By Truman Dickerson
Publication Date: 2026-08-20 09:04:00
After 27 years, it must have been hard for Jeff Dean to let go.
Dean, who quit Google to build his own AI startup called Discovery Loop, briefly choked up while describing his decision to leave the search giant after more than a quarter-century during a talk at Stanford University earlier this month.
“They have a plan for making the Gemini models awesome,” Dean says in a video of the event released on Tuesday, flashing a thumbs up while appearing to choke back tears. The talk, held on August 7, was his first public appearance since leaving Google.
Though Dean built a sterling reputation at Google, leading numerous high-profile projects, he said during the talk that being part of a small startup — four people in Discovery Loop’s case — was now not only possible but an optimized vehicle for accelerated innovation.
Pointing toward the growing availability of cloud compute, Dean said that smaller startups can now “rely on” Google and other…
