Astro Teller, CEO of X, Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” where the company incubates the nearly impossible, shared a look into what makes a moonshot and detailed the company’s “fail fast” mantra at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Monday.
Notable companies that started out as moonshots from X’s moonshot factory include Waymo and Wing.
Teller noted that X has a “2% hit rate,” which means that 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 needs to attempt to solve a huge problem in the world. Second, there needs to be some kind of product or service that, however unlikely, would make the problem go away. Last, there has to be a sort of breakthrough technology that would provide a glimmer of hope at solving that huge, real-world problem.
“If you worked at X, and you would just come up with a teleporter, you’ve got a moonshot story hypothesis, I would say, awesome, here’s a tiny amount of money, go see if you can prove that it’s wrong, because it probably is,” he said. “I don’t want you to make it work. I want you to get information about whether this is really a once-in-a-generation opportunity or not, and it’s okay if the answer is no.”
Teller went on to note that if someone is proposing a moonshot, and it sounds reasonable, the company isn’t interested, because that, by definition, wouldn’t be a moonshot. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea; that’s just not what X is looking for.
“If you propose something and it sounds pretty wild, that has those 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, awesome, here’s a tiny bit more money. Go try to find the next opportunity to kill it and repeat.”
Teller emphasized that in order to do moonshots, you need to have equal amounts of audacity and humility.
“If you don’t have really high audacity, you won’t start on these really unlikely journeys,” he said. “But, if you have anything less than really high humility, you’ll go luminously far down that unlikely journey.”
X starts more than 100 things every year, and while 2% of them make it to exit five or six years later, 44% of all of the money that the company spends is on things that graduate and are “outrageously good,” Teller said. He says this is because X “kills all the bad ideas pretty early in the process.”
Teller stated that people can learn innovation, noting that every single person was creative when they were children, but that we end up unlearning things that are useful, maybe even necessary for radical innovation. However, he says it’s possible to find these things again by creating an environment where you don’t feel stupid to go find them.