5 Unexpected Lessons Learned While Working with Silicon Valley Legends
During my time at GoogleX, I had the privilege of working with some of the most revered thought-leaders in Silicon Valley. Astro Teller, Sergey Brin, Dan Ariely, Robert Reich, Max Tegmark, and Ray Kurzweil are all legends in their respective fields. Observing them each in their work-life was a fascinating experience and each taught me a valuable lesson.
Astro Teller, CEO of GoogleX, has one of the most well-balanced minds I have ever come to interact with. The raw firepower of his intellect paired with his extreme emotional intelligence give him an almost Jedi-like presence. I always admired Astro’s extreme empathy; however, when leading a large organization, this level of empathy led to challenges. I learned from Astro that a strong leader must be empathic to build trust and camaraderie, but this must be balanced with directness. Sometimes being direct is actually better than being nice.
Sergey Brin, President & Co-Founder of Google, has a childlike curiosity. This curiosity is now a staple of Google’s culture and a key attribute that helped the company attract some of the most talented technologists in the world. While curiosity is a necessary ingredient for innovation and creativity, it must also be balanced with a healthy dose of pragmatism. When creativity is king, projects tend to lack strategic direction. When pragmatism is king, projects tend to be more incremental. I learned from Sergey that balancing these opposing forces is what allows for innovative ideas to blossom and grow.
Dan Ariely, considered a father of behavioral economics, looks at life through a novel and specific lens. Colored by his experiences as a burn victim in the early 1980s, he views all aspects of life through the lens of behavioral biases. Experts, like Dan, tend to bring their perspective into everything they do. I came to realize after working with him for several months that expertise comes with tradeoffs. In order to build great products, you need to incorporate a variety of perspectives.
Max Tegmark, a founder of the Oxford’s Future of Life Institute, is the coolest scientist I have ever met. I mean, look at that leather jacket. His persona, as a scientist I would like to get a beer with, is an extremely powerful tool that allows him to engage audiences in hard conversations, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) safety. Max Tegmark, like Carl Sagen, is an expert communicator and can take complex ideas and make them accessible and appealing to the public. AI safety, like climate change, is an issue that occurs over long periods of time, requires a Ph.D. to actually understand, and may have a catastrophic outcome if society doesn’t take action. Max Tegmark taught me the importance of communication when the goal is to invoke change when the subject matter is complex.
Ray Kurzweil, considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, is one of the most accomplished inventors of our generation. He is a pioneer of optical text recognition, speech synthesis, speech recognition, flatbed scanner technology and in the field of electronic musical instruments. He will leave a legacy that very few can match. Something that always fascinated me about Ray is his relationship with death. His work seems to consistently return to ideas that delay or cheat death in some form. The most obvious example of this is his work on humans uploading their consciousness into the digital realm. Like the alchemists of centuries past, he sought out a path to immortality, only this time with computer science. Ray Kurzweil taught me how to harness my fear of death and use it as fuel to create change in the world. While true immortality still seems out of reach for generations to come, the best way to live forever is through your legacy.
