The Truth About Google X: An Exclusive Look Behind TheSecretive Lab's Closed DoorsAstro Teller is sharing a story about something bad. Or maybe it's something good. AtGoogle X, it's sometimes hard to know the difference.

Teller is the scientist who directs day-to-day work at the search giant's intensely privateinnovation lab, which is devoted to finding unusual solutions to huge global problems.He isn't the president or chairman of X, however; his actual title, as his etched-glassbusiness card proclaims, is Captain of Moonshots--"moonshots" being his catchalldescription for audacious innovations that have a slim chance of succeeding but mightrevolutionize the world if they do. It is evening in Mountain View, California, dinnertimein a noisy restaurant, and Teller is recounting over the din how earlier in the day he hadto give some unwelcome news to his bosses, Google cofounder Sergey Brin and CFOPatrick Pichette. "It was a complicated meeting," says Teller, 43, sighing a bit. "I wastelling them that one of our groups was having a hard time, that we needed to course-correct, and that it was going to cost some money. Not a trivial amount." Teller'sfinancial team was worried; so was he. But Pichette listened to the problem andessentially said, "Thanks for telling me as soon as you knew. We'll make it work."

At first, it seems Teller's point is that the tolerance for setbacks at Google X isuncharacteristically high--a situation helped along by his bosses' zeal for the work beingdone there and by his parent company's extraordinary, almost ungodly, profitability. Butthis is actually just part of the story. There happens to be a slack line--a low tightrope--slung between trees outside the Google X offices. After the meeting, the three menwalked outside, took off their shoes, and gave the line a go for 20 minutes. Pichette isquite good at walking back and forth; Brin slightly less so; Teller not at all. But they alltook turns balancing on the rope, falling frequently, and getting back on. The slack lineis groin-high. "It looked like a fail video from YouTube," Teller says. And that's really hismessage here. "When these guys are willing to fall, groan, and get up--and they're intheir socks?" He leans back and pauses, as if to say: This is the essence of Google X.When the leadership can fail in full view, "then it gives everyone permission to be morelike that."

Failure is not precisely the goal at Google X. But in many respects it is the means. By thetime Teller and I speak, I have spent most of the day inside his lab, which no journalisthas previously been allowed to explore. Throughout the morning and afternoon I visiteda variety of work spaces and talked at length with members of the Google X RapidEvaluation Team, or "Rapid Eval," as they're known, about how they vet ideas and testout the most promising ones, primarily by doing everything humanly andtechnologically possible to make them fall apart. Rapid Eval is the start of the innovativeprocess at X; it is a method that emphasizes rejecting ideas much more than affirmingthem. That is why it seemed to me that X--which is what those who work there usuallycall it--sometimes resembled a cult of failure. As Rich DeVaul, the head of Rapid Eval,says: "Why put off failing until tomorrow or next week if you can fail now?" Over dinner,Teller tells me he sometimes gives a hug to people who admit mistakes or defeat ingroup meetings.

X does not employ your typical Silicon Valley types. Google already has a large labdivision, Google Research, that is devoted mainly to computer science and Internettechnologies. The distinction is sometimes framed this way: Google Research is mostlybits; Google X is mostly atoms. In other words, X is tasked with making actual objectsthat interact with the physical world, which to a certain extent gives logical coherence tothe four main projects that have so far emerged from X: driverless cars, Google Glass,high- altitude Wi-Fi balloons, and glucose-monitoring contact lenses. Mostly, X seeks outpeople who want to build stuff, and who won't get easily daunted. Inside the lab, nowmore than 250 employees strong, I met an idiosyncratic troupe of former park rangers,sculptors, philosophers, and machinists; one X scientist has won two Academy Awardsfor special effects. Teller himself has written a novel, worked in finance, and earned aPhD in artificial intelligence. One recent hire spent five years of his evenings andweekends building a helicopter in his garage. It actually works, and he flew it regularly,which seems insane to me. But his technology skills alone did not get him the job. Thehelicopter did. "The classic definition of an expert is someone who knows more andmore about less and less until they know everything about nothing," says DeVaul. "Andpeople like that can be extremely useful in a very focused way. But these are really not Xpeople. What we want, in a sense, are people who know less and less about more andmore."

If there's a master plan behind X, it's that a frictional arrangement of ragtag intellects isthe best hope for creating products that can solve the world's most intractable issues. YetGoogle X, as Teller describes it, is an experiment in itself--an effort to reconfigure theprocess by which a corporate lab functions, in this case by taking incredible risks acrossa wide variety of technological domains, and by not hesitating to stray far from its parentcompany's business. We don't yet know if this will prove to be genius or folly. There'sactually no historical model, no precedent, for what these people are doing.

But in some ways that makes sense. Google finds itself at a juncture in history that hasnot come before, and may not come again. The company is almost unimaginably richand stocked with talent; it is hitting its peak of influence at a moment when networksand computing power and artificial intelligence are coalescing in what manytechnologists describe as (to borrow the Valley's most popular meme) "the secondmachine age." In addition, it is trying hard to develop another huge core business toaugment its massive search division. So why not do it through X? To Teller, this failure-loving lab has simply stepped into the breach. Small companies don't feel they have theresources to take moonshots. Big companies think it'll rattle shareholders. Governmentleaders believe there's not enough money, or that Congress will characterize a misstep orfailure as a scandal. These days, when it comes to Hail Mary innovation, "Everyonethinks it's somebody's else's job," Teller says.

It is worth noting that X's moonshots are not as purely altruistic as Google likes to makethem sound. While self-driving cars will almost certainly save lives, for instance, theywill also free up drivers to do web searches and use Gmail. Wi-Fi balloons could result ina billion more Google users. Still, it's hard not to appreciate that these ideas, along withothers coming from X, are breathtakingly idealistic. When I ask Teller why Google haschosen to invest in X rather than something that might appeal more to Wall Street, hedismisses the premise. Then he cracks a smile. "That's a false choice," he says. "Why dowe have to pick?"

Google X is situated at the edge of the Google campus, housed mostly in a couple ofthree-story red-brick buildings. The lab has no sign in front, just as it has no officialwebsite ("What would we put on the website, anyway?" Teller asks). The main building's

entrance leads into a small, self-serve coffee bar. The aesthetic is modern, austere, -industrial. To the left is a cavernous room with dozens of cubicles and several conferencerooms; to the right is a bike rack and a lunchroom with a stern warning posted that onlyX employees are allowed. Otherwise, there's little indication you're in a supersecret lab.Most of the collaborative workshops are downstairs, in high-ceilinged rooms withwhimsical names such as "Castle Grayskull," and are cluttered with electronicparaphernalia and Xers bent over laptops.

The origins of X date to around 2009, when Brin and Google cofounder Larry Pageconceived of a position called Director of Other; this person would oversee ideas farfrom Google's core search business. This notion evolved into X around 2010, thanks toGoogle engineer Sebastian Thrun's effort, backed by Brin and Page, to build a driverlesscar. The X lab grew up around that endeavor, with Thrun in charge. Thrun chose Telleras one of his codirectors, but when Thrun was drawn deeper into developing the cartechnology (and later into his online educational startup, Udacity), he gave up onoverseeing other X projects. That's when Teller assumed day-to-day responsibilities.

There are differing explanations for what the X actually stands for. At first it was simplya placeholder for a better name, but these days it usually denotes the search for solutionsthat are better by a factor of 10. Some of the Xers I met, however, think of the X asrepresenting an organization willing to build technologies that are 10 years away frommaking a large impact.

This in itself is fairly unique. Once upon a time, corporate labs invested a chunk of theirR&D budget in risky, long-term projects, but an increasing focus on quarterly earnings,and the realization that it can be exceedingly hard to recoup an investment in far-offresearch, ended almost all such efforts. These days, it's considered more sensible for acompany to fund short-term research--or if it wants to think far into the future, to eitherbuy rights to an embryonic idea that arises from university research or a governmentlab, or to swallow up an innovative startup. Teller and Brin are not averse to doing this;for example, the wind-energy company Makani was recently bought by Google andfolded into X. But Google and X have often rejected the conventional business wisdom infavor of hatching their own wild-eyed research schemes, and then waiting patiently for

them to mature. Recently, when Page was challenged on an earnings call about the sumshe was pouring into R&D, he made no effort to excuse it. "My struggle in general is to getpeople to spend money on long-term R&D," he said, noting that the amounts he wasinvesting were modest in light of Google's profits. Then he chided the financialcommunity: Shouldn't they be asking him to make more big, risky, long-terminvestments, not fewer?

Rich DeVaul heads the Rapid Evaluation team. "If there's a completely crazy, lame idea, then it's probablycoming from me."

Generally speaking, there are three criteria that X projects share. All must address aproblem that affects millions--or better yet, billions--of people. All must utilize a radicalsolution that has at least a component that resembles science fiction. And all must taptechnologies that are now (or very nearly) obtainable. But to DeVaul, the head of RapidEval, there's another, more unifying principle that connects the three criteria: No ideashould be incremental. This sounds terribly clichéd, DeVaul admits; the Silicon Valleyrefrain of "taking huge risks" is getting hackneyed and hollow. But the rejection ofincrementalism, he says, is not because he and his colleagues believe it's pointless forideological reasons. They believe it for practical reasons. "It's so hard to do almostanything in this world," he says. "Getting out of bed in the morning can be hard for me.But attacking a problem that is twice as big or 10 times as big is not twice or 10 times ashard."

DeVaul insists that it's often just as easy, or easier, to make inroads on the biggestproblems "than to try to optimize the next 5% or 2% out of some process." Think aboutcars, he tells me. If you want to design a car that gets 80 mpg, it requires a lot of work,yet it really doesn't address the fundamental problem of global fuel resources andemissions. But if you want to design a car that gets 500 mpg, which actually does attackthe problem, you are by necessity freed from convention, since you can't possiblyimprove an existing automotive design by such a degree. Instead you start over,reexamining what a car really is. You think of different kinds of motors and fuels, or ofspace-age materials of such gossamer weight and iron durability that they alter thephysics of transportation. Or you dump the idea of cars altogether in favor of a -substitute. And then maybe, just maybe, you come up with something worthy of X.

DeVaul is leaning back on a chair in a big ground-floor conference room at X. He'sbrought me here to demonstrate how the Rapid Eval team discusses ideas. We're joinedaround an oblong wood table by two of his colleagues, Dan Piponi and Mitch Heinrich.The men are a study in intellectual contrasts. Piponi, 47, is soft-spoken, laconic, British--a mathematician and theoretical physicist and the winner of those Oscars. Even amongthe bright minds at Google X, he's regarded as freakishly smart. Heinrich, the lab'syoung design guru, gives off an affable art-school vibe. On his own initiative, he's builtwhat's known as the design kitchen, a large fabrication shop that's stocked with 3-D

printers, table saws, and sophisticated lathes in a building adjacent to the primary X lab.He brings a plastic tub stuffed with old eyeglass frames to the Rapid Eval session. "Thesewere some early prototypes for Glass," he explains, randomly pulling out some circuitboards and a few terrifically ugly designs. They weren't intended for the market, he says,but to show his colleagues that what they were conceptualizing could indeed be built.

DeVaul, 43, completes the trio. He has a PhD from MIT and worked at Apple for severalyears before coming to Google. It is difficult to figure out precisely what he studied incollege--after 10 minutes of explaining, it sounds like some mashup of design, physics,anthropology, and machine learning. As such, he can talk a blue streak on a dazzlingrange of topics: crime, communications, computers, material science, robotics. It wasDeVaul, in fact, who came up with the idea for Project Loon, as those Wi-Fi balloons areofficially known. He tried desperately to make it fail on technological grounds but foundhe could not, so he agreed to run the project for about a year before returning to RapidEval.

In some respects, watching his group in action is like watching an improv team warm

"This is the point in theconversation when we starttalking, quite seriously, abouthoverboards and spaceelevators."

up--ideas are bounced about quickly, analytically, kinetically, in an effort to make themstick or lead toward something better. The team on most Rapid Eval sessions numbersabout half a dozen, including DeVaul, Piponi, and Heinrich (and sometimes Teller); theymeet for lunch once a week to discuss suggestions that have bubbled up from within X orhave filtered in from outside--from their parent company, say, or somebody's -acquaintance in academia. Later in the week, one or two of the best suggestions arebrought up again more formally for further consideration. Mostly the team looks at thescale of the issue, the impact of the proposed fix, and the technological risks. Will itreally solve the problem? Can the thing actually be built? Then they consider the socialrisks. If we can build it, will it--can it--actually be used?

There's a reason they factor these questions into their earlycalculus. When you're explicitly trying to imagine productsthat have no real counterparts in our culture, the obstacleshave to be imagined, too. With driverless cars, for instance,

there remain unresolved complexities of state laws, infrastructure, and insurance; forGoogle Glass, there are huge ongoing privacy issues. But if the team believes these kindsof hurdles are surmountable and is still sufficiently curious about a technology by theend of the discussion, they'll ask Heinrich or Piponi to build a crude prototype, ideally ina few days. Once they're satisfied that it can work, they move toward getting the brass toofficially commission the project. They will not say how often this has happened, exceptthat it's exceedingly rare. "It's a really high bar to say, 'This is going to be a new Google Xproject,' " says DeVaul. And that doesn't mean it won't be killed as it evolves. It's a muchhigher bar to actually launch a Google X project, he points out. "Sometimes theproblems at Google X are very easy to frame, such as two-thirds of the world does nothave reliable, affordable Internet access." That's what led him to Project Loon. "Butsome problems are easier to see in the rearview mirror. Imagine how hard it would be toexplain to your pre-smartphone self how much this is going to change your life." DeVaulsays this is the type of thinking that led to Google Glass. "It's a matter of looking backfrom the future, where everyone walks around with smart glasses and no one leaves theirhouse without them. And then it becomes obvious: 'Well, of course I want to beconnected to information, but in a way that's minimally invasive, and minimally imposeson my attention.'"

He makes it sound quite reasonable. But this is also the point in the conversation whenwe start talking, quite seriously, about hoverboards and space elevators.

DeVaul is an avid skateboarder, and building a hoverboard is something that hehas long imagined. "I just wanted one," he tells me, shrugging. When he brought it upfor discussion last year--"If there's a completely crazy, lame idea, then it's probablycoming from me," he says--the group actually discerned some practical applications. Inindustrial settings, moving heavy things on a frictionless platform could be not onlyvaluable but transformative. "Imagine a giant fulfillment center like Amazon's, where allthe pallets can levitate and move around," DeVaul says. "Or what about a lab where allthe heavy equipment would come to me?"

"Dan, show him the hoverboard you built," says Heinrich.

"Right," says Piponi, sitting up and clearing his throat. In front of him is a small, shinyrectangle, about the size of a hardcover book. On the surface is a tight configuration ofcircular magnets. "So the first question here relates to the physics," Piponi says. "Can

you actually have an object hovering about? And so people try really hard with magnets--to find some arrangement that keeps something hovering." This is the logic behind thesuperfast magnetic-levitation trains now used in China and Japan. But these "mag-lev"systems have a stabilizing structure that keeps trains in place as they hover and moveforward in only one direction. That couldn't quite translate into an open floor plan ofmagnets that keep a hoverboard steadily aloft and free to move in any direction. Oneproblem, as Piponi explains, is that magnets tend to keep shifting polarities, so yourhoverboard would constantly flip over as you floated around moving from a state ofrepulsion to attraction with the magnets. Any skateboarder could tell you what thatmeans: Your hoverboard would suck.

But that's exactly the sort of problem X is designed to attack. "There are loopholes in thistheorem that you have to find," Piponi says. "There are materials that are kind of weird,that don't behave like magnets normally do." Piponi discovered that a very thin slice of acertain type of graphite would actually work well on a small bed of magnets. So he builtone for the Rapid Eval team. He pushes his small hoverboard across the table to me, andI try it. The graphite slice, not much larger than a quarter, floats slightly above themagnets, gliding in any direction with the most ethereal push. When DeVaul first sawthis, he tells me, he was astounded.

Yet by that point, Piponi had already moved on. As he did the calculations involved inexpanding the small hoverboard up to a usable size, the physics suggested that at acertain point the weight of the board would knock it off its cushion of air. Othertechnologies could conceivably help (you might try using special materials at supercooltemperatures), but the team decided that would create huge additional costs andcomplications--costs that would not be justified by the project's relatively modest socialand economic impact. So the Google X hoverboard was shelved. "When we let it go, it's apositive thing," DeVaul says. "We're saying, 'This is great: Now we get to work on otherthings.'"

Like space elevators, something X was widely rumored to be working on but has neverconfirmed until now. "You know what a space elevator is, right?" DeVaul asks. He ticksoff the essential facts--a cable attached to a satellite fixed in space, tens of thousands of

miles above Earth. To DeVaul, it would no doubt satisfy the X criteria of somethingstraight out of sci-fi. And it would presumably be transformative by reducing spacetravel to a fraction of its present cost: Transport ships would clip on to the cable andcruise up to a space station. One could go up while another was heading down. "It wouldbe a massive capital investment," DeVaul says, but after that "it could take you fromground to orbit with a net of basically zero energy. It drives down the space-access costs,operationally, to being incredibly low."

Not surprisingly, the team encountered a stumbling block. If scaling problems are whatbrought hoverboards down to earth, material-science issues crashed the space elevator.The team knew the cable would have to be exceptionally strong-- "at least a hundredtimes stronger than the strongest steel that we have," by Piponi's calculations. He foundone material that could do this: carbon nanotubes. But no one has manufactured aperfectly formed carbon nanotube strand longer than a meter. And so elevators "wereput in a deep freeze," as Heinrich says, and the team decided to keep tabs on anyadvances in the carbon nanotube field.

"There's a moment of silence inthe room. "I know that soundscompletely insane," DeVaulsays. But I'm not sure it soundscrazy to him."

Mitch Heinrich created Google X's design kitchen, where he and other team members build simple prototypesfor big ideas.

The larger lesson here is that any Google X idea that hingeson some kind of new development in material sciencecannot proceed. This is not the case with electronics--X

could go forward with a device that depends upon near-term improvements incomputing capability because Moore's law predicts an exponential increase incomputing power. That is why DeVaul's team is confident that Google Glass will get lessawkward with each passing year. But there is no way to accurately predict when a new

material or manufacturing process will be invented. It could happen next year, or itcould be 100 years.

The conversation eventually drifts to how the team had at one point debated the prosand cons of taking on teleportation. Yes, like in Star Trek. As with that show'sTransporter, the molecules of a person or thing could theoretically be "beamed" across aphysical distance with the help of some kind of scanning technology and a teleportationdevice. None of which really exists, of course. Piponi, after some study, concluded thatteleportation violates several laws of physics. But out of those discussions came anumber of insights--too complicated to explain here--into encrypted communicationsthat would be resistant to eavesdropping, a matter of great interest to Google (especiallyin light of recent NSA–spying revelations). So bad ideas lead to good ideas, too. "I like tolook at these problems as ladders," DeVaul says.

At the moment, the Rapid Eval team is watching the work of certain academics who are -attempting to create superstrong, ultralight materials.

One Caltech professor, Julia Greer, is working on something called "nanotrusses" thatDeVaul is particularly enthusiastic about. "It would completely change how we buildbuildings," he says. "Because if I have something that's insanely strong and incrediblycompact, maybe I could prefabricate an entire building; it fits into a little box, I take it tothe construction site, and it unfolds like origami and becomes a building that is strongerthan anything we have right now and holds a volume as big as this building." There's amoment of silence in the room.

"I know that sounds completely insane," he adds. But I'm not sure it sounds crazy tohim.

At one point, DeVaul asks if I have any ideas of my own for Rapid Evalconsideration. I had been warned in advance that he might ask this, and I cameprepared with a suggestion: a "smart bullet" that could protect potential shootingvictims and reduce gun violence, both accidental and intentional. You have self-drivingcars that avoid harm, I say. Why not self-driving ballistics? DeVaul doesn't say it's the

stupidest thing he's ever heard, which is a relief. What ensues is a conversation that feelslike a rapid ascent up that imaginary ladder. We quickly debate the pros and cons ofmaking guns intelligent (that technology already exists to a certain degree) versusmaking bullets intelligent (likely much more difficult). We move from a specificdiscussion of "self- pulverizing" bullets with tiny, embedded hypodermic needles thatdeliver stun-drugs (DeVaul's idea) to potentially using sensors and the force of gravity tobring a bullet to the ground before it can strike the wrong target (Heinrich's). Thencomes the notion of separating the bullet's striker from the explosive charge with aremote disabling electronic switch (Piponi). The tenor soon changes, though. We starttalking about smart holsters for police officers, and then intelligent gun sights-- -something that firearms owners might actually want to buy. They think that idea mighteven be worth a rapid prototype. But we also debate the political and marketplaceviability of bullet technology--who would purchase it, who would object to it, what kindof impact it might have. Eventually it becomes clear that in many ways, appearancesoften to the contrary, Google X tries hard to remain on the practical side of crazy.

Obi Felten's official title is Head of Getting Moonshots Ready for Contact With the Real World.

Later in the day, I take a walk around the Google campus with Obi Felten, 41, who is theteam member who tries to keep the group grounded. In fact, DeVaul refers to her as "thenormal person" in Rapid Eval meetings, someone who can bring everyone back to earthby asking simple questions like, Is it legal? Will anyone buy this? Will anyone like this?Felten is not an engineer; she worked in marketing for Google in Europe before comingto X. "My actual title now," she tells me, "is Head of Getting Moonshots Ready forContact With the Real World." One thing Felten struggles with is that there's no realtemplate for how a company should bring these kinds of radical technologies to market.

("If you find a model," she says, "let me know.") Fortunately for X, not everything has toevolve into a huge source of revenue. "The portfolio has to make money," Feltenexplains, but not necessarily each product. "Some of these will be better businesses thanothers, if you want to measure in terms of dollars. Others might make a huge impact onthe world, but it's not a massive market."

Later this year, X hopes to announce a top-secret new project that is likely to fall intothat latter category. What will it be? There are no discernible clues. In my ownconversations, I could only glean certain hints--that they're extremely curious abouttransportation and clean energy, and that they are especially serious about creatingbetter medical diagnostics, rather than medical treatments, because they see a fargreater impact. At one point, I walked through a Google X user-experience lab, wherepsychologists gain insights from volunteers trying possible forthcoming technologies. Alarge object, about, oh, the size of the Maltese Falcon, had been wrapped in black plastic.Go figure.

Meanwhile, consider that X has an overwhelming task on its hands already. Theorganization must move all of its unveiled projects at least one square ahead this year.Project Loon--which has not finalized a business plan yet--has apparently drawn interestfrom most of the telecom companies in the world, but is still not technically ready forscaling up. (It was unveiled in part because the patents were about to be made public,and Google preferred to disclose it on its own terms.) Google Glass, the X product closestto commercialization, and self-driving cars, which are much farther away, have bothsparked extraordinary public interest, yet it is impossible to say if or when they'llsucceed as businesses, or whether they'll have that 10-times impact within a 10-yearperiod.

That evening at dinner with Teller, I bring up all of these issues. To me, the fundamentalchallenge of fashioning extreme solutions to very big problems is that society tends tomove incrementally, even as many fields of technology seem to advance exponentially.An innovation that saves us time or money or improves our health might always have afighting chance at success. But with Glass, we see a product that seems to alter not onlyour safety and efficiency--like with self-driving cars--but our humanity. This seems aneven bigger obstacle than some of the more practical issues that the lab grapples with,but the Xers don't seem overly concerned. Teller, in fact, contends that Glass could makeus more human. He thinks it solves a huge problem--getting those square rectangles outof our pockets and making technology more usable, more available, less obstructive. Butisn't it possible that Glass is the wrong answer to the right problem? "Of course," Tellersays. "But we're not done. And it's possible that we missed. I mean, I know we missed insome ways."

The part of the X process that colleagues like Obi Felten think about, he says, is alsomeant to be iterative. "It's to say to the world: What do you think? How can we makethis better? It's part of us being open to being wrong, because it's way easier, and way

cheaper, and way more fun to find out now that we missed than to find out years fromnow, with an incredible amount of additional expense and emotional investment." Tellersays he calls X's ideas "moonshots" for a reason. "If one of Google X's projects were ahome run, became everything we wanted, I would be really happy," he says. "I would beoverjoyed if it happened with two."

At one point, I mention my own moonshot to Teller, that smart bullet that DeVaul'steam had talked through earlier in the day. It wasn't a disaster, I say, but it wasn't muchof a success, either. "Well, that's entirely appropriate," Teller says, sympathetically."Most ideas don't work out. Almost all ideas don't work out. So it's okay if yours didn'twork out." He thinks for a moment. "How about instead of a bullet it delivers a deadlytoxin that could be reversed in a week?" It wouldn't stop bad guys immediately, he says,but once they were shot, they would have to go turn themselves in to get the antidote. Hemulls it over for a moment more. "I don't know," he says, already seeing the obstaclesahead. "I'm just brainstorming."