Astro Teller

“It is the essence of innovation to fail most of the time.”

“Failing doesn't have to mean not succeeding. It can be, 'Hey we tried that. We can go forward, smarter.'”

“The real goal of AI is to understand and build devices that can perceive, reason, act, and learn at least as well as we can.”

“When you attack a problem as though it were solvable, even though you don't know how to solve it, you will be shocked with what you come up with. It's 100 times more worth it. It's never 100 times harder.”

“Really great entrepreneurs have this very special mix of unstoppable optimism and scathing paranoia.”

“We've got rings, glasses, we wear things for armor, for protection from the elements, to signal our status to other people. And we're going to co-opt a lot of those things, where wearables are going to end up being the interface between us in the world.”

“If software's the only thing in your bag of tools, I'm not going to give you great odds.”

“There's no point having something worn on your body - that's a big ask - unless you can give people something they really couldn't get otherwise. It has to be qualitatively better for it to be worn.”

“You make a ton of progress by making a ton of mistakes.”

“Phones would not be better if they could be cooler looking, if they could weight less, or if they could have more battery. Phones would be better if we didn't have to carry them around.”

“VisiCalc and WordPerfect were the killer apps of their day, but Google and Facebook make them look small in comparison.”

“Anything which is a huge problem for humanity we'll sign up for, if we can find a way to fix it.”

“Our goal is not to produce immediate results. We've been tasked with producing long-term results. That means that there's more risk in any individual thing we take on. But we still aspire to a strong return on investment.”

“Going from an error rate of 25 meters in GPS to 2.5 meters is huge. Going to 25 centimeters is going to matter just as much.”

“We're going to look back and wonder why we had to micro-control our cars.”

“It comes up over and over and over again that a ten times increase in the weight-oriented density of batteries or the volume metric, the space-oriented density of batteries, would enable so many other moonshots that that's one that just constantly comes up over and over again, and we will start that moonshot if we can find a great idea.”

“Use creativity and storytelling as your main muscle instead of smartness.”

“People text when they're meant to actually be driving. So imagine what they do when they think the car's got it under control.”

“I believe that the right thing for us to do, as much as we can and without confusing people, is to talk about how we're doing, the things that are going well but also the things that aren't going well.”

“Moonshot thinking starts with picking a big problem: something huge, long existing, or on a global scale.”