Watching Loon and Wing grow up

A personal perspective.

In the Spring of 2012, I lived in London running consumer marketing for Google in Europe, Middle East and Africa. I had just been named #4 of the UK’s top 100 marketer list, which I had mixed feelings about. Of course there was pride: It was nice to be recognised. But there was also impostor syndrome: Didn’t they know I am not really a marketer? I had never done marketing before I joined Google. And mild panic: I loved marketing but I didn’t want to be a marketer for the rest of my life. I wanted to get back to building products and businesses.

A week later, one of my mentors introduced me to a Astro Teller who was working in a secret lab called GoogleX. “You have to meet him,” Megan said. “They’re not just working on self-driving cars and Glass, there are other projects.” In our first call, Astro told me about X's projects: A network of stratospheric balloons to bring affordable internet to everyone, everywhere. Drones to deliver goods. A contact lens for diabetics that measures glucose in your tears. I was blown away by the audacity and craziness of their ideas. Connect the whole world to the internet, with balloons? Through my work with Google in Africa I had seen first-hand the impact the internet could have, from opening up education and healthcare to growing small businesses to helping farmers predict weather and make better harvests.

In our second call, I asked Astro many questions: “Is it legal to fly balloons over countries? Have you talked to any governments about it? What about privacy and security of the data going through the network? Will you collaborate with phone companies or compete with them? Do you need to make money with these projects? Do you have a business plan?” Astro looked at me and said, “We’re all engineers and scientists working on making the balloons fly. Nobody is looking at any of these things. Why don’t you come over to California and work with us on this?”

I said no. I had just bought a house in London, my son had a place at the best local primary school and I loved my 10 minute bike commute in Central London. X was in Mountain View at Google’s head-office, a suburban sprawl of low-rise office buildings at the end of a horribly congested highway from San Francisco, the only place worth living in the Bay Area as far as I was concerned. I had no interest to move. “Come and meet the team,” Astro insisted.

Duly I flew over and met the early Xers. Brian Otis, an electrical engineering professor who wanted to take the miniature sensors he had invented out of the lab and make them useful, in a contact lens for diabetics. Adrien Treuille, a computer scientist who had founded crowdsourcing project Foldit to get gamers to solve real scientific challenges and was now looking at new ideas for X to work on. Rich DeVaul, a polymath and prototyper who had worked in startups and at Apple. Cliff Biffle, a hardware engineer with a broad range of technical skills and an even broader dress sense. I would discover later that he either wore 3-piece-suits, or t-shirts saying things like ‘You might find the contents of this offensive’. Rich and Cliff were putting electronics into a styrofoam box and attaching it to a weather balloon to see if you could get connectivity from 20KM up in the stratosphere. The box had a sticker on it saying ‘Harmless science experiment, call Paul if found.’ Cliff later made this into a t-shirt for the Loon team. I decided these were my people, and I wanted to work with them. My highly supportive husband packed up his bee hives for the winter, and we moved to California as a family.

Early Loon prototype, circa 2012.

I agreed to come for six months. I split up my job in Europe among my team leads and told them that it was just like another maternity leave; I’d be back. After 3 months I rang my boss in Europe and said I wasn't coming back. She was not at all surprised. In hindsight, the six months arrangement gave me a get-out option: If it didn’t work out with these strange engineers working on crazy projects, we could go home. Six years later, I am still here.

In my first year at X, I worked mostly on Wing and Loon, solving all the problems that weren’t technology problems: Legal and government relations - indeed we did need to tell aviation authorities about our balloons; marketing and comms - how to announce the project so people would share our excitement instead of shooting it down; writing the first business plan and deciding to collaborate with phone companies. By the time we connected the first sheep farmer in New Zealand to the internet, Xers were no longer just engineers: We had built a team of marketers, product managers, lawyers, PR, policy, operations and finance experts. We were no longer just thinking about how to make the technology work, but also how to take it out into the world and make it useful.

An important early X principle was that our science fiction technology had to solve real world problems for real users. I started at X on the same day as the first lead of Project Wing. We knew that drones would be an important technology to deliver small goods in the future, but we didn’t know what we should deliver. We looked at a whole range of use cases, from medicines to food to documents and small packages. What caught the team’s imagination was defibrillators. Heart attack victims die if they don’t get help within minutes. What if we could send a drone to deliver a defibrillator to the scene within 90 seconds? We loved the idea of using drones to save lives. Project Wing was born.

As we dug deeper into the use case, it transpired that it wasn’t that easy. Our research team put a dummy in the lab, gave an innocent bystander a defibrillator and asked them to save the dummy’s life. They found it took people 6 minutes to figure out how to use the defibrillator. It was irrelevant that we brought the defibrillator in 90 seconds by drone because after 7-8 minutes the ambulance arrived anyway. Based on these data, the researchers convinced the engineering team to give up defibrillators as a use case. The researchers approached the problem completely differently than the rest of the team, and they changed course of the project. We ended up pivoting to food, which is a great first test case for drone delivery. If we can deliver a hot meal in one piece, we can hopefully deliver anything.

User experience research for Wing, 2013.

What I learnt most of all in my first year at X is how to embrace failure, which is inevitable if you are working on very audacious projects. What matters is how you deal with failure, how you take the lessons to make pivots and hard decisions. I have become somewhat of an expert on this, giving talks on how to fail gracefully on the way to success, and how to close down unsuccessful projects. Astro wrote about what Wing and Loon taught us about failure when he announced their graduation from X in early July. I vividly remember most of the moments in this video; the woman putting the notebook to her face in despair is me. I wouldn’t want to miss any of them.

Six years ago I started that ‘maternity leave’ to help Loon and Wing get off the ground. During that time I became pregnant for real, and made a bet with the Loon engineers about who was going to launch first. My daughter came 10 days early and Loon was a few days late, so I won the bet. Now my daughter is five years old, and Loon and Wing are their own companies. Watching them go out into the world I feel a mother’s pride, and wish them all the best. As for the rest of us back at the moonshot factory, we’ll continue to work on the next moonshot.

And yes we are hiring! https://www.x.company/careers-at-x/