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.”
Jeff Dean
How can one have 139 close colleagues? Remember that Dean managed mammoth teams, especially while running Google’s Research and AI teams. Dean led about 4,400 people, he said in Discovery Loop’s pitch deck.
At 9 a.m., Dean announced Discovery Loop and sent his internal farewell message.
By 2:30 p.m., Googlers were cramming into a small room to celebrate Dean. His farewell celebration had about 1,500 colleagues in attendance, he said, in a café space that fits 300.
Jeff Dean
Dean has long been an athlete. In his farewell message, Dean cited bike rides to Monterey for the company’s off-sites and a running group called “Run or Else…” His second-to-last day was no different. He had a 7 p.m. yoga session, followed by an 8:30 p.m. soccer league game.
Then came the messages. At 10:30 p.m., Dean found 400 “incredibly touching” messages on his internal account — meaning that they’d disappear as soon as he left. He stayed up till 2:30 a.m. responding to them, he said.
On Thursday, Dean was flooded with messages
Dean said he woke up at 6:30 a.m. on Thursday.
He had 250 more messages on the company’s internal chat system, he said, plus 500 more that CCed his personal email. “At least those won’t disappear in 8 hours,” he wrote.
By 5:20 p.m., Dean had responded to almost all of the messages within Google’s chat system, “but they keep coming in.” He closed his laptop.
At 11:59:59 p.m., he gained a new title: “Unemployed.”
Just a minute later, he had a new job. Dean was now the cofounder of Discovery Loop, alongside some of his “awesome colleagues.” He gave an 11:45 a.m. fireside chat at Stanford — one that was “arranged months ago” — and toured six office spaces at 2:30 p.m.
His exit from Google was complete.
