CEO of Alphabet’s X, Astro Teller, on what makes a moonshot

Astro Teller, its CEO X, “Moonshot Factory,” of the alphabet. Where the company incubates the near-impossible, shares a look at what makes a moonshot and details the company’s “fast fast” mantra. TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 Monday conference.

Notable companies that started as moonshots from X’s Moonshot Factory include Waymo and Wing.

Teller notes that X has a “2% hit rate,” meaning that most things the company tries don’t work, and that’s okay.

X defines a moonshot as three specific elements, he said. The first is that the world needs to try to solve a huge problem. Second, there needs to be some product or service that, although unlikely, will eliminate the problem. Ultimately, there has to be some kind of breakthrough technology that offers a glimmer of hope in solving that huge, real-world problem.

“If you work on X, and you only come up with a teleporter, you have a moon story hypothesis, I’d say, great, there’s a small amount of money here, see if you can prove it wrong, because it probably is,” he said. “I don’t want you to act on it. I want you to get the facts about whether or not this is truly a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and if the answer is no, that’s okay.”

Teller points out that if someone proposes a moonshot, and it seems reasonable, the company isn’t interested, because by definition, it wouldn’t be a moonshot. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea; That’s just what X is looking for.

“If you propose something and it sounds pretty wild, it has those three elements that I just described, and it’s a testable hypothesis, for a small amount of money, we can learn something that’s a little bit crazier than we thought, or a little less crazy than we thought,” Teller said. “If it’s a little crazier than we thought, cool, high five, let’s put a bullet in its head and move on. And if it’s a little less crazy than we thought, great, here’s a little more money. Try to find the next opportunity to kill it and repeat.”

Teller emphasized that to do moonshots, you have to have equal amounts of courage and humility.

“If you don’t have really high courage, you don’t embark on this really unlikely journey,” he said. “But, if you have anything less than really high humility, you’ll go down brilliantly on that unlikely journey.”

X starts more than 100 things a year, and while 2% of them exit after five or six years, 44% of the money the company spends on things that graduate and are “extremely good,” Teller says. He says this is because X “kills all the bad ideas early in the process.”

Teller says that people can learn to innovate, noting that every single person was creative when they were children, but we haven’t learned the things that are useful, 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 for finding them.