The CodeBreaker Mindset™ Ft. Dr. Astro Teller, Alphabet, The Moonshot Factory, CoFounder and Captain

The CodeBreaker Mindset™ Ft. Dr. Astro Teller, Alphabet, The Moonshot Factory, CoFounder and Captain

Chitra Nawbatt (00:11)

Welcome to The CodeBreaker Mindset™, where leaders and influencers share their paths to achieving goals and dreams. I'm your host Chitra Nabat. Joining us today is Dr. Astro Teller, co -founder and captain of X, which is the Moonshot Factory and an Alphabet company. Astro, I'm grateful to have known you for 20 years. Since then, you've been the first person to encourage me to write a book, and here we are. Thank you for the encouragement and being here.

Astro Teller (00:39)

Congratulations, Chitra!

Chitra Nawbatt (00:42)

Astro, we first met when you were founder and CEO of Body Media, an early wearables body monitoring company. You founded multiple companies, including co -founding X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory about 15 years ago. You're an author, ran a hedge fund, hold several hundred US patents. On the education side, you are ahead of the curve and got your PhD in artificial intelligence in the 1990s.

Take us through your journey from PhD to being a founder of multiple companies, including the Moonshot Factory.

Astro Teller (01:16)

Well, that's a pretty big ask. I'll give you the TLDR and I guess you can dig in if you want, but I did a PhD in artificial intelligence because it was the part of computer science that appealed to me the most. I discovered during my undergraduate days that I was a good programmer, but the thing that I was best at was creativity was exploration and the part of computer science that benefited the most from that part of my brain was the part that was the least well understood at the time, which was artificial intelligence. It was less so, you know, if I'd gone into operating systems, I don't know that my creativity would have been that helpful. So I did a PhD. I really enjoyed my time doing a PhD. As you say, I wrote a novel while I was doing my PhD. And so by the end, I had sort of three paths I could have gone down. One was to become a full time writer, which I considered, but discarded.

I love writing, but I didn't want that to be my full -time job. I could have become a professor and there's nothing wrong with being a professor, but I decided that that provided me a straight shot all the way down my life till I retired. And it really just bothered the hell out of me that there wouldn't be big surprises. I could kind of predict exactly who I'd be when I was 70 and I just didn't want that. 

And then the third alternative was to start a company. was working with some professors at Carnegie Mellon at the time, who I was really excited about how we work together. And so I offered to become the CEO of a small company called Sandbox Advanced Development, which we set up together, which was basically like a tiny early version of X that was spinning off companies.

And the third company that it spun off was a wearable body monitoring company, which we were so excited about. We closed down Sandbox Advanced Development. So I moved from being the CEO of Sandbox to being the CEO of Body Media. And I became a serial tech entrepreneur.

Chitra Nawbatt (03:24)

So let's talk a little bit about a couple of words you said there, creativity, exploration, computer science. Not a lot of folks knew what artificial intelligence was, and definitely not in the 1990s, much less getting a PhD. What caused you or opened you up to this? Is it because from birth you were exposed to world famous scientists and your two grandfathers, one who won a Nobel Prize and the other who was a founding father of the Hydrogen Bomb?

Astro Teller (03:51)

I don't know that, that drew me to artificial intelligence in particular, though I will say that the fact that my father's father worked at Los Alamos, he was one of the leaders at Los Alamos during the Second World War, got me really interested in Manhattan projects, not just the Manhattan Project, but things like what happened at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, or the Apollo space mission that NASA ran.

The idea that there are moments in history where you can get just the right group of people together with just the right mission and something really special could happen. And I got interested over my childhood and what it might look like to set up something like that or to be a part of something like that. So it took a long time for that to crystallize, but I think that X owes some of the way it's currently set up to things I've been thinking about since I was five or six years old.

The Rules of the Game

Chitra Nawbatt (04:53)

So from young to now, and you're still young, in life there is always this notion of rules. So let's get into the rules of the game. How did you figure out, especially since you founded multiple companies and been the CEO of multiple companies, you talk about Sandbox AD, Body Media, the Moonshot Factory, how did you figure out the written and unwritten rules of the game in founding and being a CEO?

Astro Teller (05:23)

When I was early into being a CEO the second time, so this was in the early days of Body Media, this wearable body monitoring company, I had grown up, I'd never had a full -time job. I had no background in business, let alone in management or leadership. I'd never been a CEO before. Again, I'd never even had a job before.

So I kind of conceived of being a CEO as being able to play speed chess with all of your employees at the same time. So if I could do my, your job better than you could do it, then I guess I could manage you. And if I could do his job better than he can do it, then I guess I could manage him. You know, spoiler alert, that doesn't work. It's a horrendous way to manage and an even worse way to lead arguably. And so by the time there were 20 people, I was physically and mentally exhausted and people were pretty grumpy.

So I had to decide at that point, either I was going to give up how I conceived of myself and what counted as being an impressive person. And up to that point, I thought of being smart as what defined me and what made me a good person or an impressive person. I was either going to have to give that up and then like, who am I? Or I was going to have to stop being a CEO because clearly those two were not well aligned. And thought about it for a month. was painful. And I decided I was really interested in being a CEO. So interested that I was willing to give up my current definition of how I thought of myself and what it meant to be a manager and a leader. Once I decided that then I was like a blank slate. I had no idea what I was doing. And so I just got really interested in why people don't do the things that you ask them to do. And I've been on a journey ever since of curiosity where saying, Hey, we should go that way. And pointing in some direction is surprisingly unhelpful. It doesn't affect employees as much as you might think it does. And so I've just gotten really interested in why that is and maybe how we can restructure an organization that helps the employees understand and feel great about going in the direction that is the direction the organization wants to go in.

Chitra Nawbatt (07:45)

What did you discover? Because when you said you were very curious about when you ask a group of folks or ask a person to do something, why they don't do it. What have you discovered from that?

Astro Teller (07:53)

Well, I mean, a simple example is that a lot of companies, organizations, not just companies, say one thing, but then create incentives that are very different than what they say they want. And so you have to align the two as much as you can. I think lots of companies have aspirations for how they'd like to be, but they don't really hold the line on those things. So it's easy to say, yeah, no jerk policy at our company.

But if that's not in your top three or four things, it's just not true. You know, you might have a low percentage of jerks, but it's just not true unless you make it one of your top things. So figuring out what it is that your organization wants to do and then holding the line on those things, making sure that the things that you say you care about are actually the ones that you prioritize. So in the case of X, playing the long game, having match, very high levels of audacity, but very high levels of humility at the same time. Asking for everyone to be mission driven and not get sucked into their own sort of side teams as much as possible. Really holding the line on what it is we're trying to become, which is basically fighting normalcy in the case of X. If that's the priority, then it has to take priority in the strategic choices.

Chitra Nawbatt (09:40)

Did anyone coach you through that process of founding companies and developing your leadership style as a CEO?

Astro Teller (09:41)

I probably should have had better coaches sooner. I'm sorry I didn't. So I now have several fabulous coaches. But when I was a serial tech entrepreneur, now I had board members and they gave me some nuggets of wisdom, but I actually didn't have a good kind of coaching support infrastructure when I was in my 30s.

Chitra Nawbatt (10:04)

So how did you figure it out? Just trial and error of building teams, seeing what they responded to. How did you mature in that process?

Astro Teller (10:16)

I mean, I made a ridiculous amount of mistakes. That's fundamentally, I guess, the answer. Probably the thing that saved me is that because of this process I had described to you before, where I let go of being right about being smartness, being the correct metric, I had to replace it with something. And what I replaced it with was I'm going to be a learning machine. I don't care how wrong I am now. I want to win in the long run.

And so the thing that I'm going to hold myself to and then I'm going to hold the people around me to is how ferociously are we going to learn, which means whenever something goes wrong, no, no shame, no hiding it. Just what are we going to learn from it? Learn that thing, move on. And so in retrospect, I wish I hadn't made many fewer mistakes and dragged all the people around me through many fewer of the mistakes that I made. But I would like to think that I learned from all my mistakes with reasonable efficiency, so I only have to make many of them, not all of them, but many of them I only have to make once. That's something.

Chitra Nawbatt (11:22)

Well, and on that note, were there any mistakes that come to mind which you think materially has shaped you and you've benefited from today? Is there an example or an instance?

Astro Teller (11:35)

I mean, like, my first response to that question is, that's literally my life. So I'm not sure I can pick one or two, but I'm not sure how they would define. Define me because what really feels like define me is the entire list of them, but I'll give you an example or two. 

So, we've had projects here at X where I can see in retrospect the ways in which we could have tested them harder and earlier on fronts that we put off. And I remember our justifications for putting them off, but the level of determination that I have that we have here at X to pressure test every one of our ideas as harshly as possible, as early as possible on the area we think might be weakest is exactly because of all the times we didn't do that and then discovered years afterwards sometimes. Oh shit, this was never really gonna work because of this Achilles heel. We just never pressed on the Achilles heel before, so we didn't know. We thought we were winning.

So that determination to seek out that hidden flaw, if it might be there somewhere, and to get at it in all these different ways, is it possible to make? How cheaply could we make it? Does somebody really want to buy this thing? What are the unintended secondary effects of this thing that might make it actually a lot less good for the world than we thought? Whatever that is that we can attack our idea on.

That determination specifically comes from this laundry list of times where we didn't do that well enough and then discovered well after the fact we could have that we were on the wrong track.

Chitra Nawbatt (13:37)

Since you talk about X, let's get into that. How did you found X, which is also known as the Moonshot Factory, a multi-billion dollar Alphabet company? 15 years ago, how did you found it?

Astro Teller (13:49)

I'm sorry you cut out there. you ask the question again?

Chitra Nawbatt (13:52)

I said, how did you found X?

Astro Teller (13:56)

Larry and Sergey were interested in setting up kind of a 21st century Bell Labs. And they asked me and one other person whose name is Sebastian Thrun, to Co-find this place for them. It was within Google, but it was meant to be separate. And so from the very earliest days before we'd even named the place, the idea was how can we come to ideas that are way outside of what Google would otherwise be doing that have some chance of being really great for the world and could turn into enduring businesses that would deliver that goodness to the world and then go through the de-risking process and then once it looks like we really are onto something very occasionally, we'll be wrong most of the time, then for that small subset of things, how do we set them up so that they can turn into scalable businesses that can go and endure. So that's been our mission for 14 years. And, you know, obviously while that hasn't changed, we've learned a lot along the way about how to help the people within X sort of do that as efficiently as possible without killing the kind of creativity magic, which is, you know, the raw material that we use to create moonshots.

Chitra Nawbatt (15:22)

Was there any resistance to it? Are there any individuals that you had to convince to get on board before you launched?

Astro Teller (15:34)

I think that there have been misunderstandings along the way. It is easy to say but hard to tolerate. The harsh truth is that innovation is messy. You cannot make it not messy. It is a total fiction to pretend that you can get radical innovation without mostly being wrong on the things that you try.

And so I'm pre signed up to that, but helping, you know, all of my other stakeholders to feel good about that process, obviously is a journey. And the proof needs to be in the pudding over long periods of time. We need to look back and say, is this working? Are the things that we've produced generally, at least roughly valuable enough that it justifies the time and money spent so far so good.

You know, things that have come from X include Google brain, Verily - the life science business for Alphabet, Waymo - the self-driving cars for alphabet, Wing - the drones for package delivery, is another Alphabet company and many other things. So I think our track record at this point is solid on the fact that even though we're wrong, a lot of the time and have to say so regularly, the outcome is still worth it.

Chitra Nawbatt (17:04)

And when you talk about innovation being messy, does that mean then there's no rules or how do you think about rules, right? Because at X, you said the goal is to create 10 X impact in the problems you solve. So when it comes to the tech.

Astro Teller (17:18)

Well, that itself is actually one of the rules. If you come to me and you have an idea that sounds pretty good and like it's likely to work, we're not interested. That's a rule at X. If it's likely to work, there are other groups in the world that won't just do it as well as us. They will do it cheaper than us and maybe even faster than us. That is not our superpower. 

Our superpower is exploring the unlikely efficiently. And so one of the rules at X is you have to bring us something that number one is a huge problem with the world because if you can't name that, what are we doing here? Both because we want to do good for the world, but also because enduring businesses should be solving some real problem in the world. Number two, there has to be some radical proposed solution. There has to be some science fiction sounding product or service.

No matter how unlikely it is that we could make it, we can agree ahead of time if we could make it, it would make that huge problem go away. And then you have to say, here is a way we can test whether this is just crazy or whether it might actually be genius. It's OK if there's only a 1 % chance you're right. It's not OK if it's going to take many years for us to find out if we're on the right track. 

So that requirement of a moonshot story hypothesis is one of the central rules at X. That's what it takes to start on that journey. And then so you can hear in how I've described that a demand for the audacity to be very high. But as soon as you start on it, you're almost certainly wrong. We are almost certainly wrong. That's okay. What's not okay is if you become in denial about the fact that you're almost certainly wrong because you just want your baby to make it.

So having humility be as high as audacity for you to be clear from the beginning, you are not likely to get there, wherever there was. And so what we're actually paying you and your team to do is to prove whether it's good or not. And we're just as interested in the truth. The only real sin in X is being in denial, is not being able to be dispassionate about what the evidence we're getting back from the world is.

Astro Teller (19:40)

So that's what the rules feel like at X not, you know, because we're in the nonconformity game. So other than breaking the rules in an efficient way, there aren't a lot of rules.

Chitra Nawbatt (19:54)

So how then do you think about quote unquote guardrails, if you will, around messy innovation, right? Because you talked about humility and a person being dispassionate. So it's not about your baby quote unquote winning or succeeding at all costs. How do you think about guardrails in terms of data, signals, pattern recognition, and ultimately professional judgment to say, hey, you know what, we've tried this. Okay, we need to stop or abort mission or redirect.

How do you think about that?

Astro Teller (20:28)

In the details, each project is really, really different. You can imagine that, you know, Google Brain and self -driving cars and drones for package delivery and the life science business - Verily like the regulatory agencies they had to talk to what counted as reasonably safe. All of these issues just so different for each of them. We cannot make one set of rules, a checklist, guardrails to live by. So it's more like, hey, welcome to X, Chitra. The real rules are we have to be serious about doing the right thing, the right thing for the world and the right thing for Alphabet. As long as if you're not serious about that, it's just not going to work out for you here. And if you are, then let's be in discovery together about how to realize that. 

If you're working on the teleportation project. You tell me what should we poke at first to see if it's going to actually survive or not. And what could go wrong here? You help me think about this. I'm not going to tell you how to think about it. You're the teleportation expert, not me. But you need to be committed in order for me to trust you to do that to this bigger picture of what we're trying to do. You can't be like, I want the teleportation project to survive no matter what, because then you're not thinking about these higher level issues.

Chitra Nawbatt (21:51)

You used the word stakeholders earlier. How do you think about building relationships and networks? Because in what you're doing, it takes creating and building relationships with a variety of complex, nuanced stakeholders, ranging from those who might still be analog to iconic leaders who've been at the forefront of innovation in high risk and reward intersections. How do you build meaningful relationships? And if you could bring that to life.

Astro Teller (22:20)

I'm sure different people have different styles. I have one, as maybe you can tell from the tigger on my shirt, of being a worm, highly transparent human. I don't have to remember too much because I tell the truth. I'd like to believe that the truth is gonna actually solve things in the long run. And this is part of it, is I just don't spend any time being political or trying to curry political favor.

That way of thinking is very smart in the short term, but I don't believe it's very smart in the long term. So I try to show up curious for the people who I'm talking to. What are you seeing that I'm not seeing, including about us? How can I help you? Why would they help us if I'm not interested in helping them?

Being very audacious myself, but also having my humility be at that same level to say, hey, tell me what we're getting wrong so we can be better tomorrow. And I have to mean that, or I won't build a great relationship with you. But if I do those things, might not win you over today, but, over time, if I'm really serious about these things, I think I'm going to win you over to being excited to at least watch the ride that we're going on from the sidelines and cheer for us. And maybe even you'll want to help because it's fun.

The Pivots

Chitra Nawbatt (23:44)

Let's talk about the pivots because in messy innovation and you talked about audacity, nonlinear 10X impact is a rule. There's going to be a lot of pivots. So take us into your, in addition to the creation methodology, but that experimentation or pivot process in innovation and in how you're launching and building these businesses.

Astro Teller (24:13)

One of the things that we say here is that we have strong beliefs weakly held. That is, it's important at all times to have a theory of what you're doing and why you're doing it. Otherwise, you don't have a guide, a sort of strategic infrastructure to build around. But at the same time, if you're always, if you have your humility high, you should always be not just open to, but actively on the lookout for what are we getting wrong here?

And so the process of saying, where might this break often by itself leads you to discoveries about, this part is harder than we thought. Weirdly, this part is easier than we thought. And then for example, how could we lean towards the easier stuff and away from the harder stuff? Like how could we re -architect this to go towards where the world seems to want to be pulling us rather than we had pre -decided where we're going and we have to stick to that.

The fact that we're a lot of pivoting is difficult because people have made promises to themselves, to their spouses, to their peers, to their investors, and then they just feel stupid. It's a lot of it's an emotional issue. Because as I was describing to you before, we've conceived of what we're doing as truth seeking.

We're buying options on the future and we're just as interested in whether there's nothing under the rock as whether there is something under the rock. We're just paying to find out what's under the rock. That's our job. And by framing it in that way, the pivots are a lot less sometimes emotional. In fact, they're often fun. I remember in the early days of Waymo or what is now Waymo, we thought what we were doing was making self -driving cars.

Pretty reasonable, it's literally what we called them. And then we realized after a while, that's not exactly what we're doing. We're transforming mobility. Transportation is a service. We're not really gonna be making the cars or selling the cars. It's really about transforming mobility. And so for years we like, we restructured that team around the concept of transforming mobility. And even that has now evolved. That team now describes what they're doing as building the driver.

Astro Teller (25:33)

That's what they're doing. Because there's a lot about transforming mobility that's still about building the cars, about connecting the users in to that experience. Waymo is building the driver. That's what they're doing. so those weren't abandonments of their goal. It was refinements and understanding what they really meant to be the best in the world at. You could call those pivots, but I would call it like learning and upgrading.

Astro Teller (27:13)

We have something called Kill Criteria. If you start on, let's say the teleporter project, and I'm asking you, are you going to be dispassionate? And then you're like, yeah, totally Astro, because you want to work on the teleporter project. And then three years later, it's not going great. We can end up kind of disagreeing about what going great means. One of the things that can put some guardrails on that dispassion is at the beginning, can you and I agree? Like if teleporting an apple across the world costs more than shipping the apple across the world and takes longer than shipping the apple across the world, that's probably not worth it. Right? I'm like, yeah, yeah, okay. So let's call that a Kill Criteria. If that turns out to be true, we can just kill the project.

What are some other Kill Criteria that we could agree on at the beginning of the project? And typically, because you're just starting the project, no matter how much you think you can, you tend to be over optimistic about how well it's going to go, how fast it's going to go. Two, three years from now, we will bring out those Kill Criteria and it will often be the case that we're flirting with those Kill Criteria, but that's good. Then we have like a really concrete way of saying, hey, we made this commitment to ourselves back then. How are we doing against these things? So that's an example that a lot of the teams here use to try to keep themselves honest when they're in conversation with themselves and with the rest of X.

Chitra Nawbatt (28:56)

And going a bit further, because you talked about, so this killer criteria, the learning process, right? When a moonshot doesn't work out to expectation or it quote unquote fails or you decide to discontinue, what is that process, that post -mortem and learning loop? And then how does that sort of feed into the individual and the team's collective pattern recognition in updating your, you know, quote unquote innovation algorithm, if you will ?

Astro Teller (29:14)

So an initial example is we talk a lot here about moonshot compost. And this is both practical, but I think it's also emotionally helpful for the people here. When we talk about moonshot compost, we're recognizing that even if the teleporter project isn't going to work out and we stop that project, the people who worked on that project, the code, the partnerships, the patents, the hardware,

They're all still here at X. We didn't lose any of them. Now we can't necessarily repurpose all of them on day one, but that doesn't mean that they're useless. It's like a challenge to us that there's still value in these people, in these patents, in this code, in this hardware. What else could we do with it? And sometimes for a totally different purpose, sometimes for a very similar purpose, a new project will come out of the ground. That's hence the idea of compost.

And by saying that, I think it helps people to feel better that when they end something, it isn't just like erased off of the earth. It's just the specifics of how it was being held together weren't right. It turned out, but there's still opportunity inherent in the work that they did and the people who we hired. We will stand teams up when they kill their project. If I have to kill it, we don't do this, but if they kill their project.

We stand them up and give them a standing ovation at all hands, which we've done many times. And I think that there's a pride that people at X get from having ended projects for the right reasons. It's kind of a relief when you can say, I still think that there's something here, but we just don't have the proof. We're ending it for right now. And you get to feel intellectually honest. And then people clap for you for being intellectually honest.

Sadly, that is just not how the rest of the world works. And it's kind of mind -blowing when people actually cheer for you for having done the right thing and stopped your specific thing for the greater good of the organization.

Chitra Nawbatt (31:24)

What's then your pattern recognition on the necessary ingredients to build and scale profitable tech and AI driven companies? Because most of the companies out there are not doing the 10 X, right? And so.

Astro Teller (31:40)

I mean, there's lots of details about it. For example, partnering with groups who have things that you don't have can often supercharge the exploration. But partnering with groups that are external to us, often not external to Alphabet, is bad if you don't set their expectations well up front.

So if I'm coming to you, I'm working on the time machine project, you are now external to Alphabet. And I say, hey, I'd like to work with you on this, but I need you to know we're on a learning journey. Here's what I'm hoping to accomplish. Here's how it would benefit you and the rest of the world if it worked. But this is not done. And you cannot go on this journey with us as though we have a finished product because we're just going to disappoint you. 

Now, if you act...And we'll scare away 80 % of the prospective partners by saying that. But the 20 % who come with us afterwards will come with us in the right ways and for the right reasons. So that's an example where we've learned partnering is great. It's actually absolutely critical in most of the things that we do. But there is a right way and a wrong way to do that partnering. You have to make them real partners in the learning journey instead of pretending that you're done because it's easier for them to understand it that way.

Chitra Nawbatt (33:20)

when it comes to the learning journey, things that each one of us deal with is fear. And a barrier to pivoting is fear. You've said that quote, our main cultural battle is against fear and the strong gravitational pull toward conventional ways of thinking and behaving.

All of us have been conditioned for years not to fail, not to be vulnerable, and to minimize risk. How do you rewire the self and the team to solve for this?

Astro Teller (33:37)

Again, I can give you an example or two. These are very detailed, long stories, but here's an example or two. One, I'm going to create a bit of a glass ceiling on how other people behave, so I had better be working on myself and my fears, or why are you going to do that? That's an example. Two, how I treat you is really going to matter.

If I say don't have fear, but then when you say, don't know, I'm like, haha, you're stupid, I think less of you for having said you don't know, you will go, Astro is not serious about that no fear thing. He is creating fear in me right now. Back to business as usual. Where if you say, I don't know, or Astro, I disagree with you, and then I high five you, not even necessarily because you're right, but because I knew that that was like a fearful moment for you and I'm giving you this little immediate positive reinforcement for having gotten over your fear and showed you and showed everyone else in the meeting that I value people not letting their fears control them that we don't need. We can create a microcosm where that's not true, but only if we all do it together. So there are little things like that that help. 

The standing ovation I just described at the end of a project where project has said, no, called time on itself. There's a huge amount of fear that comes with that. If you get a standing ovation, you feel a little bit less dumb afterwards. You feel a little bit less fearful. Having a place where people share the personal work that they're doing with each other. In fact, I'm doing an offsite with my directs at the end of this week. And that is the first thing that we're doing at our offsite is we're talking about the personal work we're doing on ourselves, how it's going, and what the rest of us can do to support them. That is literally the first thing at our offsite. Because if I'm asking you to do personal work, but then we're all just like quietly doing it and nobody can see it, you're gonna feel alone and so will I. No one's gonna do the work.

Chitra Nawbatt (35:50)

On that notion of personal work. What's critical situation where you were hijacked? First, an example where you were hijacked by yourself, self-sabotage, and then when you may have been hijacked by somebody else. How did you deal with it? How did you recover and pivot?

Astro Teller (36:08)

You know, I'll answer that partly by saying, I don't know that another person can hijack you. I think we always hijack ourselves. The world is full of stressors. But when we react badly, that's on us. We can't blame that on the stressors. So I would say 100 % of the hijacking is self -hijacking. That'd be my description. So usually I am oversensitive, maybe this is true for all of us. When I, when I get hijacked, you know, if you are working at a different organization, but we need your help, your support in some way, and you're critical of what we're doing. And, and I feel like instead of you criticizing the issues on their merits, you're just being kind of like nasty or political.

Look, maybe you're not even doing that and I'm over reading it. Or maybe you really are doing that, but it's still how am I going to react? In my best moments, I can show up curious to you. I cannot react. I can help bring you back on side with us. But in my worst moments, of course I can get defensive, sad, combative even because I'm trying to defend X from, you know, the onslaught I think that you're bringing our way. 

But those are my fears rearing their head. Those are bad habits, which I try really hard to unlearn. And I think we all do those kinds of things where all of the ways that we're afraid of what people will think of us, of what will happen to us as individuals, to our sub teams, to the whole organization we're part of, then lead to a series of bad behaviours which almost exclusively make us less safe instead of more safe, even though we're frantically trying to improve our safety in those moments.

Chitra Nawbatt (38:05)

Something you talked about earlier about you being a serial tech entrepreneur, what's your pattern recognition on the launcher CEO, so the founder CEO who launches a company that may or may not be the same person that takes the company through its phase of growth or the long -term endurance CEO? Any pattern recognition or thoughts on attributes, recipe if you will for the launcher CEO versus the builder CEO versus the endurance long-term CEO? May be the same person but an often case especially in Silicon Valley may not be.

Astro Teller (38:45)

I'd like to start by saying, I think we over judge people. think Silicon Valley and maybe the whole world tends to over rotate on people's past and their resumes. And I don't think that that is doing each other the best service we can do. That doesn't mean everyone's equally qualified for every job, but I wish we could look a little bit deeper into people's actual work and their behaviors, their habits, their beliefs, their style.

Those things are what determine whether someone's going to sort of be able to take the particular organization for the next round of scaling, whether it's from zero to 30 people or 30 people to 300 people or 300 people to 3000 people.

Number two, usually, you know, battle scars are helpful. If you're running a widget factory and like people have made widget factories before, that's probably what you want to max out on is like, who's run the most widget factories, let's hire her. When you're doing something really new, I think it's easy to over -rotate on, you know, the people who have the most experience because often you're breaking all the rules, you're trying...to change a market in some way. 

And so someone who has done it right before is actually as likely as not to do the wrong thing this time by following a playbook that worked the last time. That's probably not what's called for. So what you really want is someone with very high integrity, high intellectual horsepower, someone who is a good human being, who is a good communicator.

Those are the kinds of people who then you can get them coaches for the areas that they don't have as much about. They're going to hire people who are smarter than them. If they have high IQ, they won't be frightened by people who are more talented than them. And that's a lot of what leadership is just hiring people better than you for the, all the different things that have to be done. So I would lean into those things instead of like picking at what point, you know,

Astro Teller (40:54)

Suzy has to get out of her chair so we can put Bob in there because Bob's done it before. There are moments for that that's typically not where I lean.

The Magic 

Chitra Nawbatt (41:07)

Let's now talk a little bit about the magic in science. How do you define intuition and serendipity? And then where do they come into the innovation creation process?

Astro Teller (41:28)

I think of intuition as just pattern matching. Or if you think of it like we have these little production rules in our head, A implies B, B implies C, C implies D. At some point we've seen that so many times that we know that A implies D because of the chain rule of those implications. And we just kind of store that A implies D and we kind of forget the chain.

I think the moments of intuition are really that kind of pattern matching where we've just learned enough rules, we've practiced them enough that we no longer are doing it at a conscious level. Some of it is happening unconsciously, but that doesn't mean our brain isn't sorting through these kinds of implications in our lives.

Astro Teller (42:16)

I would also say serendipity is pretty critical for what we're doing. It's a lot of where our raw material comes from. But we can't just be like wild and crazy and trying anything, any time. Then it would just be a mess here with no focus or direction. So a lot of what's challenging about making a Moonshot factory is how do you allow for a lot of nonconformity, a lot of serendipity and creativity and exploration, but also kind of shape and focus it so that it doesn't kill the creativity, but it also doesn't allow the creativity to be formless. And so for example, asking, so what questions? Hey, that's a cool frictionless surface that you built over there in the corner. What's that good for?

And like, I'm excited. I didn't know you could make a frictionless surface, but I'm also not just going to let you mess around with a frictionless surface forever. I would want you to tell me a story about what we could do with a frictionless surface, because if you can tell me a story, fantastic, let's go for it. That's great serendipity. If you can't, maybe we should go explore in other areas. If you can't even tell a story about what we might do with it, maybe that's just intellectually interesting, but not practically interesting.

Chitra Nawbatt (43:45)

Is there a specific example at the Moonshot Factory where serendipity played a critical role and what was the impact? Where even it caused you to pinch yourself as like, wow, did that really happen? Did we just really get this home run or however you want to characterize it?

Astro Teller (44:03)

Yeah, you know, a lot of the serendipity that we've had is designed, or be it at the meta level. A way to think about that is one of our sayings here is get out into the real world as fast as possible. Now, partly we do that because if you're wrong, if what you're doing just doesn't make any sense, you will find out quickly when you go out into the real world. But often it's not that you're wrong full stop. It's just like the world is just different than you thought. The things that are going to be challenging are different than the ones that you think and sometimes in a really good way. 

So I remember once, for example, we had put this laser free space optics, wireless optical communication. We sent a huge amount of data bandwidth using a laser to this really large apartment building in Nairobi. And we were offered to let all the people in this really large apartment building was several hundred apartments by internet for like a fourth of what they were otherwise paying. And it was all you could eat as much internet as they wanted. And we thought, everyone's going to buy this. It's going to be great. was one of our early experiments. And it went terribly. 

After several months, I think there were like 10 apartments out of a hundred that had bought into it. We're like, okay, we totally failed there. Wonder what's going on. And we dug in and it turned out that 10 of the apartments were buying all you can eat and then reselling it at a profit to the other, you know, 90 apartments in the building. So we could have chosen to think of that as a bad thing, but we actually decided, wait, that's a great thing. What we just realized is instead of we have to sell it to everybody, people want to be resellers. Why don't we like make that problem into a benefit?

Let's see all of our customers as prospective entrepreneurs, especially in the global south, where they're just a lot more used to being scrappy like that. If they want to spread it to other people for us and take some profit on the way, fantastic. So that's an example where getting out in the world taught us something we could have treated as a failure, but instead by seeing it differently, it turned into a benefit.

Chitra Nawbatt (46:28)

Astro, what's your advice on how to cultivate The CodeBreaker Mindset™ for those of us trying to create our own path of plan to action?

Astro Teller (46:40)

Decide what you believe, work backwards from the end. There are a lot of things, the habits that we work on at X, it's still hard and I won't say that we're doing it particularly perfectly at getting everyone even here at X to practice them. But what I can say is I have zero doubt that playing the long game is what we should be doing. So we're going to be playing the long game. And every time in every way where I find us not doing that, I say, nope.

We're going to be playing the long game and then we have to work backwards from there. How are we going to install that in our culture in a really workable way? But at no point do I say, yeah, all right, fine. Forget playing the long game. So I would encourage everyone to pick that set of things they believe, start with the end in mind and then work backwards on how to design a set of habits that will reliably get them there. 

Chitra Nawbatt (47:36)

And finally when it comes to the long game, tech and AI aren't going anywhere. It's here to stay and for forever. And there's some folks that are afraid and still struggling on how to deal with that. What type of mindset and skills will equip people for the future, especially to deal with the high velocity of change coming from tech and AI led innovation?

Astro Teller (48:02)

First, I just want to start by recognizing what you said is right and it's a lot for almost everybody. The world is changing faster and faster and the truth is that's going to continue. It is not only going to continue to be at a high pace, the pace will continue to increase. And that's scary for most of the world and I acknowledge that. And given that that's true,

I think that the most important skill we all can have is being ferocious learners. Is the skill of adaptation itself, which is learning. What can each of us do as individuals and as organizations to be good at learning new things, to be excited about at least some of the changes in the world? How can we choose to see some of these things as opportunities instead of problems?

Because the changes are just going to keep coming and resisting them won't change the rate at which they're incoming. we can, instead of seeing it as a tsunami that's swamping us, how can we see it as the wave we can surf?

Chitra Nawbatt (49:15)

Astro, Thank you so much for joining us.

Astro Teller (49:20)

My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Chitra.

Chitra Nawbatt (49:23)

Thank you for supporting The CodeBreaker Mindset™. For more episodes go to www.chitranawbatt.com to like and subscribe. Connect with me on social media @ChitraNawbatt.