Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by Astro Teller

We don't have some message from God that gives us a list of what's good and what's not good. Obviously, we have to make our own flawed judgments about each thing.

We've got rings, glasses, we wear things for armor, for protection from the elements, to signal our status to other people. And we're going to co-opt a lot of those things, where wearables are going to end up being the interface between us in the world.

If you want to explore things you haven't explored, having people who look just like you and think just like you is not the best way.

We need to make sure that the things we are already working on turn out to do the things we believe they can do and creating value both for the world and ultimately for Google.

I personally have a philosophy around authenticity and vulnerability.

Doing exercise without monitoring yourself will be rare in the future of wearable technology.

Rather than thinking of ourselves as a computer, and trying to give you computer-like functionality, it's better to start from the understanding that this is a pair of glasses, and say, 'How smart can we make these glasses for you?'

Really great entrepreneurs have this very special mix of unstoppable optimism and scathing paranoia.

Google Glass is the wearable computer that responds to voice commands and displays information on a visual display.

We don't take on Google Glass or the self-driving car project or Project Loon unless we think that on a risk-adjusted basis, it's worth Google's money to do it.

When we try to make a car that drives itself, we believe - whether we're right or not - we believe that there would be strong net positive benefit to the world if cars could drive themselves safer than people could.

Making a moonshot is almost more an exercise in creativity than it is in technology.

The Explorer edition of Glass wasn't for everyone, but the Explorer program pushed us to find a wide range of near-term applications and uses for something like Glass.

There's no point having something worn on your body - that's a big ask - unless you can give people something they really couldn't get otherwise. It has to be qualitatively better for it to be worn.

The cycling helmet can save your life, but it doesn't look good and tends to ruin your hair.

I'm a father to four kids, so it bothers me that even though our children think big naturally, our society systematically trains them out of thinking that way.

When you try to do something ten per cent better, you tend to work from where you are: if I ask you to make a car that goes 50 miles a gallon, you can just retool the engine you already have.

Our goal is not to produce immediate results. We've been tasked with producing long-term results. That means that there's more risk in any individual thing we take on. But we still aspire to a strong return on investment.

You make a ton of progress by making a ton of mistakes.

The real goal of AI is to understand and build devices that can perceive, reason, act, and learn at least as well as we can.

If you're shooting to make the world 10% better, you're in a smartness contest with everyone else in the world - and you're going to lose. There are too many smart people in the world.

Most of us have to spend a lot of energy to learn how to drive a car. Then we have to spend the rest of our lives over-concentrating as we drive and text and eat a burrito and put on makeup. As a result, 30,000 people die every year in a car accident in the U.S.

Wouldn't it be awesome if we had a jetpack that wasn't a death trap? The problem is that it is going to be so power inefficient. I just couldn't live with that... it would be as loud as a motorcycle.

A ten-times increase in the weight-oriented density of batteries would enable so many other moonshots, if we can find a great idea. We just haven't found one yet.

Why shoot for the moon? It matters because when you try to do something radically hard, you approach the problem differently than when you try to make something incrementally better.

Moonshot thinking starts with picking a big problem: something huge, long existing, or on a global scale.

Use creativity and storytelling as your main muscle instead of smartness.

The world is not limited by IQ. We are all limited by bravery and creativity.

Failing doesn't have to mean not succeeding. It can be, 'Hey we tried that. We can go forward, smarter.'

The longer you work on something, the more you don't really want to know what the world is going to tell you.

When technology reaches that level of invisibility in our lives, that's our ultimate goal. It vanishes into our lives. It says, 'You don't have to do the work; I'll do the work.'

VisiCalc and WordPerfect were the killer apps of their day, but Google and Facebook make them look small in comparison.

If you don't have a tonne of optimism, you're not going to make it... you won't be able to evangelise to everyone else. On the other hand, if you aren't constantly paranoid about what can go wrong and put plans in place, then you're going to get bitten at some point.

Moonshots live in that place between audacious projects and pure science fiction.

I think wearables in general have, as their best calling, to better understand our current state and needs and to express those back to the world.

People do really stupid things while driving.

It comes up over and over and over again that a ten times increase in the weight-oriented density of batteries or the volume metric, the space-oriented density of batteries, would enable so many other moonshots that that's one that just constantly comes up over and over again, and we will start that moonshot if we can find a great idea.

Actually, that issue of 'Don't be evil' is probably the number one reason we throw out ideas.

When you attack a problem as though it were solvable, even though you don't know how to solve it, you will be shocked with what you come up with. It's 100 times more worth it. It's never 100 times harder.

I started my second company in 1999. BodyMedia was set up to take advantage of the future of wearables - sensors and computing worn on our bodies in any and all ways that could make our lives better.

I think we'll see, not only with Glass, but the watch wearables, with the contact lens, that each of these things have their own best purpose, but it will take more on our part and society's part to figure out what that is.

Phones would not be better if they could be cooler looking, if they could weight less, or if they could have more battery. Phones would be better if we didn't have to carry them around.

The great decision was the Explorer program. The thing we did not do well is that we allowed and somewhat encouraged too much exposure to the program.

Really, having people who have different mental perspectives is what's important.

Here is the surprising truth: It's often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.

Find some fun way to get a little more oil on your hands or mud on your boots. Sometimes, that's what it takes to take down some of the really big problems.

I believe that the right thing for us to do, as much as we can and without confusing people, is to talk about how we're doing, the things that are going well but also the things that aren't going well.

People text when they're meant to actually be driving. So imagine what they do when they think the car's got it under control.

Going from an error rate of 25 meters in GPS to 2.5 meters is huge. Going to 25 centimeters is going to matter just as much.

I'm a compulsive storyteller, an avid reader, and have always nurtured the secret goal of spending my life as a writer.

There is no law of physics that says just because we're connected, there has to be this schism between our physical lives and our digital lives.

The faster you can get your ideas in contact with the real world, the faster you can discover what is broken with your idea.

Without getting into specifics, I assure you we are looking at very substantial opportunities for Loon - Google-scale opportunities.

It's crazy that you have to tell your phone or your computer or your house or your car 'It's me!' hundreds of times a day. Wearables will solve that problem.

We're excited about how tech can be used to get tech out of the way.

It is the essence of innovation to fail most of the time.

I don't believe a mistake-free learning environment exists.

I grant that people are generally uncomfortable with how fast privacy issues are changing in the world, but Google Glass is not going to move the needle on that.

I do believe that making a factory for innovation, a moon-shot factory, is possible.

The future is all about leading a stress-free life and having all the solutions for all problems at hand.