Jeff Dean choked up describing his exit from Google after 27 years. Discovery Loop, his four-person lab, is raising $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation.
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Jeff Dean choked up describing his decision to leave Google after 27 years. A video of the Stanford talk, released Tuesday, shows him flashing a thumbs up while praising the team he left behind. "They have a plan for making the Gemini models awesome," he says.
Dean spoke at Stanford on Aug. 7, his first public appearance since leaving the company. He spent more than a quarter-century at Google leading high-profile projects. Discovery Loop, the four-person startup he now runs, rests on a different premise: small teams are no longer a constraint; they are an advantage.
He pointed to the growing availability of cloud compute. Smaller startups, he said, can now rely on Google and other providers to build out the infrastructure AI work requires.
"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 at small scale also filters out "slight distractions" that slow progress inside large organizations, Dean said. "We're super excited as a small company about working in a really focused way on science and engineering automation," he added.
Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit company, which commits it to weighing social impact alongside shareholder returns. Dean said he and his cofounders "might make decisions that are not in the company's financial interest but are in the broader societal good."
Its goal is building systems that automate the experiment cycle, from proposing a test to evaluating the results. Discovery Loop also wants to take on parts of the 14 Grand Challenges, engineering problems 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 list includes "Reverse Engineer the Brain" and "Prevent Nuclear Terror."
The initial funding round was announced in a press release dated Aug. 5, two days before the Stanford talk. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures led it. Lightspeed and Kleiner Perkins participated, along with 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.
AI agents now handle work that once required several employees. Modern startups are scaling more quickly and thriving with only a handful of staff. Dean's own team counts four people.
The leap still carries nerves, Dean said. "It's a little nerve-wracking," he said. "But at the same time it's also exciting."
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