Astro Teller has your dream job, currently serving as the Captain of Moonshots at the Google[x] lab. There, he dreams and creates things like Google Glass, smart contact lenses, balloons that bring the Internet to the most remote regions, and many other seemingly impossible projects he and his team hope will one day become reality.
We’re thrilled to announce that Astro will be joining us for an onstage interview at Disrupt NY 2014.
Google has been making strategic purchases recently that will allow it to participate heavily in the “Internet of Things,” the movement that will put connectivity functionality into nearly everything in your home. The company bought Nest, which makes connected thermostats and smoke and carbon monoxide detectors; Deepmind, an artificial intelligence company that will help Google focus on deep learning; and robotics company Boston Dynamics.
Google[x] is also building self-driving cars, creating clean energy with airborne wind turbines, and doing … something … with its mystery barges. And that’s just the projects we know about. Google[x] is undoubtedly looking at many other ways to make what we already do 10x better and bring what would otherwise seem like crazy, impossible, and/or far-off ideas into our reality.
Astro Teller is a big idea guy, an entrepreneur who co-founded several successful companies. Prior to landing at Google[x], Teller co-founded and still serves as an acting director of Cerebellum Capital, Inc., an investment management firm that makes investment decisions using an advanced algorithm based on statistical machine learning. He also co-founded BodyMedia, a leading health wearables company that was acquired by Jawbone in 2013, intellectual property holding company Zivio Technologies, and Sandbox Advanced Development, an advanced development technology company.
Teller is also crazy smart, holding both a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master’s degree in symbolic and heuristic computation from Stanford. He was awarded a Hertz fellowship, which rewards the nation’s most remarkable Ph.D. students in the physical, biological and engineering sciences for his work in artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon.
And according to his LinkedIn profile, he makes a mean margarita. Maybe he’ll demonstrate this for us on the Disrupt stage.
This will be Teller’s first time participating in Disrupt. He joins other notable founders speaking at Disrupt NY, including Secret co-founders Chrys Bader-Wechseler and David Byttow, Vine’s Colin Kroll and Kickstarter’s Yancey Strickler. More speakers are set to be announced in the coming weeks as the event nears.
Disrupt NY will take over the Manhattan Center in New York City on May 5-7. Tickets can be purchased here, and if you’re interested in being a sponsor, please contact our sponsorship team here.