The existential joy of doing really hard things

From digital X-rays to renewable energy, Raj Apte has spent his life at the cutting edge of innovation. With more than 85 patents under his belt, he’s played a significant role in bringing many new technologies to market over the years: grid-scale thermal energy storage; ultrasonic biometrics (used in smartphone fingerprint scanners); printed organic electronics; digital X-ray sensors; and micromachined diffractive displays (displays that enable, among other things, ultra-high-resolution projectors and VR goggles). 

Developing futuristic technologies was always something that appealed to Apte: even as a kid, he tells me, he knew he wanted to be a biomedical engineer. That might sound far-fetched, but he recently uncovered sketches and notes from seventh grade (around 12 years old). In them, he had laid his future career plans, alongside circuit diagrams and musings about what it would be like to be Spock, the character played by Leonard Nimoy in the original Star Trek. 

No wonder, then, that Apte ended up at X, the “Moonshot Factory” of Google parent company Alphabet, almost a decade ago, in 2015. Based in Mountain View, California, X is birthplace to self-driving cars, delivery drones and more. Its mission is straight from sci-fi: develop breakthrough technologies that could provide solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges, from climate change to food security.  

“The physicist says it’s boring and the engineers say it’s impossible” 

Over the years Apte has held numerous roles at X. While a Principal Engineer on X’s Rapid Evaluation team, Apte’s role was to identify, investigate and evaluate potential ‘moonshots’ – transformative ideas at the edge of possibility, inspired by NASA’s original moonshot. 

It’s a job he feels he was born to do – literally, he tells me, as he was born 6 houses away from (and used to shop at) the Mayfield Mall, the shopping centre which would become X’s headquarters. Apte hails from a family of engineers and entrepreneurs. His mum, Kay, defying contemporary social norms and the glass ceiling, created the first accounting firm to use computer technology in Palo Alto – blazing a trail that would inspire Apte himself. 

X’s Rapid Evaluation team included scientists, technologists and other experts who are loosely organised but laser-focused on exploring and evaluating inventive solutions. The “rapid” part comes from the designated “Captain of Moonshots” (or CEO) Astro Teller’s philosophy: the most efficient way to find actual ground-breaking solutions is to speedily sift through as many ideas as possible, remaining focused on the challenge rather than any one specific approach. 

Perhaps most importantly, Apte says, X’s moonshot hunters have a knack for sniffing out situations where “the physicist says it’s boring and the engineers say it’s impossible” – ideas that are sufficiently advanced to leave the lab, but too risky for traditional short-term commercialisation. 

Crossing the “innovation inefficiency” gap

That sweet spot is exactly where Apte thrives. Prior to X, Apte managed a research team and cleanroom at legendary technology incubator PARC (formerly Xerox PARC). Over the course of two decades, he and his team invented and brought new technologies to market – most notably, the digital X-ray.

Apte’s work on the digital X-ray was his first experience combining research and business – and it opened his eyes to the difficulties of getting new technologies out of the lab. Persuading people to actually use their technologies was more difficult than anticipated: Despite the clear benefits of the digital X-ray over film, radiologists were hesitant to adopt the change. 

It was a pattern he’d see over and over again – “Not invented here” syndrome, the tendency to reject ideas from outside. “That struck me as a huge inefficiency,” Apte says. PARC’s solution: build 20 of the first digital X-ray medical imaging systems and give them to teaching hospitals to stoke research and train students. It was a runaway success: InnovaFlex, the company that spun out from PARC, is one of the world’s leading sources of high-resolution x-ray technologies.  

He continued to see the same pattern after leaving PARC to work as an independent consultant helping startups develop early-stage prototypes across a range of technologies. Potentially world-changing approaches, like radically better X-rays, were getting stuck in the gap between invention and real-world application. The innovation pipeline itself was broken. 

That was, rather serendipitously, around the time Apte met Teller, CEO at X. Apte was hired to consult on the development and prototyping of a new technology for bezel-less screens. Teller spoke with Apte about potentially coming to X – but it took almost three years of hearing a “little birdie in the back of my head constantly saying Astro’s name”, says Apte, before he decided to come onboard in 2015.

An idea worth its salt

As a researcher, Apte says he often felt like he had a solution in search of a problem; at X, he’s doing the opposite, asking, “What does the world actually need?” X runs projects in a small and scrappy way, which Apte describes as the best approach for evaluating moonshot problems. “We spin up small teams of the smartest people we can find, who are absolutely in love with the problem, and not necessarily with any given solution to it.”

Just three months into his new role at X, Apte found the project that would occupy him for the next several years: renewable energy storage at grid scale. “Project Malta” explored whether it would be possible to use heat stored in molten salt, which is relatively inexpensive, safe and nontoxic, to bank energy for long periods of time at grid-scale. 

How to store and retrieve energy at massive scale is a considerable challenge for the renewables industry; solar and wind are intermittent and unpredictable sources. Although battery costs have fallen dramatically over the past decade, grid-scale battery storage needs to grow significantly for the world to reach Net Zero targets, and batteries are still just too expensive. 

The idea was built on research by a Nobel Prize-winning physics professor, who came up with a theoretical system for grid-scale energy storage – and, coincidentally, taught Apte quantum mechanics as a PhD student at Stanford. But, as Apte explains, no one wanted to develop it. It was a classic example of a potentially transformative idea getting caught in the gap.

Apte jokes that his boss made him project lead for Malta because he was the only person who understood the underlying physics. But he was intrigued by the challenge: “It’s completely implausible, but doesn’t actually violate the laws of physics,” says Apte. “That is the perfect combination.” 

Over the next several years, Apte led a small team to de-risk the ideas – and prove the industry wrong. In late 2018, Malta spun out to become an independent company, led by CEO Ramya Swaminathan and backed by investors including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures. 

The end of Moore’s Law

Apte returned to the Rapid Evaluation team, looking for his next challenge. He soon found it: leading a project that, as he puts it, aims to revolutionise electronics in a post-Moore’s Law world.

Moore’s Law is the famous observation that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles about every two years – meaning that every two years, computers get twice as powerful without an increase in cost or size. “If the car industry had progressed like the electronics industry,” Apte says, “then a car would go at the speed of light and cost $1.”

Somewhere between a law of nature and a self-fulfilling prophecy, Moore’s Law is behind the phenomenal and consistent growth in computing power of the last few decades – but it’s now coming to an end. This coincides with skyrocketing and unprecedented demand for powerful compute, driven by artificial intelligence-based systems such as ChatGPT and other large language models. 

The scale of this challenge is what drew Apte in – as well as the opportunity. The scenario is similar to the original 1980s personal-computer revolution, which democratised access to digital technologies. With significantly more powerful computers, the potential of AI and machine learning could be realised on a global scale, says Apte.

Climate research, in particular, stands to benefit. “Imagine if every person who has a laptop that can access Google Cloud could do climate modelling?” says Apte. “I really love the idea of taking things out of the ivory towers of the experts and sharing them with everybody.”

Like all X projects, the details are strictly secret and the outcome is high-risk and uncertain. But counterintuitively, that difficulty is what makes it easier to keep going, says Apte.

Finding the existential joy of doing really hard things

“There’s an element of fun in all this, when you become engaged in problems that you feel are important,” he says. “When you’re surrounded by people and you’re all working on problems that are so hard that you can forgive yourself for failing. There’s a light-heartedness and a joy that comes out of that.” 

It’s a privileged position to be in – one that Apte is grateful for. X’s approach supports experimentation and long-term results over short-term productivity, allowing Apte and his team the opportunity to focus on solving hard problems on a longer time horizon rather than the inverse. It was an opportunity to improve how innovation itself was done, and tackle the inefficiency gap he’d seen. 

Apte also acknowledges how extremely lucky he is to experience the joy of doing really hard things in his day-to-day life. It makes him think of a classic book he read as an undergraduate, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering by Samuel C. Florman. “It’s really about how fun it is to create things that make the world a better place,” says Apte. “I loved it as a student, but I didn’t feel it. Now, it’s what gets me up every morning.” 

Story by Aisling O’Gara