8. Kevin Ichhpurani of Google Cloud: The Ins and Outs of Platform Building

In the Season 2 premiere of The Platform Journey, Avanish and Kevin discuss: 

• Driving value to your underlying platform through partnerships (3:35) 
• Reevaluating the way we categorize partners; building network effects to solve customer problems (6:17) 
• Embracing “coopetition” and the importance of transparency when building a platform (9:16) 
• Understanding and communicating the core and context layers of your ecosystem (12:42) 
• Kevin’s key advice for an ISV setting out on the platform journey (15:15)

Guest: Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate VP at Google Cloud

Kevin Ichhpurani is Corporate Vice President, Global Ecosystem and Business Development at Google Cloud. Kevin brings nearly 25 years of experience in the technology industry leading global strategy, platform ecosystem transformation, venture capital and mergers and acquisitions. Most recently, Kevin served as Executive Vice President and Corporate Officer of GE. Prior to GE Digital Kevin was a Senior Partner, Global Markets at Ernst and Young and before Ernst and Young Kevin served at SAP as Executive Vice President, Head of Business Development and Global Ecosystem. Kevin holds an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

Host: Avanish Sahai

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018 and of Birdie.ai since April 2022. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow.  From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase.  Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.

About Tidemark

Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale.  Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years.  Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.

Links

• Follow our guests, Kevin Ichhpurani
• Follow our host, Avanish Sahai
• Learn more about Tidemark