Jennifer Strong:  What if you could build solutions that unlock entirely new realities for millions of people?

Aiming for something so big and so audacious that it seems almost impossible to imagine is often referred to as a moonshot. 

And what might it mean if a big part of what’s standing in the way of your moonshot… is your mindset? 

I’m Jennifer Strong, and this is SHIFT. 

[THEME]

This episode - a conversation with the author of the new book - Invent Now - The Next Leap in Moonshots.


Dr. Salima Bhimani: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Dr. Salima Bhimani. I am incredibly fascinated with how we find new possibilities in places that are overlooked and unseen and undervalued. I was the former chief strategist for responsible technology business and leaders working with all of Alphabet Google's moonshot companies, including Waymo, Wing, and DeepMind, and now I'm CEO of 10X Responsible Tech, where I help organizations and companies and leaders globally find their next moonshot.

Jennifer Strong: So you've worked with companies making genuine bets on the future. What did you see about how breakthroughs actually happen that kind of contradicts the mythology that's around them? 

Dr. Salima Bhimani: Yeah. It's so fascinating, Jennifer, because, you know, in the moonshot space, you're sort of... You enter a space where you have to expect the impossible.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: You, you go in thinking, "I'm gonna find something that nobody else will ever find or will look [00:01:00] for." So in that space, in-invention and innovation is kind of baked into the spirit of why you're there and what you're doing. The one thing that I started to think about is so much of that is centered around technology.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: It's centered around let's build a breakthrough technology or an innovation that nobody has done before in order to solve really complex problem And that is inspiring, quite frankly, for me. It was, it was hugely inspiring. But what I also started to notice is that it's not just a problem that needs to be solved in the world with technology, but really what you're dealing with is something that's an ecosystem.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: It's an ecosystem of people, community, systems, technology coming together in order to unlock something that we haven't unlocked in the past. And that is actually how I think of an innovation and invention. I really think of it as sort of it lives at the friction point between people, systems, and what technology could unlock when those [00:02:00] things come together in order to find a solution to a problem, in order to find a opportunity that, you know, no- nobody thought existed before.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: And, and that is what excites me really, to be honest with you. And I think Alphabet and the moonshot world of, you know, Waymos and the DeepMinds really was like a launching pad for me to take what I think of as moonshots to the next level or the next leap. 

Jennifer Strong: Mm. So at Alphabet, you were the first person in this role, and it means you were kind of defining it as, as it went.

Jennifer Strong: What did you decide the job was, and was it different maybe from what Alphabet thought they were hiring you to do? 

Dr. Salima Bhimani: Yeah. You know, I came in and I told them that I wanted to really take these companies that at the time were nascent, you know, in their, in their maturity, and really build into their foundation and their mission how they build technology and solutions for the world in a way that includes more of the world, so that it reflects more of the world, so that when they take their car out, when Waymo takes [00:03:00] their car out, they're like, "Oh yeah, we thought of that particular issue because we saw it from the vantage point of X group of people," or, "We thought of it from the vantage point of Mumbai and not just San Francisco."

Dr. Salima Bhimani: You know? So that was really, that was really my job and, and I don't know that anybody at Alphabet at the time really understood what I was saying. They were like, "Okay, you wanna, you want to do more, like, systemic change. You wanna embed sort of responsibility into how we're building this. Okay, that sounds amazingly fascinating and interesting.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: Let's do it." And 'cause that's how the moonshot space is, you know? Whatever. It sounds cool. It sounds interesting. It's gonna make us better. Wonderful. Let's make it happen. So I, you know, I jumped into that and, and I found it challenging at times because, 
you know, again, you're sort of working against the grain of how innovation has been thought of.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: But in other ways, because it was in the moonshot space, there was a lot, there was a lot of room to really push the boundaries of how people were thinking about building a moonshot and the [00:04:00] impact it could have on the world. 

Jennifer Strong: This is something I love about travel and field reporting and, you know, all the dif- various places you go in the world, and you see the things that maybe were born in incubators or made by engineers in one place in the world, you see what someone actually does with them somewhere else.

Jennifer Strong: Which kinda gets me to this thing that I was thinking before we got on here, which is that, you know, when PR firms pitch your new book or pitch you to us journalists, they kind of frame you as the Silicon Valley insider, which you are, but honestly, what I love about it is just how much you and I are both outsiders, too.

Jennifer Strong: Like- ... we both have these rather unlikely stories for how we came to be- Yes ... doing what we do. Yes. Can you talk about that, your background and what you were doing before you came to Google? 

Dr. Salima Bhimani: Yeah. Um, I'm so glad that you brought that up, 'cause sometimes people stop at the Google six, seven year or whatever stint it was.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: But I'll t- I'll tell you by telling you a story. When I was, when I was 19 years old, I went to sort of the Northern Pakistan, which sits between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Himalayan mountains. It's this huge region that runs [00:05:00] through this valley, and the valley goes all the way from, like, the base all the way up to, like, the China- China border.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: And so I had gone there to, at 19, to help them develop an education program that would expand economic opportunity. Now, what did I know about this as a 19-year-old? Not much, right? But I-- this, this was me. Like, throw me a hard problem, and I'm gonna go and figure it out. Yeah. So I went, and, uh, as soon as we got there, you know, we were told we had to get on a bus, and the bus was gonna take us up this mountain range.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: So this would take, like, seven or eight hours All of a sudden, we start to realize that this driver's not driving straight, okay? He's driving everywhere, and the guy next to me whispers in my ear, "I think he's drunk." And I said, "What?" So we're going up this mountain range with this drunk driver, okay? And I'm thinking myse- to myself, "I don't know if I'm gonna make it."

Dr. Salima Bhimani: But all of a sudden, I look out the window, and I look down this range, this massive mountain range, and what I see is absolutely [00:06:00] spectacular. And what I see is what almost looks like land carvings, okay, into the mountains, across the slopes, like the most beautiful art you've ev- I've ever seen in my whole entire life.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: And I'm like, "What is this?" And I come to learn these are agricultural terraces that have actually been sketched into the mountains, etched into the mountains so that farmers can farm in what is not flat land, you know? And so this is sort of like a... It, it was a example of engineering, culture, you know, sort of local ingenuity coming together for centuries before, like, modern engineering, okay?

Dr. Salima Bhimani: In order to... So that this, these communities could live in very, very difficult terrains. Sort of, um, emblematic example of, of how I began my career, but more my life mission, which is really like where do we unlock those opportunities and possibilities for [00:07:00] people with them, not for them, but with them, in ways that we wouldn't have imagined before.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: And they helped me see that. That terrain, while I was about to die, helped me see something I would have never seen before, and it, and it completely changed my point of view on what's possible and what's not 

Jennifer Strong: Amazing. And from there, what, what were you doing? Didn't you direct a play, write a play? You had this whole other life in Toronto before going to California.
Dr. Salima Bhimani: Erica, you're so good at your job. Oh, stop. Yes, I, I think I did, yeah. I mean, I did a whole bunch of things. I-- So I worked in the field of education. Um, I did some work around women's human rights early, early on. Yes, I directed a play on sort of, again, sort of telling the stories of communities that don't get to tell their stories.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: So that became a big part of my life. I was a dancer. I was trained as a dancer, um, trained as a theater artist, and then spent a lot of my time working with government. So I did a lot-- Uh, I was in Canada, and so I worked with local governments all the way to the federal government. And then I [00:08:00] decided to do a PhD because I had been kind of in the field for a long time, and I was-- I needed a minute to sort of think about what I had done, whether it w- had impact, you know, where was it working, where was it not working, you know, this sort of, this desire in me constantly to keep expanding and ev- and evolving my own practice, my own thinking.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: So I did this PhD, and then I left and thought I was gonna go into academia, and then I realized academia would shrink my spirit because I'm a creative and a builder, and I can't, I can't sit behind pushing paper or, you know, whatever. I mean, and let me, let me just say that the pursuit of education and being an educational, whether it's an instructor or a professor or a teacher, is incredible, and I admire people.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: I've done those stints myself. But I just knew that now I wanted to take sort of my 20 years and really say, "Now where do I take it? What do I t- what do, what do I do with this?" And so I need to go somewhere where the impact is so big, where people-- the footprint is so large on [00:09:00] our future and our present that I wanna go and work there, and tech kept coming up.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: So, as I've told this story many times, I just applied to a job randomly on LinkedIn to Google. Um, I didn't have any big desires to go to Google. I just thought, well, Google's having a big, big impact on the world. I, I could go there. Let me apply. And, you know, seven interviews later, they said, "There's this role with the other bet companies that hasn't existed before."

Dr. Salima Bhimani: I said, "Sure." 

Jennifer Strong: In hindsight, what did you maybe not know about tech in this case that in retrospect was actually kind of an advantage? 

Dr. Salima Bhimani: Yeah. I mean, the thing I love about having worked at Alphabet and, and, and been in that environment is that I'd say 99.9% of the people that I met and that I worked with, and I worked with, you know, pretty much all the CEOs for all the bet companies and everybody else that worked there, th- they really care about the mission, you know?

Dr. Salima Bhimani: And that was, that, that felt very important to me, that people were not just there because it's Google, [00:10:00] but they were there, or Alphabet, they were there because they really cared about the problem that they were trying to solve. But the one thing that I, I felt really good about is I didn't come from tech, so I didn't have a preconceived notion about how innovation or invention needs to happen in that, in that space.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: I really didn't, you know? Like, I was sort of like, I came in, the first two weeks I remember a colleague sat me down and they're like, "I think you're a little bit too ambitious," you know? And I was like, "What? What do you mean? This is Alphabet. Of course I'm ambitious. This is the point of being here," you know?

Dr. Salima Bhimani: And so I was kind of a little bit taken aback by that, but also I was like, "Ooh, you just egged me on. Great." You know? Let, let's keep, let's keep pushing. Let's keep pushing. And in some ways, I think that the moonshot world made me really good at moonshots Because it's so- it's almost like it made me too good at it in, in some ways, because it's like the…

Dr. Salima Bhimani: If the ethos is, like, solve a hard problem, find a really, you know, find a, a solution that no one else is gonna find or that's gonna be really [00:11:00] difficult to find, then I just feel like for me, that ethos was so embedded in who, already who I was, right? But, but I wasn't colored by, you know, we have to play within the system.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: So if I needed to go talk to a CEO, I went and talked to the CEO, you know? If I needed to go and say, "Hey, let's connect this engineer to that product person who don't normally talk to each other," let's do that, you know? If it meant have we looked at the data around what this product is doing this way, you know, I would just ask those questions, and I didn't have-- I was not mired by I need to sort of operate in the way the system thinks of me as legible or recognizes me in some way.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: You know what I mean? Like, I wasn't motivated by that. And not to say that people there are, but I just wasn't. So I felt like I broke the boundaries of where to go and how to go and build, and... But I always just thought that as me being really good at what the space asks for, you know? [00:12:00] Somebody else might think it was sort of pushing the boundaries in ways that was uncomfortable, and I think some people were uncomfortable, of course, right?

Dr. Salima Bhimani: Because you, you, you're asking them to think differently about the problems that they're solving. And it-- And in the, in the Alphabet, the moonshot space is separate from the Google space, right? But a lot of people come from Google, and so the way in which we built solutions or products or tools, some of that ethos from Google, you know, came over, but these companies were not Google.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: They were more, quote-unquote, "startup companies," right? So they had a lot more space to room, and room to really grow and learn and sort of challenge and test. But I think, I think in a space like that, it's sort of like a, it's a give and take, you know, where people are like, "Yeah, but we like how we did things at Google, but we also are in this new space, so we can learn how to do things differently."

Dr. Salima Bhimani: And I think I sort of sat in, in between that to say, "Yeah, let's keep pushing the envelope of how we build moonshots." 
Jennifer Strong: Well, it's also a reminder Google was not always Google. There was a time when it was- Yeah ... a scrappy, big [00:13:00] idea- Yes ... you know? That seemed- Yeah ... unlikely as well. So, you know, the pitch for your new book is essentially optimistic, I'd say.

Jennifer Strong: You know, the next great breakthroughs are just sitting out there waiting for somebody in plain sight, hidden, but in plain sight. Yeah. Would you agree? 

Dr. Salima Bhimani: Yeah. 'Cause, 'cause I think that maybe in this moment right now, people are struggling. I was talking to somebody a couple of days ago, and they were saying, you know, like, "It's so hard for people even in tech to feel optimistic because we don't necessarily understand where AI technology is going.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: We don't know whether we're gonna have jobs. We don't know, you know, what's gonna matter in the future in terms of skills or purpose. Like, what purpose am I gonna have? You know, how am I gonna contribute to the world?" So I think we're kind of in the middle of that, and, you know, my book is not necessarily a response to that.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: It started, I'd say, generations ago for me, is how, how I wrote it, you know? Um, but I do think ultimately what it's saying is that, you [00:14:00] know, we have been building invention and innovation in a particular kind of way, and it's been, in some cases, highly successful, right? Silicon Valley has done a wonderful job of being Silicon Valley, you know?

Dr. Salima Bhimani: Um, and they will continue to build as they continue to build, and, and that's fine. I think that's great. However, I think that there is a call for invention and innovation for the rest of the world. Um, and there are lessons to be learnt from Silicon Valley, things that we can pull over and things that we might say, "Hey, no, not for us."

Dr. Salima Bhimani: Um, and there's lessons from the entire, the rest of the world around, you know, what invention or innovation can look like. And what I'm saying is that we're in a moment now, espec- particularly with what AI could unlock in terms of tools and, um Uh, tools and access where we could be building solutions in ways we haven't done before.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: And, and part that is that we shouldn't be building for people, we should be building with people. That means that we're taking, you know, context [00:15:00] and geographies, and we're taking expertise, and we're taking, you know, local insights, and we're bringing them together, and we're saying, "Now if we come to- ca- came together and discovered a moonshot, what would it look like?"

Dr. Salima Bhimani: That's something we haven't really done, right? We, we've been building more in silos. We've been building in more in sort of incubated spaces. And there's a, there's a, there's a lot of history and reason why that's been the case, and that will continue to be the case. I don't have any delusions or even desire to say we shouldn't be doing that.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: What I, what I'm just saying is that there's other paths, and we haven't really explored those paths. But I'm hyper excited that we're in a moment where we could. We could unlock things we haven't because human ingenuity, we haven't tapped in to that collective intelligence, collective human ingenuity that could really help us do that with technology as our partner, and that is something that, uh, from even a civilizational perspective, we're in a moment that we've never been in before.

Jennifer Strong: It's really interesting. Partly when somebody [00:16:00] raises something of, like this, the next thing is, "And here are the nine things that need to change for this to happen." And I'm sure that some of that's also true, but what you're proposing is a little different- Yes ... than that. It's also saying, "Hey, everybody, come on, we can all choose to maybe think a little differently and try new things."

Dr. Salima Bhimani: Well, that, that... I mean, that's what makes a moonshot different from anything else, right? Like, I mean, there are people who build technology solutions all the time, right? Uh, who build solutions with technology all the time. Moonshots are different. Moonshots are meant to be, "Let's go explore the thing that hasn't been explored.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: Let's go do the thing that we haven't done before. Let's go find the, discover the problem and what could, what the application that could change the world forever." That is a very different kind of ambition. We're talking next level ambition in some ways, right? So I'm not saying we shouldn't build those incremental products or, you know, the solutions that are gonna maybe solve that one little thing that needs to be solved.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: We should continue to do that. That's gonna continue to happen. I'm just saying that there's this other opportunity in front of us, and [00:17:00] that is not something we should look away from and in fact we should step into. Because the question we should be asking ourselves is 10 years from now Who had a hand in, in really defining the future and building the future?

Dr. Salima Bhimani: And I wanna say more of the world needs to be able to answer that question. 

[MIDROLL]

Jennifer Strong: You know, we all have our broken record speeches, right? The lines that we say way too much. And for myself, I think over the last few years, it's been watching people use AI to do these incremental things or to make lots of cuts and to become more efficient, which this is not to say that efficiency is bad or that incremental change is we're building.

Jennifer Strong: It, it's more to say, "Hey, where are the moonshots?" Like, now that we have something that can allow us to have a little more time on our hands to try other things or go further, maybe we would take this moment and not try to cut our way to greatness only. Maybe we would try to achieve some of the goals perhaps a younger, more dewy-eyed version of ourselves were excited to go out and take on.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: Yeah. And if you... And you know, with AI, and obviously, Jennifer, you know this very well, like we're not just [00:18:00] talking about like a tool. We're talking really about a brain, right? We're talking about a brain that is going to evolve and do things that we haven't even yet fully, completely understood. So I, I just think that we're, we're in a moment where we have to ask ourselves, what is our relationship to that, you know?

Dr. Salima Bhimani: Is it gonna be one where we're just on the receiving end? Is it gonna be one where it's just gonna be utilitarian? You know, you made me... I did my spreadsheets better. Or is it gonna be one where we're really thinking about... I was talking to this, I was talking to this organization sitting on 50 years of data, okay?

Dr. Salima Bhimani: And they said to me, they said, "Well, tell us about how you think we could get better." I'm like, "It's not a question of whether you can get better. I'm just... Let's start with, do you know what you're sitting on? Like, do you, do you understand what's in front of you?" And they didn't, and it was fascinating to me.

Dr. Salima Bhimani: And I was like, "Okay, and now do you understand what AI, any kind of emerging technology, could help you uncover with this? Not just for you, but for the ecosystem of people that you actually work [00:19:00] with and work for. So you're not just unlocking for yourself, you're unlocking for this en- entire industry based on what you already have."
Dr. Salima Bhimani: And see, that kind of thinking, that kind of sort of evolved sort of state of being, I'd say almost, for leadership and for companies and for organizations, is the moment that we're in right now, that it's calling for, it's calling for that, but we keep kind of going back to efficiencies and kinda like, you know, how many people can we cut?

Dr. Salima Bhimani: And I'm like, "Okay. Sure. That's one part of the very small part of the story, but you're missing the bigger picture here." And that, that's the call that Internet Now is really bringing to people. And it's not just big companies. It's companies and industries across the world globally, but also communities across the world, you know?

Dr. Salima Bhimani: What could you solve now? 

Jennifer Strong: Absolutely. Well, this has been a delight. I really enjoyed our chat, and I hope we do it again, so stay in touch, and we'll talk to you again soon. 

Dr. Salima Bhimani: Thanks, Jennifer. I, I loved meeting, uh, another, uh, [00:20:00] maverick.