5 ms·

I don't understand why Google doesn't woo silicon valley startups more aggressively. Gcloud is actually a pretty solid service, far more usable at varying level

I don't understand why Google doesn't woo silicon valley startups more aggressively. Gcloud is actually a pretty solid service, far more usable at varying levels of technical expertise. A lot of nice integrated tools for high end users (EC2/kub8/cloud console/etc) that gives AWS a good run for their money, and (gcloud web browser, web console, gcutils) for devs not that familiar with cloud tools that are significantly easier to use than AWS. It's a boon for startups that are being quick and scrappy and haven't brought on a cloud specialist but need to use the cloud to run things regularly. But where are the 1 year's worth of free credits ads? Or the regular meetups to hand out cloud credits and give a tech talk and promote some startup? I'm not even talking about basic customer service and support, something Google is notoriously skimpy on (although probably mandatory to build developer relations). This stuff is key. If they captured a unicorn or so, and churned out the occasional semi-corn technical founder who advocates for a gcloud stack out of SV when they move to their next gig, they will have grow their market so much better. It's mindboggling to me that with their resources and being based in MTV, and being the single largest corporate alma mater of SV technical founders, more startups here aren't being marketed to use gcloud.

withdavidli 8y ago
They did this when I first moved to the valley in 2013. Found them sponsoring hackathons and giving away GCP at 10k-50k free first year for just participating, prizes for winning hackathon was, I believe, actual cash plus 50k+ more GCP. But not sure if they kept up the sponsorships.
avip 8y ago
Anecdotally, I spoke with both gcp and aws reps in previous startup (not in US), and both told me the "take free 500K in credits" party is over. YMMV
- boulos 8y ago
  Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. I don't think we ever offered $500k, but have consistently done $100k for up to a year. There were definitely lots of startups that would chase credits across us, AWS and Azure (who at least at one point would do $300k). While I think it's great to ride free credits while you can, it's probably a mistake if your company is changing infrastructure each year in search of free dollars. And even worse if you do so at a huge hit to your productivity and ultimate product success.
  - avip 8y ago
    Agree completely, and the 500K number was indeed from azure. So have consistently done $100k means this program still exists?
    - boulos 8y ago
      Yep! I mentioned it in a separate comment but the URL is cloud.google.com/startups (and has been since we started it). The easiest mechanism is via a firm who has funded you, and they just "nominate" your company via a simple portal.
StreamBright 8y ago
What are the guarantees that I am not ending up with the same situation like those companies who's dev account got terminated without the possibility of appeal? AWS and Azure build into relationships with cloud architects and companies doing cloud migrations. I see GCP as a liability at this stage based on the stories that I read here on HN. Is GCP any different than the App Store? Do I have a chance to appeal if they detect something wrong in our infra? Will they terminate my account permanently and will I be banned forever? These are the questions that I need answer for before I even think about using GCP. https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-start-up-google-play-publisher-account-on-christmas-day-5cb69a454da0 https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-start-u... https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/8w9shu/help_google_terminated_my_developer_account_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/8w9shu/help_goo...
bad_user 8y ago
Google has lost much of the trust developers placed in them, first of all by terminating products some of us loved [1] and also by terminating user accounts in an automated fashion with no way to appeal. Imagine your business depending on Google Play Store, then getting your account banned due to some association with another account that supposedly broke their ToS, with no way to contact support, to appeal the decision or to even find out what the hell happened [2]. I mean, imagine that your spouse buys a Nexus phone, sells it [3] and your account gets banned via association, along with your right to publish apps or content on Play or to access your email archive. And if you think this can't happen with a GSuite account, since that's supposedly the gold standard for their support, how about getting your entire company of 100-150 people banned [4]? So the answer for me at least is that I have a trust issue with Google. No thanks, AWS has been around for longer, I haven't heard so many horror stories from them and if I'm feeling adventurous one day, I might try Microsoft's Azure, since they have actual support and without the history of shutting down products over night. [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ [2] https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-start-up-google-play-publisher-account-on-christmas-day-5cb69a454da0 https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-start-u... [3] https://www.dansdeals.com/shopping-deals/google/dont-mess-with-the-google/ https://www.dansdeals.com/shopping-deals/google/dont-mess-wi... [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_getting_google_to_ban_our_entire_company/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...
- spiderfarmer 8y ago
  This is a big issue for Google. I know many people with a deep distrust of anything Google and personally I’m avoiding them whereever I can. Google doesn’t understand that support isn’t something that can be offloaded to a forum. Not in B2B and especially not in the enterprise world. The only way to get solid support for a product is to spend 1M/year on Adwords.
- jaimex2 8y ago
  +1 Most people I've talked to have zero trust in Google not changing the services without warning, killing it, or banning accounts with zero chance of getting hold of a human. Cloud is not a core product, the chance of it being killed is higher than its market share I'm certain.
mrweasel 8y ago
Capturing startups seems like a gamble, compared to Microsofts strategy of just forklifting customer that already known and trust them into Azure. And at this point IBM is basically starting from scratch. You have to be an enormous company, with existing IBM contracts to even consider them a cloud provider. They also made a mistake with Watson and focusing too much on that one product. Right now it's hard to see that IBM cloud offering doesn't necessarily involve Watson.
- cm2187 8y ago
  It would be super interesting to see the startup vs mid range vs enterprise client breakdown of each cloud providers. As we are entering the very end of the evonomic cycle I’d expect those to behave very differently in a recession.
- hibikir 8y ago
  It's actually the opposite: If you are building an infrastructure company, you are far better off chasing startups than large enterprise companies. Microsoft just has an overwhelming advantage for them in the cloud: The fact that they are already using their services outside the cloud. I don't know if you've ever tried to sell something, but selling to startups is relatively easy: They are starting from almost zero, so making changes and trying new things is cheap. When selling to enterprise can be a one or two year process, you can get a startup to sign up in an hour.. and that's if they don't just discover your product and sign up without sales! But the real kicker here is that if your product bills more to larger companies for good reasons (like, say, you bill by the server, or by the transactions they process), then their growth is your growth, without needing more sales. Fortune 500 companies that aren't cloud providers themselves aren't going to grow fast at all. And while some startups fail, the ones that don't make up for that loss: You get a lot of baseline growth without having to grow your sales team. And if you do catch a future unicorn or two, you will then get to understand large company needs from an existing company, instead of having to waddle through complicated sales processes. Amazon didn't start selling their cloud offering to Fortune 500 companies either: Those came around many years later, and in practice rely on hiring people that are familiar with the technology. Unless you have some sales gimmick that works really well with large companies (and nowadays, neither Google or IBM have one), getting startups, and a wide array of individuals that get practice on their offerings for free on their spare time, is the best way to go, and it's not even close.
sigi45 8y ago
Startups don't make the money. All of those boring old companies do and they don't need fancy fancy they need: - easy to understand for an avg it guy - slow change - good price - trust
coredog64 8y ago
> ...and churned out the occasional semi-corn founder who advocates for a gcloud stack... I got the impression that’s the deal with Pivotal. Some ex-Googlers recreated Borg as BOSH (Borg++). Since then they push GCP as their premier public cloud integration despite most customers being in AWS. Their docs on AWS integration blow chunks, and they took their sweet time delivering a (broken) version of PKS for AWS.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  I work for Pivotal. Our internal development environments mostly run on GCP, after migrating from AWS. We chose it because (a) it performs much better and (b) Google would give us the time of day, unlike Amazon. As it happens BOSH made that process manageable for most individual teams because of its design. We do however spend significant amounts with Azure and AWS, to test our various systems on this platforms. PKS came to GCP first because the opensource feedstock, CFCR (née Kubo) was co-developed by Pivotal and Google and was first developed on GCP. As for chunk projection, I can put you in touch with relevant teams for feedback -- jchester@pivotal.io.
matwood 8y ago
They purposely turned away many of those startups with changes in pricing like they did for the Maps/Geolocation API [1]. I'm sure there is an example, but I don't know of one when AWS has ever raised prices on a service. [1] http://geoawesomeness.com/developers-up-in-arms-over-google-maps-api-insane-price-hike/ http://geoawesomeness.com/developers-up-in-arms-over-google-...
bhouston 8y ago
I wish Google has a CloudFront equivalent cache system. Their CDN can only be bucket supported or in front of an load balancer. But sometimes I want to just have an arbitrary back end which I can do on CloudFront. I ended up using CloudFront in front of Google services just last month to hit a performance need.
- boulos 8y ago
  Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. The main challenge with "remote origins" is ensuring that it's legitimate to do so (so that we don't allow folks to use our network as a weapon), and that most of our load balancing / GFE-based systems have historically only known how to point at Borg jobs (this is why it took so long to add the GCS bucket support!). We hear you.
boulos 8y ago
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Nearly all VCs and Accelerators are on our list of partners at cloud.google.com/startups where that up to $100k in credits offer lives. You would not believe how contentious it was in the early days of GCP to fund this... Unicorns take a while to grow, but I still think Snap was one of the most fascinating stories, as they were entirely on App Engine and Datastore well into their unicorn days. Is Niantic interesting? Shopify? Presumably Spotify stopped being a unicorn startup and is now just a successful company. To your other point, lots of ex-Googlers choose GCP, which I mostly put down to "I don't worry the way others do". If you've been at Google, you already know and trust a lot of the underlying systems and people. Adopting BigTable, Spanner or Dataflow doesn't sound scary to you, or make you worried that you won't be able to hire people that "know GCP" the way that "everyone knows AWS". Similarly, you "know" that Google isn't going to shut it down. Others don't necessarily feel that way, and frankly we just don't even get considered. I personally think that's an interesting signal for a startup: if they do a technical evaluation and choose GCP, rather than sticking with AWS as the default. The ex-Googlers choosing it because they still have friends at Google isn't a particularly great business plan for us, but they do provide great feedback! (Particularly people who say "Umm, I used to work on < X >, can't you just enable that for the public version? I've got money").
- true_tuna 8y ago
  I’m ex google. I still have friends on the cloud team. I’ve built on aws and gcp. If you asked me aws or gcp I’d say aws. Having seen the sausage factory from the inside I cannot say I have a greater trust in G than in Amazon. The biggest thing for me is GCP documentation is garbage. If you don’t know everything already you’re going to have to figure some things out. AWS documentation is adequate. GCP DOCUMENTATION IS NOT.
  - boulos 8y ago
    To be clear, I didn't suggest all ex-Google people go with GCP. I just said that the ones that do are basically saying "Eh, I'll be fine".
- js4ever 8y ago

withdavidli 8y ago

They did this when I first moved to the valley in 2013. Found them sponsoring hackathons and giving away GCP at 10k-50k free first year for just participating, prizes for winning hackathon was, I believe, actual cash plus 50k+ more GCP. But not sure if they kept up the sponsorships.

avip 8y ago

Anecdotally, I spoke with both gcp and aws reps in previous startup (not in US), and both told me the "take free 500K in credits" party is over. YMMV

boulos 8y ago
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. I don't think we ever offered $500k, but have consistently done $100k for up to a year. There were definitely lots of startups that would chase credits across us, AWS and Azure (who at least at one point would do $300k). While I think it's great to ride free credits while you can, it's probably a mistake if your company is changing infrastructure each year in search of free dollars. And even worse if you do so at a huge hit to your productivity and ultimate product success.
- avip 8y ago
  Agree completely, and the 500K number was indeed from azure. So have consistently done $100k means this program still exists?
  - boulos 8y ago
    Yep! I mentioned it in a separate comment but the URL is cloud.google.com/startups (and has been since we started it). The easiest mechanism is via a firm who has funded you, and they just "nominate" your company via a simple portal.

StreamBright 8y ago

What are the guarantees that I am not ending up with the same situation like those companies who's dev account got terminated without the possibility of appeal? AWS and Azure build into relationships with cloud architects and companies doing cloud migrations. I see GCP as a liability at this stage based on the stories that I read here on HN. Is GCP any different than the App Store? Do I have a chance to appeal if they detect something wrong in our infra? Will they terminate my account permanently and will I be banned forever? These are the questions that I need answer for before I even think about using GCP. https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-start-up-google-play-publisher-account-on-christmas-day-5cb69a454da0 https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-start-u... https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/8w9shu/help_google_terminated_my_developer_account_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/8w9shu/help_goo...

bad_user 8y ago

Google has lost much of the trust developers placed in them, first of all by terminating products some of us loved [1] and also by terminating user accounts in an automated fashion with no way to appeal. Imagine your business depending on Google Play Store, then getting your account banned due to some association with another account that supposedly broke their ToS, with no way to contact support, to appeal the decision or to even find out what the hell happened [2]. I mean, imagine that your spouse buys a Nexus phone, sells it [3] and your account gets banned via association, along with your right to publish apps or content on Play or to access your email archive. And if you think this can't happen with a GSuite account, since that's supposedly the gold standard for their support, how about getting your entire company of 100-150 people banned [4]? So the answer for me at least is that I have a trust issue with Google. No thanks, AWS has been around for longer, I haven't heard so many horror stories from them and if I'm feeling adventurous one day, I might try Microsoft's Azure, since they have actual support and without the history of shutting down products over night. [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ [2] https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-start-up-google-play-publisher-account-on-christmas-day-5cb69a454da0 https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-start-u... [3] https://www.dansdeals.com/shopping-deals/google/dont-mess-with-the-google/ https://www.dansdeals.com/shopping-deals/google/dont-mess-wi... [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_getting_google_to_ban_our_entire_company/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...

spiderfarmer 8y ago
This is a big issue for Google. I know many people with a deep distrust of anything Google and personally I’m avoiding them whereever I can. Google doesn’t understand that support isn’t something that can be offloaded to a forum. Not in B2B and especially not in the enterprise world. The only way to get solid support for a product is to spend 1M/year on Adwords.
jaimex2 8y ago
+1 Most people I've talked to have zero trust in Google not changing the services without warning, killing it, or banning accounts with zero chance of getting hold of a human. Cloud is not a core product, the chance of it being killed is higher than its market share I'm certain.

mrweasel 8y ago

Capturing startups seems like a gamble, compared to Microsofts strategy of just forklifting customer that already known and trust them into Azure. And at this point IBM is basically starting from scratch. You have to be an enormous company, with existing IBM contracts to even consider them a cloud provider. They also made a mistake with Watson and focusing too much on that one product. Right now it's hard to see that IBM cloud offering doesn't necessarily involve Watson.

cm2187 8y ago
It would be super interesting to see the startup vs mid range vs enterprise client breakdown of each cloud providers. As we are entering the very end of the evonomic cycle I’d expect those to behave very differently in a recession.
hibikir 8y ago
It's actually the opposite: If you are building an infrastructure company, you are far better off chasing startups than large enterprise companies. Microsoft just has an overwhelming advantage for them in the cloud: The fact that they are already using their services outside the cloud. I don't know if you've ever tried to sell something, but selling to startups is relatively easy: They are starting from almost zero, so making changes and trying new things is cheap. When selling to enterprise can be a one or two year process, you can get a startup to sign up in an hour.. and that's if they don't just discover your product and sign up without sales! But the real kicker here is that if your product bills more to larger companies for good reasons (like, say, you bill by the server, or by the transactions they process), then their growth is your growth, without needing more sales. Fortune 500 companies that aren't cloud providers themselves aren't going to grow fast at all. And while some startups fail, the ones that don't make up for that loss: You get a lot of baseline growth without having to grow your sales team. And if you do catch a future unicorn or two, you will then get to understand large company needs from an existing company, instead of having to waddle through complicated sales processes. Amazon didn't start selling their cloud offering to Fortune 500 companies either: Those came around many years later, and in practice rely on hiring people that are familiar with the technology. Unless you have some sales gimmick that works really well with large companies (and nowadays, neither Google or IBM have one), getting startups, and a wide array of individuals that get practice on their offerings for free on their spare time, is the best way to go, and it's not even close.

sigi45 8y ago

Startups don't make the money. All of those boring old companies do and they don't need fancy fancy they need: - easy to understand for an avg it guy - slow change - good price - trust

coredog64 8y ago

> ...and churned out the occasional semi-corn founder who advocates for a gcloud stack... I got the impression that’s the deal with Pivotal. Some ex-Googlers recreated Borg as BOSH (Borg++). Since then they push GCP as their premier public cloud integration despite most customers being in AWS. Their docs on AWS integration blow chunks, and they took their sweet time delivering a (broken) version of PKS for AWS.

jacques_chester 8y ago
I work for Pivotal. Our internal development environments mostly run on GCP, after migrating from AWS. We chose it because (a) it performs much better and (b) Google would give us the time of day, unlike Amazon. As it happens BOSH made that process manageable for most individual teams because of its design. We do however spend significant amounts with Azure and AWS, to test our various systems on this platforms. PKS came to GCP first because the opensource feedstock, CFCR (née Kubo) was co-developed by Pivotal and Google and was first developed on GCP. As for chunk projection, I can put you in touch with relevant teams for feedback -- jchester@pivotal.io.

matwood 8y ago

They purposely turned away many of those startups with changes in pricing like they did for the Maps/Geolocation API [1]. I'm sure there is an example, but I don't know of one when AWS has ever raised prices on a service. [1] http://geoawesomeness.com/developers-up-in-arms-over-google-maps-api-insane-price-hike/ http://geoawesomeness.com/developers-up-in-arms-over-google-...

bhouston 8y ago

I wish Google has a CloudFront equivalent cache system. Their CDN can only be bucket supported or in front of an load balancer. But sometimes I want to just have an arbitrary back end which I can do on CloudFront. I ended up using CloudFront in front of Google services just last month to hit a performance need.

boulos 8y ago
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. The main challenge with "remote origins" is ensuring that it's legitimate to do so (so that we don't allow folks to use our network as a weapon), and that most of our load balancing / GFE-based systems have historically only known how to point at Borg jobs (this is why it took so long to add the GCS bucket support!). We hear you.

boulos 8y ago

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Nearly all VCs and Accelerators are on our list of partners at cloud.google.com/startups where that up to $100k in credits offer lives. You would not believe how contentious it was in the early days of GCP to fund this... Unicorns take a while to grow, but I still think Snap was one of the most fascinating stories, as they were entirely on App Engine and Datastore well into their unicorn days. Is Niantic interesting? Shopify? Presumably Spotify stopped being a unicorn startup and is now just a successful company. To your other point, lots of ex-Googlers choose GCP, which I mostly put down to "I don't worry the way others do". If you've been at Google, you already know and trust a lot of the underlying systems and people. Adopting BigTable, Spanner or Dataflow doesn't sound scary to you, or make you worried that you won't be able to hire people that "know GCP" the way that "everyone knows AWS". Similarly, you "know" that Google isn't going to shut it down. Others don't necessarily feel that way, and frankly we just don't even get considered. I personally think that's an interesting signal for a startup: if they do a technical evaluation and choose GCP, rather than sticking with AWS as the default. The ex-Googlers choosing it because they still have friends at Google isn't a particularly great business plan for us, but they do provide great feedback! (Particularly people who say "Umm, I used to work on < X >, can't you just enable that for the public version? I've got money").

true_tuna 8y ago
I’m ex google. I still have friends on the cloud team. I’ve built on aws and gcp. If you asked me aws or gcp I’d say aws. Having seen the sausage factory from the inside I cannot say I have a greater trust in G than in Amazon. The biggest thing for me is GCP documentation is garbage. If you don’t know everything already you’re going to have to figure some things out. AWS documentation is adequate. GCP DOCUMENTATION IS NOT.
- boulos 8y ago
  To be clear, I didn't suggest all ex-Google people go with GCP. I just said that the ones that do are basically saying "Eh, I'll be fine".
js4ever 8y ago