Sundar Pichai reveals at IIT-KGP that Google's appetite for failure is what makes it such a great company

Google has seen a number of its high profile projects fail spectacularly . Google Glass augmented reality spectacles are no longer available to the general public, but continue to be used for industrial and medical purposes. Google wiped out Glass data and started a new project known as Aura . Project Wing was Google’s alternative to Amazon’s delivery drones . There is the modular smartphone initiative known as Project Ara that got shelved. Hardware by google keeps tanking . Google print ads, Google Wave, Google Nexus Q, Google Lively have all failed .

Yet Google as a company continues to grow, and is the most profitable wing of its parent company, Alphabet . The technology offerings by Google are ubiquitous. Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, and YouTube are all essential parts of the internet. What is it that makes Google repeatedly fail, and yet keep growing as a company? Sundar Pichai’s interaction with students at his alma mater, IIT-KGP, might shed some light on the issue.

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google was asked at the interaction with students from IIT-KGP, the institution he passed out from before heading to US, “What is it that drives innovation at Google?” Pichai replied “I think we have always had an ambitious approach to it. We call it internally as 10x or moonshots. We try to work on things which people will use every day, it will apply to billions of people, and it solves a real problem for them. So that is the bar, anything we try to do, we think of it that way. We aim high, we try to use deep computer science to anything we approach, so that we can have a differentiated approach to solving it. And you want to aim high enough that you fail a few times. That is the natural part of the process.”

Google’s parent company, Alphabet has a history of starting expensive projects, known as “moonshots” or the “other bets.” These include the secretive Project X for self driving cars, Google Fiber, and internet service provider, and Google Glass. Successful moonshots include YouTube, Google Play, Google Wallet and Google Earth. The moonshot projects are expensive efforts , and the risk Alphabet takes with them is high.

Pichai went on to elaborate “In fact Larry used to say if you work on really difficult things, you are better off because you have no competition. Others are not working on that difficult a problem. And even if you fail, you end up doing something great in the process. I think that is the philosophy which has guided us all through these years.”

The company’s philosophy is to aim so high that failure is virtually guaranteed. It is a part of the process of what makes Google works, and the reason why Google has so many successful projects. There are few other tech company owners that keep their companies teetering on the line between wild success and disaster. The only other individual with companies constantly on the brink of disaster due to investments in seemingly impossible undertakings is Elon Musk .