Astro Teller & Ivo Stivoric: Why moonshots require unlearning everything you know

0:01Ivo Stivoric: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.

0:26Astro Teller: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. Today we're speaking with Astro Teller. He's captain of moonshots. And his partner, Ivo Stvorik, vice president at X. Astro has a PhD in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon and wrote a prophetic 1997 novel about AI called Exegesis. He's the grandson of Edward Teller, who worked on the Manhattan Project.

1:07Astro Teller: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. Evo brings a unique perspective on bridging human needs with breakthrough tech. Together with Astro, he co-founded Body Media, one of the pioneering companies in wearable health monitors, which was later acquired by Jawbone.

1:49Astro Teller: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. I'm Eli Willard. 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.

2:21Astro Teller: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 at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe. That's designbetterpodcast.com slash 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 at thecuriositydepartment.com, and we'll help you out.

3:13Astro Teller:We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

3:20Ivo Stivoric:This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook.

3:53Astro Teller:And now, back to the show.

4:00Astro Teller:Astro Teller and Ivo Stivorek, welcome to the Design Better podcast. Thanks for having us. Excited to be here. 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. Is that the beginning of your friendship with Ivo?

4:32Ivo Stivoric: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 a 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. Adult supervision is kind of a funny concept, but especially for how young we were.

5:12Ivo Stivoric: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 learn from talking to the field or talking to these different users and how we were going to build stuff in a lab versus build something in a lab and then bring it out there and say, what, you don't know how to use a computer and a mouse or a hedge-borne display?

5:51Ivo Stivoric: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.

5:59Astro Teller:Those were 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.

6:12Ivo Stivoric:Yeah, at that time, it was MIT, Carding and Mellon, and Georgia Tech, really, a little bit of Toronto, too, that were leading the pioneering research in that. Thad Starner was still at MIT at the time. He only moved to Georgia Tech a little bit afterwards. That's correct, yeah.

6:26Astro Teller:So that turned into a company. And so the two of you meet playing soccer, have some complementary interests here, and that became a company. Tell us about that process and what you did.

6:39Ivo Stivoric:Obviously, as Astro completed his PhD, 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 move it towards the body? What would be the opportunity? I think the other thing that drives both of us, including today at X, is this whole purpose and impact opportunity that you're looking for in your life or your career or where you're headed. And I think 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 it could go.

7:17Ivo Stivoric: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're 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 six or seven or eight, 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.

7:55Ivo Stivoric:And so we spent time really thinking through the whole domino or whole vision of what that platform could become. Yeah. And I would say we brought two very different things together. So the work that Evo 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.

8:39Ivo Stivoric:Movement, bending, sleeping, that kind of stuff too. 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 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.

9:30Ivo Stivoric: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.

10:04Astro Teller:So Body Media, you guys create this, it was acquired by Jawbone in 2013. What was that process like of 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?

10:23Ivo Stivoric: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 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 were just early.

10:55Ivo Stivoric: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 kinds 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.

11:29Ivo Stivoric:As you 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.

11:39Astro Teller:So 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.

12:14Ivo Stivoric:I think both of our careers have helped us a lot in getting to here. There is a sense in which we're 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.

13:05Ivo Stivoric: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.

13:53Ivo Stivoric: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, 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 roadmaps 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.

14:36Ivo Stivoric: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. I want to have people in a few dollars to get it kicked off and see if there's some viability there. Plus, you know, 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.

15:06Ivo Stivoric: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.

15:20Astro Teller: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, and 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. The blueprint we use, which sounds sort of deceptively simple, but it's actually

15:43Ivo Stivoric: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?

16:28Ivo Stivoric: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, you know, 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.

17:04Ivo Stivoric:And we just move on to the next one.

17:07Astro Teller: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.

17:34Ivo Stivoric:And 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?

18:14Ivo Stivoric: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 until 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.

18:46Ivo Stivoric: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.

19:23Ivo Stivoric: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.

20:09Ivo Stivoric:Even though, as Ivo said, ultimately it doesn't count unless we create an enduring business that does have some product or service.