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At X, Failure Is Not an Option: It's a Feature (Astro Teller's 2016 TED Talk) (backchannel.com)

Posted by timothy on from the well-on-that-basis-we're-geniuses dept.

New submitter Evan Hansen writes: Everyone likes to pays lip service to "fail fast," but when was the last time your boss gave you a bonus when your project was killed? In his 2016 TED Talk, concluded just moments ago, Astro Teller, the head of Alphabet's X R&D lab shares some never-before revealed stories of his team's failures and iterations, and explains how "fail fast" can be more than a trite cliche. The first X project was the self-driving car, and subsequent ones include Google Glass, Project Loon's Internet service via balloon, Makani energy kites, and a drone delivery service dubbed Project Wing.

4 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. It's good to be an elite by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Man, it has got to be great being at the top. Where you can fail and nobody will fire you for it. In the rest of the world, when you are associated with a failed project, that puts you first in line the next time layoffs come around. That almost happened to me once, but luckily I smelled it coming and managed to distance myself from my friend who was in charge of the failing project. It broke up our friendship, but I still had a job afterwards and he didn't. So, you could say I "failed fast" in that I quickly determined that my friend had a failure face and I quickly failed to stick with him when times got tough.

    But for some reason I was never invited to give a TED talk about it. I wonder why? Oh yeah, I'm a filthy prole, I forgot. Why did Astro Teller get to give a TED talk? Because he's the grandson of Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb. His father was a professor. Stanford couldn't admit him fast enough. He got into Google because Googlers distrust people who are not like themselves. He even gets away with a stupid-ass name like "Astro" where in the rest of the world a name like that will get you swirlies.

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    1. Re:It's good to be an elite by JoeMerchant · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And like most things, the sane answer is somewhere in the grey area.

      The sane answer is the boring answer - no risk no reward...

      Of course, serious R&D, whether it's insane spoiled children in California today, or gentleman scientists at Bell Labs in the 1950s and 60s, basically requires a lot of input capital... many ideas will fail to prove their worth, and once in awhile you'll get something like the transistor.

    2. Re:It's good to be an elite by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The stuff they talk about at TED doesn't apply to anyone's life. TED is hot air, fluff, and pie-in-the-sky bullshit. It's a fucking joke!

      My favorite TED talk

      : https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      The talk itself is some self indulgent stuff about how she came to believe that there is a God. But irony abounds!

      http://gawker.com/professional...

      This new reformed woman had a bit of a road rage incident, followed a 73 year old woman home, ran over her with her car, then started to back up to run over her again but fortunately was stopped.

      I haven't looked at TED talks the same way ever since .

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  2. Failure - a learning experience by colinwb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The British economics commentator Hamish McRae once wrote about a bright young executive put in charge of a project which subsequently failed: he tried to resign but was told by a superior that he had just been through an expensive training course in what not to do, and that if he thought that he could leave and take that knowledge to a competitor he had better think again.