Finding our next big breakthrough at X

Sometimes to find the needle in the haystack, you just need to make the haystack disappear.

At X (formerly called Google[x]), our mission is to invent and launch moonshot technologies that could make the world a radically better place. We look for big problems that affect millions of people, and we bring together engineers, artists, scientists and designers to try to come at these problems from an entirely new perspective that might make the previously impossible seem plausible, like internet access from Loon balloons and cars that drive themselves.

As we’ve investigated various new technologies, we identified a powerful underlying innovation so radical it could unlock new categories of moonshots. We’re always investigating ways to make things faster, smarter, more energy efficient. But what if we could make them smaller? Imagine if we could compress data to the point that we could speed compute times by 10X. Or if we could miniaturize physical objects, dramatically increasing global portability while reducing their carbon footprint. After encountering so many challenges that only compression can solve, we decided to bring in the best to work on this truly transformational technology.

We’re hiring our first ever Chief Compression Officer, Richard Hendricks, to make our biggest moonshots, well, smaller.

Tackling gigantic shrinking challenges at X

Richard is a world class expert in compression, and is the former CEO of Pied Piper where he developed an innovative new data compression algorithm. He joins our team of collaborators, creators and dreamers at X and we look forward to his contributions, big and very small.