IT Blog

I first experienced the power of bold risk-taking when working for Jeff Bezos at Amazon in the early 2000s, while he was not only inventing the gold standard of e-commerce but also literally building rocket ships. However, it wasn’t until I worked at Google that I truly caught the vision for the moonshot process: I saw it while sitting with the Google X team a day a week for over a decade and watching them invent the technologies that will power our future lives.

Google X, now renamed simply X, is in a building that used to be a shopping mall several decades ago. Rather than building it out as an office space with the signature vibrantly colored and expertly designed interiors of the other global Google buildings, Sergey Brin instructed the design team to keep it bare-bones and tactical. The walls are few and the structure is mostly bare concrete columns, with the original engineering spray paint markings and electrical and fiber cables cascading down from the ceilings. It is cold…