“Fail Gracefully, Learn Fast”: How to get failure culture right
Obi Felten of X, the Moonshot Factory, on their approach towards solving hard problems
At our signals Founders’ Academy, we had the pleasure of hosting a keynote by Obi Felten. At X, the Moonshot Factory, she is responsible for getting early stage X projects out of the lab and into the real world. The goal of so called X projects: “10x impact on the world’s most intractable problems, not just 10% improvement”. Live from San Francisco, Obi’s talk featured the three key learnings that she gathered from working on projects like Google Glass or Loon, the latter of which describes stratospheric balloons that bring Internet connectivity to remote communities across the world.
What is a moonshot? Think of a huge problem in the world and apply a radical solution — something that sounds like science fiction today but that in five to ten years can bring a breakthrough in technology. A moonshot is science that makes that radical solution possible and turns science fiction into reality. Many of the problems that X works on actually fit into the UN Sustainable Development Goals, such as food supply, clean energy, mobility, logistics, and connectivity.
1. Fall in Love with Problems, Not Technology
Engineers tend to fall in love with the technologies, so they focus on how to optimise the technology. But ultimately it’s incredibly important to always stay grounded in a real problem.
“The danger of focusing too much on the tech is that you end up building cool technology that people ultimately don’t want or that doesn’t solve real problems.” — Obi Felten
One great example is one of X’s most famous projects: Google Glass. Designed as a consumer product, the idea was that one could access information and browse images by looking up at the corner of your eye. The beta program launched in 2013 and the device was tested by a diverse set of users: parents, teachers, fashion models, doctors, and more. Their feedback wasn’t great: the battery didn’t last long and it was all voice controlled, which in 2013 basically meant that most of the time, the glasses didn’t understand what the user was saying.
Although it was flopping as a consumer product, people started to use it for B2B applications: In warehouses to find the right location, in manufacturing to deliver training, and in hospitals to access patient records. Thus Google Glass was quietly reborn as a B2B product. This is a great example of how testing a product in the real world helped find its weaknesses and accelerated its use in a different area than where it was originally intended.
2. Fail Gracefully, Learn Fast
One of the standard Silicon Valley clichés is to fail fast. But ultimately, it’s not about the failure, but what you learn from it. People are afraid of losing — whether it is faith, pride, or missing out on the next promotion at work. As this pattern is so deeply rooted within humans, it has to be counteracted actively. At X, it happens that people are promoted for a failed project. Why? One needs to acknowledge that every path to great success is littered with failures. The point is to handle failure in a way that allows for fast learning. That is what people at X are rewarded for.
Tips for learning fast
Tackle the hardest part of the problem first.
- Make a list of all the problems that you need to solve for the project and then rank them by how confident you are that you think you can address it.
- Do you already have a solution in mind or do you have no idea on how to solve it?
- How scared are you? How important are these aspects to the project?
- Take the ones above “really important and really scary” and that’s what you work on first.
Set kill criteria upfront.
- When do we know that things are not working? Because when you hit that kill criteria and everyone agrees that this is the point of no return, it becomes a less emotional decision to stop working on something.
3. Make Contact with the Real World
Technology is inevitably shaped by being used in the real world and influenced by physical, cultural and economical forces. As the Google Glass project has shown, early feedback is invaluable, especially for hardware. You can change an app, but once you roll out a project, you can’t put the product back in the box.
An example of testing a project under real world conditions was project Loon, where internet access is provided through balloons. The first test was done in New Zealand in 2012, connecting a single sheep farm to the internet. But only in 2017 did Loon undergo its first true real-world test, this time in Puerto Rico. All the infrastructure had been destroyed by a hurricane. There, Loon had to be launched immediately, without a long trial period. In the end, Loon helped restore connectivity, bringing internet via balloons to several hundred thousand people during a six-months timeframe. The large-scale trial not only had a positive impact in terms of disaster relief, but also yielded crucial learnings with regard to providing big amounts of data to real customers. This was a big step for Loon towards becoming its own company, and led to them delivering their first commercial service in Kenya in 2020.
Conclusion
The mission at X, the moonshot factory is to invent and launch moonshot technologies that make the world a radically better place. The core question is: How can you have a positive impact in the world, but also make money doing it? X’s projects prove that lots of impact is to be yielded when teams do not shy away from tackling hard problems and combine a purposeful mission with the speed and ambition of a startup.
Here at signals, we believe that X’s approach offers a lot of inspiration for entrepreneurs with regard to building the right mindset and team culture to achieve big things. We hope you enjoyed Obi’s talk. You can find the videos of all talks delivered at the signals Founders’ Academy on Vimeo.
“All the great inventions are not made by a single great mind behind it but by great teams.” — Obi Felten
About Obi Felten
At the Moonshot Factory, Obi Felten is responsible for getting early stage X projects out of the lab and into the real world — or ensuring they fail fast. Previously she was Director of Consumer Marketing for Google in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Before Google, she launched the ecommerce business of a major UK retailer, worked as a strategy consultant, and led eToys.com’s (unsuccessful) expansion to Germany during the first dotcom era.
Along with her work at X, Obi is a startup mentor and angel investor, with a focus on women entrepreneurs. She holds various board seats, e.g. at Springer Nature, a global academic and educational publisher, or Picasso Labs, an image analytics startup.
