Astro Teller
Captain of Moonshots and CEO, X. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executivefounderscientistauthor@astroteller ↗LinkedIn ↗astroteller.net ↗Wikipedia ↗
At Alphabet’s X, Teller oversees the research, development, and spinout of radical technologies and businesses, including Waymo, Wing, and Verily. Prior to leading X, he co-founded wearable maker BodyMedia and machine-learning hedge fund Cerebellum Capital, and has published novels and nonfiction books including Exegesis and Sacred Cows.
2shows
2appearances
47statements
8resolved
5supported
1contradicted
63%fully supported
Everything Astro Teller said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Teller: If half the world halts AI, the other half keeps going
“And I really think if we get to that line and then some half of humanity says, okay, we're out, the other half of the humanity is just going to keep going.”
Teller: Completed wind and solar farms are idling due to grid bottlenecks
“Think about the tsunami of renewables that are already waiting. They've literally already been built. They're just sitting there in the dirt, wind farms and solar panels waiting because we don't have a virtualization of the grid.”
Teller: Alphabet's X is not structured to scale products to billions
“We are not the right place to move something from, yeah, we have something special here to it's ready in a really thoughtful, responsible way to serve a billion people a day.”
Teller: Innovation labs must spend capital disproving hypotheses, not proving them
“Audacious enough that we'll try almost anything, but then humble enough that we're honest right after we start out on each of these investigations that we're probably wrong and that we need to spend our money figuring out that we're wrong rather than trying to…”
Teller: Project Taara delivers 20 Gbps over 20 km at sub-0.1% fiber cost
“If you plug the internet like a fiber optic cable into one, you have 20 gigabits per second up to 20 kilometers away for less than one 1000th the cost of trenching fiber.”
Teller: X evaluates 1,000 to 1,500 ideas per decade
“And so our job is to try 1000, maybe 1500 ideas per decade. And if we get a couple Google brains or Waymo's or wings per decade, Especially if we're really efficient at throwing most of those ideas away early, then this is really good for our investor alphabet…”
Teller: X funds initial exploration for weeks or months, never years
“We do not fund things for five years so you can go try it. We're going to fund this for like five weeks, maybe five months, which is easy for us because you're part of X, right?”
Teller: AI-guided design will transform every discipline over 30 to 40 years
“We're going to see this sort of thing play out In every discipline in the world over the next 30 or 40 years, and it will take a long time.”
Teller: Fish has one-eighth the carbon footprint of beef
“And because the carbon footprint of a pound of fish is one eighth the carbon footprint of a pound of beef, we are wildly better off as humanity moving to producing food through aquaculture.”
Teller: Google Brain and Transformer foundations originated inside Alphabet's X lab
“One of the early things that we did was a thing which, when we graduated back to Google, was called Google Brain. Google Brain is the origin of much of what you now think of as Bard, and so that was an example in the earlier days of X of us making something, r…”
Teller: Seriously automating a factory currently costs $1 billion
“Right now it costs a billion dollars to seriously automate a factory.”
Teller: More than half of X's current projects target climate change
“More than half of what we're doing right now is in the climate change space, but not because I mandated that, but because that's what people were excited about”
Teller: Autonomous driving delays stem from human drivers' legal gray areas
“One of the things that I think caught Waymo by surprise, got us by surprise, is that there are a lot of things that human drivers do that if we want to follow the laws, we can't do. Those humans just kind of like are in the gray area a lot about how they choos…”
Teller: Project Loon worked technically but failed on commercial spectrum deals
“We built it. It was working. We were beaming LTE and five G 200 of thousands of people in multiple countries. We couldn't figure out how to get the business to close with the owners of the spectrum that we had to work through in those different companies. So w…”
Teller: Taara moves more daily data than Project Loon's entire history
“And we're rolling these out right now in mainly Africa and India. And that project is now moving more data to real customers per day than Loon moved in its entire history.”
Teller: Cost per ton is the only metric that matters in carbon capture
“The number of dollars it costs for you to sequester a ton of carbon is like the only thing that really matters at the end of the day.”
Teller: Alphabet X shut down Project Foghorn over $15-per-gallon floor
“This project was called Foghorn. Like, that felt like a real save the world moment. It was actually working. And we could not convince ourselves we were going to get it cheaper than about 15 dollars gallon of gas equivalent. And that's just not going to save t…”
Teller: Graduating X projects typically spin out with 10 to 50 employees
“If you do that for six years and you've burned down a lot of the risk, if we're actually at the place where like, well, there's a sizable chance this actually could be a Waymo someday. Then it graduates from X and you know, often this is sort of on the order o…”
Teller: X teams must author kill criteria when going full-time
“We insist on just called kill criteria. So if your project has moved past the investigation stage, now a few of you are going to be full-time on this thing. We're tracking the costs. It's probably not public yet. There might only be three or four of you full-t…”
Teller: X spent five years building rapport with grid operators before launching moonshot
“We spent five years doing things that would help us deeply understand their problems so that we could start helping them. And the first couple of things we did weren't even the moonshot. It was just getting a rapport going so that we could, with the grid opera…”
Teller: Humanity derives up to $3 trillion annually from oceans
“So the humanity gets about two and a half, almost three trillion dollars a year from the oceans.”
Teller: Global manufacturing spending is approaching $10 trillion annually
“The world spends sort of pushing 10 trillion dollars a year making stuff.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Astro's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | Captain of Moonshots and CEO, X | 1 | 26 | 57% 4/7 | full record on Big Technology → |
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Captain of Moonshots and CEO, X | 1 | 21 | 100% 1/1 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |