Google Cloud's Darren Mowry on startups consuming AI credits faster than ever and sticky infrastructure

uh global startups at Google Cloud World. Let's bring in Darren. How you doing, Darren? Good to see you.

Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me. As you can tell, I'm in a pretty cool spot here in Mountain View, so it's great to be able to spend a few minutes with you.

Thanks so much for hopping on the show.

Looking sharp as well. Thank you for wearing wearing a suit.

Thank you. I had to brush off the suit. I had to kind of dust off show somewhat presentable today, guys.

Yeah, it looks great. uh take us through uh what what uh the event, what's going on today, what's been announced, who's there, everything.

Yeah, that's great. So, we're actually in a in a couple hours going to be kicking off our first global AI builders summit. And so, we're going to have a couple hundred founders and builders here in this room, which I can tell you about if you're interested. A little bit of cool Google history here. And then we're going to have um a few uh actually tens of thousands of startups and builders around the world joining us digitally as well. So today we're having customers like Lovable, Replet, Fireworks, and others on stage talking about, you know, the problems they're trying to solve, but how AI is actually helping them complete, you know, completely revamp the industries that they're in. We also have some Google Cloud and some DeepMind folks joining us as well to talk about kind of how quickly we've seen the evolution, where we are now, and we'll look around the few corners into what's coming. So some really uh great sessions today over the next few hours. So we're we're excited about that.

That's great. Tell me about the history of the building. You said that there was something special about it.

Yeah. So, we're actually in this place called Charlie's Cafe, believe it or not. And you guys probably know Google has been known for having good food, good cafeterias for a long time. This was our first cafeteria named after our 57th employee, Charlie. And so, in all seriousness, although it is a little bit of an urban legend, we actually do deeply believe in creating great spaces for people to come together and challenge each other, have good conversation, and eat a little bit of good food, too. I'll definitely admit that. But we're here in this space. We thought it's a perfect spot to kind of bring everybody together, talk about building and innovation. So, uh, it'll definitely be a great few hours.

What, uh, give give us a high level on what the last year has looked like in your role specifically around, you know, supporting startups that just have an insat insatiable demand for uh, inference and uh, you know, all the other infrastructure needed to scale these types of applications. No, it's a really good question. You know, you guys um should know I've been in cloud computing for a while. I was at another hyperscaler for a long time at the early days of cloud and I thought we were moving fast then until we've entered this AI revolution, right? Which I think the compression and the speed is like nothing I've ever seen before. Um over the last 18 months, we've definitely felt what I think we would really call like a seismic shift, frankly. Um the old school way of thinking about cloud through the lens of infrastructure as a service. All of a sudden, people talking about all layers of AI from chips and infrastructure, right? Are we going to use Nvidia chips? Hey Google, what's up with this TPU concept that Anthropic is relying on? Kind of what does that mean? When you get to the model level, you know, the fact that Gemini and what we're releasing with VO, these are first class citizen models as I think you guys can see in terms of performance, cost efficiency, but the fact that we're building and going to continue to innovate on our models, but also partner with, you know, folks like Anthropic, folks like Meta to make sure Llama and Sonnet and others are also first class products that startups that are building on Google are able to use in a super integrated fashion. And then this concept more recently right which is this agentic this agent you know agent AI this is not a theoretical pursuit I think it's interesting that when we talk to founders and they give us some feedback the feedback they're telling us is the agent capability from Google cloud is a real capability it's not a planned release of products hopefully in the future right it's a fully integrated stack where startups have an SDK and an ADK they can build these agents as I said using firstparty and thirdparty models they can publish them distribute ute them and we can even help them go to market right so to this to your point the last 18 months break neck speed I think we're all learning quite a bit as we go but I would say the feedback that we're getting from founders and builders especially are a telling us we're on the right track doing the right things and frankly they're saying go even faster right help us do even more even more quickly so uh with nano banana you guys may have seen that was released recently these are things that are coming out of our deep mind team uh and there's going to be further announcements again around agents and new models fairly shortly that are going to keep us very top of mind and very much a part of what startups are building every day.

Yeah, it's fantastic. Um I Google's always been very uh is a great partner to the startup ecosystem giving out credits. Uh do you feel like startups are burning through credits faster now in the AI age? I feel like uh I remember going through Y Combinator and getting some huge amount of credits and not really knowing what to do with them. Exactly. Yeah. Good. Well, they usually expire after a year. Um, but I feel like with with AI, like you can you can actually accelerate much faster. What's the mood been like from startups that you work with?

No, it's a really good point. When you think of our Google Cloud for startups program, which does have a credit component, an engineering component, a support component, training, etc. We definitely have had a dramatic increase in the amount of startups coming to the platform. So, that's first and foremost a really good signal. To your point though, which I think definitely shows you understand this space is getting into these programs is one thing. Even being approved for credits is another thing, but actively consuming the credits and building value. That's what the startups care about and that's what we care about. Right? So what I've seen now over my almost five years at Google Cloud is in the last 18 months, not only do we have more startups than ever in the program, they're consuming the credits extremely quickly. And more importantly for us at least and I think for these startups they're staying with us right this concept of I'm going to jump from one platform to another to use credits worked in a commoditized cloud world where you could go from a virtual machine to a virtual machine to a virtual machine now that I'm able to come to these startups and do what we talked about a moment ago of GPU TPU Gemini claude sonnet llama agents wrapped in Google cloud we're finding these startups are using the credits but then they're like I'm not going anywhere Right. And so I think that is the true business case and value proposition behind these credit programs.

That's great. Uh anything else, Jordy?

No, thank you for joining and uh have fun out there. Wish wish we were uh going to be able to catch some of the talks ourselves, but uh we'll have to be there next time.

Yeah, we'll catch up with you soon. Thanks for taking the time.

Yeah, that's all right. Great seeing you guys. Have a good day.

We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Darren. Have a good one.

You up next, we have Kavon from Macroscope coming in the studio. Also the founder of Periscope. Um, we will bring him in in just a minute. In the meantime, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Multi-asset investing industry leading yields are trusted by millions. I like noise. Thank you, Jordy. Uh, what were you about to say?

Uh, Periscope was acquired by Twitter.

Yes.

And did that become