How One Google Engineer Turned Tragedy into a Moonshot

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2019

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mo Gawdat, founder of One Billion Happy and former Chief Business Officer at Google's X, spent years working in technological innovation. At Google's so-called "dream factory," he learned how to operationalize moonshot ventures aiming to solve some of the world's hardest problems. But then a personal tragedy — the loss of his son — set him on a new path. Gawdat launched a startup with the moonshot goal of helping one billion people find happiness. Gawdat is also the author of "Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Kurt Nick is here from Ideacast. I want to tell you about the Big Take
0:05.1	podcast from Bloomberg News. Each weekday they bring you one important story
0:10.0	from their global newsroom like how AI will upend your life and why China's
0:15.4	targeting the US dollar. Check out the big take from Bloomberg wherever you
0:20.2	listen. Welcome to the HBO Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish.
0:43.0	For years, Mo Gaudet was successful but not always happy. An engineer by training he started at
0:55.2	IBM Egypt later worked for Microsoft and then Google in emerging markets. In 2013
1:01.6	he became the chief business officer at Google X, that's the famous
1:06.3	Moonshot factory, where world-changing projects that seem nearly impossible still
1:11.9	get funded.
1:13.6	Then a personal tragedy made Gaudat channel his experience and energy into something else,
1:19.6	happiness.
1:21.0	There is so much humanity in this place. It makes me cry how we forget it. Okay? We forget it because we don't stop.
1:31.0	Seriously, seriously, enough of pretending, enough of thinking that unless I appear to be exactly
1:40.2	what they want me to appear I will fail.
1:43.0	As a matter of fact if you appear to be exactly what you are,
1:46.8	I promise you you will succeed.
1:49.6	Last year Mo Gaudot left Google to launch a new moonshot, a startup with the goal of helping 1 billion people find happiness.
1:59.1	He also wrote a book about it called Solve for Happy, engineer your path to joy.
2:04.0	I spoke with him in front of a live audience at Inbound, a conference of sales and marketing
2:09.1	professionals. So I want to talk to you about moonshots and operationalizing moonshots, which seems like such a
2:26.4	contradiction in terms. And you're the perfect person to talk to you also
	...

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