"Inside the Valley": Jeff Dean Revealed the Scene of His Resignation at a Top Conference, Where He Was Surrounded by 1500 People

How did Jeff Dean spend his last 48 hours at Google?

The answer is: he was probably busier than an average office worker on a regular workday.

According to the schedule he shared at the top conference KDD 2026:

He first announced his departure to 139 "close colleagues", then attended a farewell gathering with about 1500 attendees.

Right after the farewell event, he still went to his yoga class as planned and played his football game as usual.

When he got home in the evening, he replied to colleagues' farewell messages one by one, and kept replying until 2:30 a.m.

He only slept for 4 hours. When he woke up the next day, new messages popped up again.

It was not until Thursday afternoon (August 6) that Jeff Dean closed his Google laptop for the last time, and returned his employee badge and work notebook.

At 23:59:59, he wrote down a new identity for himself:

"Unemployed".

But just after midnight, he started his new job right away, and transformed into Co-founder and CEO of Discovery Loop.

It is no exaggeration to say that even the departure of Google's legendary engineer is far busier than most people's~ (doge)

The Last 48 Hours of Jeff Dean Before Leaving His Post at Google

Early on Wednesday local time, only about 12 people inside Google knew that Jeff Dean was preparing to leave the company.

At 8:30 a.m., he pulled 139 "close colleagues" into a video conference, and personally announced the news.

This video conference was full of sadness. Jeff Dean described it in his own words:

Everyone was emotional and tearful, and they were "sending heart and sad emojis like crazy".

In the sidebar, some people thanked him for the help he brought, some said he had always been their role model, and others joked:

"We will launch a GoFundMe for you, Jeff."

Hmm~ The sadness was also mixed with a little Google-style humor.

For an ordinary person, it is probably hard to imagine that they have 139 close colleagues at work.

But this is Jeff Dean! He has stayed at Google for 27 years, participated in generations of core projects one after another, and once led a team of about 4,400 people.

Half an hour later, at 9 a.m., Jeff Dean sent an internal farewell letter to all Google employees, and publicly announced the establishment of his new company.

In the letter, he confirmed that he would leave Google together with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le to found Discovery Loop.

They hope to explore how to use AI and automation tools to accelerate machine learning, scientific and engineering research in a smaller environment.

This internal farewell letter was written very sincerely, without any trace of resentment.

Jeff Dean specially mentioned that Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the entire Alphabet team fully understand and support their decision.

He still firmly believes that Google and Gemini are in a very favorable position, and will continue to exert huge influence in the future.

He also explained to his colleagues that the reason he chose to say goodbye via email was that he did not want everyone to get the news from second-hand or third-hand rumors. Compared with separate conversations, a single email allows more colleagues to hear his explanation directly at the same time at least.

In the second half of the letter, Jeff Dean reviewed his nearly 27 years of experience at Google.

From Search, MapReduce, Bigtable, to Google Brain, TPU, TensorFlow and Gemini, he has almost run through several generations of Google's core technologies.

However, what he remembers is not only the projects.

There are also cycling to Monterey for company events, the "run or die" running group he formed with colleagues, 18 office relocations, and 29 Google offices he has visited across five continents.

He confirmed that he would work at Google until August 6. Colleagues in Mountain View could go to his workstation to say goodbye to him in person.

A few hours later, countless people really flocked over.

At 14:30 p.m., Jeff Dean's farewell event officially started.

The event was held in a Google cafe that usually can only accommodate about 300 people, but about 1500 colleagues came to attend that day.

In the photos taken at the scene, the cafe was completely filled with crowds. Some people squeezed at the door, some stood in the corridor, and the people at the back could only hold up their mobile phones to shoot the front.

Jeff Dean was completely surrounded by people with no space left around him.

However, after the farewell meeting, Jeff Dean did not continue to immerse himself in the parting atmosphere.

At 19:00 p.m., he went to his yoga class as usual.

At 20:30 p.m., he went to play a football league match.

Truly a legend worthy of the name...

As his 27-year Google career was coming to an end, he still attended classes and played football as scheduled, without delaying any of his daily arrangements.

He also showed his sports routine in the comment area. In addition to football and yoga, he also works out, rides bikes and runs every week, with a wide variety of activities.

It turns out that all successful people must be people with super high energy levels.

At 22:30 p.m., Jeff Dean got home and opened his Google internal account again.

He found that there were 400 messages waiting for him to reply.

The trouble was that all these messages were stored in his Google internal account. Once his account permissions expired the next day, all these messages would disappear along with it.

So Jeff Dean started replying to them one by one.

Until 2:30 a.m. the next day, he finally finished replying to all 400 messages. In the schedule, he even added a special bracket note:

"Phew."

Then he went to sleep.

Four hours later, at 6:30 a.m. on Thursday, Jeff Dean woke up.

There were 250 more messages in his internal account. In addition, there were about 500 replies from colleagues to his internal farewell letter.

Fortunately, Jeff Dean had added his personal Gmail to the CC list before, so these emails would not disappear along with his work account.

He wrote in his schedule:

"At least these won't disappear in 8 hours."

At 17:20 p.m., Jeff Dean had replied to almost all internal company messages.

But new messages kept popping up nonstop.

However, the time to return the computer came, so he could only close the laptop.

Later, he posted a photo of his Google employee badge and work laptop on X, with only one line of caption:

"Handed it back..."

The shell of the laptop was still covered with stickers of TensorFlow, Bigtable and the Google Brain pattern, like a compressed version of Google's technical resume.

Some people noticed that the laptop Jeff Dean returned was a Chromebook.

He later explained that since he often ran to and from work, he had always prepared two laptops, one at home and the other at the company, so that he would not have to stuff his laptop into his running backpack every day.

The one at home was a MacBook, but he thought it was too expensive for Google to buy two MacBooks for him, so he chose a Chromebook as his second work laptop.

Wait a minute... It turns out that Google's most legendary engineer even thought about saving money for the company?

What else can this be if not love for the company?

Jeff Dean later specially apologized to his colleagues:

"For those Google colleagues who still sent me internal chat messages after I closed my laptop for the last time on Thursday afternoon, I'm sorry I couldn't reply to you."

His nearly 27-year legendary engineering career at Google ended just like that.

At 23:59:59 p.m., in Jeff Dean's schedule, he wrote a line for himself:

"Unemployed".

......

One second later, he got a new job immediately!

Co-founder and CEO of Discovery Loop.

Why Did 1500 People Come to See Him Off?

Such a well-known legend does not need much introduction in the first place.

But to explain the unprecedented grand occasion of his farewell, we have to look back at what he left for Google.

Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999. He was one of the earliest batches of employees of the company, and also Google's 30th employee.

In