A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:13:50 · Pablo Srugo, Astro Teller
[00:13:50] S2: So before we get into that, I do want to touch a little bit on. As much as you say it's easy. Where do those, you said two hundred ideas per year that actually get a code name, which means there's probably more before that that don't, but where do those come from? How are you sourcing those ideas? [00:14:02] S0: So sometimes they come from Xers. They almost never come from me. I do that on purpose because I don't want this to be the Astro show. A lot of places get over controlled by the people at the top, not just controlled in the hierarchy sense, but controlled in the sort of mental and creativity sense. I want this to be a very bottoms up place. [00:14:24] S2: Is it also the danger of people saying, oh, Astro likes this idea. So let's invest more in this one because it's going to go further? [00:14:30] S0: Yeah, so I don't let us play that game. I'm a truth seeker. I'm like, oh you're working on the teleporter. It's not like I don't want the teleporter to win. But if the teleporter is not going to be a Waymo, I want to know now. I don't want to know in three years, and I want you to be with me in wanting to know now, and not wanting to know in three years. So I don't want you to work on the stuff that's like, live to fight another day. [00:14:54] S2: Right.
00:14:54 · Pablo Srugo, Astro Teller
[00:14:54] S2: Right. [00:14:55] S0: Live to fight another day is absolutely what happens in the rest of Silicon Valley. But every entrepreneur knows in their hearts that that's actually like building a ladder to the moon. All these band-aids, they hate it, they all hate it. So let's work on the thing that really teaches us, is this going to change the world or not? I don't care if anyone pays for it right now, let's answer the scariest questions. When the scariest question left is, will someone pay for it? Then we better go get someone to pay for it. [00:15:24] S2: We talk about this in the context of the podcast as, before startup mode there's research mode and having interviewed a lot of founders. Not all of them are good at this phase of figuring out if it's even the right idea to go after. A lot of founders have the DNA of being sellers or builders, so they want to get going, they want to get started, and they just want to start punching through walls, and making things happen. As you say, build that ladder to the moon. Whatever it is, just make it become reality without taking that first step that's a little bit more detached. Where you're able to very easily dismiss something, let something go to move to the next one and the problem becomes you might spend three years or five years on an idea. That is literally you pushing a boulder up a hill and it's just never going to get easy on the other side.
00:16:09 · Astro Teller
[00:16:09] S0: I would say the vast majority are doing that to some extent. Now, you can make that less likely as an entrepreneur if you make sure that you can see your goal from where you are. If you can see your goal, metaphorically speaking. Where the only really hard thing is how fast you run getting from here to there. That's what startups are built for and that's totally not what X is built for. But if your goal is over the horizon, you don't even know what direction it is and it might not even exist. So I think of it like, if we were lost in a rowboat. Somehow people get in this mindset of how vigorously I row is going to save us. You know what? If we're lost in a rowboat, I'm going to spend ninety percent of my time with the sextant and ten percent of my time rowing. But that is a really hard thing to get people to unlearn because they have learned that progress is the ultimate metric instead of learning being the ultimate metric. But especially while we're at X, because we're not yet company building. We do things that look more and more like company building. But we're buying options on the future and so information gain, the learning per dollar, is what we're actually trying to maximize. Now over time, of course, we do have to start answering questions like, does anyone want this thing? How much would it cost for us to make this thing? How much would people pay for this thing? Is the second number larger than the first? Ultimately you have to ask and answer questions that start sounding like business questions, but we do it as a set of experiments. We still even there say, we're not trying to find something people will buy and then sell a lot of it. We're trying to deeply understand, is there a dent in the universe to be made here? And if so, what's the right way to do it? The ideas come from all over the world. We often will find in a university, someone has some cool thing. I don't know, at Johns Hopkins, someone invented a frictionless surface. A frictionless surface is not a moonshot. That is a raw technology opportunity. Someone else might be really interested in ending warfare. Ending warfare sounds like a nice thing to do. Humanity is not better for wars, but that's also not a moonshot. The trick is to find a bunch of needs and technology pieces, and mush them together in a really surprising way.
00:18:29 · Astro Teller, Pablo Srugo
So we're not the paradigm shifting scientists. That's not what we do. We're paradigm shifting system engineers. We're trying to bridge that gap between basic science and something that's like venture investable. But that's like often a five or six year gap that gets filled very badly. [00:18:47] S2: And tell me a little bit more about the idea. So they come from a bunch of different places, but what does an idea look like in its rawest form? Is it like Waymo or a self driving car? Was that the idea, or was it, you know what I mean? What do they look like at that stage?
00:18:58 · Astro Teller
[00:18:58] S0: So the ideas come from all over the world. In the very early days, Waymo said, more than a million people die in car accidents. It makes no sense that humans are still driving cars. A moonshot for us is huge problem with the world, science fiction sounding solution to that problem, and some technology or set of technologies that give us a sense that this is a testable hypothesis for making that science fiction sounding solution. So Waymo said in the early days, more than a million people die in car accidents every year. More than a trillion dollars is wasted in car accidents and people sitting in traffic. That is not the future. Crazy idea, what if cars just drove themselves and we're just going to make a self driving car. And here's a set of reasons to believe that the technology, LIDAR, radar, et cetera, is just ready enough. This was like circa 2009, 2010, that maybe we could do it. We'll be the right amount too early in trying to do that. But even then, saying we're making a self driving car turned out to be the wrong framing. I mean, it got us going. But after a while, we realized, oh, we're not actually trying to make and sell cars. That's not our job. So if the first five years Waymo thought we're going to be making and selling a car. The next five years they thought, actually our job is transforming mobility, just moving people from point A to point B, that's our job. But even that framing, while better was still wrong. Because do we really want to be the ones cleaning the cars? Do we want to be the ones charging the cars? Do we want necessarily to have to own the interface with the consumer on their phone? And so if you ask Waymo now, what's your framing for what you're doing? They say they're trying to make the world's safest driver and so, by getting more and more specific. Obviously the world's safest driver was a part of making a self driving car. But as they're getting more and more concrete, and specific about what they want to be the best in the world at. It opens up more possibilities for them to explore that space differently, to partner better with other people and that's part of the learning journey of a moonshot, is trying to understand the sort of architecture for where we're going, why we're going there, what kind of help we need along the way.
00:21:11 · Astro Teller, Pablo Srugo
How to understand what it means when the alligators jump out of the swamp and try to bite us. [00:21:17] S2: And would you say, take Waymo for example. It's a type of idea which I would categorize as, if you build it, they will come. If you can actually deliver self driving and you figure out the logistics and you figure out the price, obviously. But many people are going to want to not drive their car because many people want a driver. Are most of your ideas like that where it's, will the tech get there, and that's kind of the main risk? Or is that just, that just happens to be Waymo, but others are more. Maybe the tech is there and now it's a demand risk or the risk is somewhere else other than just, can we build it?