At X, I see up close every day how messy innovation is

These days it’s Alphabet not Google and just plain “X” not Google[x]; otherwise the mission remains much the same for the far-out R&D lab at the world’s most valuable tech company: Change the world. Break things. Not necessarily in that order.

Led by Astro Teller (born Eric before he adopted a first name that really suited him), X deliberately takes on challenges that seem to fit more comfortably in the pages of pulp science fiction than on the balance sheet of a public company. Its first project was the self-driving car, and subsequent ones include Google Glass, the Project Loon Internet service via balloon, Makani energy kites and a drone delivery service dubbed Project Wing. (Several X projects have graduated from the program: the Google Brain neural network is now part of the Research team at Google, while health spin off Verily Life Sciences is now developing a smart contact lens that originated at X, as well as a project that hopes to release nanoparticles in the bloodstream to detect early disease.)

Teller’s boss, Sergey Brin, wants X to drive dramatic change, defined as a 10x improvement on current methods, through rigorous experiments involving atoms, not just bits (in other words, real stuff that can crack, fall apart and explode). Oh yeah, and the goal is to make stuff that actually works — and, eventually, turns a profit. As Teller describes here in an adapted version of his 2016 TED talk, this requires a radical new method of invention that goes beyond the by now trite cliché, “fail fast.” It’s often a messy technique, as the examples below, some of which are made public here for the first time, illustrate.

— The Editors, Backchannel

In 1962, at Rice University, JFK told the country about a dream. It was a dream to put a person on the moon by the end of the decade. The eponymous moonshot. No one knew if it was possible to do, but he made sure a plan was pulled together to do it if it was possible. Great dreams aren’t just visions. They are visions coupled to strategies for making them real.

I have the incredible good fortune to work at a moonshot factory.

At X, formerly called Google[x], you’ll find an aerospace engineer working alongside a fashion designer and former military ops commanders brainstorming with laser experts. These engineers, makers, and inventors dream up new technologies that we hope can lead to profound improvements in the way we live. We use the word moonshot to remind us to keep our visions big. To keep dreaming. And we use the word factory to remind us to have concrete plans for giving each vision its best chance to flourish.

But I have a secret for you. The Silicon Valley hype machine has created this myth of visionaries who effortlessly build the future. Don’t believe the hype. The moonshot factory is a messy place. But rather than avoid the mess or pretend it’s not there, we’ve tried to make it our strength. We spend most of our time breaking things and working to discover that we’re wrong. That’s it. That’s the secret. Run at all the hardest parts of a problem first. Ask cheerfully, “How are we going to try to kill our project today!” We’ve found a balance that’s working for us — allowing our unchecked optimism to fuel our visions and then harnessing enthusiastic skepticism and critical thinking as a way to breathe life, breathe reality, into those visions.

I want to show you some of the projects we’ve had to leave behind on the cutting room floor and some gems that have, at least so far, not only survived this process but have been accelerated by it.

Here’s our moonshot blueprint. ­

We look for a huge problem in the world that affects many millions of people. ­

Then we try to propose a radical solution for solving that huge problem ­

And third, there needs to be some reason to believe that the technology for such a radical solution could actually be built. Some glimmer of hope to get us going and some clear first few steps we could take along that journey.

Last year we killed a project in automated vertical farming. This image above shows some of the lettuce we grew. 1 in 9 people on the planet suffer from undernourishment so the need for a moonshot is clear. Vertical farming uses 10 times less water and 100 times less land than conventional methods, and you can grow food close to where it’s consumed, so you don’t have to transport it long distances. We made progress on many of the issues like automated harvesting and efficient lighting but in the end we couldn’t get staple crops like grains and rice to grow this way, so we killed the project. If someone comes up with a dwarf species of rice, let us know — because that might crack the puzzle!

Here’s another huge problem: we pay enormous costs in both resources and environmental damage to ship goods worldwide. Economic development of landlocked countries is limited by lack of shipping infrastructure.

We came up with a radical proposed solution: ­a lighter­-than-­air, variable buoyancy cargo ship. This could get the cost of shipping closer to boats than planes, get the carbon footprint of moving cargo lower than for boats, and get speeds of transport halfway between boats and planes — all without needing runways. A real moonshot.

We came up with a set of clever technical breakthroughs that together might make it possible to build such ships inexpensively enough in volume. However cheap they would be in volume, though, we found out it was likely to cost close to $200M for the R&D and materials to design and construct the first one. Since X is structured around tight feedback loops of making mistakes, learning, and new designs, $200M is way too expensive for us to get the first data point on whether we’re on the right track. If a project has an Achilles heel, we want to know up front, not way down the road. So we killed this project.

As often happens, we may get a phoenix from the ashes of this project — the cargo project got us thinking about how we could make something lighter than air. Now we’re investigating a new material that’s super strong but wants to float. It could change how we interact with the sky, buildings, transportation, and more. Stay tuned!

Discovering a major project flaw doesn’t always end a project. It often gets us on a more productive path. This is our fully self­-driving prototype vehicle, which we built without a steering wheel or brake pedal. But this wasn’t always our goal.

With 1.2 million people dying on the roads globally each year, making cars that drive themselves was a natural moonshot to take. Three years ago, our retrofitted Lexus self­-driving cars were doing so well in testing that we loaned them out to other Googlers, to see what they thought of the experience. And we discovered that our plan to have the car do almost all the driving and have the person take over for emergencies was a really bad plan. It just wasn’t safe. People didn’t do their part, staying alert in case the car needed to hand control back to them. This was a very serious moment, and it sent the team back to the drawing board. And they came up with a beautiful new perspective.

Aim for a car where you’re truly a passenger — you tell the car where you want to go, push a button, and it takes you from point A to point B. By itself. This is how we could transform mobility. We’re grateful to have learned that as early on in the project as we did. It’s shaped our project ever since. Now, our cars have self­ driven more than 1.4 million miles and they’re out every day on the streets of Mountain View, CA, and Austin, Texas.

When you hit a potentially project­-ending discovery, sometimes it’s possible to shift your perspective instead. That’s one of X’s mantras. Come at the problem from some unusual angle that lets you get past project flaws as you uncover them. Shifting your perspective is so much more powerful than being smart. When you try to improve on existing techniques, you’re in a smartness contest with everyone who came before you. Not a good contest to be in.

Take wind energy. We’re not going to build a better standard wind turbine than all the very experienced people already in that industry. That’s a failure before we even start. But we have found a way to get higher up into the sky to reach faster, steadier winds and get more energy, without hundreds of tons of steel to get up there. Our Makani energy kite rises up from its perch by spinning up several propellers spread along its wing, pulling out a tether and drawing power up the tether as it rises. Once the tether is all the way out, the kite goes into crosswind circles in the sky and now the propellers that lifted it up have become small flying wind turbines, and this sends electricity back down the tether.

We haven’t yet found a way to kill this project, and the longer it survives that pressure, the more excited we get that this will be a much cheaper and more deployable form of wind energy for the world.

Perhaps the craziest­ sounding project we have is Project Loon.

We’re trying to create balloon­-powered Internet — a network of balloons in the stratosphere that can beam an Internet connection to rural and remote areas of the world. We hope this could connect as many as four billion people who today have little or no internet connection. But you can’t just strap a cell tower to a balloon and put it up in the sky. The winds are too strong; it will be carried away. The balloons are too high up to be tied to the ground and those tethers would be dangerous to planes. Here comes the crazy moment: What if, instead, we let them drift and taught them how to sail the winds to go where they needed to go?

The stratosphere has winds moving at quite different speeds and directions in thin strata. So we hoped we could use smart algorithms and wind data from all around the planet to maneuver the balloons a bit by moving up and down across a relatively small distance to find those different winds. The idea is to have enough balloons so as one floats out of your area, there’s another one ready to float into place, handing off the Internet connection just like your phone hands off to different cell towers as you drive down the freeway.

We get how improbable that vision sounds. For just that reason, since 2012, the Loon team has prioritized work that seems most difficult and therefore most likely to kill the project because we can’t accomplish it.

First we tried just doing Wifi from a balloon in the stratosphere down to an antenna on the ground — at first on our cars as we chased the balloons around, and then later on houses. We got it working! So we continued.

Could we get the balloon to talk directly to handsets rather than needing an antenna as an intermediary receiver? Yep! Could we get the balloon bandwidth high enough so it’s a real Internet experience? Our early tests were barely a megabit per second, but now we can deliver up to 15Mbps, enough to watch a TED talk.

Could we get the balloons to talk to each other, which would help us get a signal deeper into rural areas? Check!

Could we make balloons the size of a house stay up for more than 100 days while costing less than 5% of what traditional long life balloons have cost to make? In the end, yes! But you name it, we had to try it to get there!

We made round silvery balloons.

Giant pillow shaped balloons.

Balloons the size of a blue whale.

We’ve busted a lot of balloons.

One big thing that was likely to kill Loon was how well we could guide the balloons through the sky. One of our most important experiments was putting a “balloon inside a balloon” There are two compartments: one with air and one with helium. By pumping air in, you make the balloon heavier, or you let air out to make it lighter. These weight changes cause it to rise or fall and this simple movement of the balloon is our steering mechanism — we float up or down to find the wind traveling at the speed and direction we want. Is this good enough for us to navigate the balloons? Barely at first but better all the time.

These days, with our latest balloon, here, we can navigate a two mile vertical stretch of sky and sail a balloon to within 500 meters of where we want it to go from 20,000 kilometers away. We still need to lower balloon costs, but last year a balloon made inexpensively went around the world 19 times over 187 days, so we’re going to keep going.

Today our balloons are doing pretty much everything we’d need a complete system to do. We’re now in commercial discussions with telcos around the world and we’ll be flying over places like Indonesia for real service testing this year. Imagine another few billion people getting connected to the educational and economic opportunities of the Internet! And it makes me particularly happy to see the Loon team making such a bold vision come together by making fast failing central to their work.

This probably all sounds too good to be true. And you’re right. Being audacious and working on big, risky ideas makes people inherently uncomfortable: they’re pouring their all into an idea that’s far away from what most other people believe is sane and realistic. And they’re constantly confronting their own failures and inability to crack the problem. You can’t just command everyone to fail fast. People resist because they worry, “what happens if I fail?” Will people laugh at me? Will I get fired? I told you at the beginning what our secret is. I’m going to leave you with how we make it happen. The only way to get people to tackle audacious ideas AND get them to run at the hardest parts of the problem first is if doing that is the path of least resistance. We work hard at X to make it safe to fail. We killed over 100 investigations last year alone. I didn’t kill them. The teams themselves killed each one. And teams kill their ideas as soon as the evidence is on the table because they’re rewarded for it. They get applause from their peers. Hugs and high fives from their manager. They get promoted because of it. We’ve bonused every single person in teams that ended their projects, from teams as small as two to teams of more than thirty.

We believe in dreams at the moonshot factory. And enthusiastic skepticism isn’t the enemy of boundless optimism. It’s optimism’s perfect partner. It unlocks the potential in every idea. It makes the seemingly impossible actually accomplishable. We can create the future that’s in our dreams.

This is adapted from my 2016 TED talk. Images courtesy of X.