Architects of Google Maps leave Google!

The hottest news currently is of Bret Taylor and Jim Norris, two high-level Google engineers who quit the #1 search engine to join Benchmark capital, a Venture Capital firm as "Entrepreneurs in Residence", reports Venture Beat.

About the new members, Peter Fenton, general partner at Benchmark Capital commented, "Bret and Jim's stellar reputation at such a young age suggests great things to come. They have an infectious passion for creating and building transformative Internet services, and we look forward to working closely with them as they investigate, develop and create plans for their next great venture."

The departure is shocking, more so as it follows the very recent departure of Popular Google anti-spam engineer Vanessa Fox, who left for Zillow.

During his four years atGoogle, Bret Taylor was architect of major Google services like Google Maps, Google Maps API, Google Web Toolkit, Google Local, Google's crawling and indexing infrastructure.

"Jim Norris was technical lead on the Google Maps backend free-form location search architecture, responsible for overseeing international expansion, quality and scalability improvements. He wrote the Web server that enabled the launch of Google Maps and played a key role in its JavaScript (Ajax) implementation. Mr. Norris joined Google in 2003 as a software engineer in the infrastructure division."

Bret even has a post called How to make being unemployed sound sexy where he answers what everyone is asking.

1. "Why give up a secure job at one of the most well-respected companies in the world? Why go from virtually guaranteed to success to searching the couch for change to buy servers for a product that few people may ever use? The answer to those questions is partially rational and partially irrational. It's like asking why a comic book collector wants to spend hundreds of dollars on a first edition of a comic book no one reads anymore. It's not just a financial investment — it's an investment in your happiness, an investment in your psychological well-being."

Perhaps that says it all. Perhaps, we are more curious about why Google Biggies are leaving.

At Benchmark, Bret and Jim will evaluate opportunities in the consumer Internet market.

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