“Doing exercise without monitoring yourself will be rare in the future of wearable technology.”
― Astro Teller
“The cycling helmet can save your life, but it doesn’t look good and tends to ruin your hair.”
― Astro Teller
“Most of us have to spend a lot of energy to learn how to drive a car. Then we have to spend the rest of our lives over-concentrating as we drive and text and eat a burrito and put on makeup. As a result, 30,000 people die every year in a car accident in the U.S.”
― Astro Teller
“Really great entrepreneurs have this very special mix of unstoppable optimism and scathing paranoia.”
― Astro Teller
“The world is not limited by IQ. We are all limited by bravery and creativity.”
― Astro Teller
“Moonshots live in that place between audacious projects and pure science fiction.”
― Astro Teller
“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.”
― Astro Teller
“Rather than thinking of ourselves as a computer, and trying to give you computer-like functionality, it’s better to start from the understanding that this is a pair of glasses, and say, ‘How smart can we make these glasses for you?’”
― Astro Teller
“It is the essence of innovation to fail most of the time.”
― Astro Teller
“Every day, hundreds of millions of people stab themselves, bleed, and then offer, like a sacrifice, to the glucose monitor they’re carrying with them. It’s such a bad user interface that even though in the medium-term it’s life or death for these people, hundreds of millions of people don’t engage in this user interface.”
― Astro Teller
“I’m a father to four kids, so it bothers me that even though our children think big naturally, our society systematically trains them out of thinking that way.”
― Astro Teller
“I started my second company in 1999. BodyMedia was set up to take advantage of the future of wearables – sensors and computing worn on our bodies in any and all ways that could make our lives better.”
― Astro Teller
“Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had a jetpack that wasn’t a death trap? The problem is that it is going to be so power inefficient. I just couldn’t live with that… it would be as loud as a motorcycle.”
― Astro Teller
“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.”
― Astro Teller
“Why shoot for the moon? It matters because when you try to do something radically hard, you approach the problem differently than when you try to make something incrementally better.”
― Astro Teller
“I do believe that making a factory for innovation, a moon-shot factory, is possible.”
― Astro Teller
“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.”
― Astro Teller
“VisiCalc and WordPerfect were the killer apps of their day, but Google and Facebook make them look small in comparison.”
― Astro Teller
“I think wearables in general have, as their best calling, to better understand our current state and needs and to express those back to the world.”
― Astro Teller
“It’s crazy that you have to tell your phone or your computer or your house or your car ‘It’s me!’ hundreds of times a day. Wearables will solve that problem.”
― Astro Teller
“Here is the surprising truth: It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.”
― Astro Teller
“Moonshot thinking starts with picking a big problem: something huge, long existing, or on a global scale.”
― Astro Teller
“I personally have a philosophy around authenticity and vulnerability.”
― Astro Teller
“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.”
― Astro Teller
“We need to make sure that the things we are already working on turn out to do the things we believe they can do and creating value both for the world and ultimately for Google.”
― Astro Teller
“Without getting into specifics, I assure you we are looking at very substantial opportunities for Loon – Google-scale opportunities.”
― Astro Teller
“If you’re shooting to make the world 10% better, you’re in a smartness contest with everyone else in the world – and you’re going to lose. There are too many smart people in the world.”
― Astro Teller
“Making a moonshot is almost more an exercise in creativity than it is in technology.”
― Astro Teller
“Use creativity and storytelling as your main muscle instead of smartness.”
― Astro Teller
“We don’t have some message from God that gives us a list of what’s good and what’s not good. Obviously, we have to make our own flawed judgments about each thing.”
― Astro Teller
“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.”
― Astro Teller
“When we try to make a car that drives itself, we believe – whether we’re right or not – we believe that there would be strong net positive benefit to the world if cars could drive themselves safer than people could.”
― Astro Teller
“Actually, that issue of ‘Don’t be evil’ is probably the number one reason we throw out ideas.”
― Astro Teller
“The faster you can get your ideas in contact with the real world, the faster you can discover what is broken with your idea.”
― Astro Teller
“The Explorer edition of Glass wasn’t for everyone, but the Explorer program pushed us to find a wide range of near-term applications and uses for something like Glass.”
― Astro Teller
“When you try to do something ten per cent better, you tend to work from where you are: if I ask you to make a car that goes 50 miles a gallon, you can just retool the engine you already have.”
― Astro Teller
“If you don’t have a tonne of optimism, you’re not going to make it… you won’t be able to evangelise to everyone else. On the other hand, if you aren’t constantly paranoid about what can go wrong and put plans in place, then you’re going to get bitten at some point.”
― Astro Teller
“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.”
― Astro Teller
“Really, having people who have different mental perspectives is what’s important.”
― Astro Teller
“If you want to explore things you haven’t explored, having people who look just like you and think just like you is not the best way.”
― Astro Teller
“We don’t take on Google Glass or the self-driving car project or Project Loon unless we think that on a risk-adjusted basis, it’s worth Google’s money to do it.”
― Astro Teller
“Google Glass is the wearable computer that responds to voice commands and displays information on a visual display.”
― Astro Teller
“The future is all about leading a stress-free life and having all the solutions for all problems at hand.”
― Astro Teller
“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.”
― Astro Teller
“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.”
― Astro Teller
“There is no law of physics that says just because we’re connected, there has to be this schism between our physical lives and our digital lives.”
― Astro Teller
“We’re excited about how tech can be used to get tech out of the way.”
― Astro Teller
“I grant that people are generally uncomfortable with how fast privacy issues are changing in the world, but Google Glass is not going to move the needle on that.”
― Astro Teller
“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.”
― Astro Teller
“I think we’ll see, not only with Glass, but the watch wearables, with the contact lens, that each of these things have their own best purpose, but it will take more on our part and society’s part to figure out what that is.”
― Astro Teller
“The great decision was the Explorer program. The thing we did not do well is that we allowed and somewhat encouraged too much exposure to the program.”
― Astro Teller
“People do really stupid things while driving.”
― Astro Teller
“You make a ton of progress by making a ton of mistakes.”
― Astro Teller
“The longer you work on something, the more you don’t really want to know what the world is going to tell you.”
― Astro Teller
“When technology reaches that level of invisibility in our lives, that’s our ultimate goal. It vanishes into our lives. It says, ‘You don’t have to do the work; I’ll do the work.’”
― Astro Teller
“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.”
― Astro Teller
“We’re going to look back and wonder why we had to micro-control our cars.”
― Astro Teller
“When you go into a bar, there are hundreds and hundreds of cameras in that bar – many of them installed by that bar. They might be checking something or taking a picture of you.”
― Astro Teller
“Glass is the world’s worst spy camera. If you want to surreptitiously take photos, I would not use Glass.”
― Astro Teller
“There’s this open question of what Google is going to be a decade or more from now. Google X isn’t the only answer to that question, but it was built as a place to do some of the exploration to find some great new problems for Google to tackle.”
― Astro Teller
“Every time you drop the price by a factor of two, you roughly get a 10 times pickup of the number of people who will seriously consider buying it.”
― Astro Teller
“The moonshot for Google Glass is to harmonize the physical and digital worlds. It is specifically to find a way to help people be naturally, elegantly situated, physical and digitally, at the same time.”
― Astro Teller
“Most ideas don’t work out. Almost all ideas don’t work out. So it’s okay if yours didn’t work out.”
― Astro Teller
“I don’t believe a mistake-free learning environment exists.”
― Astro Teller
“Failures are cheap if you do them first. Failures are expensive if you do them at the end.”
― Astro Teller
“Failing doesn’t have to mean not succeeding. It can be, ‘Hey we tried that. We can go forward, smarter.’”
― Astro Teller
“Anything which is a huge problem for humanity we’ll sign up for, if we can find a way to fix it.”
― Astro Teller
“We are proposing that there is value in a totally new product category and a totally new set of questions. Just like the Apple II proposed, ‘Would you reasonably want a computer in your home if you weren’t an accountant or professional?’ That is the question Glass is asking, and I hope in the end that is how it will be judged.”
― Astro Teller
“We are serious as a heart attack about making the world a better place.”
― Astro Teller
“We know in our hearts that technology at its best should make us feel even more human than we currently feel. Sometimes it makes us feel less human.”
― Astro Teller
“I’m a compulsive storyteller, an avid reader, and have always nurtured the secret goal of spending my life as a writer.”
― Astro Teller
“Ultimately, a timeless story has to be about the human condition.”
― Astro Teller
“Our culture already has a number of well known stories about artificial life and non-human intelligence. In ‘Exegesis,’ I’ve tried to not only tell a new and engaging story but also to comment on those well known stories through the details of my novel.”
― Astro Teller
“Google is already overflowing with incredibly creative bright groups already working on lots of the software problems of the world.”
― Astro Teller
“Find some fun way to get a little more oil on your hands or mud on your boots. Sometimes, that’s what it takes to take down some of the really big problems.”
― Astro Teller
“If software’s the only thing in your bag of tools, I’m not going to give you great odds.”
― Astro Teller
“If we want to help Google become something meaningfully different in the future, then that’s more likely to happen if we focus on the physical world instead.”
― Astro Teller
“To say a scientist is not at all responsible is wrong. But to say that someone who invents a piece of knowledge or technology is responsible for all future uses is ridiculous. It doesn’t have to be that binary.”
― Astro Teller
“Your body is spewing off millions of data points a second.”
― Astro Teller
“Let’s make health care a meritocracy. Access to the best care goes to people who did what they could to avoid becoming ill.”
― Astro Teller
“A ten-times increase in the weight-oriented density of batteries would enable so many other moonshots, if we can find a great idea. We just haven’t found one yet.”
― Astro Teller
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