I’ve been fortunate in that I was in a position where I learned so much in my corporate career, and also have the ability to dedicate more and more of my time and resources to making my vision a reality.
My vision is to make one billion people happy. It’s the biggest mission I’ve ever assumed, and it might actually be one of the biggest missions that humanity needs today.
I spent the last 11 years of my life working at Google, opening almost half of Google’s offices globally. Then, I moved to Google[x], the innovation lab, where I was chief business officer, working among an elite team of engineers, until February 2018. We worked with artificial intelligence – AI – machine learning. I believe that in the next 15 years or so, this artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence. Now is the time for us to shape the lessons we teach these mechanical babies.
In 2014 I lost my son as the result of a medical error during a routine surgical procedure. It triggered me to do the most unexpected thing, which was to write a book about happiness. The book Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy was released in March 2017. It was my attempt to honor my son’s way of living, and was really the core of the onebillionhappy mission. As an engineer, my happiness model is based on the theory that happiness is your default state and you can return to this state when you make that choice.
I left Google to dedicate the rest of my life to #onebillionhappy. I call it my personal moonshot. And I am happy to share it with you in this video: