Back in April 2016, Facebook made waves by poaching Regina Dugan to lead its new Building 8 division. The social network wanted to create an experimental hardware group similar to what Google was doing with ATAP. Building 8 is now dead due to a hardware reorganization at Facebook.
Last year, Facebook poached Regina Dugan, the head of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects, to lead a new hardware group. Building 8’s first products are now coming into light as a new report notes the development of a Google Home smart speaker competitor and a video chat device.
Regina Dugan recently left her position heading up Google’s Advanced Technologies and Projects group to lead a new hardware initiative at Facebook. That’s obviously not great news for Google, as Dugan was the head of many of the company’s growing ATAP projects (including Ara, the company’s ambitious modular smartphone project). But maybe it was inevitable.
Dugan’s position at Google has been a weird one from the start. Silicon Valley’s super-fast reckless “break things fast” mindset that she was quickly confronted with upon arriving at Google conflicted with her many years of experience at the United States government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Recently, she highlighted this in a story of her first meeting at Google…
In a surprising hire, Facebook has poached ATAP head Regina Dugan from Google (via The Verge). The Advanced Technologies and Projects group originated at Motorola, but was integrated into Google before the Lenovo sale. Dugan will have a similar role at Facebook leading a new hardware group called Building 8.
ATP head Regina Dugan with some of her 100-strong team
Google’s mobile-focused research group, Advanced Technology and Projects (ATP), gives projects a maximum of two years’ work before they are killed, adopted as official Google products or sold to outside companies, reports the WSJ.
The deadline was created by former DARPA head Regina Dugan in an attempt to counter the normal tendency of companies to grow less nimble and more bureaucratic as they grow in size, said Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.
Product cycles slow down as a company gets larger. All of us believe we could execute faster […]
We like this model because it puts pressure on people to perform and do relevant things or stop. I’ve spent an awful lot of time on projects that never end and products that would never ship.
The company is ruthless about killing off projects which don’t deliver notable results, said Dugan, who was hired by Google in 2012, and it doesn’t always let them run as long as two years …
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Zynga announced on Wednesday that it has appointed Google’s Vice President of Engineering, Advanced Technology and Projects Regina Dugan to its Board of Directors. Dugan joined Motorola Mobility in March 2012 to oversee the ATAP group, a skunkworks-inspired team tasked with coming up with breakthrough innovations in mobile computing. That team now falls under Google’s Android, Chrome & Apps division.
Don Mattrick, CEO of Zynga, calls Dugan an “incredible addition” to Zynga’s board:
“I have admired Regina’s work and visionary thinking for years and believe she will be an incredible addition to the Zynga Board of Directors and a true catalyst for creative thinking at Zynga,” said Mattrick. “Regina is a dynamic leader who embraces new ideas and inspires teams to reimagine how technology and tools can positively disrupt the world. As we focus on growing and sustaining our leading franchises and creating new hits, Regina’s expertise and counsel will put us in a better position to deliver consumers next generation entertainment experiences that span categories, platforms and devices.”
Dugan on how Zynga makes games that help people connect, share and energize:
“I believe we need to play. Zynga is full of creative thinkers who embrace the power of play. Einstein famously stated that ‘combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought,’ and this spirit is embodied in Zynga’s products, which have brought new technology to games. Games that help people connect, share, rest and energize through play. I look forward to working with Don and the board on the company’s next chapter,” said Dugan.
Dugan will retain her position at Google.
