How Google X Makes Radical Innovation Repeatable by Rewarding Intelligent Failure

Astro Teller (0:00)

Derek, I want your best ideas on the table right now. Be creative, be inspired, be a genius, go. My chance of getting anything good from you just went to zero.

Derek Andersen (0:09)

Zero.

Astro Teller (0:10)

The pressure I just put on you to be smart, to impress me, causes your real creativity to completely seize up. You can guarantee yourself a win. It's hard, but if you're sufficiently skillful at being the card counter of innovation, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose the hand. It matters whether you play the process right, and that you can control. We're trying to systematize radical innovation. And if that's what I'm really deeply passionate about, that means I'm trying to train us to be way smarter than me. So if I hold tightly to any one project, we're not the card counters of innovation anymore.

This episode is brought to you by Google for Startups.

Derek Andersen (1:00)

Welcome to Divot, where each week have interesting conversations with amazing people. Make sure to like and subscribe wherever you watch or listen.

Today, we're in the heart of Silicon Valley at X, Alphabet's moonshot factory with Astro Teller, the entrepreneur, AI scientist, and captain of Moonshots. Astro earned his PhD in artificial intelligence nearly three decades ago, built five companies, and spent more than 15 years leading one of the world's most ambitious innovation labs. Under his leadership, X helped incubate Google Brain, Wing, Verily, and Waymo, the autonomous driving company now valued at more than $125 billion.

But Astro's approach is as much about killing ideas as it is building them. At X, teams attacked We're going to take the hardest assumptions first, reward intelligent failure, and pursue breakthroughs that can be 10 times better, not just 10% better. Hope you enjoy our conversation. Walk me through what a great brainstorm session looks like here.

Astro Teller (2:02)

I think there are lots of different ones. I described the jam session a little bit to you. Let me give you another one that we use a lot that most people find a little surprising, but we find really works, which is we call it a bad idea brainstorm. If you're here, you work here at the Moonshot Factory, and I say, Derek, I want your best ideas on the table right now. Be creative, be inspired, be a genius, go.

My chance of getting anything good from you just went to zero.

Derek Andersen (2:32)

Zero.

Astro Teller (2:32)

The pressure I just put on you to be smart, to impress me, causes your real creativity to completely seize up.

Now imagine if I say, I don't want your good ideas. I don't even want mediocre ideas. Let's see how horrible we can make our ideas for at least the first 10 minutes here. So if we're gonna start, like we're trying to solve climate change, I'll say, I don't know, maybe Thanos was right. Maybe we should kill half the people in the world. That is a horrible solution. Okay, what is your horrible idea?

Like really, what's a horrible idea right now? Yeah, horrible idea. Really terrible idea for solving climate change.

Derek Andersen (3:17)

Take all the cars in the world and put them in a landfill and don't let anyone drive over again.

Astro Teller (3:23)

Okay, I'm not sure that that's quite as horrible as mine, but maybe that won't work. It's not as bad as yours. All right, what about genetically engineering smaller people? The carbon footprint of a human scales roughly with the weight of the person. So if we just had people who weighed half as much, then we'd have lower carbon footprint.

Derek Andersen (3:42)

That's a really so terribly great idea.

Astro Teller (3:45)

Thanks. So you'd be surprised, even your terrible idea of throwing away all the cars. I'd be like, how would that be actually? Like what would happen if we threw away all the cars?

Derek Andersen (3:56)

So you'd be surprised to play it out in your mind.

Astro Teller (3:58)

How fast, even when you're trying to make bad ideas, you end up stumbling onto stuff where people like, hold on a second, really? Like what if we like play with that just a little bit? Maybe there's actually something good there.

Now we're feeling silly because there's this invitation to be bad, right? We're feeling playful. We're feeling unencumbered by the pressure to be smart. If anything, the pressure is get as far away from smart as you can. And that actually limbers up your creativity. So that's an example. It's not the only thing we do, but it's an example we do here regularly.

Derek Andersen (4:37)

Where do you think your mindset around creativity and what's possible came from? I know your grandfather is this very innovative scientist. Like, did it come from, is it in your genes? Is it something you learned? Is it something your parents, your grandparents helped you with?