By 2010, Google had already won the argument it started in a Stanford dorm room. Search was solved, the ad machine was printing money, and the company was big enough to buy almost anything it wanted. So Larry Page asked a stranger question than "how do we grow?" He asked: what would we build if failure didn't scare us?
The answer was a semi-secret lab called Google X — founded in January 2010, tucked into a building about a mile and a half from the main campus in Mountain View. Its first hire was Sebastian Thrun, the roboticist who had won the DARPA challenge for self-driving cars. Its mission, in the lab's own words, was to "invent and launch moonshot technologies that could make the world a radically better place." Not better products. A radically better world. The bar was deliberately absurd.
The moonshot formula
X didn't chase random sci-fi. It ran a formula. A true moonshot, the lab decided, sits at the intersection of three things: a huge problem affecting millions or billions of people, a radical solution that sounds like science fiction, and a breakthrough technology that gives you at least a fighting chance of actually building it. Miss any one and it's not a moonshot — it's either a fantasy or a normal product.
The man put in charge of enforcing that discipline was Astro Teller, whose actual job title is "Captain of Moonshots." (Yes, really. He rides a rollerblade around the lab.) Teller's genius wasn't picking winners. It was building a machine that could kill losers fast, cheaply, and without shame — before they burned years and hundreds of millions of dollars.
The one that flew
The lab's founding project became its crown jewel. The self-driving car effort, which began in earnest as the Google Self-Driving Car Project on January 17, 2009, was exactly the kind of bet nobody sane would fund: cars that drive themselves, on real roads, with no one touching the wheel. For years it looked like a very expensive science experiment. Test cars logged millions of miles around the Bay Area while skeptics rolled their eyes.
Then, on December 13, 2016, it stopped being an experiment. The project graduated out of X and became Waymo, a standalone Alphabet company. A decade later it wasn't a demo anymore — it was a paid robotaxi service running in multiple U.S. cities, carrying hundreds of thousands of riders a week in cars with no human driver at all. The moonshot had landed.
Waymo wasn't the only graduate. Wing, X's drone-delivery project, spun out in 2018 to fly packages to people's backyards. Verily left in 2015 to become Alphabet's life-sciences arm, working on everything from glucose sensors to surgical robotics. When an X project worked, the reward was independence — it got pushed out of the nest to become its own company.
The glorious failures
But most moonshots don't land. That's the point, and X built its whole culture around it. Teller preaches that if you want big wins, you have to make it safe to fail — so the lab celebrates the teams that kill their own projects. People get applause, and sometimes bonuses, for proving their idea won't work. Killing a doomed project early is treated as a victory, not a defeat.
The graveyard is spectacular. Project Loon spent a decade (2011–2021) trying to beam internet down from stratospheric balloons drifting 20 kilometers up, steered only by riding different wind layers. It genuinely worked — it delivered emergency connectivity in Puerto Rico and Peru — but it could never be made cheap enough to survive, and Alphabet shut it down in 2021. Makani chased clean energy with kites: a wing tethered to the ground, flying in circles to generate wind power. Google bought it in 2013, tried for seven years, and grounded it for good in 2020.
And then there's Google Glass — the face-mounted computer that launched to developers in 2013 and became a cultural punchline. Wearers got branded "Glassholes," privacy fears piled up, and the consumer version was shelved by 2015. (Glass quietly lived on for years as a factory-floor tool, proving that even a "failure" can find a smaller, useful life.)
Here's the thing critics miss: none of these were embarrassments to the people who ran them. A balloon that spanned continents, a kite that made electricity, a computer you wore on your face — each one pushed the edge of what was thought possible, and each one taught the next project something. X's bet was that a factory built to fail cheaply and often would, every so often, produce a Waymo. So far, it has.
Next time: the moonshots got so big and so strange that Google needed a whole new shape to hold them. In 2015, the company reorganized into something almost nobody saw coming — a holding company called Alphabet.
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