right as Google X was being birthed,

I sat down with Larry Page.

And I was trying to work with him on how we were going

to talk about what Google X is.

And I was having a hard time getting something concise out

of him.

So I just started throwing things at him to respond to.

So I said, are we a research center?

He said, "no."

I'm glad to hear that.

Are we an incubator?

"Sort of, not really."

Are we just another business unit for Google?

Is that what we're going to be?

"No."

The original vision statement that Kennedy gave to the nation

in 1961, that we were going to put a man on the moon

and return him safely by the end of the decade,

was the original moonshot proposal,

at least in the moonshot sense.

So I was delighted when I-- after 10 of these things,

I threw out to Larry, are we taking moonshots?

And he said, "yes, that's what we're doing."

That made me really happy.

So from that afternoon on, what I've

been telling the people at Google X

is that we're trying to build a moonshot factory.

What I mean by that is that we're trying to take moonshots.

That word is to remind us that we're

trying to work on things that are very hard, that aspire

to make the world 10 times better in some way

than it currently is, not 10% better,

to remind us about the risks that we're taking

and the long-term nature of the work that we have ahead of us

when we try to do these things.

The word factory is meant to remind us

that even though we are doing these risky long term things,

that we want to pursue doing them with an eye

to actually having the impact that we aspire to,

that we're building products and services for the real world.

Fast forward five years, I'm tickled, I confess,

to see that the word moonshot has

made its way, fairly heavily now, into the popular lexicon.

I understand though-- I haven't seen the show myself--

that the TV show, "Silicon Valley," the Google in it

is called Hooli.

And they've now started their own Google X-like organization,

which they call XYZ, instead.

And it's taking moonshots also.

And I've personally been upgraded

from captain of moonshots to head daydreamer in the TV show,

apparently.

The fact that it's out there is important.

And part of the reason that I think that it's important

is that there's this bizarre-- it's understandable,

but it's this frustrating game of "Not It"

that we all play with ourselves.

So the small companies say, I can't take moonshots.

That's for big companies to do because it costs a lot of money

to take moonshots.

The big companies say, well, we aren't

going to take moonshots because that

means taking a lot of risk.

That's not really our game.

That's what the small companies should do because they

have nothing to lose.

The governments say, well, you know like 50 years ago,

we were taking moonshots.

But that's not really our thing anymore.

We have to work on popular, immediate problems.

We don't have any money.

Like, that just can't be us, sorry.

Academics love talking about moonshots.

They like writing the papers.

They actually produce some of the underlying science that,

later, can turn into a moonshot, but they're not

the system builders who are going to build

the moonshot themselves.

Everyone thinks it's someone else's job.

But we're not going to fix the biggest problems in the world

if everyone thinks it's someone else's job.

The truth is, we can all work on moonshots.

Working on things that aspire to be 10 times better, rather

than 10% better, is a mindset.

That's what it is.

It's got nothing to do specifically

with the risk, or the money, or the time frame.

It's a mindset about what we're working towards.

And counterintuitive as it is, if you

work on things that aspire to be that much better,

it not only isn't harder, sometimes

it's literally easier because, when

you aspire to make the world that much better,

you have to start over.

And when you've acknowledged to yourself as a team

that you're going to start over, you

know that what's going to happen next

can't be built on what people have done before.

You have to, in a meaningful sense,

come at it from a new perspective.

And that often, not always, but often unlocks

possibilities that make the impossible seem possible.

So this is our blueprint for how we

take moonshots, for what a moonshot should

be in our minds.

The first thing is that there has

to be a huge problem in the world that we want to resolve,

that we want to have go away or mitigate

in some meaningful way.

So for example, 1.2 million people

die every year in car accidents.

More than a trillion dollars is wasted every year

with people sitting in traffic.

That is a legitimately world scale

problem it would be awesome if we could make go away.

Number two, there has to be a radical proposal for how

to make that problem go away.

If it's something that people have tried over and over before

in the past, the idea that we or you or anyone else

by just trying harder, or staying up later at night

is not really a good outcome.

It's not very likely to work.

So cars that drive themselves all the way from point A

to point B-- I think that's like the poster

child for a radical sounding proposal

to make that kind of problem go away.

And then, the third one is there has

to be some reason to believe some breakthrough

technology, some aha from science or engineering,

which makes us believe that, even if it's not guaranteed

to work, we have a decent shot at learning through the process

and maybe, just maybe, getting there.

In the case of self-driving cars,

that was the DARPA Grand Challenge

work that originally happened and some advances

in smart software and smart sensors.

So each project that fits into this mold then

has to describe not just that it fits these things,

but that, in principle at least, it

could produce in the long run a Google scale business

or Google scale value to the company in order for us

to help it move forward.

Our goal is to have each of these things

create a ton of value for the world,

but then also create back to Google

a fair or equitable return on its investment

for taking these big risks.

And five years in, I'm very happy to say

that we've started to make real progress in this space

through the graduations that we've done.

Some of them play out in different ways.

So for example, the massive neural network project

that we originally built at Google X,

we graduated back into the main part of Google,

called knowledge, which is what you might think of as search.

And in that part of Google, it now

is servicing over 50 products and services helping

all these different parts of Google turn signals

into symbols more effectively, which is helping

Google to be successful.

And certainly, that's not all our credit

because they've done a lot since they left.

But we helped to get that going.

And that is a good example of the sort of thing

that we're shooting for.

In a very different way, the smart contact lens

work that we built, it wasn't going

to probably work out optimally for us,

not only to do the original work on that project,

but to take it all the way to the market ourselves.

So we developed a partnership with Alcon, the eye care

division of Novartis, and now we are headed towards the market

through this still very complex process

of trying to make contact lenses be

able to sense the glucose in your eye to help diabetics

manage their diabetes better.

But that is another example where

value can be released through this work, in this case,

through a partner.

Another of the critical operating principles

that we have at Google X is throwing ourselves out

into the world to get contact with the real world

as fast as possible.

It's not sometimes a natural thing to do,

but it is an absolute critical thing

to do, especially when you're taking on particularly

big, hard projects.

You can't possibly know at beginning the right thing

to do, but you can have a process where

you discover faster, rather than slower, that you're

on the wrong track.

That, you can do.

So we go through these processes for things

like the self-driving cars, for our flying wind turbines,

for Project Loon, for contact lens work that we do,

and for others.

We go through this process where we force ourselves

to seek out this contact.

And sometimes, this turns out to be us dragging our balloons up

to South Dakota to expose the balloons to Arctic winds.

Sometimes, it's asking a really specific tiny question,

like how long will this glucose sensor

the size of a piece of glitter actually

be able to sense glucose while sitting in this tear fluid.

The question is how and how fast can you

discover that what you're working on

is the wrong thing to be working on.

And the secret is it's discouraging

to hear these things.

We all avoid going out into the world,

throwing ourselves at the world to discover these things.

But no matter how discouraging it

is now, if you put more time into doing it,

you will unconsciously avoid even more doing it tomorrow,

or a week from now, or a month from now.

And that's why doing it as fast as you can

is actually the easiest time and the most efficient time

to discover that you're on the wrong path.

And that's why it is sort of central to how Google X works

on solving these problems.

I want to emphasize-- what this basically

means is we don't know.

And I would go so far so to say, nobody really

knows the right way to build any of these projects.

If you listen to the media stories,

you get this nice, tight arc where the entrepreneurs that

make it were destined to make it,

and the ones that didn't work were losers who were never

going to make it anyway.

And it completely misses the point,

that feeling in the pit of your stomach

where you know where you want to get to,

but you really don't know how to get there.

I have those feelings all the time.

Every single one of our project leads at Google X

has those feelings.

You're not alone.

That's just the truth of the world

that we have those feelings all the time.

All we can do is take our best guess about what

we should be building.

And then, don't wait.

Get quickly out into the world to discover

how wrong you are, which parts are salvageable,

and which parts you need to go back

to the drawing board about.

That's the only way to race forward.

So I'm going to tell you about Project

Wing as an example of this.

Project Wing had some kind of bumpy months--

some very bumpy months in late 2013, early 2014.

So the goal for Project Wing is self-flying vehicles

for delivery.