ITERATING YOUR WAY

&A-: TO INNOVATION

with Sebastian Thrun

Sebastian Thrun knows how to create big, bold prod-

ucts that change the war ld. He led the team that
created Google Glass and the Google Self-Driving
Car, and is the co-founder of Udacity, which is tack-
ling the new frontier of how to democratize edu-
cation by delivering a great learning experience
online. All of these creations started out as com-
plex, knotty problems with solutions that seemed
nearly unimaginable. And yet, little by little, Thrun
shepherded his teams to an answer. We talked with
him about the importance of iterating relentlessly,
and what to do when fear and doubt tempt you to
waiver from your course.

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You've developed a number of revolutionary
products. How do you focus your energies at
the beginning of a project?
When thinking about products, I like to use a mountain-climbing
analogy. The first step is to pick a peak. Don't pick a peak because it's
easy. Pick a peak because you really want to go there; that way you'll
enjoy the process.
The second thing is to pick a team you trust and that's willing to
learn with you. Because the way mountain climbing really works is
that you can't climb the entire route perfectly. You have .:o know that
you are going to make mistakes, that you'll have to turn around, and
that you'll have to recover.
You also have to maintain your sense of purpose. For a long time,
it may feel like you're on the wrong path, but you must have the resil-
ience to forge ahead. You just have to keep moving uphill.
It sounds like it's more about focusing on the
process for you, as opposed to the outcome.
Absolutely. For me, the journey is much more delightful if you can
derive pleasure from the process every day, rather than at the end of
the year. If your goal is to IPO and get rich, then you're going to be
in for a very long, very sad ride. Because most people don't IPO and
don't get rich.
Our most important asset is our time, so I think it's best to man-
age your time well right now and be happy about it, rather than focus
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on some deferred goal, like buying a fancy car in the future. The data
shows that people who are rich aren't any happier, so you might as
well derive your happiness from what you are doing today.
How does iteration figure into your process?
Do you think it's best to create a functional
prototype as soon as possible?
To return to the mountain idea, if you think about it, there's no other
way to get up the mountain than taking a hundred thousand steps.
You could have all the meetings and all the documentation and work
for weeks on end to make the perfect plan. But in my opinion, all
you've done at that point is lost time. You've done nothing. You've
learned nothing.
Sure, if this mountain has been climbed ten thousand times
before, then you just get the book, and the maps, and you follow the
same steps. But that's not innovation. Innovation is about climb-
ing a mountain that no one has climbed before. So there ought to be
some unknowns along the way because no one has solved the prob-
lem yet.
And when you're innovating, sheer thinking just won't work.
What gets you there is fast iteration, and fast failing. And when you
fail, you've done something great: you've learned something. In hind-
sight, it might look a little embarrassing, and people will say, "You
should've known that." But the truth is yòu couldn't have known
because it's unchartered territory. Almost every entrepreneur I
know has failed massively many, many times along the way.
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What's the most common mistake that people
make when they're developing a product?
One mistake I see a lot is the eternal thinker, the perfectionist. This
is the person that builds all the components without putting them
together, because there's perfection in component development.
And they have this idea that if you only put things together right
before launch, everything will go fine. Of course, that never happens.
The second mistake I see is more of a character issue, which
is being discouraged by failure. Where you do something three or
four times, spend half a year in development, and think, "Oh my
god, I'm not there yet, let me change my career ... " So that's a lack of
perseverance.
The last one I see is being driven by fear. When your competi-
tor does something new, you become fearful and decide that you're
going to change course. But every single time you do this, you're
already behind your competitor and that's just a bad idea. You have
to have faith in yourself, and believe in your vision.
At sorne time, everybody is driven by fear. But we need to-as
much as we can-take fear out of the game. One way to do this is
to imagine that you are already successful. You've looked into the
future, and you've succeeded. What would you enjoy doing today
given that knowledge?
Clearly, certain personality types are more
comfortable with iteration and failure than
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others. Do you think you can learn to be if it
doesn't come naturally?
It's obvious to me that there's a certain personality type that can deal
with failure more than others. But I think this awareness can also be
acquired, especially when you realize that the failures that corne out
of experimentation really don't relate to you as a person. It's just the
course of innovation; failure is a systemic part of that process.
For instance, if you're driving a car, and after three hundred
miles the car runs out of gas, no one takes offense because the "fail-
ure" is inherent to the car, not to you. It's not your failure to operate
the car correctly. We all know that you have to refill the gas tank;
that's just the way it is. So if we think of failure in innovation in the
same way-as having to refill the gas tank regularly-we can take it
much less personally.
That's a great metaphor. So you think the idea of
constant-and playful-experimentation is the
best mind-set for innovation?
It's very uncommon for people to have the attitude of 'Wow, I don't
know." In childhood, researchers call this a "growth mind-set"-this
idea that you're comfortable with the fact that you just don't know
something yet, or that you just can't do something yet. But most peo-
ple are raised with this feeling that they know everything.
But if you know everything, you can't possibly innovate, right?
It's impossible, because there is nothing new to learn or discover.
There's this funny saying that I like: "Af ter high school, kids know
everything, after their bachelor's degree, they know something, and
after a PhD, they now know that they kn ow nothing."
I think that the ability.to see how much more there is to know
and be humble about it is actually a good thing. Return ing to the
mountain metaphor, every mountain climber I know of feels small in
the mountains and enjoys the feeling of being small. No matter what
you do, the moun tain is always bigger than you are.

SEBASTIAN THRUN is CEO of Udacity, a start-up

focused on democratizing higher education. He is also
a part-time Google fellow and research professor at
Stanford University.

-+ www.udacity.com

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