Astro Teller

speaker

540 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Astro Teller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Leap Academy with Ilana Golan · Google X's Astro Teller: Why the Biggest Breakthroughs Start with Failure | EP167 · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

Anyone who pretends differently is telling you a just so story after the fact.

That's just survivor bias.

You cannot do radical innovation without being mostly wrong.

So the main thing that happened while I was interviewing

with Alphabet is I kept asking, what is your tolerance for stopping things?

Because that is the rate limiting step of innovation.

If you don't have tolerance for that, I can't succeed here.

And essentially, everybody said, we want to be great at that, but we aren't yet great at that.

And I believe them.

They at least wanted to be.

And so my only sort of ask or test before I joined Alphabet to help co-found what is now the Moonshot Factory was operational and cultural separation.

Not because Google is anything other than great.

Google is a really amazing company.

we needed to be and work differently in order to produce something that would be different.

And I was convinced that in order to be able to create an environment where it was rational, locally, to actually kill your own projects, to be in this sort of much more rapid sort of discovery, intellectual honesty process,

We needed to have a subtly but profoundly different culture, and that couldn't happen without the cultural and operational separation, which, you know, Alphabet, Google gave to me and Sebastian, which is why I joined.

I'm gonna play a game with you where we're gonna pretend that you're coming to join X. Don't worry, I'm not actually stealing you, but for this conversation, imagine that you're considering coming to X and you're asking me that question, which is like the central thing that you should care about and I had better be able to answer.

On the surface,

All we're asking for is intellectual honesty, nothing more.

So surely we can agree that if the thing that you're working on is not actually the best way for X in alphabet to spend its money trying to help the world, if God came and told us that that was the truth, we could agree we should stop doing that thing.

Showing 61–80 of 540 · page 4 of 27