Mar 26, 2025 · 31m · saastr
The Secrets Inside Google Cloud’s Growth with Sarah Kennedy, Vice President Google Cloud Marketing
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In this episode of SaaStr What's New, Google Cloud VP of Marketing Sarah Kennedy and Jason Lemkin discuss the drivers behind Google Cloud's 30% growth, the economics of AI infrastructure, developer-led procurement, and strategic enterprise partnerships like Salesforce.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Jason holds 35.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Jason as informed peer 5.2 Guest teaching 3.7 Guest disagreement 0.7 Jason pushing back 2.7
speaking balance: gold is Jason, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 15:21 Sarah defends why enterprise security and data estates matter
When Jason questions why Salesforce infrastructure choice matters given Salesforce is already secure, Sarah gently rejects the premise to emphasize that AI performance cannot be separated from data estate locality.
Hardest push from Jason ▶ 3:19 Jason demands the real drivers of market share gainsJason pushes Sarah to drop generic marketing summaries and explain the exact competitive differentiators winning customers over to Google Cloud.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 15:24 Sarah explains the centrality of data estates in AISarah educates Jason on how modern enterprise AI is tethered directly to the underlying storage and data estate layer like BigQuery.
Jason holds their own ▶ 29:21 Jason contextualizes AI UX history via Google PhotosJason demonstrates domain expertise by framing modern thinking models against Google's early automated AI products where internal reasoning was previously hidden.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Jason as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Jason pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core Pillars Fueling Google Cloud's 30% Growth | 5 | 4 | 1 | 5 | Jason directly challenges Sarah to push beyond generic marketing talking points and explain the exact drivers of Google Cloud's 30% growth. Sarah responds constructively by detailing how initial workload migrations turned into broader AI platform adoption. | |
| The Long-Game Go-To-Market Strategy and Developer Education | 5 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Jason cites long-term enterprise migration lifecycles and questions how sales teams manage patience without overt pushiness. Sarah outlines Google's long-game strategy focused on deep developer training and bottom-up adoption. | |
| Rapid AI Model Evolution and Enterprise Adoption | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Jason shares his own observations regarding Marc Benioff's enthusiasm on recent earnings calls and the productivity friction of multiple SaaS tools. Sarah expands on the Salesforce partnership details, including Agentforce and Google Workspace integration. | |
| Data Estates and Enterprise Security as AI Cornerstones | 5 | 5 | 1 | 5 | Jason questions why running Salesforce on Google Cloud matters if Salesforce is already enterprise-secure. Sarah clarifies that AI models fundamentally depend on data estate architecture, making co-located BigQuery and Google security layers critical. | |
| Helping CIOs Translate AI Terminology into Business Value | 6 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Jason shares data points from $100M+ scaleups seeing AI costs decline and asks what CIOs are seeing regarding cost versus ROI. Sarah explains that fear of falling behind outweighs raw cost concerns, aided by Google's backend TPU efficiencies. | |
| YouTube Scale, Creator Advocacy, and Small Business Storytelling | 5 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Jason highlights YouTube's dominance as a podcast and video platform and asks how that translates into enterprise and developer credibility. Sarah shares how internal cross-product learnings and creator advocacy campaigns drive organic adoption. | |
| Google Cloud Next '25 and the Resurgence of In-Person Events | 4 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Jason inquires whether large-scale physical events still deliver meaningful ROI compared to prior years. Sarah openly admits she previously doubted in-person events would rebound, then describes Next's rapid scaling to 32,000 attendees. | |
| Curating Google Next: The Fifty-Fifty Developer-Executive Ratio | 5 | 4 | 0 | 2 | Jason probes how Google balances event resources between existing accounts and new prospects, referencing past Google I/O developer compositions. Sarah explains that existing customers are often greenfield in AI and outlines the deliberate 50% developer target. | |
| Exploring Thinking Models, Multimodal AI, and Responsive Apps | 6 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Sarah demonstrates how she uses Gemini thinking models to analyze keynote table reads and live streaming inputs. Jason synthesizes this with the historical evolution of AI from background features like Google Photos into interactive, conversational apps. |
Statements from this episode (11)
Kennedy: Google Cloud tripled its $12B revenue run rate in five years
“I'm actually, it's my fifth year at Google, and I think when we started, we were at a twelve billion run rate, and now she said it's more than tripled”
Kennedy: Google Cloud was third in cloud, but first in AI
“We were the third place player for a long time in the cloud space, but we really are the first choice when it comes to AI.”
Kennedy: Enterprise AI procurement is almost entirely a developer-led motion
“It's almost primarily a developer led motion in pretty much every environment. CIOs have to be accountable and responsible, but they're learning, they're being taught by their developers, the things that they've been distant from for quite a while.”
Kennedy confirms Google Cloud's Salesforce partnership is worth multi-billions
“In the big B's. Yes.”
Kennedy: Employees only actually want to use Google Workspace and Slack
“For years, like large enterprises have had a lot of different opportunity and choice when it comes to collaboration and productivity platforms, but typically Only two of them people really want to use, and that's Google Workspace and Slack.”
Lemkin: Slack has become a tax on time and an unnecessary app
“I don't want to go to, honestly, I don't want to go to Slack. It's a tax on my time. It used to be wonderful and there's no knock on Slack. It's a great business, but it's become another browser or another app I have to do.”
Kennedy: Google Cloud secretly coaches CIOs to sell AI internally
“Giving them that language as a CIO to partner with their peers is a really important part of the value we bring, and we do that behind the scenes with them and educate them on, it's not just about what language they want to use, it's about the language they ne…”
Lemkin: Scaleups over $100M ARR no longer worry about AI compute costs
“The scale ups I work with, the ones at a hundred million or above, honestly, I don't hear a lot of worries about cost anymore. They've gotten good at it”
Lemkin: Application-level AI compute limits will disappear by next year
“I feel like we're going to enter an era maybe next year where there's no limits. It's at the application level. I'm not saying that ML engineers can't consume every GPU and GPU, but what I mean is at the application level, I think an era is going to come where…”
Kennedy: Most existing Google Cloud customers are entirely greenfield for AI
“With a portfolio as big as Google, we've got a ton of people That come in that had been existing quote, existing customers in the traditional marketing definition who are greenfield or prospects in the AI space. Most people are, right? Because it's so new. And…”