INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Mo Gawdat, the former Google and Google X executive, is probably best known for his book Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy
He left Google X last year
Quite a bit has been written about the events that led to him leaving Google, including the tragic death of his son
T0day, I sat down with the Egypt-born Gawdat at the Digital Frontrunners event in Copenhagen, where he gave one of the keynote presentations
Gawdat is currently based in London
He has adopted a minimalist lifestyle, with no more than a suitcase and a carry-on full of things
It was built for the Silicon Valley mentality of disruption, if you want, while actually, what you need is cooperation
There are so many successful players out there, so many efficient supply chains
that integrates all of the players in the retail ecosystem
A lot of the food we buy goes to waste (together with all of the resources it took to grow and ship it) and single-use plastic remains a
If everything you need to cook a meal arrives 15 minutes before you want to start cooking, you only need to order the items you need at that
given time and instead of a plastic container, it could come a paper bag
the likes of Uber, are obviously building some of the logistics networks that will enable this kind of immediate drop shipping, but Gawdat
that it can be done without using massive amounts of resources
Indeed, he argues that one of the problems with Google X, and especially big moonshot projects like Loon and self-driving cars, was that
Take the example of Loon and Facebook
Loon took longer than it should have
In my view, it was basically because of an abundance of resources and sometimes innovation requires a shoestring
A lot of people are advising him to raise money for it
ambitions are massive, but Gawdat thinks that his team can get the basic elements right, be that the fulfillment center design or the
routing algorithms and the optimization engines that power it all
actually be happy if others adopted his idea, thereby reducing waste.
