Sean Mullaney

speaker

1,197 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 23 Apr

Sean Mullaney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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The Entrepreneur Experiment · Why 10x Goals Are Easier Than 10% Ones: 5 Scaling Secrets from Google X & Zalando with Sean Mullaney · 23 Apr 2026 podcast

And Sergey was so excited about it that he's like, I want to do this full time.

I want to figure out what they call moonshot ideas.

Ideas that are just so big and transformational that Google can take all of its advantages, whether it's computing power or research or distribution, and put big money behind ideas that are just outrageous.

And so he kind of formalized that into what was at the time called Google X. And they started to staff up their first two or three projects outside of the self-driving car.

So you'll remember Google Glass was one of them.

And so he started this project called Google Wing and hired an MIT professor and two or three of his students and basically said, I want you to create, you know, a flying delivery system using drones.

so they'd just gotten started and um there was a real shortage of people who understood kind of operations go to markets like this kind of so x would turn to the parent organization at google and they basically said look we want to hire someone to come in and run operations and

Is there anyone in the sales operations organization that's like really innovative and, you know, could be good in a founder startup environment?

And so my name quickly came up and I got called in, had an interview and they're like, yeah, but you've got to move to Silicon Valley.

And I'm like, oh, you know, this is like the one thing that I would move to Silicon Valley to be in this like, you know, Google X labs.

That's quite a jump.

So one day I'm sitting in the office here in Dublin, and then the next week I'm in a desert in Nevada with drones duct taped together, crashing them in a NASA facility.

About a year and a half.

Yeah, and this is the thing that Google was exciting to work back then.

It was still like a Wild West entrepreneurial playground.

And the founders were still really encouraging this kind of mindset of try a ton of stuff, experiment with everything.

Hire people who have no reason to be hired but are just experimental and intelligent and let them loose.

Yeah.

And it's not just big organizations, you know, um, C point we're, we're still in a startup mode, you know, we have 20 people.

Um, but I'm constantly trying to create room for what I call technical discovery, which is trying things that we don't know whether they're technical, technically possible.

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