff super fast.

Jason Del Rey: Good morning, everyone. So a lot of what I do day to day is cover a company you all know well, which is Amazon, and Amazon’s obviously dominant when it comes to one main type of commerce, which is I know what I want, I go and I search it in a search box, and I get it delivered to me very quickly. But in an e-commerce world, there’s still not a lot of companies that have nailed the idea of serendipity or discovery shopping, the kind of shopping a lot of people still do in the physical world. One company that’s probably made more strides than most in this way is Stitch Fix, so I’m very excited today to have the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix, Katrina Lake, join me onstage.

I know we have a audience here, tech and media folks, everyone who knows Stitch Fix, but maybe a small percentage who get confused about how it exactly works if they haven’t tried it yet, and you can try to convert them later. Sometimes you get compared to subscription companies, get compared to traditional retail, give me the 30-second explanation so some people in the room aren’t confused of how the model works.

AT&T is close to nailing down its deal to buy Time Warner, a massive content company that owns HBO, CNN and the “Harry Potter” film franchise.

But I’ve wondered about the merits of the deal. Since Time Warner content still has to be made available to competing distributors — whether Verizon or Comcast or Amazon or Netflix — AT&T doesn’t get an advantage by owning HBO or Warner Brothers or rights to NCAA games on Turner.

We could live in a future world where people pick and choose the traits their babies have, but it may not be the right thing to do.

It’s just one of the many ethical dilemmas that Francis deSouza, CEO of genomics testing company Illumina, who was interviewed by CNBC’s Christina Farr Wednesday at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. llumina sells DNA sequencing technology to companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com.

There are two big “holy wars” that the cryptocurrency industry is fighting.

That’s according to a panel of leaders in blockchain technology who spoke Wednesday at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. — Kathryn Haun, a Stanford lecturer on the board of Coinbase; Bridget van Kralingen, who leads blockchain efforts at IBM; and Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple — who feel that some of these wars are worth fighting and others are merely a distraction.

Most people think of Airbnb as a real estate rental business, but that’s wrong, says Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky.

“I think the key that makes Airbnb is the fact that we’re a community, not just a series of commodities,” said Chesky, speaking onstage at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

For years, Airbnb has faced major legislative problems in big cities like San Francisco and New York, and CEO Brian Chesky thought it would be over by now.

He realizes now he was mistaken.

As a public company CEO, Katrina Lake said having a diverse team was always good for Stitch Fix. And now she wants the company to serve as an example of a big public company with a great deal of diversity of demographics as well as thought.

“What I hope is we can be the living, breathing example of why diversity is important and how you can build that into a large publicly traded company,” Lake said at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. “But now I feel more of a responsibility to make sure people see us as that.”

China is catching up as a hub to the world’s biggest internet companies.

Five years ago, China had just two of the world’s biggest public tech companies by market value while the U.S. had nine. Currently, China is home to nine — Alibaba, Tencent, Ant Financial, Baidu, Xiaomi, Didi Chuxing, JD.com, Meituan-Dianping and Toutiao — while the U.S. has 11.