A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:06:26 · Pablo Srugo, Astro Teller
[00:06:26] S2: Completely agree and any of those businesses, Google Brain, Waymo. I mean, these are businesses that are once in a generation type businesses. Just about any founder that I know would be more excited to have one of those, let alone multiple of them. What I want to talk to you about is, when I graduated university, I wanted to be a founder, I wanted to be an entrepreneur and frankly, being honest here. The thing I struggled with most was, especially at the beginning. How do I come up with a great idea? How do you actually do that? And now, I've spoken to many founders, and there's many. You know, you've got your classic, I felt a problem myself, I went and fixed it, it just kind of happened. You know, maybe Shopify was built that way. You've got the other ones that are even more serendipitous than that. Facebook is just, I'm building stuff, I'm having fun, I'm having a good time, something clicks and I'm just going to chase that, and execute on it. But when you're going to sit down and you're going to say, I'm going to create a Moonshot deliberately. That just feels harder to me, and I'd love to explore what happens behind the scenes to make that happen. [00:07:21] S0: Yeah, so I'm going to pretend that I'm recruiting you to come to X, because I think that'll help. You don't actually have to quit your job, though maybe you will. It's happened before. [00:07:31] S2: Maybe I will, yeah.
00:07:33 · Astro Teller
[00:07:33] S0: But pretend that we were in this dialogue. You're a founder and you're thinking of coming to X, but you kind of want to know, what am I signing up for here? So one of the fundamental things I would want you to know is, if you have something you just really believe in, please do not come to X. I would analogize that, I know this doesn't sound super friendly. If you want to go to Vegas and you just believe that seventeen is your lucky number, and you want to bet on seventeen on the roulette wheel. Okay, more power to you, I guess, and it might come up seventeen. And you'll make a lot of money. So I'm not saying no, I'm just, but I'm telling you for sure, that's not what happens at X. At X, we're trying to be the card counters of innovation. So it is a very different process. If you come to X, I want you to work on making a moonshot. But I also want you to understand you will be wrong over and over and over again. What I owe you, what all of X owes you, if you're going to join us, is that we have to be serious about not punishing you when you're wrong. That as long as you're pursuing potential moonshots in really smart, scrappy ways and being intellectually honest about how it's going. If the answer is nope, this is not pulling our average up, let's just put a bullet in its head and move on. Bad news, you get no equity while you're here at X. But the good news is you haven't bet your kid's college fund on the teleporter. So if the teleporter turns out not to be the right thing for us to do, and we're actually going to celebrate you for stopping it. Because you're being intellectually honest, you just get to try again and maybe the time machine will work out if that's the next project that you try. So if it appeals to you to be more of a card counter, to be part of a process with zero friction and high flow. Where we're collectively exploring which of the things that we're currently looking at might be a Waymo, might be a Google Brain. If that excites you, come here and do it and the amazing news is at the end of, you might try several, they fail. Finally you try one and it actually gets all the way through X. You graduate, we give that team founders shares. A lot of the company goes to them, and you took no risk the whole time while you were doing it.
00:09:48 · Astro Teller, Pablo Srugo
And we can afford to do that because we're so much more efficient at stopping the things that aren't really great pretty early in the process. So it is a very different way of being an entrepreneur but for at least a class of entrepreneurs, typically ones who've already been to the wars once or twice. [00:10:06] S2: They know how hard it is, that's right. [00:10:07] S0: Oh yeah, they're like, I know how hard it is and I know how much luck is involved. And I know the reality distortion field, like I'm sick of that. I want to be part of a team that's much more sort of intellectually, honestly trying to churn through ideas as thoughtfully, as efficiently as possible. [00:10:26] S2: So let's get to the meat of it. Let's talk about, beginning to end in as much detail as possible. How you end up with a Waymo, right? It's got to be some kind of a funnel that creates ideas and then, but you tell me. How does all that work? How does the machine work?
00:10:26 · Pablo Srugo, Astro Teller
[00:10:26] S2: So let's get to the meat of it. Let's talk about, beginning to end in as much detail as possible. How you end up with a Waymo, right? It's got to be some kind of a funnel that creates ideas and then, but you tell me. How does all that work? How does the machine work? [00:10:39] S0: So at the very early part of the process, we look at one to two hundred ideas per year in enough detail that they get a code name. In the very early part of the process, no person is full time on any one of those projects. At the very least, we would ask you to have a major and a minor. Because the chances of the thing that you have a major on, that you're spending at least half of your time on, stopping in the next six months is very high. You need to not feel existentially tied. You have to not worry too much about your job and you have to worry less about what people will think of you, or what you think of yourself. If the thing you're currently working on turns out not to be the right answer, since most of them are not the right answer. [00:11:22] S2: And am I right in thinking that that's less about the cost per idea? Like, one person doing two things costs you less than one person doing one. and more about the psychology of it?
00:11:22 · Pablo Srugo, Astro Teller
[00:11:22] S2: And am I right in thinking that that's less about the cost per idea? Like, one person doing two things costs you less than one person doing one. and more about the psychology of it? [00:11:30] S0: It's entirely about the psychology, because we'll often have two or three people part time on each idea. So we could just have one person a hundred percent on the idea. But first of all, people are smarter together in groups than they are individually. It's easier to be dispassionate and to be honest with yourself when there's other people who are poking at the thing with you. That means you can go and get a world expert in electrochemistry, a world expert in 3D printing, who we have on staff, for the five or ten percent of their time that you need without actually having to hire anybody. Because they're all part of X. So you get to actually act like a ten or fifteen person company with nobody actually feeling too existentially tied to it. So again, if you were coming to X, I would want you to really watch the following. You're going to need to move your sense of self worth from winning, which is what you, me, all of us were trained since we were five years old. I am good if I win. I'm good if I get an A plus on the test. That is not how X works. You will be miserable at X if you tie your sense of self worth to that. You have to rewire your sense of self worth to how wisely you can explore ideas and how viciously. In fact, we can attack our own ideas and pressure test them to see which ones survive.
00:11:30 · Astro Teller, Pablo Srugo
[00:11:30] S0: It's entirely about the psychology, because we'll often have two or three people part time on each idea. So we could just have one person a hundred percent on the idea. But first of all, people are smarter together in groups than they are individually. It's easier to be dispassionate and to be honest with yourself when there's other people who are poking at the thing with you. That means you can go and get a world expert in electrochemistry, a world expert in 3D printing, who we have on staff, for the five or ten percent of their time that you need without actually having to hire anybody. Because they're all part of X. So you get to actually act like a ten or fifteen person company with nobody actually feeling too existentially tied to it. So again, if you were coming to X, I would want you to really watch the following. You're going to need to move your sense of self worth from winning, which is what you, me, all of us were trained since we were five years old. I am good if I win. I'm good if I get an A plus on the test. That is not how X works. You will be miserable at X if you tie your sense of self worth to that. You have to rewire your sense of self worth to how wisely you can explore ideas and how viciously. In fact, we can attack our own ideas and pressure test them to see which ones survive. [00:12:48] S2: Are there people that have been at X for five years, ten years, and never had any idea become a big success?