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 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 therefore you're in the opposite mentality where you're totally open for the reasons why something might fail or not work and you're also stack ranking your ideas based on the honest like failure signals so question and then you decide like the duration the resources how do you what are the next steps you must design yeah everything i call technical discovery

You've got to prove the hardest thing first.

And typically when you're building something that could be 10x better, you have to have a technical breakthrough.

Technical breakthroughs tend to be the reasons why you can do 10x better.

And so the question is like, why is no one else done 10X better product, right?

Well, they haven't had the technical breakthrough or the experimentation or tried all of these things.

You know, when you think about like every single incredible breakthrough in humanity, it's because, you know, it's not because the apple fell on Newton's head and he just had the idea, right?

It's because someone sat in a lab and tried a hundred different ways to solve the problem and failed.

And every one of those failures failed.

taught him something and every failure is something that you learn about the problem that you can use to make the next experiment and so you know sitting around and trying to figure out the electric motor right you know they sat around and did a hundred experiments and every single one that failed they learned something

One of the biggest mistakes that I made as a startup founder was the third startup that I ran.

And I ended up working on this for four or five years.

And looking back on this honestly now,

um i should have killed the startup two years earlier i ended up working on it for two years of my life where i could have been working on something else that opportunity cost is enormous because i did not see the failure signals and i didn't say you know what we should shut this down and work on something else and i think it's the biggest mistake young founders make they so want it to work out that they end up basically using all of their energy to try to focus on how it could work

without ever having a pre like when you start on something you need to say you know what is it that i need to prove or disprove and honestly say did i prove it or disprove it and if you haven't proved it and it's a failure you got to shut it down really fast or i've it failed but i learned something that's so interesting i'm going to start a new experiment okay what was the most interesting project you worked on in google x

So, I mean, the drone delivery project was the the entire project that I worked on at Google X. And what I what I really learned about this was we used to go out into because you couldn't fly drones legally anywhere in the US apart from military airspace.

So we used to have to go out into the desert.

We worked with NASA.

NASA had aerospace that we could use.

And we literally would be duct taping together pieces of plastic with computers inside it and, you know, sending them up, trying to get them to do kind of test loops and stuff.

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