A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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?
00:12:48 · Pablo Srugo, Astro Teller
[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? [00:12:55] S0: Yeah, there are lots of people who are very good at beating up on ideas or helping to rapid prototype the ideas. So they're awesome Xers, but they never started an idea. By the way, another thing that's easy to say but very hard to rewire around is we literally don't track whose idea it was. We don't let people talk about who founded the idea. [00:13:19] S2: Interesting. [00:13:20] S0: Because the ideas are easy. Ideas are trivially easy. We have a thousand ideas a year, that many of them just don't even get code names. Ideas are not the hard part. Our alpha comes from how efficiently we can discover which ideas are valuable. So if you want to be a cool Xer, if you want to have street cred here. It's not because you came up with the idea. Who cares? It's because you helped us kill the idea or figure out this sort of perspective shift that takes an idea from good to great. [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?
00:13:50 · 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.