Business
If a trillion dollar market opportunity exists, you can bet the people at Google are thinking about it. Within X, Google’s most secretive lab, they’ve been working on solving the problem of how to make building construction more efficient in order to deal with the world’s severe and worsening urban housing shortage. By the year 2050, the global population is expected to grow by 2.2 billion people, and 90% of that growth is expected to take place in cities that are in dire need of new housing. In China, one company has figured out how to deal with this challenge by prefabricating components for skyscrapers inside of a factory. Sponsored by: If you’re a startup, apply for DigitalOcean’s Hatch program, where if selected, you’ll have access to their cloud for 12 months, in addition to technical training and mentorship. You can also go to do.co/predictingourfuture and ask the sales team for a free trial. Interviewees Episode Excerpt Google & Flux When you hear the word Google, you first and foremost associate it with search. You have a disagreement with someone: let’s Google it. You want to know where to vacation: Google it. You want to know what a company does: Google it. But if you’ve been watching Google over the years, you know that Google does much more, than well, Google. There’s Gmail and Google Hangouts and Google Apps and Google Drive. The relationship between these offshoots became so obvious that Google just decided to brand them collectively as the “G Suite.” Somewhere along Google’s path of phenomenal success, the company decided to start working on some super interesting and hard problems that are really unrelated to the company’s initial mission of organizing the world’s information. The founders of Google have become so invested in developing other businesses that the company is no longer called Google. In January of 2016, the company was renamed Alphabet, with Google becoming just one of their subsidiaries. Calico is Alphabet’s biotech subsidiary that is focused on extending human life. Verily is Alphabet’s life sciences subsidiary. One of their projects is to develop contact lenses for diabetics that are able to determine when a person’s glucose levels are running high. And then there is Google X, now referred to simply as “X,” the secretive think tank within Alphabet pioneering projects like the driverless car that will one day make the act of driving obsolete. On the website for X, the mission statement reads: “We’re a moonshot factory. Our mission is to invent and launch ‘moonshot’ technologies that we hope could someday make the world a radically better place.” Google can be very secretive about their work, and this is ground zero for where their secret projects are born. X’s stealth projects have one of three outcomes: they are elevated to a division within Google and made public, they are spun out to become a separate stand-alone company, or they are killed. To date, the only company to ever come out of X and be spun out into a separate entity is Flux. I spoke with Jen Carlile, a Co-founder of Flux, who initially joined Google as a software engineer in 2010. Jen Carlile: “The way that Google X works is they identify what they call ‘world scale problems’ and then put a group of smart people together and say, ‘try to come up with a solution for this that can be tackled within a 10 year time horizon.’ So our big hairy problem was urban population growth. And the Google X leadership recognized that the pace at which we're building buildings and with the way that we do it now, we're simply not going to be able to keep up with urban population growth.” In 1803, just 3% of the world’s population resided in urban areas. I have this romantic image of living in the 18th century in a glamorous European city. But as it turns out, if you lived in a city in the early 1800’s, you were part of a minority.