Google's Moonshot Factory Falls Back Down to Earth | Hacker News Reader

Google's Moonshot Factory Falls Back Down to Earth

bloomberg.com

68 pointspetethomas60 comments

> McKinsey & Co.-trained entrepreneur who abandoned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics to build startups in sub-Saharan Africa

That does not sound like the profile I'd want to run a moonshot project. To me you either you want someone who is very goal oriented to do a research lab approach or very product oriented to do a deep tech startup approach. Abandoning a PhD indicate it's not the former and McKinsey indicates it's not the latter.

That whole first paragraph elicited a nearly irreversible eyeroll.

Have we learned nothing of mythologizing these tech people? That sentence, structured to make this executive seem super human, is a lot of what is wrong about SV. Putting consulting/finance showmen (and women) above true innovators.

She’s was a PhD candidate in theoretical physics and is working at a startup directly building mobility robotics prototypes. How is she a consulting/finance showman? Because she was at McKinsey at one point?

Maybe if she quit immediately after losing the Google X prestige you might be able to infer something about her motivations, but she’s clearly passionate about the deep engineering project she’s working on and still at it even in the startup environment, so your comment seems to completely miss the mark.

To me, it raises red flags of status-seeking behavior (ie, extrinsic motivation). I read the OP as saying the person was looking to check resume boxes rather than achieve something great. There's almost a template of what the stereotypical SV entrepreneur's resume "should" look like, and it's part of that myth. Sometimes, I think people get too concerned with looking the part rather than being the part. (I can't speak specifically in this situation because it's behind a paywall).

It's not that people can't achieve great things by extrinsic motivation, but if I were a betting person (and that's essentially what VC is), I'd prefer to put my money on someone with more intrinsic motivation because it tends to wane less when things get tough or the tides of what's trendy change.

I think this is mixing somewhat the portrait of that person with who that person might. The portrait might be somewhat stereotypical but the person might not be.

Of course that’s possible, but unless we know them personally, there only information we have is from their portrait. That’s also why I said they are “red flags” and not definitive conclusions.

> she’s clearly passionate about the deep engineering project

There is nothing there saying that she is passionate about anything. The kind of thing she's doing is only a job. Just because you're doing something related to startups doesn't mean you love startups, most of the time it is just a job you need to do to get from point A to point B.

Meh, this assumes that there are no other ways for innovators to build businesses than running google x. In fact, most innovations do not come from here. OTOH, a lot of innovators fail to make businesses, so, I think you can't draw much conclusion from a single sentence in an article.

As to what is wrong with SV - it's really what's wrong with the market in general. After years of no interest rates and dumb ideas like Juicero, reality is setting in as the cost of capital is not zero, and so equity holders have plenty of alternative returns that are acceptable and don't require moonshots.

The mountain climbing is also amusing since, in my experience, running moonshots needs someone who is inherently lazy. Driven, yes, but also lazy. You don't want someone who climbs mountains as a hobby. You want someone who figures out how to get a helicopter to take them to the top of the mountain. You need to de-risk every single thing possible, even if others say you can't do that, by taking the laziest and least risky approach. Then concentrate on the areas you can't de-risk. Then once you get it running you iterate and optimize the lazy bits.

edit: Actually de-risk and not simply lie about de-risking. Eventually you need to publicly test the prototype and the lies will fall apart.

(I'm going to assume you're serious). Only in the tech bubble could a hobby which is challenging and probably gruesome at certain points, be held against you. In any normal conversation a person who climbs literal mountains would be looked at in a positive light. Not saying it's the one defining quality you'd need to successfully run a company, but you somehow managed to place it at the completely wrong side of the proverbial scale. Of course, it's probably completely insignificant and uncorrelated, but I wouldn't be surprised to read that someone who plays a piano is also incompetent to run a company because ...I don't know, I guess I'll have to wait to read that one here soon.

Something can be good for X overall but be bad for subsets of X. The fact that you find it so offensive for me to even make that statement says more about the mono culture you view the world through than the one I view the world through.

edit: Of course Google, the king of the tech bubble, saw this as a positive so your statement about this being a tech bubble thing is also really amusing. If anything the tech bubble would likely agree with you so you're part of the tech bubble mindset on this one.

I think it depends what exactly you're doing.

Me, I think "moonshot" is a very buzzy buzzword, not a concrete thing, despite what it's named after. I've listened to both Chris Hadfield's "An Astronauts Guide to Life on Earth" and Richard Wiseman's "Shoot for the Moon", and it was extremely clear how little there was in common between the perspective of the professional psychologist and the guy who actually went into space.

> Only in the tech bubble could a hobby which is challenging and probably gruesome at certain points, be held against you.

Did you mean to say something completely different? What if your hobby is making crush videos?

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Man-heads-t...

> “In any normal conversation a person who climbs literal mountains would be looked at in a positive light.”

It’s irrelevant to most conversations. Someone who regularly brings up their mountain climbing unprompted doesn’t necessarily appear in a positive light.

The point he’s making is one person cares about doing the task as efficiently as possible in a new way and the other cares about performative behavior done in a performative way.

He has a point. The point is inventors don’t care about repeating performative tasks like climbing a mountain everyone has already climbed before in the same way everyone else has.

They care about doing new things in better ways.

It’s a subtle but important distinction.

Unless you mean by "lazy" someone against all ways of exerting effort (why build something then anyway), then someone can be "lazy" as well as climb mountains. No contradiction there: Hate that something takes so much effort and find a "lazy" way to solve that while enjoying mountaineering is fully compatible.

Laziness has been valued before [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...

> in my experience, running moonshots needs someone who is inherently lazy

What is your experience with moonshots?

I'm afraid that means you don't understand climbing very well.

For almost all climbers, climbing and mountaineering entails a lot of managing risk. It's a constant partner in anything you do, and one thing you learn from climbing is to put in place processes to manage risk, and then trust in them in situations that are scary.

That's how you run a large corporation. Not a successful startup or moonshot project.

It is perfectly valid to ignore a risk and then assume you'll figure something out if it comes to pass. Few things happen quickly so you'll have time to talk to other founders and investors and so on. Or maybe you'll fail and then start a new venture in six month. Trying to plan for mitigations ahead of time will mean you spend all your time on mitigating risk versus growing the business. A climber that does that is a corpse.

Sure. I'm not trying to say they're the same thing. But the vast majority of climbers have a _conscious_ approach to risk. Some risks are worth taking. Some aren't. The key is that you have to be aware of them and be proactive about them, even though some times, the decision is, "yeah, the weather forecast is uncertain, but this is our best window for trying to summit, let's go."

Being conscious about your risks _is_ very compatible with running a startup or moonshot.

Astro's "kill it early" philosophy is a good example of this. There's a lot of risk in running for a long time with an idea that doesn't actually have legs. The "process" you use to mitigate it is to try to kill it as fast as possible. That's not process in the sense of filling out a lot of forms, but it's a process nonetheless, and a healthy one in a startup environment.

Completely agree. The thing about running marathons and climbing mountains is part of the myth in Wall Street and SV that the person needs to be a super human and work 24 hours a day to be really successful. It is 100% BS, but people will cultivate this kind of fallacy to get ahead.

McKinsey trains you to squeeze every cent possible from corporations

While training your competitors or political rivals as well.

Not just corporations. Plenty in government as well.

Actually, they train you to squeeze money from everyone. They squeeze money from you to help you squeeze money out of your customers.

> McKinsey & Co.-trained entrepreneur who abandoned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics to build startups in sub-Saharan Africa

wasn't Jerry Maguire engaged to be married to this combination of bullet-points at one point - also the mountain climbing...

> Abandoning a PhD indicate it's not the former

How is that? PhD is just a title indicating some relationship to science. If you have successful career as a goal, you started PhD thinking it will be useful, the got better understanding of your needs and switched to something else, that is called being able to make a tough call. If anything, experience of pivots is a startup person quality.

A PhD only proves you can stick through on a research project for 4-5 years and can convince 3-4 other PhDs that you are a competent scientist

So it doesn't necessarily correlate with research aptitude. I've known incompetent PhDs and incredibly talented folks who only had a BS

...but for a company as distracted by shiny things as Google, where a major trust problem is that they get bored and drop products after a couple years, maybe they should look at "ability to stick things through" as an important qualification

Pretty sure the lack of focus from the top. From what I understand people working there are as confused as the general public when something gets dropped or the 10th messenger service is announced

But Google doesn't drop projects because some researchers or devs got bored. That's a management decision.

Moonshot to me indicates there is a specific goal versus simply making a startup that may pivot utterly. If the Apollo project ended up building a high speed train then it'd have been a failure no matter how good that train was.

> Founding team of the African office of investment fund focused on starting new businesses from scratch to fix market failures.

This is context from the person's LinkedIn[0] - looks like maybe someone who was a manager in a fund that had preallocated money to be spent on African agri-businesses, rather than you might think of when you read the phrase "building startups".

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-zealand/details/experien...

You would need way more information to judge, you cannot dismiss someone just based on that type of details, it’s too low quality data points to be interpreted as meaningful signal

Edit: anecdotally, I know the company has pretty bad reputation however ex-McKinsey coworkers I’m working with are exactly what you described, “very product oriented to do a deep tech startup approach”. Also pretty good engineers.

McKinsey & Co. has 45k employees. The stereotype you might have of their employees is not universal. I know someone who worked for a startup/greenfield tech project division at a similar company who went to that job from a start up and right back into a start up after it.

Looks like they McKinsey has a whole arm, Fuel, doing that type of work: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...

The ultimate blob-person: a highly intelligent, fanatically hard working person who's motivated by establishment prestige above all else.

I worked in Area120 and then at Waymo, in the X building, and saw lots of the other X projects. They built some jaw-dropping stuff.

It's tempting to talk about structural problems, incentives, the dynamic between search ads & "moonshots".

But I think the main variable that explains the outcomes is quality of management. Running projects like these requires excellent leadership - giving brilliant engineers autonomy to experiment, yet guiding them towards a consistent goal. Knowing when to double down and when to pivot.

The stories about John Krafcik, Astro Teller, and Andy Conrad [https://www.statnews.com/2016/03/28/google-life-sciences-exo...], or what happened with Levandowski paint a picture that sufficiently explains the outcomes.

> yet guiding them towards a consistent goal

You mean on a per project basis or as an overall strategy for the org?

Both but here I meant per-project.

That Statnews article might be on the level, but it quotes Rob Enderle twice. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, here are some of his greatest hits:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rob_Enderle

https://archive.ph/2jwd2

I don’t know how “McKinsey Trained” could be anything other than an absolute insult.

Believe it or not, McK juniors are amazing.

It’s middle management and up that are the snake oil salesmen.

Sure. whatever I've hired tons of them and I would not describe them as 'amazing.'

I would describe them as perfect for a modern world where the most efficient thing is to sell a narrative, but not execute on it or be responsible for the outcomes.

I really think they are pretty much the opposite of amazing, and mostly just fool people who don't know any better.

> Sure. whatever I've hired tons of them and I would not describe them as 'amazing.'

Seems your hiring process is flawed?

yes. thats it. everyones hiring process is flawed but yours.

Not sure why you seem to have perceived this as combativeness. For what it's worth: wasn't the intention.

Have a great weekend, anyway!

Trying to beat tyranny of the East Coast scientifically rigorous startup equation using a 2-stage West Coast system (whimsy+VC — softtech)???

http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-stanford-start...

2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40434290

2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6715864

Did work with a couple of these.

I couldn't tell if it was because of the flim-flam nature of the people they hired, or the flim-flam nature of Google's organizational culture.

A lot of good ideas died on the vine either way.

What do you mean by "flim-flam"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scam

A scam, or a confidence trick, is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust.

Other terms for scam (aside from confidence trick) include con, con game, confidence game, confidence scheme, ripoff, stratagem, finesse, grift, hustle, bunko (or bunco), swindle, flimflam, gaffle, and bamboozle.

Having some experience with these moonshots myself, my guess is that they are referring to the constantly changing focus/priorities. It felt to me like these orgs had shiny object syndrome with little care for whether they were building sustainable businesses.

Any insight into why the process is so difficult to spin the companies out?

is not difficult?

looks like before they're just funding the whole project until some sort of conclusion

now looks like they'll focus on early stage funding (angel/seed) and spin off companies to gather funding from 3rd parties to further develop

which means Google will let go off of equity at early stages

My former boss (CTO of a large multinational Electronics company) once explained to me that 'true' (unrestrained) R&D is only possible if you have a monopoly and want to lower your margins to avoid antitrust scrutiny. This rings true to me. It also signals that Google is now entering a phase of real competition.

> 'true' (unrestrained) R&D is only possible if you have a monopoly

* Bell Labs

* IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center

* Xerox Parc

I always felt when DoJ was suing Microsoft for antitrust the best evidence of their monopoly was that Microsoft Research had started spitting out good work.

I think you're onto something wrt Google.

I think you present opinion of your former boss as if it were a fact.

Another commenter added some examples, I'll also add the whole public sector (research institutes, univerisities) and some governmental orgs. I did a lot of "pure" R&D (in the public sector and close vicinity) and never worked in a company even close to a monopoly.

A functional government has a monopoly on violence. Funding public sector R&D is tax money well spent, but it's still monopoly money.

well i'm glad it happened this way, rather than overzealous legislators ending the gravy train

it's so much more fulfilling to work on moonshot robotics compared to showing ads to people more efficiently

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