The Truth About Google X: An Exclusive Look Behind The Secretive Lab's Closed Doors . Or maybe it's something good. At Google X, it's sometimes hard to know the difference. Teller is the scientist who directs day- to- day work at the search . He isn't the president or chairman of X, however; his actual title, as his etched- glass business card proclaims, is Captain of Moonshots—. Is scuba diving a safe activity? Rapid ascent/ violent water movement. It has been great to workout with Drew, John, Matt, Craig.verizon.net/res8kp13/crossfitgulfcoast/</a><br /><br /><strong>SATURDAY'S RESULTS:</strong><br />CrossFit Warmup, Dan John's The 'Rapid Ascent' Program.<br />8. Volume III, Issue 11 March 2005 Get Up! The Official Newsletter of the. Dan John to learn this valuable exercise. It is evening in Mountain View, California, dinnertime in a noisy restaurant, and Teller is recounting over the din how earlier in the day he had to give some unwelcome news to his bosses, Google cofounder Sergey Brin and CFO Patrick Pichette. Not a trivial amount. But Pichette listened to the problem and essentially said, . But this is actually just part of the story. There happens to be a slack line—a low tightrope—slung between trees outside the Google X offices. After the meeting, the three men walked outside, took off their shoes, and gave the line a go for 2. The rapid ascent of a 20-year-old wunderkind. Pichette is quite good at walking back and forth; Brin slightly less so; Teller not at all. But they all took turns balancing on the rope, falling frequently, and getting back on. The slack line is groin- high. And that's really his message here. When the leadership can fail in full view, . But in many respects it is the means. By the time Teller and I speak, I have spent most of the day inside his lab, which no journalist has previously been allowed to explore. Throughout the morning and afternoon I visited a variety of work spaces and talked at length with members of the Google X Rapid Evaluation Team, or . Rapid Eval is the start of the innovative process at X; it is a method that emphasizes rejecting ideas much more than affirming them. It comes from Dan John's pdf, which is excellent if you haven't read it. Please join this discussion about The Rapid Ascent Program. That is why it seemed to me that X—which is what those who work there usually call it—sometimes resembled a cult of failure. As Rich De. Vaul, the head of Rapid Eval, says: . Google already has a large lab division, Google Research, that is devoted mainly to computer science and Internet technologies. The distinction is sometimes framed this way: Google Research is mostly bits; Google X is mostly atoms. In other words, X is tasked with making actual objects that interact with the physical world, which to a certain extent gives logical coherence to the four main projects that have so far emerged from X: driverless cars, Google Glass, high- . Mostly, X seeks out people who want to build stuff, and who won't get easily daunted. Inside the lab, now more than 2. Teller himself has written a novel, worked in finance, and earned a Ph. D in artificial intelligence. One recent hire spent five years of his evenings and weekends building a helicopter in his garage. It actually works, and he flew it regularly, which seems insane to me. But his technology skills alone did not get him the job. Juran; Born December 24, 1904 Br. This highly visible position fueled Juran's rapid ascent in the organization and the course of his later career.:110.But these are really not X people. What we want, in a sense, are people who know less and less about more and more. Please join this discussion about The Rapid Ascent Program. Then as you learn more about the ascent, your body, your recovery, program tweaking. It comes from Dan John's pdf, which is excellent if you haven't read it. The competitor list for the Act-Belong-Commit Augusta Adventure Fest events will be updated to this page shortly. Skip Navigation Links. Rapid Fat Loss Tips from Dan John. Make sure your program fits your level of experience. While you might have specific focused goals, be sure to also check to see what you might be missing. John McKay; Sport(s) Football: Biographical details; Born. John Harvey McKay (July 5, 1923. Yet Google X, as Teller describes it, is an experiment in itself—an effort to reconfigure the process by which a corporate lab functions, in this case by taking incredible risks across a wide variety of technological domains, and by not hesitating to stray far from its parent company's business. We don't yet know if this will prove to be genius or folly. There's actually no historical model, no . Google finds itself at a juncture in history that has not come before, and may not come again. The company is almost unimaginably rich and stocked with talent; it is hitting its peak of influence at a moment when networks and computing power and artificial intelligence are coalescing in what many technologists describe as (to borrow the Valley's most popular meme) . So why not do it through X? To Teller, this failure- loving lab has simply stepped into the breach. Small companies don't feel they have the resources to take moonshots. Big companies think it'll rattle shareholders. Government leaders believe there's not enough money, or that Congress will characterize a misstep or failure as a scandal. These days, when it comes to Hail Mary innovation, . While self- driving cars will almost certainly save lives, for instance, they will also free up drivers to do web searches and use Gmail. Wi- Fi balloons could result in a billion more Google users. Still, it's hard not to appreciate that these ideas, along with others coming from X, are breathtakingly idealistic. When I ask Teller why Google has chosen to invest in X rather than something that might appeal more to Wall Street, he dismisses the premise. Then he cracks a smile. The lab has no sign in front, just as it has no official website (. The main building's entrance leads into a small, self- serve coffee bar. The aesthetic is modern, austere, . To the left is a cavernous room with dozens of cubicles and several conference rooms; to the right is a bike rack and a lunchroom with a stern warning posted that only X employees are allowed. Otherwise, there's little indication you're in a supersecret lab. Most of the collaborative workshops are downstairs, in high- ceilinged rooms with whimsical names such as . This notion evolved into X around 2. Google engineer Sebastian Thrun's effort, backed by Brin and Page, to build a driverless car. The X lab grew up around that endeavor, with Thrun in charge. Thrun chose Teller as one of his codirectors, but when Thrun was drawn deeper into developing the car technology (and later into his online educational startup, . That's when Teller assumed day- to- day responsibilities. There are differing explanations for what the X actually stands for. At first it was simply a placeholder for a better name, but these days it usually denotes the search for solutions that are better by a factor of 1. Some of the Xers I met, however, think of the X as representing an organization willing to build technologies that are 1. This in itself is fairly unique. Once upon a time, corporate labs invested a chunk of their R& D budget in risky, long- term projects, but an increasing focus on quarterly earnings, and the realization that it can be exceedingly hard to recoup an investment in far- off research, ended almost all such efforts. These days, it's considered more sensible for a company to fund short- term research—or if it wants to think far into the future, to either buy rights to an embryonic idea that arises from university research or a government lab, or to swallow up an innovative startup. Teller and Brin are not averse to doing this; for example, the wind- energy company Makani was recently bought by Google and folded into X. But Google and X have often rejected the conventional business wisdom in favor of hatching their own wild- eyed research schemes, and then waiting patiently for them to mature. Recently, when Page was challenged on an earnings call about the sums he was pouring into R& D, he made no effort to excuse it. Then he chided the financial community: Shouldn't they be asking him to make more big, risky, long- term investments, not fewer? Rich De. Vaul heads the Rapid Evaluation team. All must address a problem that affects millions—or better yet, billions—of people. All must utilize a radical solution that has at least a component that resembles science fiction. And all must tap technologies that are now (or very nearly) obtainable. But to De. Vaul, the head of Rapid Eval, there's another, more unifying principle that connects the three criteria: No idea should be incremental. This sounds terribly clich. But the rejection of incrementalism, he says, is not because he and his colleagues believe it's pointless for ideological reasons. They believe it for practical reasons. But attacking a problem that is twice as big or 1. If you want to design a car that gets 8. But if you want to design a car that gets 5. Instead you start over, reexamining what a car really is. You think of different kinds of motors and fuels, or of space- age materials of such gossamer weight and iron durability that they alter the physics of transportation. Or you dump the idea of cars altogether in favor of a . And then maybe, just maybe, you come up with something worthy of X. De. Vaul is leaning back on a chair in a big ground- floor conference room at X. He's brought me here to demonstrate how the Rapid Eval team discusses ideas. We're joined around an oblong wood table by two of his colleagues, Dan Piponi and Mitch Heinrich. The men are a study in intellectual contrasts. Piponi, 4. 7, is soft- spoken, laconic, British—a mathematician and theoretical physicist and the winner of those Oscars. Even among the bright minds at Google X, he's regarded as freakishly smart. Heinrich, the lab's young design guru, gives off an affable art- school vibe. On his own initiative, he's built what's known as the design kitchen, a large fabrication shop that's stocked with 3- D printers, table saws, and sophisticated lathes in a building adjacent to the primary X lab. He brings a plastic tub stuffed with old eyeglass frames to the Rapid Eval session. They weren't intended for the market, he says, but to show his colleagues that what they were conceptualizing could indeed be built. De. Vaul, 4. 3, completes the trio. He has a Ph. D from MIT and worked at Apple for several years before coming to Google. It is difficult to figure out precisely what he studied in college—after 1. As such, he can talk a blue streak on a dazzling range of topics: crime, communications, computers, material science, robotics. It was De. Vaul, in fact, who came up with the idea for Project Loon, as those . He tried desperately to make it fail on technological grounds but found he could not, so he agreed to run the project for about a year before returning to Rapid Eval. In some respects, watching his group in action is like watching an improv team warm up—ideas are bounced about quickly, analytically, . The team on most Rapid Eval sessions numbers about half a dozen, including De. Vaul, Piponi, and Heinrich (and sometimes Teller); they meet for lunch once a week to .
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