The Digital Trail

This episode of The Moonshot Podcast explores two ambitious moonshots focused on bringing "visibility" to the world's most complex and opaque digital and physical systems. First, Astro is joined by Mike Wiacek, Stephen Gillett, and Shapor Naghibzadeh from Chronicle to discuss how they built a digital immune system for cybersecurity, using Google-scale data analysis to detect anomalous activity and combat a global economic threat. Next, Astro speaks with Steven Chen and Suresh Vishnubhatla from Chorus, a moonshot focused on indexing the physical world to address monumental supply chain waste and inefficiency. 0:00 - Intro 01:25 - The "A-ha" moment that started Chronicle 03:35 - Rethinking the future of cybersecurity 05:17 - Building a "Digital Immune System" 11:35 - The terrifying scale of cyberattacks 10 years ago 13:08 - Understanding the 3 tiers of cybercriminals 15:46 - How Chronicle differed from other cybersecurity tools 19:27 - The “Coming Out” party: taking the tech public 21:12 - Returning to Google 23:23 - Memories and lessons learned from their time at X 24:53 - Enter Project Chorus: Meet Steven and Suresh 26:11 - Solving the supply chain’s biggest blind spot 29:41 - From idea to execution: How Chorus took flight 31:07 - What Chorus offers today 34:26 - A deep dive into the tech 36:46 - The evolution of Chorus 40:27 - How Chorus achieves “System-Wide” visibility 44:17 - Why every item in the supply chain matters 46:07 - Behind the scenes: Funniest project moments 47:28 - How Chorus could fundamentally change the world 48:55 - Final thoughts – Hosted by Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots, The Moonshot Podcast goes behind the scenes with creators and inventors trying to find radical solutions and breakthrough technologies to the world’s biggest problems. These are the untold stories of innovation from 16 years of Alphabet’s moonshot factory. The Moonshot Podcast is a Pique Action production for X, The Moonshot Factory, produced in association with Blanchard House. If you want to take your own moonshots, we've developed a certificate course with MasterClass on how to take bold ideas and translate them into real world impact. Check it out here: https://www.masterclass.com/certificates/breakthrough-innovation-strategy-from-bold-idea-to-business-impact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices