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Astro Teller & Ivo Stivoric: Why moonshots require unlearning everything you know
00:27:27
We chat with Astro and Ivo about how they've maintained one of tech's longest creative partnerships, why moonshots require unlearning everything you know about building products, and how they're using their "moonshot factory" push the boundaries of what's possible when you combine emerging technology with empathy for human needs.
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- [00:02]
Astro Teller
I think that great design is actually about just helping people realize that they don't have the complete set of constraints yet. That's it. The thing that gets me excited about design is just the process of appreciating what is the full set of things we're going to have to solve here. You can't solve them all first, but let's at least know what they are and kind of be poking at them in a really thoughtful way.
- [00:27]
Aaron Walter
When a company talks about taking a moonshot, it often ends up being something trivial, a new emoji keyboard or delivering a pizza in less than 30 minutes. But at X the Moonshot Factory, which is part of Google, they're tackling some of the world's thorniest problems, sustainably feeding the world's population, climate change, education, and much more.
- [00:45]
Eli Willery
Today we're speaking with Astro Teller. He's captain of Moonshots and his partner Ivo Stavorik, vice president at X. Astro has a PhD in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon and and wrote a prophetic 1997 novel about AI called Exegesis. He's the grandson of Edward Teller, who worked on the Manhattan Project, but his own legacy is built on creating protected spaces where multidisciplinary teams can tackle humanity's biggest challenges. From self driving cars to Internet access delivered by balloon, Evo leads a portfolio focused on climate change, sustainability and social justice. A designer by training who cut his teeth in the early days of wearable computing at Carnegie Mellon's Engineering Design Research Center, Ivo brings a unique perspective on bridging human needs with breakthrough tech. Together with Astro, he co founded Bodimedia, one of the pioneering companies in wearable health monitors, which was later acquired by Jawbone.
- [01:50]
Aaron Walter
We chat with Astro and Evo about how they've maintained one of tech's longest creative partnerships, why moonshots require unlearning everything you know about building products and how they're using their moonshot factory to push the boundaries of what's possible when you combine emerging technology with empathy for human needs. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology.
- [02:10]
Eli Willery
I'm EliWillery and I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better Premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. You get four episodes per month rather than just two. All are ad free and you get invited to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. You'll hear a preview of this episode, but if you'd like to Hear the full conversation Please consider becoming a premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com that's designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. It's just seven bucks a month and it supports not only your personal growth, it also supports your design community. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. If you can't afford a subscription right now, just shoot us an email at subscriptions the curiosity department.com and we'll help you out.
- [03:07]
Ivo Stavorik
Foreign.
- [03:13]
Eli Willery
We'Ll return to the conversation after this quick break. Design Better is brought to you by WIX Studio, the platform built for all web creators to design, develop and manage exceptional web projects at scale. Learn more@wix.com studio and now back to the show.
- [03:43]
Aaron Walter
Astro Teller and Ivo Stavorek, welcome to the Design Better Podcast.
- [03:48]
Astro Teller
Thanks for having us.
- [03:49]
Ivo Stavorik
Excited to be here.
- [03:50]
Aaron Walter
Astro, you and I share an almost crossing of the paths in that you were at Stanford in the early 90s and I was there maybe a couple years after you left, but it was a really interesting time to be there. Sort of the dawn of the commercial Internet. I remember using my first Internet browser when I got to campus. But let's fast forward a little bit beyond that and let's talk about your time at Carnegie Mellon. And is that the beginning of your friendship with Evo?
- [04:15]
Astro Teller
Yeah, I did a PhD in artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon. Ivo and I met on the pickup soccer field at the time though we actually started club soccer team together afterwards and he had just finished his undergrad in design, but he was one of the grown up supervision in the field of wearable computers and so as I was doing my PhD, he was co running the wearable Lab part of the Engineering Design Research center at Carnegie Mellon and I started consulting with them and that's how we started working together.
- [04:50]
Ivo Stavorik
Adult supervision is kind of a funny concept, but especially for how young we were. But the only thing I'd add there is from a design background there was a unique opportunity there to bring a cross functional team together to build something that would actually have impact or usability in the field in things like inspection, manufacturing, maintenance, those kind of enterprise or industries. Leading a lab was like being a product manager or being an initiative or platform manager and how to bring all these different disciplines together to one vision, one voice or one kind of delivery that was going to have the kind of results that you learned from talking to the field or talking to these different users and how we were going to build stuff in the lab versus build something in a lab and then putting it out there and said like what? You don't know how to use a computer and a mouse or a headboard display? What's wrong with you? The whole idea was to get out there, learn from people first and then build something that was going to work in their spaces and their workflows and how things go.
- [05:42]
Eli Willery
Those are the very early days of wearables. I live close to Georgia Tech and worked at mailchimp right next to the campus and I would see people walking around with wearable computers, those little twiddler input devices and so forth.
- [05:55]
Ivo Stavorik
Yeah, at that time it was mit, Carnegie Mellon and Georgia Tech really that were a little bit of Toronto too that were leading the pioneering research in that.
- [06:03]
Astro Teller
Thad Starner was still at MIT at the time. He only moved to Georgia Tech a little bit after that.
- [06:07]
Ivo Stavorik
Yeah, yeah.
- [06:09]
Eli Willery
So that turned into a company and so the two of you meet playing soccer, have some complimentary interests here and that became a company. Tell us about that process and what you did.
- [06:22]
Ivo Stavorik
Obviously as astro completed his Ph.D. he had lots of options to go to different places. I think we probably both had various options to consider, but as we got involved in the wearable space, we kept thinking about, well, what happens if you turn the sensors around instead of trying to understand the environment and AR kind of stuff and moved it towards the body? What would be the opportunity? I think the other thing that drives both of us, including today at X, is you know, this whole purpose and impact opportunity that you're looking for in your life or your career, where you're headed. And I having a chance to work in healthcare as a first opportunity in wearables was very attractive to us and would have many ideas or directions that could go. Like there was no lack of interest or invention or opportunity there, maybe more than we expected. I think the other thing there was like if you were ever going to do something really interesting in human interaction with technology, if you didn't understand the human body or you didn't tap into the five senses plus the sixth or seventh or eighth depends on how you count and how you think about the world. You were never going to do anything like really brand new in interaction design if you couldn't tap. That also was like a thesis we had, that's a very long term thesis. But starting in healthcare would allow us to learn all these things about daily lives of people, human physiology, how these things could be tapped for other opportunities. And so we spent time really thinking through the whole domino or whole vision of what that platform could become.
- [07:43]
Astro Teller
Yeah, and I Would say we brought two very different things together. So the work that Ivo had been doing was, hey, there are other people working in wearables, but they're all techies and the things that they're making, no one is ever going to use. It doesn't matter whether the tech works or not, no one's going to use them. I and the people who are working for me have actually done the work to figure out what people would actually wear and where you could put not only interactions on the body, but where you could put sensors on the body in ways that are actually relevant to the actual physiological signals. But also what would people actually tolerate and wear on a long term basis.
- [08:22]
Ivo Stavorik
Movement, bending, sleeping, that kind of stuff too.
- [08:25]
Astro Teller
And then what I brought was I had just done a PhD and one of the things that my PhD showed and was one of the first times it had been shown was that you could take a set of sensors from the human body and even though each of them was noisy, there was real evidence that, that if you combine them in what is now known as sensor fusion, you could get a gestalt signal about what was going on with the person that was much better than any one of the underlying sensors that they could kind of compromise and make up for each other's flaws. And so that technological aha combined with this new understanding about wearability allowed us to have confidence that we could go into the space of multi sensor wearable body monitors for health and wellness.
- [09:13]
Ivo Stavorik
Yeah, even diagnostics and therapeutics and other things in the future. That was really what impassioned us to consider the concept. And I mean to say it in a slightly different way, like could you take $10 of sensors ultimately and be able to replicate what a $500,000 medical device in a lab clinical setting delivers for diagnostics? And through the work that Astro had proven out and working together as a team at the company Body Media, which is what we named it, in the end we were able to actually prove out that thesis.
- [09:47]
Eli Willery
So Body Media, you guys create this? It was acquired by Jawbone in 2013. What was that process like of like moving a company that you've built, you've got these ideas and that gets acquired and moved inside of a company. How did that change the work that you were doing?
- [10:06]
Ivo Stavorik
As we were going through a lot of the journey that we were on, there was obviously other opportunities to look at what we maybe weren't able to do on our own. We were two private companies who grew up a certain parallel path in the industry of wearables. Them More on the started on the audio side, we started on the wellness and health side, had some convergence that happened later as we went through our own being early arcs of a startup journey that you can be on. I always joke that sometimes, as you said earlier, sometimes when you're that early into a market space, people will call you pioneers. Other people will just say, well you're just early. But we had gone through different journeys as startups and thought together we could really do something demonstrable in the space. And that connection based on our familiarity with our journeys, but also the technologies that were synergistic and complementary and also the idea that we would expand the platform in multiple ways from like wellness to different parts of healthcare, but also into other kind of consumer applications. Cause we also had the audio piece with Jawbone and what we could do with that in the home and automation and new interactions was a really unique vision and very design centric starting point. Both companies actually, as we brought that together, thought that why not attempt to pull that together and see if we could be one of those private companies that complete the whole arc as a convergence instead of separate.
- [11:23]
Eli Willery
Let's fast forward further. You're now still working together. It's kind of amazing. This is a very long partnership that you've had. You're both at Google X in leadership roles and Google X is doing some pretty amazing stuff and in a lot of different types of spaces. I'm curious if either of you have reflected on how the early parts of your career kind of prepared you for the type of work that you're doing at Google X, where you're working on Moonshot, kind of think big, take bigger risks, types of projects for sure.
- [11:57]
Astro Teller
I think both of our careers have helped us a lot in getting to hear there is a sense in which we are trying to help people learn how to be entrepreneurial. And so having been entrepreneurs ourselves, I mean, I don't know how we could do that part of our job without it. We are also trying to help people do something which is outside the norm. It's sort of not the fair way for the venture world by design. And I think that we've always been hanging out in this sort of land of what if? In a way where we were always very clear about what it took to raise the money, but we were always interested in solving for something over the horizon. Whereas most of the best venture backed companies tend to be distant, but you can see it from where you are and so then running incredibly fast in a specific direction and sort of, you know, I'll walk over hot coals and blast through the brick walls. That's how I'm going to win. Moonshots is very different. Moonshots has a lot more curiosity, a lot more wrong turns. You fundamentally don't even know what the right question is. Design thinking. We don't yet know what the solution is. And both Ivo and I really like that kind of curiosity. A sort of designing of the problem itself and designing of the prospective business and all of the exploration, hypothesis making and then the testing of those hypotheses, trying to understand what the real constraints are and if you can change the constraints themselves and then designing within those constraints. I think we both grew up professionally doing both of those things and riffing off of each other very productively in that process. And that's what taking moonshots is really. Yeah.
- [13:46]
Ivo Stavorik
And I'll also add that, as Astro mentioned, like keeping an eye on the horizons. I don't think there's any enterprise that we've gone after early days or even here at X, where we know that there might be some early 1.0 and ventures into the marketplace, but we're always keeping an eye on that 4.0 or where the vision and the opportunity can be that advanced development or being on the edge of technology or understanding what those edges are so that we can import them or sequence them into our roadmap apps has been something that I think we've always had an affinity towards and have kept consistent with any of the work we've been doing. I think the other thing is that we've seen the battles or the shots on goal it takes to get something up and running, even if it's the first one and a half people working on an idea and some small amount of change to start something. Many of our moonshots have started in that same way. 1/2 people in a few dollars to get it kicked off and see if there's some viability there, plus time talking to a bunch of people in the market and even some potential partners and so forth and some lab time. So from the very early days, we've also seen the arcs of what can go positive with those developments. We've also seen where there can be troubles in the mix and how you might pull a rabbit out of a hat when those troubles come around. And so some of that entrepreneurial experience has really helped us when we're trying to found or shepherd or help build up these new moonshots here at X.
- [15:03]
Aaron Walter
So X has a pretty specific definition for moonshots. I mean, Sometimes it's like we have a moonshot to invent this new flavor of soda. You know, I think the aspiration for you guys is a little different. So maybe you could define what exactly would qualify for a moonshot at Google X.
- [15:19]
Astro Teller
The blueprint we use, which sounds sort of deceptively simple, but it's actually very hard to come up with a great version of it is one name the huge problem with the world you want to solve, which is to make sure that there's actually some reason to do it, that it's not an academic exercise. It also helps make it more likely you can create a business out of it if you're really solving a problem for somebody. Two, what's the science fiction sounding product or service? The radical proposed solution that however unlikely it is, you could actually make the thing? We can pre agree if you made that radical proposed solution, it would actually solve the huge problem. And then three, what's the breakthrough technology that gives us some glimmer of hope that you could actually make that radical proposed solution, thereby solving that huge problem with the world? That doesn't mean you're at all likely to win. It means there's a testable hypothesis. Once you have those three things, you have a moonshot story hypothesis that you can at least go test, which is that first one and a half people and those first tens of thousands of dollars, which is, we have a glimmer of hope. Let's apply a little bit of pressure and get a tiny bit of evidence. Either that evidence will teach us that things are looking more likely than we thought. Ooh, two glimmers of hope. Then we double down on it. Or that first piece of evidence doesn't look so great, fine, we just don't work on it anymore and we just move on to the next one.
- [16:49]
Eli Willery
When does judgment come into play? Because one of the challenges with a moonshot with a big idea is you kind of need some room to run to try some things out and not have people coming in and saying, will it make money? Is this commercially viable? But when does judgment come in where someone's going to review this and say like yay or nay, or you have to report out on what you've done.
- [17:17]
Astro Teller
The judgment ramps up as the dollars being spent ramp up. So we can be very open minded at the wide part of our funnel because we're not spending very much money on these tiny little things right at the beginning. Once it's 10 people or 20 people, it's a lot more serious. If we get 15 people working full time on something, then we're going to apply a lot more judgment about what is the evidence you're gathering, how efficient are you at gathering evidence, and what is that evidence telling us about the quality of this moonshot, the reward risk ratio of the thing that you're trying to do, and how does that compare against other things we could be doing with that same money?
- [17:57]
Ivo Stavorik
I might also adjust a little bit how you're asking about judgment. I mean, it's a very iterative process, as you two know from your own practices. You're out there in parallel asking for judgments almost all the time. I mean, first of all, we're going after the hardest part of the problem first. If you've seen any of the historical dialogue that we've explained about doing moonshots versus waiting till the end to find out that it's never going to come together. So I think we're actually talking to the commercial opportunities. We're talking to potential partnership opportunities, investment opportunities in parallel to the work we're doing here to see if the thing will even work. We're bringing other people to the table who can really test our hypotheses and maybe give us maybe new opportunities that we haven't been considering because they're bringing a different perspective or maybe challenge us with the way we're doing it. So I think the quote unquote judgment and to use other terms like critique is iterative and constant. If anything we're doing at this scale or could be scale in the future, and we are trying to build things that definitely should have a purpose, otherwise we wouldn't take it on, but need to be sustainable, enduring businesses in the future. I think we're looking at that very early also, not as a we're going to have the answer right away, but as a parallel track to the evolution of the concept or the opportunity.
- [19:06]
Astro Teller
As fans of design thinking, if you go back to the three criteria I just named, huge problem, radical proposed solution, breakthrough tech. We could say, what's the market? But we don't. We say, what's the huge problem that allows people, do you want me to make you a chair or do you want me to make you an ass levitating device? Kind of the same ask, but kind of not right, because an ass levitating device opens up a lot more opportunity for creativity and seeing the world differently. When we say radical proposed solution, we could say product or service, but we don't because especially in the early days, we want to free people from some of that kind of mechanical business plan. Y Thinking that can constrain how they're going to solve the problem. Even though, as Ivo said, ultimately it doesn't count unless we create an enduring business that does have some product or service.
- [19:58]
Eli Willery
Yeah, I think there's a question inside of my prior question, which is I'm curious about the collision of perspectives that often happens in these scenarios. First, it's not too many companies that believe in and invest in big idea thinking, like Google is doing with Google X. That's rather unique. And then to have the Runway, and Runway is time, space, resources, money to be able to try something out. And generally what I've seen is executives, they are running a company, they are responsible to shareholders, and they have to provide answers. But they also want to innovate and they want to create new opportunities for the business. And there can be a collision where these two forces meet. Here's the space to go create and is this a viable thing or does it need to be killed? I would think that in doing the type of work that you're doing, you would confront that or have some methodology or way of thinking or even just a way of explaining ideas that maybe mitigate some of that collision.
- [21:11]
Astro Teller
One of the things I would say is if some other company tried to start a moonshot factory right now, they would have a different set of challenges than Alphabet has, because Alphabet has already taken the pain and primed the pump. These things take 7, 8, 10 years to go from that sounds crazy to oh, my God, that's definitely a good idea. And even that's definitely a good idea. But that doesn't mean it's profitable yet. Right. Because Alphabet has already primed the pump. It looks like we're spending money every year here at X and we're putting out something great into the world every year. So it feels almost like you get this immediacy, which partly solves your question or your problem, that tension, but it's a fake solve because really, the money that goes in now, a lot of it is actually investing for, like, the deep future. But because the pump has been primed, it feels like money goes in and something great comes out immediately, and that helps to resolve it. But you have to take the pain of money goes in and nothing comes out for seven or eight years before you get to that magical place. I think that's just part of the reality of any moonshot factory. You have to prime the pump to help solve that problem. And then on top of that, that's part of my job, is to create a sandbox inside of which people don't feel too much of that tension. They understand they're playing the long game. They have to show up with urgency every day. But they understand that the point of that urgency is to use Alphabet's money really wisely, but not to play a short game with that money. And that's my job, to make sure that Alphabet feels good about that.
- [22:49]
Ivo Stavorik
The companies we were in before, we would always keep this look at the horizon, look at what's next, keep advanced development going constantly. And so understanding that as part of the principle, like when these other issues come up, serious business challenges, issues, opportunities, and you're trying to make trade spaces, keeping that advanced development opportunity alive, knowing that it will be an asset sometime in the future, is something that came up even as really young parts of our career and have seen that grow over time and see the value of that. That being said, it is a safe space here that's been created to go take some shots on goal on some of these ideas. And what we also said was, you're not starting with 150 people and 150 million and go from there. You're talking like one and a half people, tens of thousands of dollars, and go try something, and you're building up a pipeline of portfolio of projects. They're going really early stage and like, kind of coming down to those where you get to the rate of one or two of these pop up a year that become more public and more understanding of how this has been going. So you do have to take some upfront investment. But then pretty soon it starts to become a flow of the pipeline where water's flowing and new ideas are showing up all the time as a discipline and persistence. And some of those ideas are actually making it through the different phases to the point where people see what we mean when we say moonshot, or what we mean when we've given that early safety for those multiple shots and goal to find the right way to go into that market. Even if it took us 10 years to find the right way, because we might have tried a project 10 times, but the 11th time we finally figured out the right way to market, or the timing of the technology, or timing of the market, or some other incentive structure that exists now that will allow us to actually make a play.
- [24:25]
Aaron Walter
Astrid, you mentioned design thinking a few times, and I'm curious, because I would say it's gotten the term itself, and maybe human centered design in general has gotten a little bit of a bad rap in recent years, and maybe deservedly so, because you see these instances of kind of design theater where we get a bunch of people in a room and there's post its and there's whiteboards and then nothing really happens, nothing gets built. So I'm curious if you do use some of these methodologies. My guess is or hypothesis is that you put in that last segment, which is actually implementation and building something and trying it versus just having all these ideas that maybe a really lo fi prototype gets made but nothing else. Yeah, I'm curious about that.
- [25:04]
Astro Teller
First, I'm not a designer. I'm not even close. I'm excited about design, especially kind of in the broader sense of design, but I'm not a designer. I really like the definition. This is from Herb Simon, who is one of the fathers of artificial intelligence. Also not a designer, but he said.
- [25:21]
Eli Willery
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