State of Cloud Marketplaces 2022

Sanjay Mehta:
We’re a couple minutes in. Let’s get rolling. Really appreciate everybody being here today. I think it’ll be an action-packed hour. We’ve got some esteemed guests. By way of intro, my name is Sanjay Mehta. I’m the chief cloud officer at Tackle. People frequently say, “What is a chief cloud officer?” And I respond with, “We think every software company needs one.” Cloud go-to-market post-sale marketplace is all really big things now, in terms of how you talk to your buyers and meet your buyers where they want to be. And sometimes we find organizations try to do that haphazardly with just loosely coupled teams and dotted line reporting and other such things and it never really works. And when somebody owns the ball, if you will, it tends to go well. So whether that’s your VP of cloud or your chief cloud officer probably doesn’t matter. It matters that they have the responsibility to break glass and to get stuff done.

Sanjay Mehta:
I am joined by Ally Goldstein Norup. She’s the head of VC & startup ecosystems for the Americas at Google Cloud. For those of you not keeping up on the latest news, they dropped the P in GCP, so it’s… I’ve been training or retraining myself all week, GC. Before joining Google, Ally was an EIR, an entrepreneur-in-residence in FinTech at Techstars. And she’s helped more than 15 Techstar programs along the way. And I always admire folks who are amazing founders and entrepreneurs and find the time to have big jobs and give back and Ally’s done a ton of that. I’ll let her add on with a bit more during her intro as well. And then John Leon [inaudible 00:01:51] friend in the last year or so, which is awesome, at Apiiro. Like me, lots of time in kind of the go-to-market channel sales world, including great companies like GitHub and Twistlock, which is now part of Palo Alto and ExtraHop, which had an equity event, what, about a year ago, I think, give or take?

John Leon:
That’s about right? Yeah. About right.

Sanjay Mehta:
About a year ago. So for those attending, feel free to drop questions in the chat along the way. I’ll either try to feed them into the conversation in real time, or maybe one of my esteemed colleagues can jump in and try to answer as well. We will try to leave some time at the end for a live Q&A so you have a chance to ask any questions there as well. So with that, maybe I’ll pass it over to Ally first, just to add on any introductory remarks.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
Sanjay, I’ll give a little bit to that. First off, I’m excited to be here. I told the crew beforehand, I do these, and this is actually one of the webinars that I haven’t done this yet. And I’m excited about it, partially because I’m a two-time recovering founder. That’s the fun part that we always get to say on this side. And also partially because having joined Google and Google Cloud, thanks for the note about removing the P for platform. Good to know on my side as well. Very specifically, having joined Google Cloud about a year and a half ago, I spend three parts of my day and none of it equals up to 100, it equals up to about probably 150, 175 sometimes. But with one part very specifically with Googlers and making sure that we’ve got all of the Googlers who are excited to talk with all of you working with VCs and working with startups.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
Second part with our VC relationship. So work with amazing VCs from Canada down to [inaudible 00:03:43]. Early stage to multi-stage in growth. And then lastly but not leastly, it’s just the founders and the operators that are on this call. And so I should update that bio site, my bad. I’ve mentored a ton, and I’m a huge lover of everything KPI and cloud related, having built on three clouds. John’s bio’s way impressive so I have to extend mine a little bit. Having built on three different clouds is, I hope you all come away with an amazing understanding of why you want to build with Google Cloud and why you want to start early for it. So John, I had to keep up. I mean, you’re an amazing startup operator and founder.

John Leon:
Too many words on a slide, I don’t know. But so not a founder, but certainly involved in the startup community for years, Ally. And this is my fourth startup that I’m now a part of here, I’ll say my best. So Apiiro is now the company I’m with today, but my journey has been throughout series B, series C, now series A, and certainly over the, I’m going to say 10 years in the DevOps world that I’ve been in, DevSecOps world I’ve been a part of for 10 years now, a lot has changed. I mean, a lot has evolved and now it’s working with partners like Google and Tackle. I didn’t know Tackle six years ago. Now I know Tackle and they’re one of the most important partners I have and certainly Google helping us become the startup that we are and the acceleration that we’re seeing is attributed a lot to our relationship with GC, Google Cloud. And so happy to share that story today and talk about our learnings and experiences with your team, Ally, and do the best to educate and share knowledge that I can today. So thanks for having me.

Sanjay Mehta:
You’re like me, John, you show up right after product market fit is established, right? Now let’s hit the gas and go, but being the idea person is not for the faint at heart. But so I was on this panel down in Miami, there was a first ever conference for this group called Partnership Leaders, which is a pretty cool group, for those of you that are in Alliance’s persona on the call today. Not to give a free plug to my friends over there, but it was a pretty cool experience. And I was on a panel and they shocked me with their first question, which is, “You just walked into a karaoke bar,” which I usually do out of the country and after a couple of cocktails. So I was familiar with it, but not hugely familiar. And they said, “So if you just walked into a karaoke bar and somebody handed you the mic, what would you sing?” So Ally, what would you sing?

Ally Goldstein Norup:
You Can Call Me Al by Paul Simon.

Sanjay Mehta:
So close. You almost got it right. You can play her off.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
Oh, okay.

Sanjay Mehta:
Right. You Can Call Me Al. That’s what you were doing.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
Exactly. Yeah. I’ve sang it with my dad since I was a kid.

Sanjay Mehta:
Oh really? Oh cool. That’s awesome. John?

John Leon:
Oh, was I supposed to do this too?

Sanjay Mehta:
You got to do this too, buddy. Yeah.

John Leon:
Oh, geez. Now you caught me flat-footed on this one.

Sanjay Mehta:
That’s the point of the question, yes, to catch you flat-footed.

John Leon:
Boy, going back to my dad what we played growing up, Kenny Rogers, The Gambler. I’ll go with that. I’m going to go with that.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
Great one. That’s a great one. Sanjay?

Sanjay Mehta:
I went with Sweet Child of Mine because this company was headquartered in Tokyo. So somehow when you’re with your Japanese colleagues in a karaoke bar, nobody sings Sweet Child of Mine better than the Japanese. If I picked, it would be a country song, but I don’t know actually what I would pick. But I don’t have a voice for singing, I have a face for radio. Cool.

John Leon:
Totally [inaudible 00:07:14]

Sanjay Mehta:
So you’ve done this a lot, man. I think it’s a pretty brave thing you do, which is you walk in and you take the job and you’re like the first partnerships person in the door and the leadership team and the board look at you and like, “Hey, John, go form partnerships with the biggest companies in the world.” And you’re like, “Sweet. I got it.”

John Leon:
“You’re an army of one. Go for it.” Right? Yeah.

Sanjay Mehta:
Army of one. I’m going to go work with Google so they care a lot about me. Why do you do it? What’s at that core cloud go-to-market that gets you really, really excited?

John Leon:
Well, look, in a nutshell, it’s in my blood. I love the startup world and just the hustle, I think you called it earlier, Sanjay, and just the roll up your sleeves. And one day you’re building strategic relationships. You’re doing something [inaudible 00:07:58] or washing dishes, you’re walking the dog, all of it. And I just enjoy that tremendously so that’s just a personal note. But I’ve noticed and learned through the years, just there’s a different sort of requirement and stage at every step of the way from seed to series A to B to C. And every stop you learn something through the years. And certainly I’ve learned the importance of our cloud providers and cloud partners like Google. I’ve watched things like Kubernetes be misspelled so many times, CISOs not even understanding what Kubernetes was and what is this service that our operations and developer people are using to deploy applications in a microservice format, et cetera, and yada, yada, right?

John Leon:
And so you watch the evolution and then all of a sudden these things just become, of course that’s how we do it. Of course, we use GP to deploy services. Of course that’s how we keep velocity and stability and operations scale, et cetera. And same holds true for go-to-market around choosing your cloud provider and building on that cloud provider and go into market with that cloud provider today. In 2022, as I took this job at Apiiro, and I’m talking with the investors and the board, and they’re asking about strategy and vision, what you would do, clearly, this is no longer a choice, it is a must, if you’re going to go-to-market and be successful in this era of our industry.

John Leon:
That question didn’t come up, frankly, in 2017, 2018. The traditional format is you build your direct sales force as a seed series A and then you bolt these things on over time. And the narrative I’m going to tell today and the story as we go through this conversation is that that’s no longer the case. We need to start day zero, day one, thinking about these things. So it’s been a great ride. It’s a wonderful ride at Apiiro. We’re on a fast trajectory with our partners at Google and Tackle and happy to share the story today.

Sanjay Mehta:
Sweet. I love it. And we’ll flip it around. So Ally, you’ve been a founder and now you work at Google. And in a way you’re the on ramp for great startups to come work with Google. And I think the dirty little secret in other ways you might be a gatekeeper too, I’m guessing. Lots and lots of startups knocking on that door, wanting to form the next great partnership and having the solution for the business problem they might not completely understand. What’s that for you? What makes a great better together story for a startup?

Ally Goldstein Norup:
So John stole my tagline, which I love him for in that regard, which is, I think we used to always talk about in my startup in my founder days, thinking about not just marrying what’s going to be your next sprint with your long-term build map, but also thinking about what that build map and that product roadmap looks like as you’re building and how you’re going to build it. I mentioned in my intro that I built with three different clouds. One of the CTOs that I worked with built on two of them with me, and it was actually during COVID that we started playing around with higher base and BigQuery. And that was a, no pun intended whatsoever here, but a gateway drug for me to get to know the power of Google Cloud, formerly known as GCP, and with that, be able to think about it.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
So to that, I always give a little bit of a hack, which is if you were looking at Alphabet as a whole, and you were thinking about what is it that Alphabet and Google just outperforms on, you’re probably going to think about natural language processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and on top of it, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, some of that dev tooling. Kelsey Hightower, as I said in the chat, John will thank you for reminding everybody about GK and Kubernetes and big data. Looker was acquired in and the combo of Looker and BigQuery is huge. And so with that, and sort of putting my hat on, I came over to the Google Cloud side because I wanted to work with founders and specifically work on our Google [inaudible 00:11:47] program. I’m happy to do a plug for it if I’m allowed at this point, Sanjay.

Sanjay Mehta:
We love plugs,

Ally Goldstein Norup:
Okay. I will do my first plug and then I’ll put all of the rest into the chat at some point. It’s an amazing program that our team who’s got recovering founders, they’ve got recovering operators and XVCs, we put it together and Thomas Kurian, the head of Google Cloud launched it earlier this year in January. It is a chunky program for all PRE-CC and series A companies. Sort of top line, it’s $200,000 of credits over two years, up to 100,000 the first year and up to another 100,000 in the second year. You can see it’s not just a 100K program and it’s a two-year program solving for two pain points we saw in the market. What I love about it is it really makes it so that my job, where I started the beginning part of the conversation, I get to come and not be a gatekeeper, but more so specifically, maybe an enabler and a glide path for a lot of our startups and our founders to get to getting those credits.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
Sure, we partner with our VCs to be able to do that, but getting them connected with our startup team and our sales team, to make sure that they’re knowing how to build, and think about all of the reasons that John already said of thinking about how you’re going to think about that go-to-market motion when you get to those later stages. And factoring GCP, sorry, Google Cloud into it so that you’re there from the beginning. I’m a big proponent of putting out that roadmap and being able to think about how you’re going to be able to build smartly along that way and that build better. And I’ll touch more of that throughout, but that’s sort of how I think about it.

Sanjay Mehta:
Yeah, that’s awesome. We just had the first question I saw in the chat. How do you spell Apiiro, John?

John Leon:
That is a tough one. I like it. So it’s A-P-I-I-R-O. That is a Greek word for infinity. Now, it’s an Israeli company, so maybe our founders like Greek food, I don’t know, or how they came up with the name. But we like it because it starts with the letter A is for one reason. So you’re always stop at the list. But it’s Apiiro, A-P-I-I-R-O.

Sanjay Mehta:
Israel’s like America in that way. Most of the good food is important, I think. At least the one time I went there. So John, I got know your journey a little bit. John came to one of our sales meetings to talk to… Like the voice of the customer, which was really, really cool. So I know a little bit about how you started your relationship with the folks at Google Cloud, but maybe you can share it with the broader group here. How’d you get started? How was it grown? What are the points interface? What did you do on the tech side? Maybe a little-

John Leon:
Yeah, happy to do it, Sanjay. So let’s see, we were founded in 2019, came out of stealth in 2020. Our two founders, Idan Plotnik Yonatan Eldar, are both amazing guys, former guys, long [inaudible 00:14:51] guys in the industry. Created the product. We got introduced to the Google resources and making the decision to build on Google by way of Greylock. Amazing investor that’s a part of our team here. Super supportive, got us introduced to Ally and Google and the organization. And it’s super important as you decide how you’re going to build your SaaS service to align with a provider, a cloud provider, rather, that can really be there every step of the way. And so, as we got our engineering dev resources plugged into things like Google Workspaces to begin working with Google tooling, as we started to develop code and start to produce workloads and run those workloads on GKE, we started to use those resources just for all those factors of scale, stability, speed.

John Leon:
We want to focus on building the product, the SaaS service, to the best of its ability to have the features that our customers require. And so early on, as a stealth company, before we came out into market, it was advantageous for us to just choose a cloud provider that was going to help us with those resources. We don’t even think about the underlying infrastructure, frankly. It’s so easy to utilize the tooling that I mentioned. So that was a big part of our decision-making process. We had Google credits as well, cloud credits that allows us to spin up these resources very cost effectively, allocate our capital in a way that was more efficient on the things that we needed to do to get to market. And through those resources, the underlying infrastructure as well as the individuals that we worked with on Ally’s team, it’s been a success story for us. The go-to-market piece we’ll get to, but that’s just the underlying componentry of it.

Sanjay Mehta:
Well, Ally, anything to pile on there? You look like you’re stirring there.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
I’m pondering. I am. Sanjay, you knew exactly. And so there’s a couple of key takeaways, and I’m actually, I’m going to pull them up on our side chat here so that I’ve got it for it. So the team and I will put in the chat the link for applying for credits and the overview. Once you get on there’s some best practices and our team can send them as part of the follow up for you. But to pull on John’s narrative that he just did, John’s side note, I’m going to tell our team to cut your part of the recording at a certain point. It may get repurposed into other content. But this is one of those reasons that we always sort of call of it, and I call these our top four. So when you’re thinking about that go-to-market motion at the end, here’s a few things to keep in mind that you’re going to be angling towards in that longer product roadmap.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
So it’s simplifying your billing by adding your product to a Google Cloud invoice. So you are selling to a big company, and John’s going to give a couple examples later on, and this is an amazing way so that you can expedite that process. Number two, you’re spending smarter on your own sides by counting your software toward their Google Cloud spend commitment. So John, I’m teeing you up for a point on that, which is they have a commit and they’re going to want to spend and they’ve specifically chosen your tool. This is an amazing way to be thinking about that. Number three, when you come onto the marketplace at that moment, there’s flexible pricing terms and payment and schedule options that you can configure and sort of work through. And so those are really amazing opportunities to have that flexibility to truly partner with Google Cloud. So maybe the P is no longer a platform but partner in this regard, Sanjay.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
And lastly but not leastly, so point number four, it’s about control and compliance in this regard. There’s powerful management and governance that we here at Google and Google Cloud have built, and it’s 100% in the marketplace. So you go through that vetting and you’re able to partner with us all. So Justin in our chat will tell me if I say this the wrong way, but very specifically, I always think it’s that verified vendor sort of check as you get up onto the marketplace. So it’s building upon John’s sort going into that. That’s four takeaways that I would add along too.

Sanjay Mehta:
Love it. I love the mention at Greylock. John, I think it’s so important if you’re in a seat where you can control your investors, like the person first, the firm second, and the money third. And if you get that right, you get tremendous board meetings, lots of great feedback. You get a tremendous partner to walk into the right relationships. And with that, you’ll get good money that follows and sticks with you. So I assume we got a lot of founders and early stage folks on the call with many rounds to go and a tough climate and a tough financial market. But I think when you put the money first, bad things happen so bet on people and teams, even when it comes to your investors. So some awesome tips so far, I think. I always say marketplaces are kind of sneaky complicated. They make so much sense on the surface.

Sanjay Mehta:
“Hey, my buyers are there, a bunch of incentives. I want to be there.” And then there’s the reality of, oh, wait, I need product cycles. I need operational support. The rules change every so often. There are a lot of things you can do around what Ally just talked about. Pricing strategies and listing strategies and whatnot. So what are the pro tips that you’ve developed over the last few years that you would… If somebody is relatively new to the game or maybe kind of middle of the game, but struggling, what are the things that you think are the best pieces of advice to navigate the journey?

John Leon:
Well, let me start with a couple of things. One is, and I think I mentioned this earlier in the call, you’re never too early to hit this stage now. In 2022 and as we move forward, thinking about your indirect motion is super, super important now. That consists of your cloud strategy, how you’re thinking about traditional resellers, how you’re thinking about consulting partners, the full gamut. And it’s very important that early, when you’re building muscle into the organization as a founding team, as a leadership team, that you’re starting to build that muscle at the earliest point that you can. To be transparent, we hire young SDRs. These are folks that are fresh out of college, might be a first job. They don’t know the acronyms like we do. And you’ve got to start building that mentality, that mental muscle, very early about what is a cloud. Sometimes it’s the basics.

John Leon:
What is a cloud? What is a cloud marketplace? Why do my customers care about cloud marketplace? And I think collectively, we all know that through the years, budget and spend gets aggregated and Google Cloud is fantastic about saying, “Hey, commit that spend to us. We’re going to give you a great discount and a great deal.” Now I’m a customer, a prospect, rather, from our eyes that has committed spend that can be accessed. And so this leads to my second point, which is early on, because I joined as a series A, [inaudible 00:21:40] Sanjay. So I was there for market fit and message alteration and finding the right message and product fit. And so you might argue, gee, the partner guy come too early in that cadence. And I’d say, absolutely not. To be a part of that at the outset, to understand how the message is maturing and evolving so that you can take that effectively to the ecosystem is so, so important.

John Leon:
So this is more than just about technology and product feature and fit, which is 100% important. Got to have innovation. We’re solving a problem that the customer cares about. But hand in hand with that, as you work with your CROs and your indirect sale motion is to make it easy for your customers to procure your solution. Meet them where they are, be easy to transact with, be easy to do business with. The answer that we want to give to our customers is always yes. You want to buy through a reseller you’ve worked with for 15 years? Absolutely. Right? As a leadership team, as a young startup, we want to say, yes. You’ve got committed cloud spend for the next three years with Google Cloud. Absolutely we want to transact for our product, our solutions to the marketplace with you and help you achieve the KPIs you’ll likely have with Google Cloud.

John Leon:
There’s a reason why you’ve got that committed spend in place, the discounts that come along with that, is there’s typically a KPI that someone cares about. In a large organization, as you’re selling to your particular buyer persona, someone in that org guaranteed cares about that KPI. And now you’re solving two problems. You’re solving the immediate problem that your solution provides and the value that extends, but you’re also solving a problem for someone else in the organization, strategically helping them achieve that committed spend goal that they have. So those are just some of the insights and tips that we have at a high level around that.

Sanjay Mehta:
Yeah, I love it and I love your point that it’s never too early. And one thing that Ally reminds me of is if you want to have a great partnership with Google, with your platform on Google, it’s a lot easier. And you make that decision really, really early in the life cycle. Once you do, it’s really hard to change. So being intentional about where you platform and what partner you’re going to go to the dance with, ultimately you’re going to meet your buyers in lots of places. I think you’re completely right, John, but I think that’s a really important bet that isn’t always taken as seriously as it should be. Ally, anything to pile on? Or we got a question in the chat that came in for you. We can just…

Ally Goldstein Norup:
I’m going to answer part of the question now and then I’ll go from there, which is I think the thing to think about in this environment is some of your customers are going to be on multiple different clouds, but more likely than not, they’re on this one, in addition to the others. And so for those who, when you were thinking about that, John and I were talking about this in our prep call, the thing that you don’t want to happen, and this is part of that building early, is you want to be able to accelerate that last part of the deal. So what John said specifically, you want to be able to say to them, “Yeah, we’re on the Google Cloud marketplace. We’re able and we’re ready to go there. We’ve built on Google Cloud and we’re able to help you.” And so very specifically, I always think about it as it’s very much that there are a lot of really, really big customers that are on, looking to our marketplace.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
And they love looking to the marketplace for that ability to be able to spend. We announce a lot of them, but many of them you don’t know. There was an announcement with Northwell Health just earlier this month, the Allen Institute in Seattle. There’s some great partners to that. And so they love coming to the marketplace and looking. Secondarily, it really can accelerate those deals. So I’m giving a prelude to something later that Sanjay’s going to ask me, but a lot of people ask me, what’s the worst mistake that you can make when you’re thinking about ISV and co-sell and the marketplace? And very specifically, it’s not thinking about it early enough, because then you just elongated that deal. And I’ll go into that more later, but think about it that the marketplace is where your customers are already looking. They’re looking on that for places where they could be. And more so specifically, they love doing it and it can accelerate that deal right at those last moments. Those are my two things to build upon for John’s comment.

Sanjay Mehta:
Perfect. There was another one that just came in live here about just comparing the state of the Google Cloud marketplace today to some of the other marketplaces and the ability to transact in certain ways. And I know there was an article, I think from Kevin just a couple months back about some near-term and forward-looking statements around the developments happening in Google Cloud. I always look at these things and say, someone always gets out first. And the ability to fast follow you have somebody to learn from. You also learn from the mistakes and you can improve and make it better. And certainly it tackled where we have hundreds and hundreds of ISVs transacting across all the marketplaces. We’re seeing massive acceleration with Google Cloud. So you want to take a crack at that one?

Ally Goldstein Norup:
I will take a crack and then I’ll say I’ll answer something maybe a little later on a non-recorded line. I came from finance, previously, so I’ll say it in that regard. The way that I think about this is it’s all sort of what was your last experience? And so the maturity of it, it’s very mature. I’ll comment to that. And more so, specifically, I think the thing to think about is you don’t know who you may not know. And to part of Kevin’s article, we have a number of really great partnerships that are coming out, a lot of them across huge verticals that you all know. And I actually was just pulling with our teams and stats for Cloud Next that’s coming up next month on startups and large enterprises.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
So I happen to know, for example, on the retail side, 9 of the top 10 retail companies in the world are on Google Cloud or use Google in some fashion. And so in that regard, I think about it less about sort of the maturity of the marketplace, and to what Sanjay was talking about, you are already probably building in some of our ecosystems. And so make that about your build for the optimization of the builds and know that there are going many of your customers now and into the future that are building with us. And so let’s not get into he said, she said on what’s the maturity of.

Sanjay Mehta:
Perfect. I frequently say that half the marketplace battle lives inside of your own virtual walls and companies. If you’re a company that’s been around a long time, you got a lot of history, you got a lot of baggage, you got a lot of channels, you’ve done things the same way. So it seems kind of obvious. If you’re in a startup, what’s not as obvious is the people you’re building your startup with actually have those same habits from the companies they came from and it’s really hard to change behavior. So what are some of the typical stumbles you see internally, not working with Google Cloud or not trying to reach out to those buyers, but what are the internal things you’ve had to navigate that were the most prickly?

John Leon:
Yeah, Sanjay, that one’s near and dear to my heart, that question. Through the years, as I’ve joined, as I mentioned, my fourth startup, as much as you’re being interviewed for a role into the organization and talking to the founders, a proper sort of ecosystem leader should be interviewing the organization as well. Does it have the right understanding of a good market strategy that is going to allow you to scale the business? It’s hard to see past kind of the near term, the near term problems that exist this quarter that we’re trying to solve for. A lot of the ecosystem vision needs to be out two to three quarters ahead. Where are we going as an organization, as a company? And am I going to have the right infrastructure in place to scale this business? And if I take it even to a more tactical conversation, do your CRO and indirect sales leader see eye to eye? Do they see the world the same way?

John Leon:
Do they understand the importance of both? Because that’s going to trickle down to the sales force and those folks that are involved with the indirect business so that they’re working together and everyone is rowing the same direction. As a small company it’s so, so important to have as much friction removed from the works as possible. And certainly as a product leader, most founders are product leaders, product visionaries, et cetera. They understand that side of the fence, right? You’ll understand that side of the fence. It’s critical that your go-to-market engine, that you understand where the friction points might exist. And this is one of them that I’ve seen through my career is that friction. Now, the beauty of Apiiro where I’m at now is we’re all rolling in the same direction. I mean, the CRO, the founder, all of us are talking the same thing about cloud and the vision we have around it in the ecosystem.

John Leon:
So that’s important. I’d say that is a very kind of uber point. The other point I’d make beyond that, that are a bit more tactical and I’ll give you a three, is from a sales standpoint, I mentioned, we typically go look for SDRs that are quite younger in their careers. We’ve got a sales leader. Building the muscle in the talk track at the earliest point in time around cloud, we qualify, and our customers, we talk and we ask them questions. What cloud provider do you utilize? Who are you strategically aligned with? And sometimes my economic buyer doesn’t know that question, but they get the information that helps us understand, okay, this is a Google Cloud customer. We have a relationship with Google Cloud. That gives us leverage in this particular relationship, be that through the committed cloud spend, through a Google seller who’s working that relationship that we can connect to.

John Leon:
There’s a lot of touch points around that that opens the doors for us. So that’s one, is building that into the talk track so who they’re working with. The second is from an operations standpoint. It’s a team effort, it’s a team game when you’re starting a company. Bring your operations people in, your rev ops, the people that are going to be transacting, recognizing the revenue, booking the PO, sending the invoices. You want them to understand how this process works. And I’ll give a bit of a plug to Tackle on that front. They’ve been super helpful in their resources with us in partnership, to help our operations people understand that process flow. They need to be a part of it. And then lastly, customer success. And maybe customer success should be the first, in terms of, we all know churn is death to startups. You never want to see a customer leave for reasons that you can control.

John Leon:
We make it a part of our strategy. I talk with our customer success people. And as we think about renewals and expansion, if we can run it through GCP or through Google Cloud, we will. That has to happen because we’re trying to build that relationship with Google Cloud as we grow as a company and show the influence and impact we can have on Google Cloud. So it’s a big part of our strategy, make sure you’re thinking about it as you think about expansion renewals and so forth.

Sanjay Mehta:
You covered a lot of ground there. [inaudible 00:32:32]

John Leon:
I went off a little bit. Sorry, Sanjay.

Sanjay Mehta:
No, it’s great. And there was actually a question that came in, in the chat that you touched on as well. “I’m working with a customer. How do I figure out if they’ve got committed cloud spend?” And you talked about alignment across the team, which is super important. You touched on how do you work with a cloud provider. And sometimes the answers to questions like does this customer have committed cloud spend show up on a cocktail napkin versus a program, but there’re also programs being developed around what’s the propensity to buy for a certain customer versus a different customer, which are interesting data points if you can get your hands on them.

Sanjay Mehta:
So I think this is the power of cloud go-to-market and we’re in an evolution. And we like to say, if cloud’s in the third inning of a baseball game, then cloud go-to-market and cloud marketplaces are the first out of the first inning. So there’s $500 billion of B2B software that gets transacted every year and marketplaces are consuming small single-digit percentages of that today but growing at a rapid, rapid pace where, by the end of this year, that might be closer to 4% or 5%. And by the end of 2025, it’ll probably be 15%. So it’s grown really, really fast. So I think you hit some great points there. Ally, I do that every time. Ally, anything to pile on?

Ally Goldstein Norup:
Oh, you’re good. So funnily enough, I mean, Google Cloud is a sponsor of MLB and I know that they use Google Cloud. Can we use all of the baseball analogies for that? Yeah. I mean, to pile on for a second and to address a little bit of John’s question that came into this, sort of the demographics and who’s purchasing into the question that was in there. For this, it’s a huge growth trajectory. Let’s go back to what John said. When he was doing this in 2007, you didn’t think about this. And then 2018 and coming in into 2022, this is a very specific channel for a lot of B2B and especially sort of in the DevOps and the dev tooling space. This is an amazing channel as you get to some of those growth stages. And so in that regard, I’ve got a fantastic stat that I’ll give a call out to Justin, that he just said to me, which is in this regard, the number of a million dollar plus deals in the last year have grown by over six X.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
I could give you the demographics of what’s going on right now. I could list off a couple of the customers that I know are building with, and we’ve done case studies and blog posts on them. But more so specifically to John’s point, the evolution of this space is really moving. And so you want to get out in front of it and there’s a lot that’s going to be coming to it. I mean, Tackle is a good example of this. I mean, you all have grown enormously over the last couple of years, just due to the growth in this space and this channel specifically.

Sanjay Mehta:
We’re thankful for that. Thanks for helping fuel all that growth. It’s been a good ride so far. Just getting started. So we touched on it earlier a bit, but what are the big pitfalls? What are the mistakes people make that we should save them cycles and hair loss by giving them some sage advice?

Ally Goldstein Norup:
Yeah. So, I mean, I’ll give you a reoccuring phone call that sometimes happens from a VC. I won’t say it was Greylock in this instance, to give them a secondary shout out. What happens is we get a call, usually from the founders or the head of [inaudible 00:36:10] saying, we’ve got a deal, and John will talk about a little bit of this in the future. We’ve got a deal and we’re in the last stages and we need to be up on your marketplace today in order to get that deal done. And so I always say, one of the best practices around this is building on Google in the early days. You probably start in our ecosystem anyway. John said this in the beginning, they started with Workspace and then they expanded into GKE and Kubernetes. You probably are using, potentially you’re building with apps and play, or you have ads that you’re running.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
A lot of those things can be run and started through with Google Cloud. My fun tagline that I always sort of say, and I don’t have a slide for it this time, is the fact that Google Cloud is the cloud that Alphabet built for itself. So it’s built very much with those products and those things in mind, and they’re easy to use. And so if you’re building on our ecosystem, it’s got great integrations for that. So I always, to go to John’s three things to keep in mind when you’re building on that early side. One, this is an emerging space and it’s accelerating really rapidly. And so, as you are thinking about this, you’re going to want to be thinking about building with us and building with us early. So number two, you’re going to also be want to be thinking about the ecosystem that you’re building in.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
We take a super one Google approach. And so we try our best, especially on the cloud side, to help all of those companies that’s been building in other parts of Alphabet build and use the best products that we have. And number three, it’s one of those things that it is, I want to come back to that the marketplace, a lot of those big names, ADT, LVMH, Kohl’s, I mentioned a few already. John will mention a few of his customers, if he can. In that regard, they’re already with us and so as you’re getting to that last mile of signing those deals, the last thing you want is to have to call us and say, we need to migrate or we have to build a brand new roadmap part with you also, your part of the marketplace and get going that way. You might as well start with that from the beginning and think about what parts of your build you could build with us, knowing that ultimately, ISV and co-sell is going to be part of your go-to-market and your channel acquisition strategy in the future.

Sanjay Mehta:
Love it. John, [inaudible 00:38:4

John Leon:
Just dropped in. I was reading the chat there, Sanjay. I just dropped a link to David, or Dave, rather, asking about Google customers and how to identify if they have spend. And again, another one of my cheat sheet tricks is Google puts a whole directory of their customers out there on their public website. And so I’d do a little cross reference and say, “Oh, look at this. We just landed this customer and they’re also a GC customer. Great. Let’s connect the dots through my partner people and advisors that we have through Google and so forth.” So it’s just connecting the dots like that is super helpful. That resource helped me out. Today as we engage in our prospects and we’re going through the sales qualification process, we’re asking those qualifying questions. If we find out GC is involved, we immediately contact our Google team to get a bit more G2, more intelligence.

John Leon:
“Hey, we’re here. We’ve got a value prop that customer’s leaning into. We want to transact this,” and everyone, just again, I mentioned, rows in the same direction. So that’s just a very tactical thing that we’re doing today that really helps us identify where that spend is at, back to Dave’s question. No, I think other than that, Sanjay, I think that, gosh, the things that we’re doing now that I think are going to pay off over time and what I’d message also to the audience here is that don’t expect that day one when you launch marketplace that all the leads are going to come inbound. That’s not how the process works. So it is a process of ensuring you’ve got a procurement strategy, a go-to-market and procurement strategy that aligns to your customers. That’s the first data point. You want to make sure that you’re equipping your sales people in a way that they don’t get to the point where Ally just talked about.

John Leon:
They get to the final deal. It’s December 22nd or it’s getting to the end of the year and now they can’t transact it. Because you’ve put so much work in the POC. You put so much work to find a technical champion and get it approved and then now you’re stuck. So this is very, very important is that you build it. Don’t expect that the floodgates open, but you’re equipping your sales team to be successful over the trajectory and life of your startup. Now, once you get past that, you should have the expectation that you’re going to have activity through the marketplace in cloud and that requires some additional resource and time. Meeting the sellers, taking advantage of the partner advantage resources in Google, getting your brand and name out there through those channels and that builds over time. So I’ll add that to the conversation, Sanjay.

Sanjay Mehta:
Yeah, that’s great. I’m still working on my talk track, but it’s something like, ‘Discovery happens in co-sell and the magic happens in the marketplace.’ But it isn’t a Kevin Costner movie. Customers just don’t fall from the sky quite yet. Maybe they will one day and maybe it’s drizzling in your community, but it’s not drizzling in everybody’s community right now and certainly not a downpour. But you’ve got to co-sell. And at Google, a lot of it happens. The Google sellers, the ISV managers, there may not be this completely buttoned up program around it, but they’re super eager to work with you.

Sanjay Mehta:
When you have a great solution to validate solutions and social proof that it’s making an impact for customers, get your word out and celebrate your success and be loud. And I find the Google community pretty welcoming, to your point, Ally, on those partnerships and that ecosystem and bring the best solutions forward. So yeah, you don’t have to wait, I think. It’s not too early to go in and shake the trees a bit. With lots of early stage companies joining us today, Ally, maybe another selfish plug number two for the amazing startup programs available from Google for early stage folks.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
Yeah. I’m going to answer that, but I’m also going to build on something you just said there, Sanjay. So I’m in LA today and we’re hosting startups here today and I just got off the stage there. And one of the things I always say anytime we’re here is being Googly, so being friendly, wanting to partner, it actually it’s part of the reason I came to the company, but it’s also, it’s like an ethos here. Every single Googler is going to want to partner with you. And one of the concepts that we have is we build many skilled programs.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
So a one-to-many actions. So the Google for startups cloud program, it’s for all PRE-CC and series A companies. That is a skilled motion. What John and Sanjay are talking about is those next levels of a one-to-few and a one-to-one. The one-to-one is what we’re talking about. You can do all of this do it yourself stuff that John has been alluding to. And by the way, John, I’m taking your talk track. It’s amazing. You’re taking all of the bullet points that I want to say and you say them way better.

John Leon:
I’ve earned that coffee next week when I see you. Is that right? I’ve earned the coffee?

Ally Goldstein Norup:
Yeah, exactly. Coffee, coffee, lunch. Yeah, all of it. So as you can tell, we just get very excited about our customers and finding ways to partner with them. I started all of our talk, talking about the best part of my day is working with founders and startups. And it’s finding those ways that we can plug them in on those one-to-one and one-to-few, where can we go be the ambassador and the stakeholder internally talking about why this is so cool? All of you are building disruptive things. You’re building things you’re incredibly passionate about. Some of them are like Apiiro and coming out of Israel, but many of them are global in nature. And that’s the beauty of this. So dial it in for a second. You’ve got amazing Googlers on the other side, they have scaled programs that they can take advantage of. Our program of the Google for startups cloud program is one of them.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
Once you’ve done all that do it yourself, work that there’s lots of documentation on, John, I’m bookmarking that list as well, you’re going to be able to get yourself to a better place so that when you get up on the marketplace, you’ll be able to work even more so to position yourself with those customers you know now and the customers you know in the future. So that’s the part I want to build on from what you said, Sanjay, sort of going to your question, I’m going to call out additionally a couple, few things. And apologies, I will actually reference some notes because I want to get this right. So you’re starting in the early days and you’re building with Google Cloud. Utilize, whether it’s our startup program or one of our other digital native programs, you’re going to move that, and when you get to marketplace specific, there’s a few things that are always good on the best practices to think about.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
One is upon publishing your product to the Google Cloud marketplace there’s going to be some good things to know about market. Think through, do it yourself. How are you going to position yourself? You’ve done all that fundraising. You’ve done all that selling. Make sure it’s robust. So that’s number one. Number two, every ISV partner unlocks our what’s called launch pop co-marketing benefits bundle, which includes, just to name a couple, PR and blog support for telling the world that you, your startup is now on Google Cloud. So there was a question in the chat earlier of I’m on marketplace. I now need a little bit more. So go look up and definitely make sure that you’re connecting with the launch pop co-marketing benefits bundle. So in addition to those PR and that blog post, more so specifically, there’s also available on that one-to-few that I was just talking about a semi-custom demand gen campaign to accelerate your growth.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
And there’s so much more in between that. The thing that you all need to keep in mind, and John, I’m going to steal your language in this regard, is we’re all here to partner. Many of it is one-to-many, some of it is one-to-few, and a lot of it is one-to-one, so that we can partner with you to really get that better together story together, pun intended, I think, in that regard, and then amplify it. The one thing that… To address one of the questions about other cloud marketplace is that I can definitely say, having been a founder, is that when you come and you partner with Google, the Google amplification is it’s legit. There is a reason that Googling is a verb, but more so specifically, we put it all behind and we want to make sure that we’re amplifying how you are partnering with us, because we’re Googling about it, we’re excited. We work hard to make sure that you are successful and you are successful with us. So hope that addresses a couple of questions in the chat as well.

Sanjay Mehta:
Perfect. Appreciate it. And Steve, I saw your other question as well on how do you use marketplace to maybe combine products and services? And my answer, and we’ll let others chime in too, I don’t think you’re too early in your thinking. I think this is the type of thinking to influence and to sit down and partner with Google to say, “Hey, this is the type of solution I want to deliver.” [inaudible 00:47:55] you early in terms of, is there a mechanism to make that happen today? Absolutely. But is that the mechanism we should be thinking of 12 months, 24 months, whatever it is, down the road and getting googly about it and sitting down and saying, what’s the art of the possible look like, and how can we bring that to life together? I think your timing is probably really, really good, but I’ll let others jump in.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
John, I’ll let you give, if you have any thoughts on that one, first.

John Leon:
I don’t have any personal experience with that, to be honest. But I will advocate for, and just back up what Sanjay mentioned, that as we brought sort of unique situations to Google as a partner and through my partner advisor that I work with, it’s amazing the flexibility that is brought forward to us. We’re relatively still small. In honesty, we’ve closed some deals with GCP, with Google, through Google Cloud, major multinational package, good company. We’ve got renewals teed up to go through Google Cloud. We’re starting to build that, turn that crank mill and build that business. But even though we’re just getting started, the amount of reciprocal interest in us, of resource and engagement has been stellar. So I’ll just echo what Sanjay said about the art of the possible and have the conversation.

Sanjay Mehta:
Perfect. We’ve taking a lot of questions along the way, but I want to leave a little bit more time at the end. So any closing thoughts from either of you?

Ally Goldstein Norup:
I can kick off. So I promised I would do this. So one of the things that is always really fantastic about Google, but in particular Google Cloud, is we do large scale documentation, but we also do large scale events. So for many of you startups, there is Cloud Next. That’s coming up, I’m putting it in the chat. It’s October 11th to the 13th. For those of you who are looking for some of our customers, that’s a great way to also see them, because they’ll be talking about what they built with us. More so specifically, our startup teams are going to be running some very specific programming. I will give you a heads up. My boss, Ryan Kiskis, who is from AWS originally, he joined Google two years ago. He’s going to be interviewing Dharmesh Thakker from Battery Ventures. Not Greylock, but Battery Ventures. I was able to hear a little bit of it the other day and it’s a really great session.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
It’s part of our VC AMA series. We do a lot of series, whether it’s from Founder Fridays, to our VC AMAs, to the startup programming. That’s available just there for you. Additionally, I’m also going to include reference to the Google for Startups cloud program, which I’ll do right now in the chat. And this has got a blog post all completely in there for where you can get credits, what’s the eligibility. Many of you, I have a feeling, will ping me afterwards with some questions to make sure that you’re all set to go. If it’s not, if you’ve already started to use, like Apiiro, who graduated from our program, which I absolutely love.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
If you start to use, there’s also some growth stage programs that are available as well. And we can connect you, whether it’s with our startup success teams or our sales teams to be able to talk about that. So those are two of my favorite plugs for it. Events that have good content in addition to this webinar, although I will selfishly say, after this webinar, I’ve learned so much already. This is one of the best all day. And two, the link for the credit so that you can go out there and you can get them going and you can really start accelerating that build towards what you want on that future roadmap and future selling to customers.

Sanjay Mehta:
Love it. Thanks, Ally. John, parting words?

John Leon:
I would just add, as much as I’ve tried to share some insight and knowledge in the short time that we had together, my experiences, they’re certainly my experiences and certainly for all of you out there, if you’ve got your experiences and probably knowledge that could be shared back, we’d love to hear and meet you all at LinkedIn, what have you, and continue to build that community. We’re a community of startups, right? We’re a community, we need to help each other. We’re bringing innovation to the market. We’re helping various parts of the market and it’s all super wonderful. So please reach out if there’s anything that comes to mind post this call. I will also plug both Google and Tackle in that. And I say this in all seriousness, amazing partnerships. I’ve used Tackle multiple times throughout many startups that I’ve been at, the services they offer. Been engaged with Google going back a number of years as well, and both are just stellar and world class. So thank you both for inviting me today to this presentation.

Sanjay Mehta:
Yeah. Thanks, buddy. Appreciate you being here. Yeah. And from the Tackle side, we’re publishing the results of our 2022 state of marketplace report. So this is our third annual state of marketplace report. We surveyed both buyers and sellers to pick up on the habits and the trends and the predictions of what’s happening in the marketplace world. So we will have a webinar on that on October 18th. Encourage you to tune in. We find, in fact, Google themselves use it internally for their own employees talk about it, posted out on the Google marketplace site this year, which was really cool when we were getting survey results. But it is kind of the thing to read when it comes to cloud marketplaces every year. So if you haven’t picked up a copy before, I encourage you to do that this year. And with that, I think we got just a couple minutes if anybody wants to chime in with any more questions in the chat.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
I mean, Norberto already told us that was great insights and discussions. So I feel as though maybe we should end on that note. I’m kidding.

John Leon:
Ally missed lunch. I think she’s ready for lunch.

Sanjay Mehta:
You might be right, though. Nothing coming in.

John Leon:
Second free zone. Yeah.

Sanjay Mehta:
Steve gives us the thumbs up. So thanks, Steve. We’ll go on the advice Ally and Steve will wrap up. Thanks again for being here. Really appreciate it, Ally and John, and we’ll see you again next time.

John Leon:
Thank you all.

Sanjay Mehta:
Cheers.

Ally Goldstein Norup:
Thank you all.

John Leon:
Bye-bye.

Sanjay Mehta:
Bye.