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Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

I'm Rebecca Boulon, and this is the episode where we bring on

industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. The startup world

is in a strange moment right now. Founders are being pushed to move faster than ever, using

AI while facing tighter funding, rising infrastructure costs, and more pressure to show traction

early. Cloud credits, access to GPUs,

and foundation models have made it easier to get started, but those early infrastructure choices

can have unforeseen consequences when startups move beyond free credits and into real cloud

bills. Today we're joined by Darren Mori, Google Cloud's vice president of global startups, who is right at the center of those tradeoffs.

We're talking to him about what he's seeing across the startup ecosystem, how Google Cloud is competing for AI startups, and what founders should be thinking about as they scale.

Darren, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Rebecca. I'm really excited to have a few minutes with you today. Yeah, thanks for joining. So give us a little bit of your background. Like I'm curious, what is Google Cloud for startups? What does it mean to be a part of that ecosystem? How does one get involved in this ecosystem? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot that I could probably share, but I'll give you a quick overview to get us started today. So on one hand, if you think about my background, I've been

an enterprise software and technology for longer than I'd care to probably admit, but I have had

the opportunity to work with a number of the large, hyper-scaler and enterprise technology companies.

Having spent a decade at Microsoft, spent another decade at AWS, both in North America,

...