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Google's Moonshot Factory Falls Back Down to Earth
- htrp 2y agoAny insight into why the process is so difficult to spin the companies out?
- PaywallBuster 2y agois 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
- gradschoolfail 2y agoTrying 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-startup-and-mit-startup.html http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-stanford-start... 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40434290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40434290 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6715864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6715864
- marcinzm 2y ago> 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.
- Waterluvian 2y agoThat whole first paragraph elicited a nearly irreversible eyeroll.
- mateus1 2y agoHave 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.
- aikinai 2y agoShe’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.
- bumby 2y agoTo 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.
- RandomLensman 2y agoI 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.
- is_true 2y agoMcKinsey trains you to squeeze every cent possible from corporations
- raxxorraxor 2y agoWhile training your competitors or political rivals as well.
- robertlagrant 2y agoNot just corporations. Plenty in government as well.
- is_true 2y agoActually, they train you to squeeze money from everyone. They squeeze money from you to help you squeeze money out of your customers.
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago> 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...
- ivan_gammel 2y ago> 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.
- StableAlkyne 2y agoA 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
- dgellow 2y agoPretty 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
- JohnFen 2y agoBut Google doesn't drop projects because some researchers or devs got bored. That's a management decision.
- marcinzm 2y agoMoonshot 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- robertlagrant 2y ago> 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/experience https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-zealand/details/experien...
- dgellow 2y agoYou 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.
- AlwaysRock 2y agoMcKinsey & 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-telecommunications/how-we-help-clients/startups-venture-capital https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...
- sandspar 2y agoThe ultimate blob-person: a highly intelligent, fanatically hard working person who's motivated by establishment prestige above all else.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- snowwrestler 2y ago[dead]
- julianpye 2y agoMy 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.
- JackFr 2y ago> '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.
- hifromwork 2y agoI 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.
- boojums 2y agoA functional government has a monopoly on violence. Funding public sector R&D is tax money well spent, but it's still monopoly money.
- rangestransform 2y agowell 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
- 23B1 2y agoDid 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.
- bumby 2y agoWhat do you mean by "flim-flam"?
- JackFr 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scam 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.
- deelowe 2y agoHaving 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.
- tsunamifury 2y agoI don’t know how “McKinsey Trained” could be anything other than an absolute insult.
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoBelieve it or not, McK juniors are amazing. It’s middle management and up that are the snake oil salesmen.
- tsunamifury 2y agoSure. 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.
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago> Sure. whatever I've hired tons of them and I would not describe them as 'amazing.' Seems your hiring process is flawed?
- tsunamifury 2y agoyes. thats it. everyones hiring process is flawed but yours.
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoNot sure why you seem to have perceived this as combativeness. For what it's worth: wasn't the intention. Have a great weekend, anyway!
- ddp26 2y agoI 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-exodus/ https://www.statnews.com/2016/03/28/google-life-sciences-exo...], or what happened with Levandowski paint a picture that sufficiently explains the outcomes.
- jebarker 2y ago> yet guiding them towards a consistent goal You mean on a per project basis or as an overall strategy for the org?
- ddp26 2y agoBoth but here I meant per-project.
- adolph 2y agoThat 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://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rob_Enderle
- MightyHacker578 2y ago[flagged]
- ossusermivami 2y agohttps://archive.ph/2jwd2 https://archive.ph/2jwd2