Was the Pandemic Cloud Productivity's Spark

One big aspect of SaaS is productivity apps like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive. We’ll talk with executive Javier Soltero about the role Google Workspace plays in the Google cloud strategy.

Video Transcript

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ALEX WILHELM: I am old enough to remember back when Google went public in a reverse Dutch auction, and then no company ever did that again. But jokes aside, the company is now enormous in the cloud space with both productivity applications and a public cloud infrastructure that rivals that of Amazon and Microsoft.

So to help us better understand what the pandemic has done to productivity in the cloud, we have Javier from Google, and our own Frederic Lardinois. Frederic, let's go.

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FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Thanks Alex for the intro. And Javier, thanks for being here.

JAVIER SOLTERO: Great to be here, Frederic.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Yes, we've been trying to get you for a while. So I'm glad we can finally--

JAVIER SOLTERO: I was hoping--

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: --make it.

JAVIER SOLTERO: --we could do this in person, but I mean, here we are.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Who doesn't? Who doesn't?

JAVIER SOLTERO: I know.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: But we'll get there. We'll get there. Maybe we can--

JAVIER SOLTERO: I'm with you. I'm optimistic, yes.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: --next, next year. We'll do this, and then we'll, we'll do it in person. But talking about in person, and doing stuff, now you've done a lot. And part of that has been a couple of startups, too, before you came to Google. And then you spend some time at Microsoft.

You sold Acompli to Microsoft, $200 million, not a bad deal. When you came to Google, why did you think you were the right person for that job?

JAVIER SOLTERO: Is how that works, right? I mean it's actually their choice, right?

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Hey, they wanted you, but you have to say, I want this.

JAVIER SOLTERO: You know, why-- look, I-- maybe the most honest answer is that throughout my career and even while I was at Microsoft, I always held up Google's approach to product development and particularly around products like Gmail. The notion of opinionated product design, the fact that Google is at its best when it's building products that are not just innovative, but that have a point of view, that is a lesson I learned, actually, across the two startups that I built.

Both of them had this shared quality of being in extraordinarily crowded spaces. The first one was in the systems and application management space, where there is no shortage-- today or even, whatever, 15 years ago, whenever that was-- of competitive products, and then, of course, you know, the decision to go build a mobile email app in a world where there were plenty.

It was this idea that-- that I think, like-- the foundational thesis was this-- there are now lots of choices. Technology is no longer a mysterious thing for people, for users, for companies. It used to be. And, actually, when I was getting into technology, you know, in the 80's, as a kid growing up in Puerto Rico, I felt like this was my specific private domain of like, I can nerd out on this stuff, and read "InformationWeek" and get copies of "Computer Shopper"-- which people are probably like, what is that? Oh that was big.

And it was something I was really interested in. It was not mysterious to me, but it was to everyone else. And there was an opportunity at the time, for people who didn't think technology was mysterious, to demystify that and make choices on behalf of users and companies.

Where we are today-- and actually, this was a big realization for me right before we started Acompli, was-- technology is not only no longer mysterious. It's a facet of everyday life for everyone, at home, at work, and everywhere in between. And it's a subject of choice.

So not only are there-- is it no longer mysterious, there are multiple options for anything you wish to do, whether it's an email app, or systems management, or writing documents, or whatever. And coming into the task of building Acompli throughout my time at Microsoft and ultimately as I made the decision to join Google, it was this grounding effect, I guess, of knowing that people still have to choose you, right?

And they choose you, ideally, because you have a point of view that you bring-- you as a product, or as a product team-- bring to a space. That doesn't endear you to everyone. It's sort of a freeing and difficult thing to navigate because we were-- you know, Workspace has over 3 billion users. But-- but you do better, right?

Like, when you-- and Google in particular lives by that axiom. And so the opportunity to lead these products that I held up as examples of this is always very attractive.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: What would you say is that perspective that-- that Google Workspace brings to, to the market?

JAVIER SOLTERO: Well, there's a couple of different opinions that apply to the suite as a whole. But before answering that I'll tell you that if you were to ask somebody, what is the fundamental trait that is embedded in all of Google's greatest products that endears them the most, and maybe the core opinion they all share?

And I believe-- and this is just my assessment of it-- that it is the ability for Google products, starting most notably with Search, to anticipate a user's intention and help get them to what-- get the task, or get them to what they need to do that much more effectively, delightfully, and quickly without-- and this is an important ca-- caveat-- without expecting to get a cookie as a result, right?

There's a subtleness to that sense of, like, anticipatory delight that has made all of Google's products, starting with Search and even into products like Gmail. So across Workspace, I think the core opinions, or delightful things, and the things we've been staring at over the last two years-- two years, by the way, my two-year anniversary at Google is today. So auspicious.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Congratulations,

JAVIER SOLTERO: Thank you.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Congratulations.

JAVIER SOLTERO: It feels like it's been 19, just because of all the crazy things that have happened. But anyway, while we have a point of view about bringing collaboration and communication services closer together, not because it's opportunistic, but because it's actually better for users to be able to move in and out of communication interaction.

Like, hey, we're trying to set up a meeting, into like, hey, we're actually making decisions or writing documents and sort of being able to move not only in and out across those products, but now more importantly, use those products effectively. So we're here on a video call as many people still are. And, look, I think video is great.

But I think it's, it's-- I think, silly, if not confusing, to think that the entire game plan for us to deliver hybrid work and to deliver the future of work is to spend as many hours as possible either in a video call or in a chat space. I mean, when do you actually go do work, right? There is a rhythm of work that is not exactly being facilitated effectively by many tools.

And we feel that as part of bringing our products closer together, that we have a unique opportunity-- again, in the interest of delighting and helping people be that much more effective, if subtly, to have an impact in that.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Now, you just mentioned those numbers, 3 billion users, right? It's one of the bigger SaaS products out there. What would you say is the hardest part of keeping all of that machinery running?

JAVIER SOLTERO: Well, the machinery running-- like delivering the service at quality and securely-- involves a lot of hard-earned lessons that Google is fortunate to have built up over time. I think, for example, right before I even joined Google there was a widespread calendar outage.

And that was a-- I didn't witness this. I wasn't at Google at the time. And in a way, it's probably a little bit contentious for me to bring it up, because who wants to be reminded of this? But this stuff happens, right? Like, outages happens. We saw it with Facebook recently.

So I think it's the-- what's hard about this, at least from the operational side, is ensuring that you have the culture and processes to learn from those events and ensure that you are preventing them from happening in the future with one important caveat, and that is that the decision to prevent those-- the mitigation strategy you've put in place has to be threaded through the needle of not impeding your agility to continue to deliver value to users and customers, right?

You keep 3 billion people happy by refining products and improving them over time, sometimes in really subtle ways, sometimes in larger, more visible ways. If the task of reacting and learning from operational issues of whatever scale is one that actually bogs you down, it becomes that much harder.

And I'd say maybe the other one that has been something I anticipated but has been a really-- it's one of the reasons I came here-- is that in addition to serving over $3 billion users across workspace, we have millions of customers around the world in businesses in every size, industry, and geographic region of this planet possible, right?

And the balancing act, and the reconciliation, I guess, of products that are successful in part for reasons I mentioned a minute ago, about having an opinionated point of view, taking an innovative approach to maybe existing problems, is not easily reconciled with the interests of business.

You have to bring businesses, particularly larger ones, along through this journey and actually get them to see-- as we have done, I think, a good job at-- why is it that it's actually valuable for me as a Workspace customer, let's say a large enterprise organization, to have Workspace be also something that this many billions of people actually use in such a different setting.

Well, in part it ensures that we're building the right product. Because people have to choose us. And we are actually incentivized to innovate in a way that established market leaders with inertia don't, right? And the sensibility-- given that sort of choice thing, that I talked about you know, like, that technology is no longer mysterious and it's a subject of taste-- those opinions translate to preference and taste, which we've measured and feel very good about.

So that's how these two things row together as opposed to being discrete and separate things.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Sure. You talked about balance. How do you keep that balance between the consumer who uses parts of Workspace, and the businesses? Because often, that's the same product, or very close to the same product, right?

JAVIER SOLTERO: Good question. Well, I think it comes down to understanding the difference between capabilities that are universally necessary and that are actually about making, let's say an email product, viable at any scale and that represent our point of view around email.

I'll give you a very, very specific example that sort of weaves in with my past life. Conversational layout of email, default in Gmail, anybody whose perspective on email is informed by the Gmail experience, probably rightfully cannot look at email in a way that doesn't lay out everything in conversations.

But it's not the conversations. It's actually the opinion that Gmail had from the very beginning about not forcing users to do extra work to stitch together the context of a message, whether by filing things into folders or manually keeping things around for a day long-- I mean, you look at all these things and it's brilliant.

I actually, I don't-- I wonder if this was as well thought out as it looks to me today. But I can tell you that, you know, on the flip side of this, a product like Outlook has had a difficult time. And I lived through this when I was at Microsoft. Taking people who established their habits, established their point of view about productivity, collaboration, communication, using that kind of model into a different one, and loudly and vigorously, they will resist change.

And so, you know, theirs is, I guess, a different problem than ours.

Ours is about actually really remaining true to the core set of opinions, the small set of opinions, that have made these products-- as a group, and individually-- successful, and understanding how those-- building bridges, I guess, for the commercial users, the users in company settings that are like, wait a second, I spent the last 20, 30 years of my life learning how to use Office products, let's say, or some other solution, and then all of a sudden-- like, the wrong thing to do is to just, hey congratulations, you're getting Workspace.

There's a healthy portion of all of our most successful customers that are like, I didn't ask for this, right? Like, employees. And I think the difference is a sensibility to acknowledge that, candidly and say, well, you got to bring them over. You've got to be good at building not every bridge, but the right set of bridges. The phrase I use here is like, "Cheese is best moved with wine and crackers," right? Like if you're just moving cheese.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Right. Now, a lot of people didn't ask for Workspace, they asked for G Suite.

JAVIER SOLTERO: I mean--

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: You've made some changes there.

JAVIER SOLTERO: --did they, though? Actually, I think they ask for Gmail or Google Docs. Like--

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: True. True.

JAVIER SOLTERO: --if you do a poll and you'll find that the actual brand attachment to G-- G Suite is what people would buy, and in reality, you ask a user, then say what do you use at work? And they'll say, like, we use Google, or we use Gmail, or we use Google Docs, or Google Apps, or Google Apps for your domain, or whatever.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Right, right. Now you mentioned the inertia of, you know, some of your competitors. But to some degree, don't you run into the same issue now, too? Because you're established, you know. You've got enterprise companies that are working with you that would have to retrain customers.

Does that impede some of the innovations you want to bring sometimes, that you can't move as fast as you want to anymore?

JAVIER SOLTERO: Absolutely. Success-- actually, maybe this is-- knowing the startup audience of Disrupt, like-- success, as a person who spent maybe the first half of their professional career building small things and hoping to go from, I don't know who you are, to, please care about me-- and I know, having pitched many TechCrunch journalists over the years for both Hyperic first and then later Acompli-- how hard and how important, I guess, that is, that actually scaled success brings with it its own set of other challenges.

And you can forget what made you successful in the first place. And this is why the answer I gave you earlier about understanding where the soul of these products actually lies. What is it that makes people choose them and care about them so much that changing an icon or a name, you know, prompts that much feedback?

And it's-- look, it's a powerful signal. Or, hey, you moved this button. It is the sense of responsibility that any scaled-product person-- and even a non-scaled one, even a company that is trying to go from nothing to something, needs to really be tuned into.

It is best done if you have that-- I feel like I'm in a good position, I guess, because I do know what it's like to have no one care about what you're doing, and have to build to that, and have to build a product that is chosen, particularly in crowded categories. So it's important not to lose that even as you become successful, or in my case, join something that is much larger.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Right, right. Though I have to admit, I don't know if it's Spaces or Rooms anymore. Is it Chat or Meet, you know? I think also for users confusion.

JAVIER SOLTERO: Yea. Renaming things is-- you should avoid doing it. You should avoid changing icon. Pro tip, don't change icons, don't change names of stuff. But if you have to do it, make sure you do it decisively and in a way that it reinforces the habit that you're trying to create within users and really makes sense. And I admit that that's not something that happens overnight, but yeah, avoid renaming things.

The first company we built, the name we picked we explicitly hated and promised ourselves that we would change and never did. So, names are what you make them.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: And then Acompli became Outlook for mobile, so that worked out all right.

JAVIER SOLTERO: Yeah, and it gets misspelled. It's a misspelled French word. So, I mean it's-- I like that name, by the way. I'm really fond of the Acompli name still, even years after we've moved on.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: If you ever do start up again, are you going to go back to that?

JAVIER SOLTERO: Well, I don't know, I don't own the name. We sold it, right? So.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Oh yea, that's true.

JAVIER SOLTERO: But names are such a polarizing thing. And it is actually part of that exercise of developing, especially when you're starting from a cold start. I mean, all good names are taken, and names are what you make of them. I'm living proof of this. Like, you know, no name withstands endless scrutiny.

And ultimately, it is more important to build in to what you want that name to represent. And we've been lucky to pick two that have actually endured. People still mention Acompli to me, as they do with Hyperic.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Sure. If you were to go back now and build a start up again in the SaaS space, what's missing? What would you want to build?

JAVIER SOLTERO: Well actually, I thought about that before joining Google. I was like, OK well, so I've done two wildly different things, both very difficult. Personally, I'm just very curious about entertainment. Like, I think gaming is a space that I don't know anyth-- it has all the qualities that have appealed to me, which is, I like the space.

I know very little about it other than as a user of it. And it is a graveyard of lots and lots of failed attempts. That's true of systems management, it's true of email, it's true of productivity. So logically, I would say, maybe gaming is interesting. I think augmented reality, virtual reality, there's a lot of underlying ingredients that are coming to life now, in terms of the enabling technology that are very powerful.

But the honest answer is I'm not sure. I'm sort of a one-lane person. I don't have, as I told people back after leaving Microsoft, I don't have a cool notebook where I wrote all the awesome ideas that I would do as soon as I moved on. I tend to sort of sink myself into the task at hand and do the best I can.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Fair enough. Now maybe last words of advice for the audience here. You know, if you're looking at startups, maybe to acquire in the Google Workspace space, what are you looking for? And especially, what are some of the red flags, too, that people should avoid?

JAVIER SOLTERO: Well I think the most important red flag of all is to not overstate where you are in your journey as a small company. It's very tempting for a company to, you know, the whole fake it before you make it. And I think it's important, particularly when you're engaging with a larger acquirer, whether it's Google or any other company, you don't-- the people on the other side of the table are plenty aware of the difference in scale and level of success.

And if they are not aware of it implicitly, they'll find out quickly enough. It counts against you when you over-represent things. And the next thing, and I guess it's related, connects back to this idea of the opinions and the point of view that you bring to the space that might actually create new opportunity for a potential acquirer. But it also needs to be something that is clear.

And I think there's a very imprecise balancing act between subject matter expertise, curiosity, and self-confidence that entrepreneurs tend to have a difficult time balancing depending on the situation. This shows up a lot in fundraising rounds, but it's equivalent in acquisition scenarios as well.

The more aware you are about how you're approaching that, and where-- you know just to stay kind of, to be deliberate. If you're going to go in all sort of, I know everything about this space and you're an idiot and let me come enlighten you, well, you can try that.

I would say it's unlikely to work. Because the two values that I hold dearest-- and it applies to startups and large companies as well-- is the notion of humility and curiosity. The humility to accept the fact that you don't know everything even if you've been in this forever, and the curiosity to go seek it. And it's often that scaled success blinds you of that. And that the hustle of wanting to go from nothing to something makes it seem like it's unwise to be those two things.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Got it. Awesome, thank you. That was great.

JAVIER SOLTERO: Thank you, this is great. I'm excited to keep this going. And maybe next year we'll do it in person, Frederic.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: We will, and then we'll talk about your gaming startup at that point, hear what you come up with. We'll do that.

JAVIER SOLTERO: That's a good plan. Excellent. Well great, thank you.

FREDERIC LARDINOIS: Thank you.