Astro Teller, CEO of X, Alphabet’s “moonshot factory” where the company incubates the near-impossible, shared a look at what makes a moonshot and detailed the company’s “fail fast” mantra at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Monday.
Notable companies that started as moonshots from X’s moonshot factory include Waymo and Wing.
Teller noted that X has a “2% hit rate,” meaning most of the things the company tries don’t work out, and that’s okay.
He said X defines a moonshot as having three specific components. The first is that it must try to solve a major problem in the world. Second, there must be some kind of product or service that, however unlikely, would make the problem go away. Eventually, there has to be some kind of breakthrough technology that would offer a glimmer of hope to solve the enormous problem in the real world.
“If you were working on X and you just wanted to come up with a teleporter, you have a hypothesis about a moonshot story, I’d say, great, here’s a small amount of money, see if you can prove it wrong, because it probably is,” he said. “I don’t want you to make it work. I want you to get information about whether or not this is truly a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and it’s okay if the answer is no.”
Teller went on to note that if someone suggests a moonshot and it sounds reasonable, the company isn’t interested because by definition it wouldn’t be a moonshot. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea; it’s just not what X is looking for.
“If you propose something and it sounds pretty crazy, it has the three components that I just described, and it’s a testable hypothesis, for a small amount of money, we can learn something about whether it’s a little bit more crazy than we thought or a little bit less crazy than we thought,” Teller said. “If it’s a little bit more crazy than we thought, cool, high five, let’s put a bullet in its head and move on. And if it’s a little bit less crazy than we thought, great, here’s a little bit more money. Go try to find the next opportunity to kill it and repeat.”
Teller emphasized that to make moonshots, you need equal amounts of audacity and humility.
“Unless you have really great audacity, you don’t want to embark on these really improbable journeys,” he said. “But if you have anything less than really high humility, you’ll go a long way down that unlikely journey.”
X starts more than 100 things each year, and while 2% of them make it to completion five or six years later, 44% of all the money the company spends is on things that are upgraded and are “tremendously good,” Teller said. He says that’s because X “kills all the bad ideas pretty early in the process.”
Teller stated that people can learn innovation, noting that every person was creative when they were children, but that we end up unlearning things that are useful, perhaps even necessary, for radical innovation. However, he says it is possible to find these things again by creating an environment where you don’t feel stupid for finding them.