How to Evaluate an Opportunity with a Moonshot Company
Flying robo-taxis, 3D printed organs, Mars colonization, and brain implants that give us the ability to communicate with each other without the friction of language: these are some of the greatest moonshot opportunities of our time. Sound like science fiction? It’s not. Welcome to frontier tech, featuring some of the most exciting and audacious visions for humanity.
For the dreamers among us, the allure of working on something potentially transformative for the future of our species, is considerable. But how do you turn big dreams and visions into a commercially viable product?
The answer is: it’s hard. The grander the vision, the more you have to squint to see the possibility of success, which may be a tiny speck, far off in the distance. Unlike technology that serves an obvious use case today, frontier tech often requires that you prove out a new technology while creating a market for it.
Here’s why I think it’s more difficult to evaluate an opportunity to work on a moonshot technology versus a consumer or SAAS app with obvious applications in today’s world (eg. Communications, marketplaces, or enterprise software):
1. It could be an epic waste of your time because moonshot projects are in “science fair” phase for a long time: By definition, moonshots are notoriously difficult. We’re talking about self-driving cars and space elevators. Bringing these new technologies to market require years of research, testing, and possibly a long regulatory approval process. Much of the time spent developing the core technology may feel like a science project. If you’re motivated by seeing results (feedback loop!), having real customers, and seeing your product get traction in the market, working on a time horizon of possibly decades — versus a year or two — may be frustrating. Granted, regardless of the outcome, you will learn a lot from attempts to launch a moonshot, but you’re accepting considerable risk that you won’t have market validation on your work at the end of a few years.
Upshot: If you’re trying to figure out whether you’ll waste your time over a couple years or actually see a product get to market, you need to figure out how far the technology has come from being a science project to being ready for the real world. Also, I want to help you evaluate other benefits which may accrue to you if you join a moonshot which is not ultimately successful in the market.
2. At a high level, if the market is “all of humanity,” it’s hard to focus. Moonshots have the ability to change the world and transform the lives of billions of people. They aren’t focused on solving trivial problems like picking up your laundry on demand. But if you’re solving a massive problem without an obvious glide path to adoption (eg. target millennials with Instagram ads), it’s hard to focus. Who should you serve first and why? Is it because they constitute a sizable market, or because they have the most to gain from your technology, or because they’ll be the highest paying customers? How will serving your first set of customers help you expand into adjacent markets?
Upshot: If you’re going to commercialize a moonshot technology, you need a product development process that focuses the team around ‘who is the customer’ at every decision point. This is why understanding the development process is so important in evaluating a moonshot opportunity.
3. If growth is gated by the pace of technology development, people on the business side tend to get bored and/or play Game of Thrones.
R&D time for moonshot technologies tends to be long. There are likely going to be unexpected roadblocks or delays in development. I’ve talked to several people who have worked on the productization and commercialization teams at moonshot companies and they’ve warned me about the dangers of finding yourself in a situation where there isn’t much to do as you wait for the bugs to be ironed out. This leads to boredom — or worse, the politics of duking it out for the scant bits of work that will let you demonstrate that you are adding value. By contrast, in traditional high-growth startups, everyone has too much to do and there’s less time (and patience!) for politicking.
Upshot: This is one reason I tend to weigh company culture and team dynamics more heavily in thinking through moonshot opportunities than I do when thinking about joining a high growth startup. (Another reason to pay close attention to the team dynamics is that it affects the development process — but this isn’t unique to why team culture matters so much for moonshots vs other startup opportunities).
I’ve had several opportunities show up on my doorstep to work on launching moonshot projects and I’ve been executing a process to think through these opportunities.
As part of this process, I talked to one of the early leaders at Google X and the Google Glass project. Google Glass was one of Google X’s earliest moonshots. It was a new type of wearable technology that introduced a computing paradigm where both the inputs and outputs for computing were radically transformed and much more intimate to the end user. Glass didn’t ultimately reach the market success the team was hoping for, but launching the product provided many valuable lessons about the process of pursuing moonshots.
The advice below is a starting point for the types of observations you should be making or some questions you might want to ask to evaluate an opportunity at a moonshot company.
“There are probably going to be a dozen different dimensions that all have to work for the product to be sufficient for launch. With breakthrough technology, it’s difficult to meet all of these minimum standards across all dimensions. On the Glass project, there were many dimensions related to optics alone: display resolution, display brightness, display contrast, power consumption, battery life, battery size, heat generated by the battery, the cost to mass manufacture, durability, and eye safety. Then there were considerations like physical shape and weight. Could the shape be embedded into the lens of glasses or should it be curved sunglass lenses? Was it comfortable to wear? Your nose is actually really sensitive to weight. You’ll probably find that your product is great at X and Y dimensions, but lagging on Z. And then there are trade-offs: when you improve X, Y suffers. Understanding the unsolved R&D problems will help you figure out a realistic timeline to commercialization.”
Most moonshots are stealthy, so it may be hard to mine public sources to understand exactly how far along the technology is. You’ll have to do some sleuthing to get the full picture.
This is probably harder to do than you’d expect. The business, product, and marketing members of the team may not have the technical depth to appreciate what tasks remain to be done to achieve the product they want to see built. The R&D folks may want to avoid getting bogged down in the details of what it takes to commercialize a product, so getting answers from them might be more difficult than simply asking, “so, what are the remaining tasks?”
Once you get a good handle on the status of R&D, determine how each of these parameters match up to the product plan. For example, for a brain-machine interface to work, the hardware has to record a reliable, stable signal. Getting hardware to the point where it can do this well is one of the most challenging steps. Although there are software challenges to designing ML algorithms that accurately decode the signal, training these algorithms depends on having lots of data — which brings us back to the robustness of the hardware. Understanding these dependencies in R&D is critical to figuring out how far along the product is.
If the product involves both hardware and software, you’ll need an entire team of engineers distinct from the R&D team. These are people who have experience building consumer facing products, including mechanical engineers, industrial designers, supply chain engineers, and quality assurance engineers. Has the org made any progress in building out a product development team? Is there sufficient budget and headcount for this team? What are the regulatory challenges, if any, and what is the status of each?
Building a cohesive overall experience for customers also involves decisions around branding, logo, software applications, packaging, and tight integrations between the software and hardware. Making sure the right people, plans, and processes are in place to develop the product and bring it to market is a colossal feat of human organization — but critical to taking a moonshot technology from R&D to commercialization.
To observe:
To ask:
2. What’s the product development process?
“As we were building Glass, we realized that, in theory, it was a product that could serve many different industries. We saw both enterprise and consumer applications for Glass. Some of the early opportunities were tele-scribing, or remote note taking for doctors in hospitals, collecting data on oil rigs, sharing day-to-day experiences among friends, or tracking athletic performance. We explored all of these applications, but in retrospect, we should have been more focused. It’s always better to focus v1 on serving one use case really well. Building a product to serve a number of use cases or markets always complicates the product. Moonshot products are already complicated. Most rely on changes to customer behavior for adoption, so keeping the user experience as simple as possible is paramount.”
One of the top-level questions you want to answer when you’re evaluating a product development process is whether the org is focused on building for a particular customer or use case. In theory, it sounds easy to focus on one specific application that serves a subset of people really well. Why wouldn’t a team be focused? One reason is that it’s tempting to think of early product development as a taking a portfolio of bets. If you have the resources to test many hypotheses at the same time, you’ll find product market fit faster, right? The truth is, money is rarely the limiting resource. Building a product requires a lot of emotional focus and attention from leadership.
Having too many leaders can also distract a team. Although the leaders may share an overarching vision for the product, when it comes to decisions about product features, each leader tends to have his or her personal favorite. When the team tries to integrate every leader’s favorite feature into the product, the end result is an amalgamation of features with lots of bells and whistles, rather than a focused product with a streamlined user experience.
To observe:
To ask:
3. What’s the team culture and decision-making process?
“On the Glass project, we structured the team so the designer, PM, and tech lead would make decisions about every feature. If they really couldn’t agree, they’d escalate it up. And we had the same process at the senior leadership level. I really liked this process because it was empowering, high velocity, and consensus driven.”
Your ability to be productive and impactful in the org will depend on the team’s decision-making process. Understanding the current process and team dynamics is important before joining any company, but it’s an especially important consideration for an opportunity with a moonshot company.
As with any startup, the founder has an outsized voice in setting the culture around decision-making. However, a visionary founder may have started a moonshot company as part of a portfolio of different moonshots. If the moonshot isn’t the founder’s only project, you’re less likely to get deep engagement. Effective decision-making processes tend to have one person who acts as the tie-breaker on strategic decisions where there isn’t clear consensus. Usually, it’s the founder who accepts the ultimate responsibility for making tough calls, but founders need to commit their time and attention to have the context to make good decisions.
To observe:
To ask:
“I felt there was a 5% chance of success when I started. But I thought, if this does work, it will be a game-changer. It could be as big as the iPhone.”
For those of us who are passionate about making a difference in the world, it’s exciting to have the opportunity to build a technology that could not only impact billions of people today, but also change the course of humanity. Talented, creative people aggregate around world-changing visions.
However, if you’re primarily motivated by seeing the impact of your work, you may be frustrated if you dedicate years of your life to building a product that is never shipped. Shipping products is not the only meaningful benchmark by which to evaluate all the things that can advance humanity. I’m a huge believer in basic science research that generates the ideas, principles, and theories that percolate into practical applications.
For moonshots in any domain, there’s no guarantee of success. What you’re trying to do when evaluating an opportunity is to mitigate risks in an endeavor that’s by nature, extremely risky. Meeting the three conditions below is an indication that there’s some organizational focus on finding paths out of the lab into the real world:
These conditions aren’t prerequisites to success, nor are they any guarantee of it, but they’re sensible signs to look for if you’re trying to determine whether a moonshot will amount to more than a flight of fancy.
Moonshot opportunities inspire us with their sheer audacity, extraordinary creativity, and potential for world-changing impact. However, the truest test of an exciting moonshot opportunity isn’t how far it stretches our imagination, but how much it embraces the less glamorous art of carving out a path for landing.
**Thank you to David King for all the great feedback on earlier drafts. Thanks also to Tarin Ziyaee, Nicholas Hardy, and Barrett Ames for contributing their thoughts on this subject.
***If you’ve launched a moonshot or are currently working on one, I’d love to hear more about the factors you consider most critical to success. Tweet me @nifferkin.
How to Evaluate an Opportunity with a Moonshot Company
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