Doug Wightman wields a piece of a WiFi transmitter Google X has developed to help connect the world to the InternetTimothy Archibald
Setting up an interview in a semi-secret location can be tricky, although, at first, I thought just the opposite would be true. After all, Doug Wightman works for Google. Couldn't I just Google it, I (lamely) joked in a text to him? Apparently not.
Wightman doesn't just work for Google—he's a lead software engineer at Google X, the company's generator of innovative new products and technologies. It's the place that pioneered Google Glass, attempted to make a Back to the Future-style hoverboard and a Rocketeer-esque jet pack, and that's currently putting self-driving cars on the roads of Northern California. When I had tried to find the offices on Google Maps, the application pointed me to a now-shuttered location. Wightman ended up texting me the directions, with the understanding that I wouldn't share the co-ordinates with the world.
He meets me there on a sunny California afternoon in the parking lot of a nondescript building, a boxy glass-and-brick structure that would look at home in any suburban office park. Wightman, casually clad in the uniform of Silicon Valley—T-shirt, jeans and sandals—clips a security badge onto my shirt and walks me into the stripped-down facility, part office, part test lab. Google X, Wightman explains, is aiming to improve technologies by a factor of 10. Instead of settling for incremental change, they step back and look at the big picture. "The idea is that the same effort is often required to make a 10-times improvement as a 1% improvement."
We grab a free, gourmet lunch from X's cafeteria and sit down outside at a picnic table. Easygoing and self-deprecating, you'd never guess that Wightman holds one of the world's most in-demand jobs.(1) He is also thoughtful, pausing for a brief moment after each question as he explains how he arrived near the pinnacle of the tech world.
A native of Kingston, Ontario, Wightman had a peripatetic academic career. He majored in commerce at Queen's University—"I didn't want to be stereotyped as a programmer"—before moving on to Stanford, where he earned a master's in computer science, and studied at the university's groundbreaking Institute of Design. It was his dissertation—again at Queen's—exploring how online search could make programming easier that caught the attention of some Google execs in 2012, and launched his career at the company. His subsequent work on a software system for the search engine significantly reduced the time that was required to load pages. "It's still confidential, that's the tricky part," he says, carefully. "But I built a system that's used by hundreds of millions of people every day."
When Wightman talks about his start-ups—he has incorporated a half-dozen companies—and his work at Google, he often talks in terms of design thinking (2), ideas he honed at Stanford. It's a business philosophy that draws on the work and processes designers have long used, and which are, in some ways, antithetical to traditional business practices. In short, design thinking embraces failure, a willingness to try prototypes and see what happens, and brainstorming wild ideas. Failure is part of the cultural fabric at X (3)—new ideas are subjected to repeated and persistent testing with the goal of making them fall apart. Many of these ideas are called "moonshots"—seemingly crazy ideas that have little chance of success but which would, if they were to succeed, change the world.
On the way to lunch, Wightman had shown me mock-ups for some of the projects. There was a drone built for some undisclosed purpose, as well as a prototype of a lightweight balloon, which as it criss-crosses the Earth from the edge of space, beams down an LTE signal. Project Loon, as it's known, was created with the ambitious goal of providing Internet access to the two-thirds of the world's population that is currently disconnected. So far, they're working—the balloons have stayed in the air as long as six months, one has circumnavigated the globe nine times, and, like small satellites, they've provided a good connection on the ground. Wightman is responsible for the project's cost curve, determining how many balloons are needed to provide adequate quality of coverage over a given region. "It's pretty exciting to navigate balloons around the world," he says, "in simulations and with real balloons."
While the commercial applications are still a ways off, Wightman says he loves his work on Loon—in part because it's solving one of the world's most needful problems. "I believe the Internet is incredibly empowering," he says, noting stats that show increased connectivity leads to steady, concurrent rises in GDP. "It's about opening up opportunities for people to live different lives—and the fact that we can, hopefully, play a substantial role in that is very exciting. It's a legacy, something that you can tell your kids—that I was one of the people who figured out how to make this happen."
FOOTNOTES
(1) Each year, more than two million people apply for jobs at Google, and only a tiny fraction secure a position—it's almost 10 times harder to get a job at the tech giant than to get into Harvard.
(2) The term "design thinking" was popularized and adapted for business by David Kelley, the creator of Apple's first mouse. He went on to found IDEO, an influential design firm in Palo Alto.
(3) Created in 2009, X is the baby of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who holds the title of Google's director of special projects.