JAKE & JZ: Jeff Dean's pitch deck is a masterclass in simplicity

Today John Zeratsky texted me a slide from the pitch deck for Jeff Dean’s new startup and then we talked about it:

Here’s what we talked about (condensed by Claude from our own words and then roughly edited by me):

The deck is DEFAULT and that’s awesome

• It’s the default Google Slides template! And it’s great.

• Imagine if Jeff had clicked the little “beautify this slide” nano banana button, it would’ve definitely been worse

• There’s a sophistication to simplicity. By not designing the deck, they’re saying: the content is so good that it doesn’t matter.

• JZ gets skeptical when a first-round deck looks too nice. It makes him wonder how the founders spent their time and money.

• This is the “bare-bones beats beautiful” rule from the Pitch Sprint.

Oh yeah here’s the deck or at least the tweet:

Jeff Dean@JeffDean

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

4:09 PM · Aug 5, 2026 · 360K Views

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31 Replies · 114 Reposts · 1.64K Likes

Simple is powerful, but UNCOMFORTABLE

• Look at the opening slide. It’s SUPER simple! The diagram is, like, 3 things.

• It’s exceptionally clear: here’s what we do, boom, boom, boom, here’s how it becomes huge.

• Simplifying like this is great, because investors don’t have to wonder what you’re doing. “Here is what we’re doing. Yes it’s simple. But it’s hard!”

• BUT… simplifying past a certain point feels dangerous... you’ve stripped away all the nuance and cleverness. You can hide behind complexity. You can hide behind fanciness.

• We don’t do anybody any favors by making things complex.

Now check out the team slides:

Jeff Dean@JeffDean

We created a pitch deck to tell a handful of VC firms about us and what we were up to (a fun experience!). Here’s a few slides about our background and some of the things we’ve worked on from the pitch deck (it was fun putting together the list of people in our teams who have

4:12 PM · Aug 5, 2026 · 3.13M Views

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228 Replies · 387 Reposts · 6.38K Likes

What do you think? Here’s what we think:

Team, team, team

• Most decks have one team slide. This one has three. Makes sense, they wanted to raise a gazillion dollars and the team is what it’s all about.

• This line is so nice: “We have worked together for 10–30 years and deeply enjoy working hard together on difficult problems.”

• Any founder can do this. Investors know a top failure mode for startups is cofounders who stop enjoying working together. Show the relationship, simply and sincerely.

Also…

Jeff got away with one (that the rest of us can’t)

• One slide lists the AI founders who came up through their teams at Google and left to start major companies.

• The intended message (we think) is “check this out we know how to find and lead the best AI talent in the world.”

• But… the slide never says that! So you might look at it and get the message “great people leave our organization.”

• A title says what the slide is about. A headline makes a point.

• Jeff Dean? he can skip the headline. At the sub-Jeff-Dean level (which is most of us), write a headline.

Making a pitch deck helps you think

• Jeff Dean probably could’ve raised without the pitch deck. He’s Jeff Dean!

• But even if they didn’t need a deck, making a pitch deck is helpful for the founders, too. Making a deck forces the cofounders to sit down and define: this is what we’re about, and this is how we make it work.

So… nice one Jeff!

Bye!