@rronak_: I’ve left Google DeepMind. The last two years have been an incredible whirlwind. A couple years ago, I joined a small s…

I’ve left Google DeepMind.

The last two years have been an incredible whirlwind.

A couple years ago, I joined a small startup called Codeium. There, I got to ship Windsurf, train SWE-1 (a frontier agentic coding model), go to DeepMind in the $2.4B acquisition. Now, I decided to leave the acquisition money and DeepMind.

I’m grateful to the mentors, teammates, and friends I worked with along the way.

At Windsurf, thanks to @_mohansolo and Douglas Chen, I got to see what a fast moving startup that ships relentlessly and builds for the future looks like. I learned from @thenickmoy how excellent research leadership can drive outsized innovation.

At DeepMind, I got to push the frontier of agentic coding, be part of the amazing team that shipped Antigravity and contributed to Gemini 3. DeepMind is a rare place: deeply curious people, exceptional research taste, and access to enormous compute and Google-scale infrastructure.

A few things that I learned:

1. Finding the right hill to climb. Now more than ever, there are a multitude of directions to push the frontier in AI research. It’s easy to optimize for the wrong benchmark or capability. You should step back regularly to question if you are climbing the right hill, and adjust course often.

2. The secret to being a fast-moving team. Moving quickly is not just about working hard and long hours. It requires making concrete bets about where the world will be in 6 months, aligning around them, and cutting everything else. This was our journey from the Codeium Extension → Windsurf IDE → SWE-1 → Antigravity → Antigravity CLI

3. Silicon Valley is small. Since the split of Windsurf to DeepMind and Cognition, many of my colleagues have gone to other exciting places - Thinking Machines, OpenAI, xAI, Cursor, fast-moving startups, or started their own companies. I’m grateful to have worked with so many talented, hungry people whose stories are not yet finished.

So what’s next?

We are living in one of the most exciting and powerful times in human history. Just like we transformed software engineering, soon every industry, every unit of work will be radically transformed, democratized, accelerated. With this comes new challenges, and new doors of frontier research to be opened.

More soon.

Thanks so much Ray! I remember seeing all of your reviews of Windsurf throughout the years, thanks for the continued support :)

100%

good insight!

very cool!! Yep the team is awesome

yep on to more exciting hills

great point!

Thanks Tanisha!

it’s been super fun!

you as well!!

it was a really fun run

Thanks! It was a great time, learned so much

oh yeah

Thank you! You’ve been here since day 1

The name keeps getting longer

lezgoo thanks Ash

Thanks for the kind words Sam! Huge fan of Monaco

Excited for you @rronak_!

Thanks so much Marco!! Also excited for you, big things ahead!

good one

yezzir

Appreciate it man

thanks, you guys are killing it!!

Thanks so much Ben!! Cursor

HAHA Kimball is where everything starts

Thanks Paul!! Same with you at Archive!

thanks!!

i see what you did there

hmmm

tyy!

woohoo thanks

Thanks Phil! Heard you guys are crushing it

yee

That’s true LOL Soto is truly where it all started