257 -Unlock Google Cloud Growth: Dai Vu on AI, Partnerships & Marketplace

Dai Vu, Google Cloud Marketplace Leader, Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering

“2023 was the year of experimentation and POCs. 2024 was identifying specific use cases in production. Now 2025 is going to be the year of agents.” – Dai Vu

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Dai Vu, Managing Director of Google Cloud’s Marketplace and ISV Go-To-Market programs, joins Vince Menzione on the Ultimate Guide to Partnering podcast to discuss the exciting evolution of cloud marketplaces and the rise of AI.

Dai shares his insights on Google Cloud’s explosive growth, its unique approach to partnering, and the strategic importance of the marketplace in today’s cloud landscape. He also delves into the transformative potential of AI, particularly the emergence of AI agents, and how Google Cloud empowers its ecosystem to drive innovation in this space. Tune in to discover how Google Cloud Marketplace facilitates customer choice, streamlines procurement processes, and fosters deeper collaboration between partners and customers.

This episode offers valuable advice for software companies and service providers looking to leverage the Google Cloud Marketplace to scale their go-to-market strategies and thrive in the rapidly changing world of cloud computing and AI. Dai also shares personal insights on his career journey, his definition of mastery, and his approach to leadership, making this episode both informative and inspiring for anyone interested in the future of technology and partnerships.

Key Takeaways:

1. Adaptability and flexibility are crucial for success in the rapidly changing world of cloud computing and AI.
2. Google Cloud Marketplace is a strategic priority for Google Cloud, serving as the route to market and driving significant revenue.
3. Google Cloud differentiates itself through higher-layer services like data analytics and AI, fostering customer stickiness.
4. The marketplace is evolving to facilitate outcome-based solutions, enabling partners like SIs to participate and drive business value.
5. AI, particularly AI agents, is a major focus for Google Cloud, and the company is leaning on its ecosystem to drive innovation in this area.
6. Google Cloud emphasizes a “first party equals third party” approach, prioritizing customer choice and providing a consistent experience.
7. Partners need to view the marketplace as a strategic investment and build a compelling “better together” story with Google Cloud.
8. Product-led growth and AI are transforming the marketplace experience, enabling smarter search, discovery, and solution deployment.

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TRANSCRIPT

Transcription:

[00:00:00] Dai Vu: Well, it’s interesting. The narrative, uh, of, uh, AI has been like 2023. It was like the year of like experimentation and POCs. And then 2024 was around, um, identifying specific use cases in production. And now 2025 is going to be the year of agents.

[00:00:19] Vince Menzione: We believe this time is like no other. We believe we refer to these as the tectonic shifts.

[00:00:25] Intro: All the hyperscalers in the world. If you add them all together, managed services will be 1. 5 times larger

[00:00:30] Dai Vu: because it is the Customer buying behavior that has created the need for all of us to rethink our models

[00:00:37] Intro: until we have data quality. The effectiveness of AI cannot be realized and effectiveness of the partnerships cannot be realized.

[00:00:44] Intro: Can you figure out first what your purpose is and how Microsoft can support your purpose and how you can support Microsoft purpose? Now we have a partnership. It’s the ultimate partnership.

[00:00:57] Vince Menzione: Welcome back to the ultimate guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzio and your host and my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering.

[00:01:06] Vince Menzione: At Ultimate Partner, we’ve been talking about the tectonic shifts in our world and our lives, the role of hyperscalers and co selling, and this marketplace moment. And today I’m thrilled to have in the studio, Google Cloud’s leader for marketplaces. Dai Vu serves as the Managing Director of Google Cloud’s Marketplace and ISP Go To Market programs and joins us here in the studio.

[00:01:32] Vince Menzione: Dai, welcome to the podcast. Thanks. Thanks for having me here. I am so excited to have you here in Boca Raton, Florida. We call it the genesis of the ecosystem, uh, and uh, I was really thrilled to have you join us for our event. Yeah, yes. Great event. Uh, tough to get down here, but glad I made it. Yeah. I make the trip the other way quite often and uh, it’s a long trip.

[00:01:55] Vince Menzione: So, so excited to talk to you more about Google Cloud. Uh, I thought maybe first we’d spend a little time on you, your career trajectory and your current mission and role.

[00:02:05] Dai Vu: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, I, uh, I am the global business leader for Cloud Marketplace and ISV go to market initiatives. And, uh, So my team’s charter is really just to grow the ecosystem business through Marketplace.

[00:02:18] Dai Vu: And, uh, so I have teams that are responsible for the P& L, uh, business development, partner engineering, and onboarding, uh, partner and platform strategy, deal compliance, uh, incentives, uh, co sell initiatives and, and, and more. So, um, and I’ve been in this role for about three and a half years. Uh, this is my third role at Google.

[00:02:39] Dai Vu: I’ve been at Google for over 10 years. Well, well done. Yeah. So it’s been, uh, it’s been a, it’s been a great journey. Uh, and, uh, before this current role, I spent four years in the product group. So an area in the business called the. Application monetization platform. So this was around, uh, bootstrapping and growing our Kubernetes serverless developer platform, um, multi cloud initiatives with Anthos.

[00:03:03] Dai Vu: Uh, and then before that, I, I actually started in the ads business, one of the ads. And yeah, yeah, it was, uh, But it was more like ads infrastructure. So we did, I was in a product management role within ads and commerce that focused on things like, uh, business process automation and workflow automation. And so that was a good, uh, landing spot, uh, for, uh, within Google and cloud had not yet quite matured.

[00:03:26] Dai Vu: It was, I was joking. It was called, uh, Google for work at the time. Google for work. That’s right. I remember that back in 2014. And, uh, and if you kind of look, you mentioned trajectory, if you kind of look at what I’ve done in previous, uh, I’ve had a number of different, uh, functional roles across a number of different, uh, areas.

[00:03:43] Dai Vu: Like I guess, You know, I’ve done product management roles at IBM, um, uh, systems group. Uh, I was at Microsoft. I think we overlapped a little bit. I was, I was basically the, um, lead product manager for Hyper V within Windows server. Yeah. I remember Hyper V. Yeah, exactly. And I’ve also had roles in a sort of ecosystem at SAP business development.

[00:04:04] Dai Vu: And then, uh, I’ve also done some strategy consulting with BCG and McKinsey. And, uh, yeah, you know, as you mentioned, it’s, it’s kind of like an interesting trajectory because I’ve done a lot of different functional roles, meaning that I haven’t been like, like an ecosystem person, but, you know, in my entire career, I’ve done a lot of product.

[00:04:22] Dai Vu: Uh, and, uh, you know, I think the one thing that’s been constant is I’ve always been in something around B2B and enterprise tech. And I tend to focus on, uh, businesses that are scaling. So kind of bringing new disruptive technologies to the market, figuring out how we can, uh, scale that to, you know, multi billion dollar, you know, triple digit year over year growth, that type of stuff.

[00:04:44] Dai Vu: And, uh, and I think one thing that I think I like about my role is my current role is it has a little bit of everything, meaning that you do a little bit of product, you do a little bit of partnering, you do a little bit of sales, you do a little bit of like strategy. All these different. Like functional roles I’ve had in my career have kind of led me to a role like this.

[00:05:03] Dai Vu: So, uh, I think that’s kind of me and that’s how I make sense of it.

[00:05:06] Vince Menzione: Well, from my perspective, it’s, it’s a fascinating, exciting role and you sit, you sit in a very exciting spot, right? We talk about this marketplace moment and you’ve been at it three and a half years, which is a long time in this marketplace moment.

[00:05:19] Vince Menzione: Google cloud has been at it for, since 2017 ish. Uh, fantastic growth. I was hoping you could tell, tell us a little bit more about that growth trajectory. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:30] Dai Vu: So, uh, so I joined Google cloud in, uh, Q4, 2017 and, um, and what happened was in February 2018, we actually disclosed our, uh, revenue for the first time.

[00:05:43] Dai Vu: It was more of a one off. Right. Yeah, exactly. And at that time it was a 1 billion a quarter, which was like a 4 billion run rate back in like, uh, you know, Q1, uh, 2018. Fast forward to our most recent announcements in terms of our earnings, where we are basically a 48 billion run rate business. So you’re looking at 12 X, right?

[00:06:03] Dai Vu: 12 X, right? So, uh, in a period of seven years, which is amazing, right? And, uh, and of course we’re profitable now. I think our operating, um, uh, profit was 2. 1 billion, which was 142 percent year over year. Our backlog is close, close to a hundred billion now. And so it’s been amazing to see this, this growth over, over this timeframe.

[00:06:23] Dai Vu: And, uh, you know, what I really have been very excited about moving cloud is I think we’ve always been sort of a great technology and platform in terms of engineering and products, you know, like things like, um, you look at our sort of global network infrastructure. Uh, you look at some of the things that we’ve been trying to do to get people to adopt higher layer services.

[00:06:44] Dai Vu: Think about like. You know, data and analytics and BigQuery, uh, you know, the long history we’ve had with AI and ML, um, uh, and, uh, you know, Kubernetes, uh, higher layers of compute. And so the idea that, hey, we’re going to enter cloud, but when I try to do things a little bit different, right, this isn’t just about competing on, uh, storage and compute, which is a little bit harder to differentiate.

[00:07:07] Dai Vu: And, uh, you know, I think what we’ve been doing is trying to change the. How consumption model, right? It’s instead of like compute hour or terabytes per month, it’s, it’s things like, you know, higher layer services and microservices, things like that. So it’s kind of extended into this AI era that we’re getting into.

[00:07:26] Dai Vu: So I think that’s, what’s been very exciting. And, and I think, uh, you and I had a chat earlier about this, which is. We only grew, uh, I think 30 percent year over year, which is still faster than, yeah, faster than all the other competitors. But what’s interesting is. Uh, our workspace business is not growing as fast as our core Google cloud platform.

[00:07:44] Dai Vu: So if you were to remove it, which we don’t break out, our growth would be an apples to apples compared to AWS and Azure would be even much, much, much bigger. Right? So, so I think it’s, uh, it’s been an amazing growth and, uh, very exciting to the same area that we’re getting into.

[00:08:01] Vince Menzione: So what do you attribute to the growth?

[00:08:02] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Is it taking market share away? Is it new services? And he’s talking about microservices as well with AI.

[00:08:08] Dai Vu: Exactly. So I think that’s part of it. I think, you know, the fact that we are bringing something that’s a little bit different in terms of higher layer services and creating this sort of stickiness with customers, I think that’s number one.

[00:08:19] Dai Vu: The second thing is, I think it took a little while for us to build out our go to market organization. So it wasn’t like, say like a Microsoft where, you know, you had all these resources in the field on day one because of the legacy, uh, sort of on prem business. We had to build that a little bit over time, and I think that really started to accelerate when, uh, when Thomas Kurian came on in early 2019.

[00:08:38] Dai Vu: So, between building out the sales organization and sort of, you know, building a lot of the infrastructure, I think that, that growth has continued to, uh, to drive us quite a bit. So I think, again, it’s a combination of our unique tech, high level services, and then building out the go to market organization.

[00:08:53] Dai Vu: Does this allow us to sustain this group?

[00:08:55] Vince Menzione: Yeah, I always remember because I’ve had conversations with Google leaders for many years now about the engineering side. The prowess in engineering is incredible. Uh, and then getting, uh, maturing as an enterprise organization. That’s what you’re referring to. And I remember in the early days too, because I’ve been a fan and friend of Tony Savoian, SADA.

[00:09:13] Vince Menzione: And I’ve been with him on that journey as well. And, uh, he was actually front loading, I would say, helping the organization along during those earlier days.

[00:09:21] Dai Vu: Yeah. I mean, you could argue, uh, you know, folks like Tony and Sada, you know, they, we’ve kind of, you know, somewhat outsourced our sales organization in the early years.

[00:09:30] Dai Vu: Yeah. So, and before we, before we built it out and, uh, but now, you know, I think we have that critical mass and scale, which, you know, has driven the growth, but gives us that infrastructure to continue that growth and trajectory.

[00:09:42] Vince Menzione: So I’ve been in the room. I’ve been got had the privilege of speaking at one of your events in New York City a couple years ago.

[00:09:47] Vince Menzione: I think you were there. Yes. I’ve also been in the room at some of your other events since we got to participate in your marketplace forum. Yes. And you know, there’s a palpable excitement, I would say, in the room. And I love the way that you and your organization have leaned in here. And I will say, I’ve been critical of other organizations for not leaning in the same way.

[00:10:08] Vince Menzione: So I want to maybe spend a moment here. Like, what do you believe you’re doing uniquely or differently? Like I’ve observed it and I’ve talked to some of your leaders, but I want to hear from you.

[00:10:17] Dai Vu: Yeah. I think there are a couple of things to call out here. I think, first of all, I think, uh, you know, cloud go to marketing COSA.

[00:10:23] Dai Vu: We, you know, we, we’ve been doing that for a few years now, but I think if you go back maybe two years ago, we, you know, we had marketplaces sort of like a preferred. Route to market in terms of co sell and their ecosystem. And then we establish it as the route, meaning that all the incentives, all the field compensation, all the, uh, time to value benefits is all driving to marketplace.

[00:10:45] Dai Vu: So I think that was a very intentional decision we made two years ago. I forgot to mention, when we talked about the quarterly earnings, we had Sundar actually mentioned, um, in his opening statements about cloud, about talking about how. Uh, customers are purchasing billions of dollars annually to a cloud marketplace.

[00:11:01] Dai Vu: So the shout out, uh, kind of like really punctuated the, uh, the growth that we’re seeing. Yeah. So it’s big. Um, but I think what we’re doing is, I mentioned, we’ve invested a lot in the platform, right? So if you kind of think about the things that we’ve innovated, uh, it’s like removing some of the friction in terms of the customer and partner buying process.

[00:11:19] Dai Vu: It’s enabling. Uh, in new pricing and billing models, like upfront multi year prepay. We launched last year, it’s unlocking new solution categories, right? We, you know, we, uh, you know, in the last 18 months we’ve introduced commercial large language models from Mishcrawl, Anthropic. Uh, and cohere and, and, and anthropic.

[00:11:38] Dai Vu: And, and the idea here is that we want to sort of enable a very broad and comprehensive set of solutions available on marketplace data, uh, uh, data sets, commercial data sets from like Equifax and Dun Bradstreet. Uh, the other area is, uh, business apps, right? So that’s another area where we have a onboarded workday and service, service now, and these are solutions that historically would not be things you would think they’d go through marketplace, but.

[00:12:05] Dai Vu: We’re making very intentional, uh, partnerships where they’re seeing cloud go to market and marketplace as a way to sort of grow their business. And of course, you know, about all of the incentives we align with our end customers in terms of, in terms of, uh, commit drawdown, we, we pay our reps and, you know, partners are consistently telling us that when they go through marketplace to our very tangible benefits in terms of.

[00:12:28] Dai Vu: You know, faster meal cycle times, higher win rates and larger deal sizes. So, so it’s not just, you know, private offers has driven a lot of the growth and we’re consistently seeing deals that are in the, you know, tens of millions of dollars in total contract value. In fact, we’re doing, you know, multiple, uh, nine digit, uh, deals.

[00:12:46] Dai Vu: So that’s over a hundred million total contract value over the last year or so. So, um, yeah, so it’s, uh, it’s all in. Uh, and we continue to invest, uh, people, resources, incentives across the board. So you’d be kind of think of all the different players, you know, involved in how do you get. Our ecosystem software into a customer environment, whether it’s a sell and services partner and ISV and in customer, our field reps, all the financial and time to value benefits are just highly aligned in what’s that’s prescribed.

[00:13:16] Vince Menzione: I got to interview some of your partners at your event in Seattle back in October. I think it was right. And I, that is a consistent theme. And it was, what was unique about it for me is that you had ISVs, traditional software companies. Uh, but you also had reseller partners, uh, you had the traditional ones like CDW in the room, which I, you know, kind of the old school partners and they’ve embraced working with you and, and the recognition, uh, time to value, uh, uh, bigger deal size, greater influence on the opportunity, like work, working through the Google organization, working with your sales organization.

[00:13:51] Vince Menzione: Uh, they, they saw that as a critical success factors for them being working with you and the organization. I saw that time and time again. Absolutely. Absolutely. I also felt like when I’ve interviewed Chelsea on the podcast, uh, she’s an incredible leader. Yes. I feel like you put like, uh, we’ll call it maniacal focus on the execution piece.

[00:14:09] Vince Menzione: Maybe you could talk a little bit about that as well.

[00:14:11] Dai Vu: Yeah. So I mean, so first of all, I’d mentioned about the resources. So we have scaled up our, uh, resources in the region. So this is all about helping partners. Uh, you know, create pipeline and close deals. And, uh, Chelsea, for example, is a good example where she is highly aligned to our sales team.

[00:14:27] Dai Vu: So that’s more like a regional, uh, sort of go to market focus. We also have, um, specialists who are aligned among name partners, but on the regional side, we are, you know, whenever an end customer and a sales rep need to opportunistically identify an opportunity on marketplace and an ISB solution, uh, we are there to support the deal, right?

[00:14:46] Dai Vu: And so I think that’s one piece. We are very big on metrics. So we have these, uh, you know, pipeline reviews. We have these, um, uh, specific, uh, numbers as it relates to, um, Marketplace revenue and also what we call ratable revenue, which is basically, yeah. Well, what that basically means is, uh, we enable upfront multi year prepaid deals and, and what that does is it spreads, uh, the payments, if you will, across the term, because that tends to be a lot more aligned to the consumption that we see.

[00:15:17] Dai Vu: Uh, which, you know, fundamentally is a big part of the marketplace value proposition and a business model, which is we collect the rev share. But ultimately what we’re doing is we’re seeing these solutions drive up consumption, both in the partner tenant and the customer tenant.

[00:15:30] Vince Menzione: You talked about the cloud commitments piece and I, not everybody who is watching or listening today understands that component.

[00:15:36] Vince Menzione: I talked about it quite a bit. Obviously, we talked about this incredible TAM that’s available because your, your teams are being very effective at going at, and I like to talk about the C suite and the board making these decisions, right? The CEO, the CFO really are the ones aligning to sign the contracts and make the commitment for the organization.

[00:15:55] Vince Menzione: And then that’s available for, for, for burndown essentially, right? And for these organizations to tap into those budgets.

[00:16:01] Dai Vu: That’s correct.

[00:16:01] Vince Menzione: Um, I think that’s an important piece, but how do you, how do you help them identify that or maybe drive against that?

[00:16:08] Dai Vu: Well, I mean, I think the, the, the customer benefit here is that customers are willing to make larger commits.

[00:16:13] Dai Vu: And as they make larger commits that get more favorable discounting on those first party services. They get access to other incentives, whether it be general GCP credits or, you know, migration funds and, or our professional services funds. And so, the benefit here is that we are, uh, enabling customers to draw down on that commitment dollar for dollar through solutions to Marketplace.

[00:16:34] Dai Vu: And it’s effectively de risking that commitment. Okay? But not only that, what ends up happening is as you move workloads to the cloud, there are solutions that are naturally things that you want to procure through Marketplace, whether it be security or database analytics. And that has been traditionally our biggest categories on Marketplace because these tend to be things that enable those workplaces to move to the cloud in the first part.

[00:16:56] Dai Vu: Yes. And so I think what we’re seeing now is that customers are basically making large commits and then consolidating a growing cloud budget. And seeing what they can put in terms of like ecosystem and third party solutions as part of that growing cloud budget. And we talk about

[00:17:10] Vince Menzione: the seven seats to the table all the time.

[00:17:12] Vince Menzione: We had Jay with us yesterday and that’s where we’ve got, we got the term from Jay and we’ve been using it ever since. Thank you, Jay. Uh, but really that’s exactly what you’re describing, right? The customer is sitting at the center.

[00:17:22] Dai Vu: Yes.

[00:17:23] Vince Menzione: Uh, they’re at the dashboard, right? And they’re saying, we need a security solution.

[00:17:27] Vince Menzione: We need data. We need all these other solutions. And third party solutions as well as Google cloud solutions and pulling it all. They’re stitching together the solution.

[00:17:36] Dai Vu: Absolutely. I mean, listen, our, uh, you know, you say the customers at the center, we, uh, facilitate choice. We have an open platform, you know, we want customers to have the right workload on GCP and whether it’s a first party service or an ecosystem solution, we let the customers decide they’re in the best position to determine what.

[00:17:54] Dai Vu: What’s best for their, uh, for their business needs and their environment. And, um, and I think that’s, that’s one of the things that has made us successful on the, on the, on the, on the partnering front, which is we take a very, what I call like a first party equals third party approach, which is, you know, how we think about marketing, promoting.

[00:18:12] Dai Vu: Distributing, procuring, consistency between first party and third party, and we leave it up to the customer to design.

[00:18:18] Vince Menzione: I love that. I love that. You know, one of the biggest criticisms, we talked about this yesterday, in fact, at our event. Uh, if you haven’t watched the event, by the way, you can watch the event on YouTube.

[00:18:27] Vince Menzione: It’s still, we’re still live streaming it. But, uh, we talked about the fact that a biggest criticism in the marketplace is today is, I would call it underutilization. In other words, it’s mostly like private offers. Yeah. Big deals that we already knew about, right? So, you know, we talked about the big guys like CrowdStrike and Splunk and others that quickly got to a billion dollars or more.

[00:18:48] Vince Menzione: And a lot of that was taking their existing book of business and moving it to a marketplace. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, what are you seeing there? Cause there’s criticism that we’re not really scaling some of the smaller digital natives or even the mid, the mid market, even upper market ISVs or software companies.

[00:19:03] Vince Menzione: What, what is, what would you say to those critics?

[00:19:05] Dai Vu: Yeah, I think, first of all, we have to assess, is that a true statement? And, uh, it is fair, meaning that a big, uh, a big part of the marketplace growth has been what we call the channel shift, if you will. Right. Just going from like partner paper to marketplace.

[00:19:18] Dai Vu: Uh, but first of all, if that, if that is the case, we do find that there’s a lot of benefits of that too, because I think number one, what we see is when you renew, uh, on marketplace, you tend to manage the churn and the renewal rates a lot better. Uh, the expansion opportunities are greater. So I think there’s a lot of, uh, interest for the ISV to basically drive these renewals to marketplace.

[00:19:39] Dai Vu: And then of course, serving your customers better too, which is, you know, they want to sort of draw down their, uh, I’ll commit, they get faster time to value, they have solutions that are validated. On GCP and well integrated, so it’s serving their customers better. And then we have other sort of platform benefits that provide some efficiency, if you will, in terms of, um, things like auto renewals.

[00:19:59] Dai Vu: So the, the ISVs can manage that quite a bit better. Now, what I find interesting is that, um, we, one of the things that we’ve been trying to improve in the last year and a half is better telemetry in terms of, um, uh, you know, who’s sourcing video. Okay. Is that, you know, partners for us or Google source. And then the other pieces around what the, uh, incremental ACB is for the solutions that are renewed through marketplace where the expansions are.

[00:20:24] Dai Vu: And, and, uh, you know, I think what we’re doing now is we’re getting better visibility into this. And at some point in the future, you can imagine that we’ll start to, uh, you know, put metrics against our reps to. Identify net new pipeline and net new deals or incremental ACB. In the meantime, I think our reps are doing quite a good job of engaging in these opportunities and adding value, regardless of who’s sourcing the deal, whether it be you conducting a workshop or, you know, supporting a POC or.

[00:20:54] Dai Vu: Making the right connections in the accounts. And there’s a lot of value that they’re adding regardless of who’s sourcing the deal. But then more and more, we’ll see, uh, our reps, uh, identifying, uh, new opportunities for our partners. And of course, the other piece that we didn’t talk about is, uh, product led growth.

[00:21:09] Dai Vu: So I don’t know if we touched on that yesterday, but yeah, yeah. So product led growth is, is, is I think, uh, an interesting, um, discussion because that’s in some ways the original promise of Marketplace, which is you can just, you know, go on Marketplace, you can search, you can discover, you can try, buy. And I think there are a lot of things that suggest that this is going to grow quite a bit, right?

[00:21:30] Dai Vu: I think number one is. Um, AI and automation, hyper personalization. So now you can do things like smart suggest, you can have very intelligent search, you know, natural language. Like, Hey, I’m looking for solution that, yeah, those ability. Exactly. Exactly. So we are, we were actually putting quite a bit of investments to enable a product led growth.

[00:21:50] Dai Vu: So again, this is, think of this as a, you know, primarily customers who want to land like a smaller deal, like a, like a, like maybe a free trial or a small. And then over time they can just expand the opportunity. And we’re doing things like improving search, both cloud console and marketplace. That’s number one, we’re improving, uh, analytics.

[00:22:09] Dai Vu: So if you’re, if you want to drive like a campaign through a marketplace listing, you can measure the effectiveness of that campaign through like different stages of the, of the funnel. And then we’re also doing things going back to my first party equals third party is how can we surface third party solutions within a cloud console context?

[00:22:26] Dai Vu: So like, uh, like, uh, scenario. Yeah. Like to give an example, suppose you’re a. A developer or an ML practitioner and you’re in Vertex ai. Okay. And you know, you’ve selected a, a model from model guarded and suppose now you want to, uh, uh, purchase and deploy a, uh, a vector database. Right. We should be able to surface in context.

[00:22:46] Dai Vu: So not hunch out to marketplace. Exactly. You’re right. While you’re in. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So we’re surfacing these ecosystem and third party solutions in context for the customer and allowing them to, again, commercial. Uh, deploy, um, in, you know, uh, seamlessly without having to go to a different, uh, interface.

[00:23:04] Dai Vu: So again, this, this is blurring the lines between first party and third party. Yeah.

[00:23:07] Vince Menzione: I mean, it’s taking some of the core strengths of Google as an organization from search and Yes. And really at the forefront of AI. Yes. Let’s just discuss that. Like, Yeah. Maybe they didn’t lean in first, but leaned in right after us and, and, you know, I feel like it’s.

[00:23:21] Vince Menzione: It’s a neck and neck there, right there. I mean, in terms of, in terms of the growth.

[00:23:24] Dai Vu: Yeah, no, no, absolutely. So I think this, this, this is a, again, this will start off as a, you know, uh, where a lot of the developer focused or open source where they, you know, people like Mongo, Confluent, Elastic, those will start.

[00:23:36] Dai Vu: But I think this will extend to other solution areas. And uh, so I think this is going to be, this is going to take off and we’re investing quite a bit in this area. Yeah. Let’s talk more about AI.

[00:23:44] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about agentic AI.

[00:23:45] Dai Vu: Yeah, yeah. And

[00:23:46] Vince Menzione: agent AI.

[00:23:47] Dai Vu: Yeah, yeah.

[00:23:48] Vince Menzione: And the autonomous enterprise. How is Google planning to capture this opportunity?

[00:23:52] Vince Menzione: And what are the implications for this ecosystem that we live in?

[00:23:56] Dai Vu: Well, it’s interesting. The narrative, uh, uh, AI has been like 2023 was like the year of like experimentation and POCs. And then 2024 was around, um, identifying specific use cases and production. And now 2025 is going to be the year of agents.

[00:24:13] Dai Vu: Okay. And we do see a huge opportunity for customers to deploy agents, whether it be to AI. Uh, you know, handle complex transactions or improve customer experience or improve operational efficiency. And I think the opportunity here is we’re going to lean on our ecosystem to drive that innovation and monetization.

[00:24:33] Dai Vu: Tell us more about that. Well, when you think about it, um, you know, our partners brings very specific domain expertise, right? Maybe they know. Uh, uh, sort of a business process really well, or a vertical really well, right? We provide the platform and tools, right? Like we have, um, uh, agent builder, right? Agent builder is, you know, being able to leverage things like our enterprise search capabilities.

[00:24:56] Dai Vu: It’s being able to, um, uh, create, uh, sort of connections and calls to LLMs, as well as connecting to data sources. And of course, Marketplace will be the primary place for our customers to search, purchase, and deploy agents for our ecosystem. In fact, uh, we, we announced in November last year, uh, this initiative called AgentSpace, uh, within Marketplace, which is, uh, where customers can basically search agents that are, you know, deployable on Vertex AI and leveraging any third party LLM that’s running on GCP.

[00:25:28] Dai Vu: And so I think this is going to be big, I don’t know if it’s going to be the, like the death of SAS, but we do think hundreds, maybe thousands of agents, uh, will be, uh, will be coming to market. And again, that could be within an application to improve the overall experience, or it could be sort of the standalone, uh, agents that, uh, that our partners can, can monetize.

[00:25:50] Dai Vu: So I think this is a. So this is a big area and again, we’re going to lean on our partners in the ecosystem to drive a lot of that innovation.

[00:25:57] Vince Menzione: I love that. And it struck me when you were talking about, uh, verticals and industries, I was thinking about healthcare. Yeah. I was thinking about financial services.

[00:26:06] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Uh, Chris Sakolowski has been a guest here multiple times. Yeah. Nooks and no crisps. And thinking about like outcomes, driving outcomes and intelligence really helping to streamline all those processes around the back end of this.

[00:26:17] Dai Vu: That’s correct. I mean, that’s another, uh, area that I think Marketplace is going to help facilitate because, you know, historically Marketplace has been a very sort of like, uh, you know, product SKU focus and ISV focus, uh, uh, catalog, but, you know, over time and, you know, you’ve seen, we make the steps to enable other partners to participate in Marketplace, whether it be resellers or services partners, we actually just, uh, made professional services, a formal solution category by Marketplace.

[00:26:44] Dai Vu: So now if you have the sell and services partners involved, You can start to think about things like how can we drive business outcomes as opposed to purchase products, right? And, um, and you can start to define things like pre integrated solutions, which combines like an SI with their unique services and vertical expertise with a core, a couple core ISVs, as well as a large language model and maybe some core data and put this together to sort of drive some meaningful outcome.

[00:27:10] Dai Vu: So I think the. The evolution of marketplace will be, how do we take all these sort of like one off complex transactions and put it in a way to create sort of a very seamless discovery, deployment, and procurement process for these solutions. So this like the, a pre packaged solution, is that the way you would say it?

[00:27:26] Dai Vu: Well, there could be a couple of ways we could, it could be like a pre packaged super SKU, right? That could be, uh, uh, or it could be a, you know, multi vendor private offer where sell and services partners could piece it together. But I think part of what we talked about was help customers. Understand what these pre integrated solutions are.

[00:27:43] Dai Vu: And we have an initiative called, um, industry value networks. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that value networks. Yeah. So industry value networks is just that, which is we are basically identifying these predefined pre integrated solutions with the combinations of our. Uh, services partners, core ISV partners, and, uh, leveraging, uh, AI, ML data, and so forth.

[00:28:04] Dai Vu: So, like, one example is we have something called, um, uh, automated AI underwriting solution from our, one of our partners, Quantify, that is leveraging one of these ISV solutions called Uncork, uh, with a sort of like a low code, no code solution. So. They’re predefined. This is the idea of customers can find these things and, uh, purchase and deploy in a very sort of like, uh, low risk because they’re sort of like pre integrated and it’s just so forth.

[00:28:29] Dai Vu: So marketplace, again, I think will be the facilitator for these type of, uh,

[00:28:34] Vince Menzione: solutions. What about the go to market aspect of that? Is there, are you doing anything to accelerate that so that there’s awareness around these solutions? Cause this is new information for our audiences. Right. I think it’s really fascinating that what you’re doing.

[00:28:45] Dai Vu: Yeah, so I would say right now we have some basic things on the marketplace, which is, you know, there are ways for, like, for example, if you go to a, uh, a solution listing, there are related SKUs. So, like, for example, if you go to like a core product listing, like say MongoDB Atlas, there are professional services SKUs that are related to that SKU, right?

[00:29:05] Dai Vu: I think what we want to do is going back to how we think marketplace is going to evolve is really think about this. Sort of AI and, uh, and, uh, you know, natural language processing to say, Hey, I’m looking for a solution and we can surface the set of SKUs that, that would sort of make up that sort of pre integrated solution.

[00:29:22] Dai Vu: Now that’s a little bit further way out, but these are the type of things that I think we’d want to innovate now. Industry value networks are available today. I think we have somewhere in the orders of like 40, uh, IVNs defined with a number of different partners. Is it like super SKUs? Uh, yeah, they have to deploy.

[00:29:37] Dai Vu: You have to purchase them separately and the SI can help cobble them together. But over time you can see where marketplace can help remove some of that friction, both from a discovery in purchasing and deployment perspective. Fascinating. Yeah.

[00:29:49] Vince Menzione: So for our viewers and listeners that maybe are struggling because I do think that not everybody knows right they there’s a path There’s a journey right AWS was In first, I would say, right?

[00:30:01] Vince Menzione: And then some others have said, like, well, where do we go next? How would you help them? Like, what would you say to them to be more successful? What do you typically say to them on their journey to help them be more successful with cloud?

[00:30:13] Dai Vu: Yeah. I mean, I would say, you know, when it comes to sort of cloud go to market and marketplace, I would say that they have to view this as a very, uh, strategic, uh, investment, meaning that, uh, they have to be intentional what they do, meaning that, uh, getting listed on marketplace is very easy.

[00:30:30] Dai Vu: Uh, but. You know, that doesn’t going to equate to, uh, pipeline and deals. Uh, so you got to invest and for some of our partners, it may be a, uh, multi year journey, uh, depending on, you know, how they, how, how much do they want to accelerate it. But I think the key point is that you can view this as a side project or an experiment, because that’s going to be sort of like a self fulfilling outcome.

[00:30:52] Dai Vu: But I think, you know, I think the way I would think about it is first and foremost, your solution has to have, uh, be built on GCP. It has to potentially leverage advanced services, some of the advanced AI, BigQuery, data analytics, security. And I think you have to have a very strong better together story.

[00:31:12] Dai Vu: Like why is the combination of Google Cloud with your solution better than alternatives? Um, you have to remember we have like thousands of listings on Marketplace. We have 300 first party services and Uh, it’s, you have to stand out, right? And, uh, and, uh, uh, you know, our reps are always trying to find the best way to serve their customers.

[00:31:31] Dai Vu: So if you have a compelling solution and you have a track record, they will find and work with you. Right. Um, I think there are other things I would also point out, which is like making sure that you have the right executive focus internally in terms of like what, you know, ideally should be sort of led by the CRO we’ve talked about, you know, how do you shift from like Alliance led sales go to market to more of a CRO and sales led.

[00:31:54] Dai Vu: And then making sure that you have the right, um, you know, operational capabilities in place, you know, whether it be, um, uh, you know, like a private offer deal desk, uh, you know, or, uh, making sure you have the right policies, whether it’s like price neutral, comp neutral, and then making sure that, uh, you enable, uh, your sales rep to talk about marketplace and how to drive solutions to marketplace and talk to their customers about it.

[00:32:19] Dai Vu: But ultimately it becomes one of these things where you, you build on the success, right? You have to share pipeline, you have to register your deals and you’ve got to lean in initially, right? Don’t try to, you know, do a shotgun approach where you register every single deal and hope something sticks. It’s more around pick the, pick the industry or customer segment or vertical where you’ve had success, lean in, get those first few deals.

[00:32:42] Dai Vu: Uh, get some compelling customer references, shout at the rooftop with your internal stakeholders at Google. They’ll hear about it. And that’ll kind of build on top of that. So I think it’s, it’s one of these things where you have to get alignment, have the better together story, lean in, figure out how to work best with our Google cloud reps and you can build.

[00:33:00] Vince Menzione: Yeah. I like to say you build the flywheel, right? You, you find a point or a focus area and you land it there and then you build your brand and story and you start to build the flywheel for success, right? Just think about it that way. So some great, uh, uh, uh, and also I, I think maybe for some of our viewers and listeners, or maybe you aren’t on Google cloud today.

[00:33:20] Vince Menzione: Yeah. What would you say to them and who should they reach out to to get started?

[00:33:24] Dai Vu: Yeah. So I think number one is, uh, if you have a, a, a field sales rep, an FSR who’s assigned to you, uh, from an account perspective, I think they can give some specific, uh, guidance on, on where to get started. I think that’s number one.

[00:33:36] Dai Vu: And the, and the beauty is we have these, uh, consumption models and commit agreements that start very low, meaning that you don’t have to make a huge upfront investment. Initially, I think we had our cloud commit contracts. The minimum threshold was, I think, 10 million, uh, like, uh, 2 years ago. Now it’s like 100 K.

[00:33:52] Dai Vu: Oh, we also have, uh, what we call these flex agreements where you don’t have to make any commitment, you just basically consume. And then based on your consumption, you can get the, uh, GCP credits to sort of offset, uh, some future spend there. And then we also have a number of resources that support, um, uh, the, uh, the field sales rep, which is, you know, how to think about, uh, how to architect your solution on GCP, especially if you’re coming from on prem or another cloud provider, uh, which is best guidance.

[00:34:21] Dai Vu: And of course, um, You know, marketplace, I would say is, is, is something you need to think about as, as you scale your go to market. I would say that, you know, make sure you have, you know, pricing and product market fit before you get listed. But, you know, once you have those things in place. I think there are some good opportunities to, to scale your go to market working with us.

[00:34:41] Vince Menzione: And then there’s some engineering challenges for some that don’t have the technical chops in house. And then we have some enablers.

[00:34:47] Dai Vu: Yes, that’s great.

[00:34:47] Vince Menzione: We have organizations like Sugar, who was at our event yesterday. That’s great. That can help, help you along with that journey.

[00:34:53] Dai Vu: Yeah, yeah. In fact, again, if you make a commitment, uh, as part of your commit, there are incentives and those incentives can be used to pay some of these integrators like Sugar and Tackle and Workspan.

[00:35:05] Vince Menzione: Very cool. So we’re living through interesting times. I mean, I talk about the rapid change and transformation. I was talking about this tectonic shifts We’ve been seeing and this year alone. I mean we got off to a grand start in terms of shifts, right? We had we had Stargate. We had deep seek. I calls it the deep seek moment.

[00:35:22] Vince Menzione: It’s already it’s already past us now I’m not even talking about it any longer What would you say to our listeners and viewers on how they can optimize for their success this year?

[00:35:31] Dai Vu: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:35:32] Vince Menzione: And kind of navigate through the change, right? Cause things continue that way.

[00:35:35] Dai Vu: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would say a couple of things.

[00:35:38] Dai Vu: Well, first of all, on the marketplace front, if you’re not thinking about marketplace, if you’re not thinking about cloud go to market, you know, you have to start looking into it. Right. So, I mean, uh, the world is moving to marketplaces and. At minimum, it needs to be part of your playbook. I mean, it may take some time to sort of scale up, but, uh, figure out how to get listed on marketplace and scale your cloud go to market.

[00:35:56] Dai Vu: That’s one on the AI front. I say you have to embrace it. Um, you know, this is an interesting area where, you know, I think a combination of looking at things like how can you improve your overall customer experience, uh, how can improve your overall product experience. I think these are, you have to invest in understanding how you can leverage AI to just improve your product overall.

[00:36:18] Dai Vu: It doesn’t have to be a standalone product, right? Could be sort of a, like a co pilot or agents that you build into your application and, uh, and again, uh, drive better outcome for your customers. But then also scaling, making sure that you, uh, skill up on the latest AI technologies and Google path. And make sure you hire the right folks, especially if you’re in the, uh, selling services side.

[00:36:37] Dai Vu: Um, so making sure that you have the, the, the right folks that you hire and skill up, uh, and I think just given some of the change that you mentioned, I think you also have to be open to being very adaptable and flexible because things can shift very quickly. Right. And, uh, so I think embracing some of these changes and being very.

[00:36:57] Dai Vu: Deliberate about how you want to sort of approach and, um, and sort of, um, uh, operate in this environment will be

[00:37:03] Vince Menzione: very key. I love the adaptability. We can talk about AQ, which is the adaptability quotient. It’s more important than the EQ combined today, especially today. Right. So some rapid fire questions.

[00:37:15] Vince Menzione: I like to ask some of our guests. What book has most influenced your work?

[00:37:19] Dai Vu: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so a book maybe 20 years ago, um, uh, good to great by Jim Collins. Uh, yeah. So I, you know, I read that, um, you know, shortly after it was published, right. The graduate from business school and I apply certain concepts, whether it be like the flywheel or doom loop and in some cases, but just, I think the key point around, um, Greatness is not about luck or circumstances.

[00:37:44] Dai Vu: It has to be very intentional and a set of very disciplined things you need to do. So, uh, that’s something I’ve leveraged over the years. That’s a great book.

[00:37:50] Vince Menzione: It’s on, it’s on my bookshelf. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I love that book.

[00:37:53] Dai Vu: Yeah.

[00:37:54] Vince Menzione: What about one habit that you can’t live without?

[00:37:58] Dai Vu: Well, one habit that I’ve been doing is, uh, I get up very early, uh, so probably like 5 a.

[00:38:06] Dai Vu: m. every single day, and, uh, I’m kind of in a bit of a routine where I think it’s a combination of work, I get some very focused because I’m, that’s like my highest energy of the day, uh, and I also know that once, uh, you know, the, the core working hours start, it’s like impossible to focus on anything. So it’s making sure that I tackle like two or three things that are very difficult, right?

[00:38:27] Dai Vu: It’s kind of like eating the frog if you’re familiar with that, right? So I, I, I, I focus on that. And then I also have a routine from a health perspective where I, I ride my bike to work every day. So I’m trying to, you know, get up early. Get maybe an hour, two hours of work in and then bike to work. So I’m kind of like fresh from the day.

[00:38:42] Dai Vu: So that’s something that I love is the bike, right? The bike ride is about 18 minutes. It’s about, uh, six and a half miles. It’s mostly flat. Uh, I hate to say it’s an e bike, so it’s kind of cheating, but it’s, uh, yeah, but, uh, but yeah, that’s okay.

[00:38:58] Vince Menzione: Yeah. So is there a quote or mantra that inspires you?

[00:39:04] Dai Vu: Yeah, I think it’s, uh, I think it was Steve Jobs who said this, which is, uh, in order to be great at something, you have to love what you do.

[00:39:11] Dai Vu: Uh, and, uh, where this resonated with me was, uh, in between my, uh, Uh, first and second year of business school, I was, uh, I was an intern at Goldman Sachs where, uh, I basically, um, worked, I think, close to a hundred hours a week and I was quite miserable. And, uh, this was right during the height of the, the, the first e commerce wave.

[00:39:31] Dai Vu: And we, uh, the summer associates had a, had a lunch with Hank Paulson, who was the CEO at the time. And they were kind of challenging him to say, Hey, back in the days, investment banking is how you can make money. But now you can make money with all these, um, Uh, startups. Uh, and, uh, I think what Hank said at the time was he said, um, you know, you gotta look, we’re all good at what we do, but in order to be great, you have to be passionate about it.

[00:39:55] Dai Vu: And if you’re here for the money. You know, you’re not going to be successful. So it’s something that I do revisit every few years to make sure that, um, you know, I love what I’m doing. Cause if you’re not, then, you know, life is too short. I love that.

[00:40:07] Vince Menzione: What do you love most about what you do?

[00:40:09] Dai Vu: You know, I think honestly the, what, what I like best is all the things I, all the functional areas that I have to sort of look after.

[00:40:16] Dai Vu: So I, I, I feel like I’m operating like a GM, right? The overall business goal, the profitability, and then making sure full ownership around how the business is successful. It’s just looking at all aspects of the business, which from a broad business perspective has been, you know, one of the most rewarding, um, jobs in my career.

[00:40:34] Vince Menzione: Yeah, it’s an incredible remit. Yeah. It really is. So what is mastery?

[00:40:39] Dai Vu: Yep. You know, mastery is just having, you know, deep domain expertise in a particular area. It’s, uh, uh, a commitment to continually learn and improve. It’s, um, it’s also to our earlier point of being adaptable and flexible because, uh, things change.

[00:40:57] Dai Vu: You master something, but then the world changes or something like that. So I think those are, uh, some of the things I think about. Um, so just, uh, Just a focus on excellence and continual learning.

[00:41:08] Vince Menzione: Very cool. So, I have a favorite question. Yeah. I ask almost all of my guests this question. So, Dye, you’re hosting a dinner party.

[00:41:16] Vince Menzione: Yes. And you can invite anyone from the present or the past to this amazing dinner party. Yes. And we could even talk about where you would host this dinner party if you’re inclined to do that. Maybe you’re in Boca, maybe in San Fran, but maybe another location.

[00:41:29] Dai Vu: Yeah.

[00:41:29] Vince Menzione: Who would you invite and why?

[00:41:32] Dai Vu: Well, I think, um, one person I would invite is my father.

[00:41:37] Dai Vu: Uh, he, uh, he actually passed away about 11 years ago and, uh, but he’s always been an inspiration, uh, uh, in my life in a sense that You know, he was, uh, a fairly successful, uh, uh, military leader, uh, in, in, in, in, in Saigon. But during the fall of Saigon, he left everything there. We, uh, were refugees of the war and we came here with basically nothing.

[00:41:58] Dai Vu: And 74. 74, exactly, exactly. And, um, the way he, uh, went about, um, was, Hey, my focus now is just making sure that all the opportunities are there for my, my children, which was myself, my younger brother, and four older sisters. And, uh, that’s how he, that’s how he lived his life, so his sacrifice and his focus on making sure he provided for, um, for his kids has been a huge inspiration for me, so he would be there.

[00:42:23] Dai Vu: And then I guess, maybe I would host it, probably be in Saigon, Vietnam, which is where I was born, but sadly I have not been back. You have not been back. I’m not here. It’s beautiful. I know. It’s incredible. I know, I just gotta find, you know, block out some time to be able to visit it, but that’s probably where I would hold it.

[00:42:37] Dai Vu: And then, you know, the other folks I would invite are people who I think would be very, uh, entertaining, people who would be involved in very engaging discussions. So a couple of folks that come to mind is maybe like Jon Stewart. You know, I find him very witty and humorous and, uh, also for very provocative conversations.

[00:42:55] Dai Vu: And then maybe another one could be like, uh, Serena Williams, uh, who, you know, one of the greatest athletes of all time, uh, lives down here, by the way, lives in Jupiter. Well, she spends half her year in Jupiter, Florida, so, oh, I didn’t know that. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, that would be interesting conversation to hear about some of her great triumphs in her career, but then she also has passions outside of sports like, uh, like fashion and, and philanthropy.

[00:43:17] Dai Vu: So, I think. You know, having a very sort of engaging, witty, and thought provoking discussions. I think that would be an interesting group

[00:43:24] Vince Menzione: of people. That would be very fascinating. Maybe I’ll come along to bring dessert or something. How’s that? I’d love to meet your dad. He must have some incredible stories.

[00:43:32] Vince Menzione: Yeah.

[00:43:33] Dai Vu: Yeah. He lived a, he lived a, he lived a full life and, um, you know, and I think, uh, would be great to, uh, have dinner with him with my guest.

[00:43:41] Vince Menzione: Well, I really enjoyed our time today, Dai. So great to have you. Make the trip out here to Boca for our event yesterday and to be here today in the studio with our viewers and listeners.

[00:43:50] Vince Menzione: And I just want to thank you for your support of Ultimate Partner and for being an amazing guest for our audience. Well, thank you, Vince. It’s been great being here and I look forward to work with you on a new basis. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dai. Thank you for watching and listening this episode of The Ultimate Guide to Partnering.

[00:44:04] Vince Menzione: You know, at Ultimate Guide to Partnering, we strive to bring you great leaders like Dai to help you achieve more. And if you like what we’re doing here, please like, and subscribe to the podcast. Tell your friends and visit our website, the ultimate partner. com. You’ll learn more about our newsletter events and our amazing community together.

[00:44:25] Vince Menzione: Let’s spark the ecosystem.