The founders were involved in a controversy around their previous technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaChip#Internal_dispute_at_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaChip#External_attempts_to... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaChip#Research_integrity_c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaChip#Author_responses

Google fired the internal employee who blew the whistle on this, and while Jeff Dean repeatedly defended the project, after reading all the complaints, I came to the conclusion that (like many other Google papers) the results were selectively reported in a way that made the paper sound better than it was.