On Wednesday, Aug. 5, Jeff Dean left Google after 27 years, and three of the company's most senior researchers left with him. Shares of Alphabet (GOOGL) (GOOG) closed down 4.03% that day. By the time the podcasts got to it, the arithmetic had already been done out loud. "Jeff Dean plus three other AI superstars are leaving Google to start a company called Discovery Loop," Jason Calacanis said on the All-In podcast, taped Aug. 6. "Dean is a legend ... Google shares down 4% on the news of Dean leaving. So, 200 billion in lost market cap if you want to correlate those two things."
That last clause is doing more work than it looks like. Calacanis hedged it on air, and he was right to. Two things about this story do not fit the brain-drain reading, and the first one is in Sundar Pichai's own memo.
