Future Around & Find Out "Train the Monkey First" — How Google Built a Moonshot Factory | Astro Teller (Captain of Moonshots)
Mar 17, 2026
Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X and leader of the lab behind Waymo and Google Brain, shares how to systematize audacious innovation. He explains greenlight everything then kill fast, setting kill criteria, blending audacity with humility, and why diverse teams and prototyping accelerate breakthroughs. He also discusses bets in biology, the electric grid, and AI as foundational infrastructure.
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Set Kill Criteria Up Front
- Pre-agree explicit kill criteria and timelines with teams to force intellectual honesty.
- Use those missed targets as a prompt to ask teams for what they learned and why continuing is justified.
Train The Monkey Before Building The Pedestal
- Audacity and humility must coexist: propose wild goals but design experiments that reveal truth quickly.
- Focus on the 'monkey' (hard core capability) first and defer building the 'pedestal' (full product/infrastructure).
Make Culture Speak When Leaders Are Absent
- Embed the norms of audacity, humility, and intellectual honesty across the whole team, not just from leadership.
- Engineer culture so teammates hold each other accountable when the leader is absent.