Jeff Dean’s hour-by-hour breakdown of his Google exit: an ’emotional’ video chat, Yoga at 7, and ‘unemployed’ at 11:59

Twas the night before Jeff Dean left Google, and he was up at 2 a.m. responding to messages.

Dean left the search giant last week to build his own AI startup, Discovery Loop. He was Google’s 30th employee, spending decades climbing the ladder to his final role of chief scientist. So, he had a lot of goodbye chats to respond to.

At the KDD Conference in Jeju, South Korea, Dean shared the hourly schedule of his final two days at Google.

“For my Google colleagues who might have sent me internal chat messages after I closed my laptop for a final time on Thursday afternoon, I apologize for my lack of response!” Dean wrote on X.

Dean broke the news on a Wednesday

Before last Wednesday, Dean said that about 12 people at Google knew he was leaving.

At 8:30 a.m., he broke the news to “139 close colleagues” in a video chat. It was emotional, he said, with lots of tears and “explosions of heart and sad face emojis.”

How can one have 139 close colleagues?…