Why every company now needs to think and operate like a lab team | Josh Woodward (Google Labs, Gemini, AI Studio)

My thesis is that every company needs to start thinking and operating like a labs team. Every company definitely needs a set of people, a team. Their job is to be at the frontier. They're the people who have like a Two hundred dollar a month subscriptions on every Everyone has to get really good at trying a bunch of stuff with the latest models, figuring out what is now possible before your competition does, before a startup comes and eats your line. You gotta try to create a space. Where weird things can grow. You look at the history a large company who starts a lab. The lab is usually ineffective and fizzles out after about three to four years. You can't just nestle this under an existing business unit. It has to have its own kind of independents. You've seen more ideas thrown at the wall and tried and prototype than maybe anyone else. What are some patterns of where the best ideas come from? They very rarely come from design sprints, they don't come in conventional places, you can't microwave good ideas. Skills are you finding or trending up?

In value. I'm actually looking a lot right now for people what's their unlearning rate. How fast can they learn something and then walk away from it? What's something that might surprise people about what product market fit looks like? When you're showing people early prototypes, you're looking at people's eyes. That is the metric. What are signs that it's time to kill An idea. The team usually knows before the leader knows. Today my guest is Josh Woodward. Josh is head of Google Labs, the Gemini app.

And AI studio. He's been at Google for over sixteen years. And his job. Is to experiment with and scale new AI products. My premise for this conversation and why I believe it is so valuable.

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