X, The Moonshot Factory

“Our main cultural battle is against fear and the strong gravitational pull toward conventional ways of thinking and behaving. All of us have been conditioned for years not to fail, not to be vulnerable, and to minimize risk. So my number one job is helping Xers reset and free themselves from these invisible but pernicious constraints so they can free up their potential.” X’s Captain of Moonshots Astro Teller shares some of the ways X’s culture is designed to unleash radical creativity while remaining relentlessly focused on real technologies and real-world impact. Here are some of the lessons any team can apply if they want to break away from the ordinary and into the unexpected and unknown: https://lnkd.in/gr_YVS_T

After zooming through our latest season of podcast episodes, we’re going to take a trip back in time to revisit Season One, highlighting the origin story of X itself, shedding light on some of our best-known breakthroughs like self-driving cars and Google Glass, and revealing how transformational technologies like large language models began as experiments at The Moonshot Factory. In today’s newsletter, we look back at the creation of Waymo, the self-driving car project, and take flight with Wing, X’s radical approach to delivery using small, custom-built drones.

We can’t solve the global waste crisis with the same business-as-usual processes that got us here in the first place. At X, The Moonshot Factory, Materra is rethinking the circular economy from the ground up. We are developing breakthrough technologies and platforms that tackle waste—from plastic packaging, to textiles and electronic waste—at the molecular level to turn "trash into treasure." On this mission, our team has encountered waste in far reaching corners of the planet - which motivates us even more to make a true circular economy possible. From collecting plastic waste on remote Alaskan islands, to fending off cockroaches in Rio de Janeiro, working at Materra isn't an ordinary tech job. We are using cutting-edge AI and automation to build a world without waste. To scale this impact, we are expanding our engineering team and looking for builders who want to apply their craft to a planetary-scale problem. If you thrive on ambiguity, love deep technical challenges, and want to leave the planet better than we found it, check out our open roles: Software Engineer: To own the end-to-end infrastructure bridging our asynchronous hardware sensors with our deep learning algorithms. https://lnkd.in/e_fgr29w Software Engineer, Edge Systems & Runtime (C++): To squeeze maximum performance out of our edge GPUs and optimize our low-latency, multi-sensor data streams. https://lnkd.in/ek3rGj5k Machine Learning Data Engineer (DataOps): To architect the pristine data foundation and automated ETL/ELT pipelines that power our ML training loops. https://lnkd.in/ej4t7Ewn Join us in building a world without waste. Apply or share with future moonshot takers you might know!

Before Taara was Taara, the Loon team used free space optical communications (aka lasers) to connect balloons in the stratosphere. This animation, made by Loon engineers and their families, depicts the first time two balloons successfully connected using free space optical communications (FSOC)—20 kilometers above the ground. Read more about the test and Taara’s evolution from Loon, in the latest edition of The Moonshot Newsletter: https://lnkd.in/egUGsFKN Bruce Moision Baris I. Erkmen, Andrei Kazmierski, Devin Brinkley

X’s “meta-moonshot” is to create a reliable, repeatable system for turning radical ideas into wildly successful businesses. Today we shared one of the ways we’re approaching that goal: a partnership with independent venture firm Series X Capital, to fund some of our best moonshots as new startups. Founded by Gideon Yu, Series X provides the capital and operational expertise to help X moonshots scale as independent startups. Series X has already invested in X graduates Anori, Chorus, Taara, and Verily Health, all of which are now standalone companies. Learn more about the partnership on our blog or in Fast Company: 👉 https://lnkd.in/d34_S4mS 👉 https://lnkd.in/dgrY3FFE

How do you deliver high-speed connectivity without digging up the ground and laying cables? With frickin' laser beams! In the latest edition of The Moonshot Newsletter, Taara CEO Mahesh Krishnaswamy shares how his team went from sending internet via balloons in the sky, to beaming fiber-fast internet with lasers down on Earth. Today, Taara is delivering high speed connectivity to people in more than 20 countries. Learn how they did it and some of the team’s hard-won lessons along the way.

📐 Calipers and gaffers tape 🔌 Hardware and wire 🦄 A tin of unicorn meat 🔊 A custom soundboard loaded with William Shatner, Mr. Burns, a lightning bolt, and Charlie Brown’s teacher These are just a few of the items on the desk of Joseph Sargent, Director of Engineering and prototyping at X. In the debut edition of The Moonshot Newsletter, Joe breaks down his go-to prototyping strategies and how to find the quickest, cheapest ways to test radical concepts before building them. Subscribe to The Moonshot Newsletter for more innovation tips and let us know what would be on your custom soundboard in the comments.👇 https://lnkd.in/d5z5Seij

“Innovation is a muscle. Like any other world-class behavior, anyone can learn to do it.” But individual talent isn't enough. Real breakthroughs happen when organizations build systems and a culture that makes it possible for innovation to flourish. Astro Teller and Fast Company Editor in Chief Brendan Vaughan recently sat down to discuss how to set up a culture of innovation and unlock potential across teams. 🎧 Learn more on the Office Hour podcast: https://lnkd.in/gZSdrEAi

“How does the weather affect beams of light?”   That’s the first question every partner asks when we talk about transmitting data without wires in free-space. And honestly, it’s the right question - because until now, nobody had the data to answer it properly. Unlike radio frequencies, which have relied on a century of ITU propagation models, wireless optical communication operates in the optical spectrum at 193 Terahertz. Using beams of light less than 1/300th of a degree wide, Taara Lightbridge delivers fiber-class capacity through the air. But factors like atmospheric turbulence, rain, fog, and local terrain require a new approach to network planning. So we built one. Today, I’m thrilled to announce the Taara Link Planner - the first link planning tool built specifically for wireless optical communications, powered by nearly a decade of real-world deployment data from 20+ countries and research that we started at X, The Moonshot Factory. This is a first-of-its-kind link planner built specifically for wireless optical communications, designed to help our partners and operators plan high-capacity links without laying new fiber. Whether you're an operator or ISP evaluating backhaul links or an enterprise exploring new applications, planning your next wireless optical link just got significantly easier. Read more about the science behind it in our blog post and try out the tool today: 🔗 Link Planner: https://lnkd.in/g7BaJKUf 📖 Read the Blog: https://lnkd.in/gjBp7-Dr