Astro Teller

Dr. Astro Teller (born Eric Teller, May 29, 1970, in Cambridge, England) is the co-founder and CEO — titled "Captain of Moonshots" — of X, Alphabet's moonshot factory, which he has led since 2010. X's mandate is to create and launch breakthrough "moonshot" technologies aimed at large, unsolved problems. He earned a BS in computer science (Stanford, 1992), an MS in symbolic and heuristic computation (Stanford, 1993), and a PhD in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University (1998), where he was a Hertz Fellow. He also completed Stanford Business School's Executive Program for Growth Companies (2004). He comes from a notable scientific lineage — his paternal grandfather was physicist Edward Teller and his maternal grandfather was Nobel laureate economist Gérard Debreu.

Before X, Teller was a serial founder. From 1999 to 2007 he was founding CEO and chairman of BodyMedia, a pioneering wearable body-monitoring company (Bodybugg, SenseWear armbands) that was acquired by Jawbone in 2013. From roughly 2007–2010 he was the founding CEO of Cerebellum Capital, a San Francisco investment-management firm whose trading strategies are continuously discovered, evaluated, and combined by an automated statistical-machine-learning system. He co-founded Cerebellum with David Andre (its Chief Scientist/CTO) and Conrad Gann; Teller remains a co-founder and Director. He also founded Zivio Technologies (IP holding) and SANDbOX Advanced Development (a technology incubator/consultancy). Earlier in his career he taught at Stanford and did research/engineering at Stanford's Center for Integrated Systems, Phoenix Laser Technologies, and Carnegie Group.

At X, Teller has overseen the incubation and graduation of numerous well-known projects and companies, including Waymo (self-driving cars), Wing (drone delivery), Verily (life sciences), Google Brain, Loon (stratospheric internet balloons), Makani (airborne wind energy), Taara (light-beam connectivity), Intrinsic (industrial robotics software), Mineral (computational agriculture), and Everyday Robots, among others. He is widely known for his philosophy of "failing fast" and celebrating well-run failures, articulated in his 2016 TED talk "The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure."

Beyond his technology work, Teller holds numerous U.S. and international patents and is a published author — novels *Exegesis* (1997) and *Among These Savage Thoughts* (2006), and the nonfiction *Sacred Cows* (2014), co-written with his wife, Danielle Teller. He is a frequent keynote speaker at venues such as TED, SXSW, TEDMED, EmTech, and Aspen Ideas.

• Moonshot logic over incremental bets: Teller frames X's approach as pursuing 10x improvements rather than 10% ones — pairing a huge problem, a radical proposed solution, and a breakthrough technology that could make it real. He has repeatedly said X's job is "to make the world radically better," discussing this framing as recently as an October 2025 TechCrunch interview on "what makes a moonshot."
• De-risk by trying to kill the idea first: A signature part of his method is aggressively seeking the reasons a project will fail early ("the monkey and the pedestal") and rewarding teams for shutting down non-viable moonshots — capital and talent are reallocated rather than sunk.
• Deep-tech and AI-first sectors: The projects he backs and incubates cluster around AI/ML, robotics and automation, autonomous vehicles and drones, clean energy and climate, connectivity, and health — areas requiring hard science plus long time horizons.
• Machine-driven investing at Cerebellum: For public-market investing, his stated thesis (via Cerebellum Capital) is to let a "largely automated" ML system discover, validate against unseen data, and combine trading strategies — optimizing for steady, risk-managed, market-independent returns rather than human discretionary calls.