Astro Teller

Levon Biss


Only a few hundred metres from Google's main Mountain View campus is Google[x], its audacious skunkworks lab where researchers pursue the company's hyper-ambitious projects such as autonomous cars, augmented-reality glasses and balloon-powered Wi-Fi networks. The secretive lab, overseen by Sergey Brin, is run by Astro Teller, 43, whose business card describes him as Google[x]'s "Captain of Moonshots". Wired editor David Rowan asks Teller about his mission at the lab to prioritise "10x over ten per cent thinking".

Wired: Larry Page and Sergey Brin have often said that, rather than solving the fairly big problems, Google should go for the huge problems. How would you define that mindset?

Astro Teller: There are tests that you can apply to see if you're thinking big enough. The easiest one, the mantra that we use at Google[x], is ten times rather than ten per cent. When you try to do something ten per cent better, you tend to work from where you are: if I ask you to make a car that goes 50 miles a gallon, you can just retool the engine you already have. But if I tell you it has to run on a gallon of gas for 500 miles, you're going to have to start over. And that causes you to approach the problem so differently that weirdly, counter-intuitively, it's often easier to make something ten times better -- because perspective-shifting is just that much more powerful than hard work and resources being thrown at problems via traditional, well-tried paths.

Give some examples of "10x" projects.

You know about Google Glass and self-driving cars, but [previously] when I was a serial tech-entrepreneur, I built a wearable-body-monitoring company, BodyMedia, that was recently sold to Jawbone. For almost a hundred years before BodyMedia, people had this perspective that [if] you put a sensor on a person, you have a model for why the human body creates these signals on that sensor -- and then when you put it on a new person, you get a reading.

You run that mechanism model you have for the human body in reverse, and then you figure out what you think is wrong with them. And we said, what if instead we put many sensors on a person, and we build mathematical models between the set of sensors and how they change relative to each other? This was very uncomfortable to the medical establishment 15 years ago when we started doing this. Another example: I have had this interest for a very long time in making a software factory for ideas, a software system that builds its own ideas. I started a company that picked finance as its first industry to use this software on. It's a nontrivially sized hedge fund [Cerebellum Capital] now… It has wildly better returns than almost any other hedge fund on the planet.

What characteristics, apart from a tolerance for failure, do you notice in the entrepreneurs you see as most likely to make a successful moonshot?

Really great entrepreneurs have this very special mix of unstoppable optimism and scathing paranoia. If you don't have a tonne of optimism, you're not going to make it… you won't be able to evangelise to everyone else. On the other hand, if you aren't constantly paranoid about what can go wrong and put plans in place, then you're going to get bitten at some point.

I can see some wired readers inside big corporations now thinking, "It's OK for this guy with his crazy job-title to talk about moonshots, but that's just a Silicon Valley fantasy -- we have thousands of shareholders to think about."

They're right, and that is part of the problem. They need to reset expectations with their shareholders. This is one of the things that Larry and Sergey have done brilliantly and unwaveringly: they told their shareholders from day one that there will be two classes of shares -- you don't get to vote, we do. And if you're not in this for the long haul with us, you're probably better off putting your money somewhere else. And the stock price is doing just fine… It's a little late for Kodak, but you know, Nokia and others could have that same conversation with their shareholders. If they have already written off long-term bets and long-term thinking because their shareholders won't tolerate it, they're already dead and they just don't know it.

How much autonomy do you have at Google[x]?

A lot. I report to Sergey. Sergey is like Bruce Wayne and I'm Lucius Fox -- it's sort of his Batcave, but I help him oversee it. Google[x] has been tasked with something emotionally and intellectually hard, which is going and taking big, smart risks. But in order to ask a group to do that, you do have to give them a good bit of space -- you have to give them the room to fail.

How far do your ambitions stretch?

We have interest in every industry which is broken: the factory industry, the energy industry, the industry of agriculture. If we could figure out a way to build a technology that would make the world radically better by fixing deep-seated problems in one of those industries, as self-driving cars might in the transportation industry, why shouldn't we?

I guess there will be some mid-career executives now reading this who are thinking, "Maybe I ought to be pushing a bit harder…"

I talk to these mid-career execs all the time. I start hour-long presentations on innovation by giving them two choices: you can deliver a million-dollar bottom line to your company this year, guaranteed -- or you get a one in a hundred chance of delivering a billion dollars. Nobody raises their hand for choice A; everybody raises their hand for choice B. I say, "Okay, congratulations, you've all passed the maths test, choice B on an expected utility basis is worth ten times as much. How many of you believe that your manager, your boss or your board of directors would let you choose B?" Not a single hand goes up.

And then I say, "You don't need a lecture on innovation. You need to quit your job." You can lecture about innovation till the cows come home, but if the people at the top don't have the stomach for a real risk, nothing is going to happen.

And that's why Google is successful. Larry and Sergey just innately aren't interested in playing it safe. And that permeates the whole organisation.


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