Jeff Dean

speaker

343 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 1 Aug

Jeff Dean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Y Combinator Startup Podcast · Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI · 1 Aug 2026 podcast

So in terms of, say, the particular trade-off you offered joining a frontier lab versus, say, starting a company with just one or two or three of you and your close friends,

I think those are different experiences, right?

In a large established organization, you have some structure, you have lots and lots of amazing colleagues who know lots of things you don't.

You have lots of interesting problems that you can work on and you already have a platform for impact by your work, you know, influencing lots and lots of people in the world already.

And then as a very small startup,

you know, you have to have something you're passionate about and

there's a lot of risk in taking on, working on that particular problem in a way that you're gonna succeed and you're gonna grow an endeavor in order to do that.

But that can also be incredibly rewarding, I would imagine.

So I think, it's really up to personal taste, but at the very least, regardless of what path you take, ask yourself, if I work on this problem and the best possible outcome happens,

You know, will the world be a lot better in some way or will the world go, eh, that's kind of cool, but whatever.

That's not the kind of thing you should spend your time on.

Yeah, I mean,

you always want to find people who have really good skills in some area that's needed in a team you're trying to form, whether that's inside a company or starting a company.

But you also want to find people that are

people you delight being around, right?

Because you're gonna spend a lot of time around people working on really hard problems.

And you want people who are low ego, that are team players, that have complimentary skills to your own perhaps.

I always find working in a small team where people know things that I don't know, and where maybe I have some skills that other people don't have as much of,

you know, is super fun because you're collectively building something or working on something that none of you could maybe do individually.

But in the process of working on that, you actually gain a lot of new knowledge and new skills for yourself and so do they.

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