Show Notes 199: How Google are supporting the Cambridge Tech Ecosystem

The latest episode of the Cambridge Tech Podcast reveals a fascinating trend in the tech ecosystem: some of the most impactful people supporting startups today are themselves former founders who've made the leap into major tech companies. In this week's episode, hosts James Parton and Faye Holland speak with Alexandre Béliard and Kimoon Kim, two customer engineers at Google who are transforming how early-stage companies access world-class technical and financial support.

Before diving into the interview, the hosts kicked off with some genuinely exciting news from the British Business Bank. The East of England secured over £1 billion in equity investment across 146 deals in 2025, cementing its position as the UK's third-strongest tech region. Perhaps most striking: AI firms attracted 44% of all smaller business equity investment last year—a clear signal of where capital is flowing.

Other highlights from this week's news roundup included Paragraf's expansion with three international advisors to strengthen its graphene electronics credentials, and Cambridge Future Tech's acquisition of Vest Coast Capital, bolstering their US presence with a portfolio of 20+ deep tech companies.

Why Founders Make Better Supporters

What makes this episode particularly compelling is the candid conversation about why Alex and Kim chose to transition from founding their own companies to supporting others at Google.

Kim's journey began with an AI and machine learning consulting startup back in 2014, helping enterprises leverage emerging technologies. After ten years building and scaling, he realised his emotional wellbeing was pointing him elsewhere:

"After maybe a period of 10 years or so, the reason why I wanted to join Google is because I worked with great people who worked at Google... I just wanted to work with great people."

Alex took a different route, building a tutoring platform to democratise access to education in the US. Rather than pursuing another venture immediately, he strategically chose to surround himself with founders:

"I'd love to come back and be a founder, but shorter term, how could I be around as many founders as possible, learn from them to get these tools to get that emotional build... to later on be a founder."

Getting Into Google (And What Comes Next)

For aspiring Googlers, the pair offered refreshingly honest insights into the notoriously competitive interview process:

• Between 3-5 interviews depending on the role, with clear rubrics ensuring equal opportunity

• The "Googliness" interview assesses how you interact with peers and contribute to culture

• Resilience matters enormously—many successful candidates faced initial rejections before breaking through

• Timing and preparation are just as important as raw talent

How Google Actually Supports Startups

Today, Alex and Kim work at the coalface of startup support through the Google for Startups program:

• Eligibility begins around £50-100k in funding, with enhanced support beyond £500k

• Credits cover first-party Google products: Cloud Run, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, and the Gemini family of AI models

• Vertical-specific cohorts exist for robotics, health, and life sciences startups

• Technical guidance on scaling architecture from MVP to thousands of users

Perhaps most importantly, they emphasise that support isn't just about handing over credits—it's about human connection. As Alex puts it:

"My job is to make sure that anyone who wants to build their dreams can do it, whether it's funded, whether it's from their basement alone."

The AI Revolution Is Already Here

The conversation took a fascinating turn when discussing AI's impact. Kim demonstrated the productivity gains by rebuilding a project from 2014 that originally took six months—this time, it took an afternoon, and the AI-assisted version actually performed better.

Real-world applications are equally inspiring: startups are now using AI to fold previously "unfoldable" proteins to cure diseases, whilst others are automating the entire startup creation process end-to-end.

The Takeaway

This episode perfectly captures where the tech ecosystem is heading: experienced founders bringing their hard-won wisdom into supporting the next generation, armed with cutting-edge tools and genuine passion for solving problems.

Whether you're bootstrapping or scaling with serious funding, this conversation will show you exactly where to find the support you need.

Listen to the full episode on the Cambridge Tech Podcast and find Alex and Kim on LinkedIn to explore how Google can support your startup's growth.

Subscribe to the Cambridge Tech Podcast now, you won't want to miss this one.

Produced by Joe Donaghy of Cambridge TV. Supported by media partner Business Weekly.

Subscribe on all major podcast platforms or visit cambridgetechpodcast.com. If this episode moved you, a five-star review really does help others find the show. 🎧

AI Transcript

00:00

James Parton

Technology moves fast and now so can you. Discover polestar, the all electric performance brand vehicles redefining how we drive. Precision engineering, minimalist design and software that evolves with you. Experience it at Holdham Group in Norwich and Bury St Edmunds, or let us bring the test drive to your door. Proud sponsors of the Cambridge Tech podcast, Polestar Electric Performance Redefined. Discover@holdengroup.co.uk Polestar Foreign. Welcome to the Cambridge Tech Podcast, Talking all things technology from the heart of the UK's tech capital. Here are your hosts, Faye Holland and James Parton. Hi, I'm James.

00:59

Faye Holland

And I'm Faye. So, James, it's July.

01:03

James Parton

I know.

01:03

Faye Holland

What are you? Upscale.

01:04

James Parton

It's scary, isn't it? Well, I'm on holiday, so my commitment to the podcast is unmatched. Cause I'm in Palmer and I'm taking time away from my vacation to join the podcast.

01:14

Faye Holland

Right. So I love Palmer and I think that's brilliant and I hope you're having a nice holiday. So please don't take this the wrong way or maybe do. Are you saying my commitment isn't there because I didn't record when I was on holiday?

01:28

James Parton

I'm glad we're back together because we've gone through a couple of weeks now, haven't we? Whereas one of us has been away, so it's nice to be back together.

01:33

Faye Holland

Oh, thanks. You've redeemed yourself. So did you, before you left to go on holiday, did you actually get any work done?

01:39

James Parton

A little bit, yeah. Wrapping up a few things. Spent some time at Trinity discussing all things entrepreneurship and planning. This year's Trinity Bradfield Prize caught up with Caroline Hyde. So lots of interesting ideas for content for later in the year. So, yeah, I've got a few bits and pieces. How about you?

01:54

Faye Holland

Just on the subject Caroline Hyde, and this will freak her out. She was in my dream the other day. I mean, literally, she was sitting at this big, long table and with load speed and, oh, there's fate. I mean, it's very bizarre. I think I should be analyzed at some point in time. There we go. So I'm riding the wave of Manchesterism. So for our international listeners who don't know what that is, there's a lot of political things going on at the moment. So it's quite a good time to have a project going on that links Cambridge and Manchester, especially with some of the stakeholders involved. So it's very good. It means we are getting a crazy amount of traction. So the phone and the inbox and the LinkedIn is going a little bit crazy at the moment, but it's all good, right?

02:42

Faye Holland

It's all good progress stuff. So that's been quite exciting. So it took up most of last week and also a lot of this week as well. But the other thing I did last week was I went to the Cambridge Angels summer party, which is definitely one of those major things on the calendar each year. And Amy Weatherup, who's friend of the podcast and Robert Swan did a double act as the new chairs of Cambridge Angels. So that was really good as well.

03:09

James Parton

Nice. Nice. Yeah, I, I won't say this out loud, but I chose to watch the England World cup game instead. But don't tell anyone that. So should we move on to this week's news?

03:20

Faye Holland

Yeah, let's twist.

03:21

James Parton

Okay, so our first story. Data has been released from the British Business Bank Small Business Equity Tracker which shows the east of England secured just over 1 billion pounds in equity investment across 146 deals in 2025, making it the third highest region in the UK by investment value. The report also highlights how AI is reshaping the UK startup economy with AI firms attracting a record 44% of all smaller business equity investment in 2025. Equity in the east of England continues to be boosted by university spinouts. 15% Of all university spinouts raising equity in the UK were from this region. Furthermore, 13% of all UK university spinouts were founded in the region.

04:06

James Parton

Later this year, the British Business Bank's new East of England Investment Fund will be launched offering a range of commercial finance options with loans from £25,000 to pound 2 million, an equity investment of up to 5 million.

04:19

Faye Holland

That's great news. So next up we have Cambridgeshire Technology innovator Paragraph, who have added to its world leading credentials by adding three international heavyweights to a new advisory committee. Paragraph is already a global leader in the commercialization of graphene based electronics, but it's gearing up for additional growth. Its new advisory committee will include Oreste Donzella, Jean Michel, Richard and Thomas Pilichug. Oreste and Jean Michel will also join the board as non executive directors. So congratulations to all of those.

04:55

James Parton

And our final story this week, Cambridge Future Tech, the deep tech venture studio based at the Breathfield Centre, has acquired Vest Coast Capital which has bases in Silicon Valley and New York. Vest coast is an investment and advisory firm specialising in the capitalization and commercialization of transformative early stage technologies. Owen Thompson, founder and CEO of Cambridge Future Tech, said the acquisition of Vesco Capital grows our capabilities with a permanent CFT presence in the US as well as bolstering our existing portfolio of over 20 deep tech companies. This acquisition reflects the flow of capital and commercial partnerships that define both markets and adds to our growing investment portfolio alongside SPVs and our sister fund, FutureTech VC. So fantastic news for Mo in there. And you can listen to our interview with Owen back in episode 163.

05:47

Faye Holland

Yeah, congratulations. I mean, they're going great guns, aren't they? I saw some of their social posts over at the House of Commons with an event with MP last week as well, so they really seem to be getting some great traction. So onto today's episode where we talk with Alex Belliard and Kim Eun Kim, who give us some really good insight into both working at Google and how they support early stage businesses. Welcome Alex Kameron. It's great to have you with us today. So let's start by introducing yourselves. Alex, do you want to go first?

06:29

Alexandre Béliard

Yeah. Hi, James. Hi Faye. It's great to be here. I'm a Googler. I grew up in the us, studied in the uk, started working a bit in Ireland. I founded a startup before joining Google. Before that I worked a bit in Station F in Paris and before that I studied computer science and business at UCL in London.

06:51

Kimoon Kim

I'm Camille. I'm a customer engineer at Google. It's been five years working for this great company and before I was a technical founder in two companies. So my journey has been helping startups use Google's two best practices because I have seen them in my previous sort of startup world. What did the startup do? We were AI Machine Learning Consulting back in 2014 and we helped companies or industries like banking, insurance, telecommunications leverage AI.

07:28

James Parton

Amazing. So let's maybe dig a little bit deeper into some of that experience because I mean, both of you have been founders, so I think that is really interesting to explore. Pretty much every week on the podcast we're talking to a founder, so it'd be great to get your experience. And Alex, you've jumped around in different kind of countries, so I guess you've seen lots of different ecosystems and lots of different approaches there. So maybe both of you could talk us through those entrepreneurial explorations you've been on. And maybe the question I'm most interested in hearing the answer to is you both built companies. What made you then want to join Google? What was that kind of transition? What was the kind of motivation for, rather than being an entrepreneur going into a company the size of Google?

08:10

Kimoon Kim

Yeah, maybe I can start that first. After my university I Studied engineering. Me and my friend, we wanted to do something different. So as you can tell from my accent, I'm not from the United Kingdom, I'm from South Africa. So I was born in South Korea, moved to South Africa and did all my schooling and university there, did my engineering degree. And I decided with me and my friend that back in 2012, 2013, one of the great leaps in technology was cloud. Most of the enterprises were building tins, buying tins, having servers. But out comes this great technology where you log into a website and you can spin up a virtual machine and then stop it on a button.

09:00

Kimoon Kim

Whereas the traditional way of maybe stopping a machine would be to actually drive your way, the data center, plug in a USB and start working on it. So that felt quite revolutionary at that time. And the reason why we wanted to start something entrepreneurial is because I did an internship at a software dev company and I felt immediately that it wasn't something that I wanted to do. I would be on a desk, I would be solving lots of great problems and building something. But I didn't get that freedom that I wanted to by going out and building and meeting great founders and solving different sort of problems instead of one specific problem. So that was one of the reasons that I wanted to be that founder.

09:53

Kimoon Kim

And another thing is as soon as I started making that jump or thinking about starting my own startup, it like immediately after sleeping and waking up, it was the only thing that I wanted to do was build the companies as opposed to waking up and feeling that dread of oh no, I have to drive to work, I have to open up a computer. So it mostly came down to my emotional well being. And after maybe a period of 10 years or so, the reason why I wanted to join Google is because I worked with great people who worked at Google and they were saying how great the company is, how clever the people are. So I just wanted to work with great people. So naturally, yeah, applied at Google and went into these interviews and got in.

10:49

Faye Holland

So what happened to your business, Camille? Did you exit it, wrap it up, sell it and what was.

10:55

Kimoon Kim

Yeah, so the first company. So I did two sort of stints. The first company was doing cloud stuff. That company got sold off to Deloitte. So that's a great story there. And then the second company that focused more on machine learning and AI consulting, that still carried on and haven't, I've exited by selling my shares to my founders because yeah, it became like, we're very successful, we had lots of engineers. But it came to I, my Emotional sort of being wasn't there. So I decided to leave the baton to the founders and started to move on to something different and work with more startups. So yeah, Google gave me that opportunity.

11:46

James Parton

And Alex, what was your path like?

11:49

Alexandre Béliard

So I started a bit differently than Kimun ended in the same company though. I started around a tutoring company. So I grew up in the us Tutoring prices are crazy there. I mean you can be at 100, 150 an hour. So I created a platform to cut that in half and asked the best students if they'd be willing to give out 50, $60 hour classes instead of 100, 120. And they were. And I built that platform and working on it, I realized how when you're a founder, whatever initial motivations you have, if you want to continue, you have to be attached to a certain mission or certain passion. And then in that case mine was making sure that all students had equal access to opportunity to study and to get the right results and to go to a good uni.

12:37

Alexandre Béliard

That ended for multiple reasons that venture. And at that moment I realized that longer term I'd love to come back and be a founder, but shorter term, how could I be around as many founders as possible, learn from them to get these tools to get that emotional build as Kimun touched on to later on be a founder. And I think that's what drove me to one, join Station F for some time and two, join Google where we meet founders every day. We meet, we understand things they feel, we understand what success looks like for them. The long term vision is to go back into these courageous shoes that a founder wear.

13:15

James Parton

I think that's really interesting. And we talk to founders every week. Like I say on the podcast and often that using entrepreneurship and founding a business to ultimately join a larger company is not something we often talk about. So I think that's really insightful to kind of hear that those experiences actually open doors into global leaders like Google.

13:35

Faye Holland

It's almost like it's the best of both worlds, right? Isn't it? You've had the experiences which makes it even better when you go into somewhere like Google. So let's talk a little bit about the roles. But before we do that, what about how is it difficult to get into Google? You've got to expect it's highly competitive.

13:53

Alexandre Béliard

I'll take a shot at this. Kiwan, please help me out after. I think it is difficult to get in. I think it's important to know what you want your in for. It's not an into Google, it's what role do you want and which team do you want? Google has hundreds of thousands of employees in different cities, different regions. If you can, one, narrow it down, two, find people that work there to get their advice. Are you certain that's where you want to work? And three, it's, I think, really about leveraging what you've done in the past or working towards it to apply it into the role you're going to do at Google. That's where the understanding of your role is very important. You want to make sure there's an alignment on both of these steps. The process after that is pretty straightforward.

14:38

Alexandre Béliard

There's between three and five interviews depending on every role. And Google I find amazing in their interview process because of how clear it is. There's rubrics, there's really clear processes which makes that opportunity equal for everyone. That applies.

14:56

Faye Holland

I think I found that quite traumatic having three to five interviews for someone who hasn't had an interview for probably over two decades.

15:03

James Parton

Was your experience similar?

15:06

Kimoon Kim

Yeah, quite similar. My, my sort of process is lots of people or people that I meet often say, how hard is it to get into Google? And I say that it's. I mean, if you have the right skill sets, it makes your path easier. But I also say sometimes it's about timing because in some sort of calendar year there might be more roles and on some calendar year that might be less roles. So it's all about timing, making sure that you are prepared. And just as Alex said, like, we provide an easy way to prepare for those interviews and you have lots of sort of strategies or preparation guides on YouTube that other people can share on their journey because every role has different interview process.

15:57

Kimoon Kim

One of the interviews that I think it's quite standard across the Google sort of landscape is an interview called the Googliness. So it's quite fun where you show how googly you are, how friendly, how you interact with your peers, et cetera. I think that sort of interview was one of the standout interview for me when I was going through that process,.

16:22

Alexandre Béliard

I might add quickly. I think resilience is also important. I know a lot of people that tried to join Google got drifted a first time, a second time, and then it was the third or fourth time that went through in my experience. For example, I applied, it's a funny story. I apply and then the next day I see a rejection email from the recruiter and that was for an internship. And so I replied to the recruiter in a short email saying, Hey, I think we could, I think I deserve a shot at this for A, B, C. And then I receive a reply to that email within the next couple of hours saying oh wow, you know what, let's have a chat next day. And so that's how the processes started for me.

17:00

Alexandre Béliard

And it was an initial rejection but I think at the end of the day people are human in the back so if you can get to them, you can really make your chance and make yourself stand out.

17:11

James Parton

Yeah, that is really interesting actually. I wonder if that's actually engineered in the process to spot the people that aren't going to just take that first rejection. But Kimun, you obviously perform a technical role. What's the kind of technical side of that interview process like? Is it pretty demanding in terms of your knowledge level on different technologies for what was that experience like?

17:31

Kimoon Kim

Yeah, so I think when I applied five years ago, the process is a bit different to now. But when I first applied there's something called role related knowledge interview. So it was more around how technical you are, how do you take a problem that the interviewer gives you and how you go into deep put deep dive into it. So I always say to people, you don't know what you know. So if an interviewer is interviewing you, he or she can see by the way you answer these questions which are quite vague and it depends how deep technical you can get into. So you're not trying to solve the problem at a higher level, but you also need to go into some technical details and the interviewer will either say okay, you're going too technical into it, let's move on to another sort of area.

18:26

Kimoon Kim

Or she or he might say okay, that's quite high level, let's go a bit technical. So the interviewer kind of steers in a way that you need to go into. But yeah, it's quite vivid even till now. One of the interviewer asked me one question and I was like, I don't know the answer to that and it's okay not to know answer to that because during that time I was like, oh, I got one answer wrong and I thought I failed the interview. But the interviewer in itself wanted to say that hey, you don't need to know everything, you just need to make sure that you're honest about it. And how would you, once you don't know these questions, how would you go about maybe finding out those problems? So yeah, it's not a like a one dimensional right or wrong sort of way.

19:18

Kimoon Kim

It's more about how are you as an individual, how rounded are you? How are you able to solve these complex problems or issues?

19:26

Faye Holland

That's really interesting. Thanks, Camille, because I think for anyone interested in getting a role in Google, they're going to get some good pieces of information from that. Alex, I'm interested to know a little bit more about what your current role is and what you do on a day to day basis.

19:43

Alexandre Béliard

Yeah, definitely. I work for UK startups, specifically in Cambridge, around Cambridge, in the whole East Anglia region. My job is to find motivated founders that are growing their ideas into startups and to find these startups and understand how Google can help them grow. So that takes different channels, whether that's financially with credits, whether that's through technical help. My job is to make sure that anyone who wants to build their dreams can do it, whether it's funded, whether it's from their basement alone. My job is to help these startups grow within the uk.

20:32

Faye Holland

Are you a startup founder, considering launching or relocating your business in Cambridge? What if Cambridge, one of Europe's leading deep tech hubs, was easier to access than ever? Introducing Launch Cambridge, a powerful new initiative bringing together trusted local experts in workspace, legal, finance, banking and relocation, giving you a seamless de risked path into the UK's most dynamic innovation ecosystem. Visit launchcambridge.com for more information. So you mentioned that you're up and down to Cambridge quite often. You were recently a Cambridge Wide Open Week as well. Have you spotted any interesting startups that you can talk about?

21:26

Alexandre Béliard

There's a couple of interesting startups that I meet, I think every day, every week, especially when I go to Cambridge. I think that connection that you get with the founder directly translates their vision and their emotion, whereas you don't get that as much or as easily when you talk to them online. Cambridge Wide Open Week is the first time I've been and I highly recommend any founders from the region to go next year. Just because of its focus around life science, bio startups, their mission is anywhere around solving cancer, to folding proteins, to helping anything related with cells. And it's just fabulous to meet these founders who all have that drive to solve a bigger problem than what's happening in their country. It's really about helping the world on a bigger scale.

22:16

James Parton

And kimmu, you provide that kind of depth of technical support as and when these startups need that additional help.

22:24

Kimoon Kim

Yeah, so I come in at a stage when a startup is thinking about scaling because when they built their MVP or poc, the architecture could be quite scrappy. But the founders, when they start getting enough funding, they start seeing traction. That's when the technical engineering problem starts becoming a bit of an issue for them. Because when you're starting to handle maybe 10 or 20 people, it's fine. Having a single sort of monolithic architecture is fine. But as soon as they start hitting a thousand, ten thousand sort of users, that's when they start thinking about scaling and issues start creeping in like databases or load balancing. And that's when I come in and say, hey, this is the best practices. This is the architecture that you can build. These are the products from Google that would be able to help solve your problems.

23:21

Kimoon Kim

And because I've seen many architectures at Google and also before joining Google with helping a lot of the enterprise customers, I can be that sounding board to say, hey, I've seen a lot of companies do this and it didn't work, or I've seen it work like that and it worked really well. So I come in as like the technical trusted advisor for the startups.

23:44

James Parton

Awesome. And we're definitely going to have a bit of a deep dive on the product lines and the kind of technologies that you work with before we just move on to that. Maybe. Alex, could you just. We obviously have a big part of our audience are aspirational founders or early stage founders. What's the criteria for the program? What kind of companies are you looking for? Is that defined by revenue or fundraising, size of company? Give the listeners a flavor of the kind of companies you're scouting for.

24:10

Alexandre Béliard

That's a great question, James. We have a lot of startups that apply to the program and I think it's about timing. You want to make sure that when you apply to this Google for Startups program, which allows you to have credits to have access to technical help to keymoons here. Brilliant knowledge. I think it's important to apply at the right time and I'd recommend any startup that has raised more than 50, 100k to start applying because you'd be eligible for 25k in credits and any startups that have raised more than north of 500, 600k to apply because you really can get that breadth of one, up to $250,000 in credits and two, a wide access to different events.

24:53

Alexandre Béliard

I think when you're a founder it's important to get the credits, it's important to have that technical help, but it's very important to know who to speak to and have these connections to plug you well within the industry or outside of the industry. And I think Google here plays A strong part in understanding and knowing the ecosystem. And when a startup, for example, comes to me and says, hey, I'm trying to break into this region or to speak to this person, what can be done? To what extent can you help? And I think that's an advantage that we sometimes overlook. It's the access that can be provided to startups to grow on top of the resources they're burning through right now.

25:31

Faye Holland

And so that's a good insight into the startup program that you're involved in. What other types of programs do you have on offer?

25:40

Alexandre Béliard

There's a really breadth of different programs. So there's the Google for Startups programs that really includes any startup that has been funded and or created in the last 10 years. Then there's programs for different verticals. So for example, there's a cohort of robotics startups partnered with DeepMind that just closed. They took in a batch of 15 to 30 different startups. There's a new one opening up at the end of the year for health. Or they'll take for example, startups from the Cambridge Wide Open Week and create this cohort of only life science or health startups to help them grow, to help them get these connections and to work together with a mentor with guided engineers to grow. So really there's a couple of different programs per industry or vertical.

26:25

James Parton

That's cool. So yeah, let's talk about the product lines and the technologies. I mean, obviously Google has a vast array of different product lines. So the support guidance credits you offer is that kind of around a particular product vertical or are you spread across all the different product lines? Walk us through the kinds of products that are in scope and the kind of technical support and technologies that you would, that you offer.

26:47

Kimoon Kim

Maybe I can take that one. So the cloud credits cover first party products on Google. So anything like that Google created like cloud running, which is our sort of fully managed product that founders can build to scale their application on. If they need a data warehouse, we have BigQuery and all the way to Cloud SQL for their database requirements. If they want to host something like PostgreSQL. What the cloud credits does not cover is third party solutions. So anything that was not created by Google, the credits don't cover that. But everything From Gemini to BigQuery, Google Maps covers that.

27:30

James Parton

And when you're having a technical conversation, especially an architecture conversation is a conversation that's grounded in realism that you appreciate that startups are going to have a mixed vendor kind of situation. Do you help them advise on how Google can play nicely with other technologies or is it a more ring fence conversation around the Google platforms themselves?

27:51

Kimoon Kim

No, it's all about what's best for the startups. So if the startups needs a combination of vendor products with Google products, our engineers provide the best sort of practice for it. So even if the vendor product comes out stronger. Yeah, we do advocate to say it's because it's stronger here in this type of product. We would recommend this way of doing it. So our sort of advices are always geared towards solving the founders sort of problems using either Google Cloud products or vendor products based on our experiences.

28:25

James Parton

Okay, that's good to hear. I mean we'll definitely come on and talk about AI because that's dominating so many conversations. But I guess my other question before we move on to that was we talk a lot about the marketing side of startups as well. So can you also bring in specialism and support around the kind of Google marketing products like SEO and Google AdWords and those kinds of things?

28:45

Alexandre Béliard

That's an interesting question, James. I was working in ads before working in cloud at Google as well and SEO is a huge topic for startups, huge topic for companies. It's important to know that Google Ads and Google Cloud are two complete different companies. We often get requests from startups to work directly with marketing to help with SEO. I think there's two points to that part. The first one is startups usually ask for marketing later down the road. In the beginning it's not so much about marketing because you need to target your audience so much more niche than what Internet can help you with or what search can provide you with. You really need when you're going to market to get these human connections, to get your test out, to get your feedback, to get that loop.

29:32

Alexandre Béliard

That proximity to the customer is much bigger than what SEO can actually get you. The second bit to that is once you become a later stage company and you get you grow from being a startup to a scale up and you really want to do that SEO and drive progress from there. We definitely can put you in touch with the Google Ads team. However, it's important to know that there's two different companies. So it'll be a simple introduction to the team. But after that there's nothing much we can do just because of how different Alphabet pushes these companies to be.

30:04

James Parton

Could you walk us through what that looks like? If you're out in the field talking to customers every day, do those insights, does that feedback work its way back into your roadmap and product Enhancements.

30:15

Kimoon Kim

Yeah. So we do that a lot in our day to day job because sometimes the customer knows the product better than us sometimes and this is just because they are using it constantly, they're pushing the limits of what the products can give. And sometimes when the customer requires certain features and it's not available, what we do is as a customer engineer, I reach out to the product team to say this is a problem we're having, this is the customer that's having these problems. Is there any solutions to that? And based on that, feedback to the product team can orchestrate two sort of actions from that conversation is one, they can either put in a feature request from the customer that will be on the roadmap towards future improvements of the product or secondly, depending on the product team because different product teams work differently.

31:10

Kimoon Kim

Sometimes they want to meet with the customer and have an interview or customers problems so that they could take that into consideration for the next version release. So we do listen to the customers and we do try to build our stack so that most of these issues can be solved as quickly as possible. And yeah, most of these product requests, we can help facilitate that. As a customer engineer I think that's a strong message.

31:40

James Parton

Right. Because I think often the founders might think, well right now I'm not using Google technology, so why would I want to talk to Google? But the insights that you can gather from those conversations I bet are hugely valuable to both them in the future and to Google as a business.

31:54

Kimoon Kim

Yeah, completely agree. I mean if we don't receive that feedback signal from customers, then sometimes we don't know which direction we need to go towards. And sometimes having feedback is the best form of sort of way to get a sense where our product direction needs to go.

32:14

James Parton

AI is obviously dominating every conversation that we have right now. Could you spend some time just walking us through what kind of Google's product line looks like around AI and those technologies?

32:26

Kimoon Kim

Yeah, so at Google we have this model called Gemini which is a family of models that sort of covers everything AI within our stack. The reason why we think it's quite powerful is because of its multimodality. So whether you wanting to put images or texts or videos, the model would be able to understand as a whole. We've released Gemini 3.5 Flash, which I think is a quite capable model just because at a lower sort of token cost price, you get better pro level thinking compared to our previous models. So for anyone out there who's wanting to start experimenting with Gemini models, I would say try out Gemini 3 3.5 flash. And yeah, reach out to us or your Google representative and give us your feedback on how it's performing compared to other models.

33:28

Faye Holland

How is AI impacting or evolving your own personal roles?

33:34

Kimoon Kim

I remember back in 2013, 2014, I had to build this demo of a project. What it essentially was tracking the eye movement using a webcam. And it took me maybe six months of development, just trying to work through the bugs, trying to code up something and using open libraries like OpenCV out there and being nostalgic of it, I wanted to see with the use of AI, how quickly I could build that same project without referencing any of the code from back then. And guess how long it took. Just a simple guess.

34:15

James Parton

It's probably scary, isn't it? Half a day.

34:19

Kimoon Kim

Yeah, you're quite close. So it took an afternoon. And what was more scary was it actually worked better. And then I went back, took the code and I said, okay, this is what I built 10 years ago. What improvements can you make on it? And it started giving me 15 improvements that I haven't considered before. So it just shows you how AI is changing the way we work, the way everyone can work, how productivity can just increase. And this is just from one area of my experience, the technical experience, that it's improving. Yeah, maybe from a productivity standpoint, maybe Alex, maybe others affect you.

35:06

Alexandre Béliard

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I'd be curious, Kimun, to know after, if you think it, when building products, if AI can derive founders from their objective or their goal because of how easily it is to build cool features and to just stop on stuff to what you want to sell after. But from a productivity standpoint, it really changes my life. I mean, whether it's from filtering my emails automatically, from understanding what's happening in my Google ecosystem, and mapping out different startups I work with that exist. I have news, daily news that tell me which startups have raised. It will draft automatic emails with context based on those as well. When we demo different solutions to startups, there's an amazing solution that we're working on right now called Gemini Enterprise that helps have all of the startup's data secure in one spot.

36:02

Alexandre Béliard

And from that people can. Or startups can pull information from it, which would help build and give context to whatever you do. We can make a demo and just ask an AI to tailor it to a certain startup and it just changes our life and helps us really focus on what I just talked about before, but connecting to the human and meeting the founders in person because we don't have all that admin work to do in the backyard, that the real work really is meeting and understanding what the problems are and how we can solve them.

36:32

James Parton

Yeah, I mean, I guess on that point, I guess one of the most rewarding parts of the role is just the diversity of founders and startups that you're meeting. Are there a couple of, like, use cases that you've come across on the AI side of things that you just really love and would maybe inspire people listening to this?

36:49

Alexandre Béliard

There's two that I really like. I won't give their names, but the first one is so Auth is a project that existed within Google to fold protein to help cure certain diseases. But not all proteins can be folded. And now that AI has really advanced, I've seen this startup take all the proteins that could not be folded and ask the AI, okay, how can we fold them, how can we cure and if it's not foldable, what can we do to make it happen? And I just find it amazing to admit one, that sometimes an AI will be that's better than some of our PhDs and we'll have that knowledge, faster knowledge as well to understand how we can solve these problems. And I think working with AI to solve it is fantastic. I've seen another startup, I haven't worked with them directly.

37:36

Alexandre Béliard

They just came out of YC in California. It's a startup that allows you to create startups by itself. So it'll create a startup or financial project directly and connect everything. You just have to tell it what to do, what type of startups you want, and it'll create the connectors, it'll create your stripe account, it'll make everything you want. I think it's an amazing way to discover new horizons of what entrepreneurship can look like. I think what we're going to see in the next couple of years will just be fabulous.

38:07

Faye Holland

Yeah, we've certainly been talking to a few startups recently that are much more AI native. I can't remember who it was. There was one who was Literally everything that they do is all AI to the point where they're doing themselves out of a job as well. So I think you we're going to see an awful lot of change. It's been really great talking to you both today. Thank you so much for all of your insights, both on working at Google and what you actually do at Google. Where can people go to get more information?

38:36

Alexandre Béliard

Either contact us directly on LinkedIn. My name is Alexandre Belliard and then Kimun Kim on LinkedIn you can find us easily and if you're applying to the startup program, feel free to just type in Startup Program on Google. They have a strong SEO and you'll get the credits from there directly. You can apply and we'll be in touch quickly and I look forward to meeting you all in person.

38:57

Faye Holland

That's brilliant. Thank you very much for your time.

38:59

Kimoon Kim

Thank you.

39:05

James Parton

Today's show was produced by Joe Donaghy of Cambridge TV and supported by our media partner, Business Weekly. The Cambridge Tech Podcast is available on all major podcast platforms and on CambridgeTechpodcast. Com. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please give it a five star review. It'll really help others discover the show.

Transcribed by https://fireflies.ai/

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