Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

So Felten came on board to think about the practical problems. X may be a moonshot factory, but it’s still a factory. It must produce profitable products. “When I came here,” Felten explained, “X was this amazing place full of deep, deep, deep geeks, most of whom had never taken a product out into the world.”60 Pure idealists don’t make for great entrepreneurs. Consider Tesla, one of the greatest inventors of all time. “It’s a sad, sad story,” Larry Page, Google’s cofounder explains. “He couldn’t commercialize anything, he could barely fund his own research.”61 Although Tesla—whom Edison pejoratively called a “poet of science”—left behind a legacy of three hundred patents, he died penniless in a New York hotel.62 Reflecting on this story, Page says, “You’ve got to actually get [your invention] into the world; you’ve got to produce, [and] make money doing it.”