Astro Teller Quotes

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I've done that sort of thing in my life, but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed.

We're looking for people who are working on things that seem out of reach, uncomfortably difficult.

I welcome and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas; bring me big ideas to match our future.

Question every assumption and go towards the problem, like the way they flew to the moon. We should have more moon shots and flights to the moon in areas of societal importance.

One of my life principles is that if something isn't working, doing something harder isn't necessarily going to produce the same result.

If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.

The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That's when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.

Government is really successful when it's willing to make big, bold objectives, like, 'We're going to get to the moon.' But without leaders with big ideas, we get stuck.

Sometimes big problems are best solved with lots of small and creative solutions.

If your goal is to change the world, you can't start by doing things the same old way because it sells better.

If you give people unlimited time and money, they'll do things the same old way. But if they have to achieve the goal in a brief time, they'll either give up or try something new.

It's through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we've always mapped our path at Dell. There's always an opportunity to make a difference.

I perceive myself as rather uninhibited, with a certain mathematical facility and more interest in the broad aspect of a problem than the delicate nuances. I am more interested in discovering what is over the next rise than in assiduously cultivating the beautiful garden close at hand.

An innovation is one of those things that society looks at and says, if we make this part of the way we live and work, it will change the way we live and work.

In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.

We cannot meet big challenges with small ideas.

All revolutionary advances in science may consist less of sudden and dramatic revelations than a series of transformations, of which the revolutionary significance may not be seen (except afterwards, by historians) until the last great step. In many cases the full potentiality and force of a most radical step in such a sequence of transformations may not even be manifest to its author.

The day before something is a breakthrough, it is a crazy idea.

You can't become a history-maker stuck in tiny thinking. You just can't.

Incrementalism in technology leads to irrelevance; what you need is revolutionary change.

Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.

Steve Jobs would have wanted his words to change not just technology but politics itself.

Dream a big dream, a bold dream. Don't play conservatively between the 40 yard lines. Don't just play it safe.

We don't aim high enough with our goals. We all have more in us, and we are all capable of aiming higher.

I pride myself on being able to create mismatches. That's what I've done my whole life.