Why Jeff Dean says he left Google after 27 years to build a small AI startup

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 cloud providers to "build out the infrastructure" necessary to power AI work.

"That makes it possible for a small set of people to raise a fair bit of capital and be able to use those platforms without having to build them themselves," he said.

Working on a smaller team, Dean said, will also allow his startup to cut through "slight distractions" that would ordinarily hamper progress in large organizations.

"We're super excited as a small company about working in a really focused way on science and engineering automation," he said.

More small companies have been popping up recently as AI agents prove capable of automating processes that once required the work of multiple employees. Modern-day startups are scaling more quickly, and thriving with only a handful of employees.

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Dean's Discovery Loop, a public benefit company, aims to automate the process by which scientists and engineers propose an experiment, implement and run it, and evaluate the results.

Dean said at the talk that he and his cofounders "might make decisions that are not in the company's financial interest but are in the broader societal good."

Specifically, Discovery Loop wants to build systems that can tackle parts of the 14 challenges laid out by some of the world's most accomplished scientists and engineers to improve life as we know it. Formerly known as the "National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges," the 14 topics range from "Reverse Engineer the Brain" to "Prevent Nuclear Terror."

A Discovery Loop press release from August 5 said that the company's initial funding round is being led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital. Alphabet is a founding investor and cloud partner, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Business Insider reported last week that Dean has been in talks to raise $1 billion at about a $10 billion valuation.

Nevertheless, Dean said creating a new startup still comes with its own anxieties.

"It's a little nerve-wracking," he said. "But at the same time it's also exciting."

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