There are pitch decks, then there are Jeff Dean pitch decks.
Google's departing chief scientist shared slides for his new AI startup, Discovery Loop, on X on Wednesday — and they include a list of achievements any founder would be envious of.
One slide lists products the founding team helped build or worked on, including Google Search (the largest search engine), Ads (a highly lucrative business), and Gmail (the most widely used email service).
Other products include Gemini, Google's family of frontier AI models, and TPUs, the tech giant's custom-built chips.
Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in… pic.twitter.com/U5SovZXWrU
— Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) August 5, 2026Dean said the startup, which he is founding with other departing Google heavyweights Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, had shared the pitch deck with "a handful of VC firms."
The startup is pursuing scientific breakthroughs with AI across various fields, including computer hardware and drug discovery. Dean said that Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures would co-lead its initial funding round, with Alphabet and others also participating.
'One of the most stacked pitch decks ever made'
Dean is leaving Google after 27 years, as part of a wider AI leadership reshuffle that also saw Demis Hassabis move from CEO of Google DeepMind to become Alphabet's chief scientist and chair of Google DeepMind.
Dean was one of Google's earliest employees and has a legendary status inside and outside the company. Google staff reacted on internal message boards with fond memes, Business Insider's Hugh Langley reported.
The internet responded in a similar fashion to Dean's pitch deck slides.
"Will go down in history as one of the most stacked pitch decks ever made," Bilawal Sidhu, a former Google product leader, wrote in an X post on Wednesday.
"VCs don't select Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean selects VC," Shubham Sharma, a technical lead at YouTube, wrote in a reply to Dean's X post.
"Your deck should have just had one slide that said google me," James Rizkallah, a product data science manager at the financial technology platform Ramp, wrote in a Wednesday X post.
A separate slide shared by Dean is another huge flex.
It says the founders' teams managed or worked with people who went on to lead some of the most important AI companies: Anthropic cofounder Dario Amodei, OpenAI and Safe Superintelligence cofounder Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI cofounder Wojciech Zaremba, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, and Mistral cofounder Arthur Mensch, among others.
A third slide drives home the Discovery Loop founders' academic credentials, displaying Google Scholar rankings that place Dean, Le, and Vinyals among some of the most highly cited AI researchers.
"4 legends in one room," Delali Azumah, cofounder of software company Delalify, wrote on X on Wednesday of Discovery Loop's. "Who would not want to join them."
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Thibault is a business reporter at Business Insider's London office.He covers the intersection of wealth, work, and technology — focusing on the global economy, AI’s impact on the workplace, job and cognitive skills, and how economic changes are affecting careers. Before moving to the trending team, Thibault covered international affairs, including the Russia-Ukraine war, tensions in the South China Sea, and Russia’s economy on the news desk.He has previously worked at the Daily Express and held internships at Agence France-Presse, Politico Europe, and Factal.Il parle français. Se habla español.Email Thibault at [email protected], connect with him on LinkedIn @ThibaultSpirlet, or follow him on X @ThibaultSpirlet and BlueSky @thibaultspirlet.bsky.social.Expertise
- AI and the future of work
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