SAN FRANCISCO — At GoogleX, failure isn’t just a good thing. It’s something their engineers strive for.

“We need failures,” said Astro Teller, head of GoogleX, the company’s secretive innovation lab. “If we are going to build something, we need it to fail and fail quickly so we can learn as much about it as we can. If something doesn’t fail, how are we going to learn from it?”

Teller spoke to a packed room Friday at Google I/O, the company’s annual developers conference.

His subject was moonshots and failures. The company, he said, needs both.

Actually, according to Teller, everyone needs both moonshots and failures.

“We need to be reminded about the risks we’re taking and the long-term things we’re looking ahead to,” said Teller, who’s official title is Captain of Moonshots. “We can all work on moonshots. Working on things that aspire to be 100 times better, rather than 10 times better, is something really worth working toward. When you aspire to make the world that much better, you have to come at it from a new perspective and not depend on what people have done before.”

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