146 – A Top Google Sales Leader Investing In Partners to Fuel Hyper-Growth

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A Google Leader Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®

This decade of the ecosystem is marked by rapid growth and acceleration of digital natives – experts expect us to reach over 1 million SaaS solutions by the end of this decade. My friend Darren Mowry has held leadership roles at all three hyper scalers and joins to help us better differentiate his organization’s approach and why partners of all types and SaaS vendors should invest in building partnerships with Google. Darren Mowry is a top Google Sales Leader investing in partners to fuel hyper-growth.

In Darren’s words

Darren is a 25-year veteran of the high tech industry with a career that started in systems and management consulting and has led him to cloud computing.  He held multiple leadership roles at Microsoft for 10-years and joined AWS in the early days of the cloud where he spent 10-years in the US and Europe launching new businesses and leading large functions and geographies for the company.  Darren now leads Google Cloud’s Corporate Segment in North America where he is responsible for the company’s growing businesses focused on regional enterprises and startups/digital natives.

What You’ll Learn

  • His career journey and mission at Google (3:27)
  • Thomas Kurian’s Investment in Partners (10:03)
  • Question from our listeners, featuring Anne Wheatley (11:07)
  • A unique perspective, as a Microsoft, AWS, and now Google leader (15:57)
  • Why Google? (26:21)
  • What makes a great partner? (28:29)
  • Advice for ecosystem builders (31:30)
  • The 3 questions Darren asks often (39:42)

It was so great to welcome Darren Mowry. I hope you enjoy and learn from this amazing business leader as much as I enjoyed welcoming him to Ultimate Guide to Partnering®.

Quote From This Episode

“How do we make sure that we’re identifying and doubling down on the organizations that we think are going to have the most significant growth, right, a very common and normal thing for us to do. What’s important is that we’ve embedded partners in all of the aspects of this motion. We’re not just saying that the quote, tier three is going to be where we engage partners, right? That’s no way to build a partner ecosystem. And all of my experience working with you and other partner leaders over time proves to me that you have to feed a partnership, especially early on, you really have to fuel that partnership so that over time, you can have the kind of trust-based relationship and joint success models that are important for both organizations.“

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140 – One Google Executive Applies 10X Mindset to Improve Healthcare Outcomes with Andria McGonigle

126 – Hyper-Focus as a Growth Imperative to High-Performance Partnering with Tony Safoian of SADA.

107 – One Leader’s Focus, Taking Partnerships to the Next Level at Google.

97 – Focused Growth Investments, Google Premier Partners SADA’S Pioneering Alliance Program.

64 – Twenty Years, Leadership in Big and Meaningful Ways, with Tony Safoian, CEO of SADA.

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PartnerTap is the Founding Sponsor of Ultimate Guide to Partnering. PartnerTap is the only Partner Ecosystem Platform designed for the Enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align Channel Teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share while building a partner revenue engine.

Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Typos

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

partners, business, customers, google, organizations, cloud, microsoft, leader, companies, darren, aws, people, world, market, outcomes, events, opportunity, vince, absolutely, investment

SPEAKERS

Darren Mowry, Announcer, Vince Menzione

Darren Mowry  00:00

How do we make sure that we’re identifying and doubling down on the organizations that we think are going to have the most significant growth, right, a very common and normal thing for us to do. What’s important is that we’ve embedded partners in all of the aspects of this motion. We’re not just saying that the quote, tier three is going to be where we engage partners, right? That’s no way to build a partner ecosystem. And all of my experience working with you and other partner leaders over time, proves to me that you have to feed a partnership, especially early on, you really have to fuel that partnership so that over time, you can have the kind of trust based relationship and joint success models that are important for both organizations.

Announcer  00:38

Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to partnering in this podcast Vince Menzione, a proven industry sales and partner executive brings together technology leaders to discuss transformational trends and to deconstruct successful strategies to thrive and survive in the rapid age of cloud transformation. And now, your host, Vince Menzione.

Vince Menzione  01:02

Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering, where technology leaders come to optimize results through successful partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and my mission is to help leaders like you unlock the leadership principles and learnings of the best in the business to get partnerships right, optimize for success and deliver your greatest results. A top Google sales leader investing in partnerships to fuel the growth. This decade of the ecosystem is marked by rapid growth and acceleration of digital natives. Experts expect us to reach over 1 million SaaS based solutions by the end of the decade. My friend Darren Maori, who has held leadership roles at all three hyperscalers joins us on Ultimate Guide to partnering to help us better differentiate his organization’s approach, and why partners of all types and SAS vendors should invest in building partnerships with Google. I hope you enjoy this episode. As much as I enjoyed welcoming Darren Maori. Before we dive into the interview, I’m happy to announce that partner tap has become a founding sponsor of ultimate guide to partnering partner tap is the only partner ecosystem platform designed for the enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align channel teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share while building a partner revenue engine. I’m so excited to have them on board. Darren, welcome to the podcast.

Darren Mowry  02:38

Hey, great to be here events. I gotta tell you, I have listened to these over the months and years and a ton of people that I know that you and I have worked with. And I’m so flattered to be able to spend some time with you. So thanks for having me.

Vince Menzione  02:48

Well, I am so excited to finally welcome you to ultimate guide to partnering. You are Google sales leader, former Amazon leader who played a pivotal role in that organizations rise. And we met back at Microsoft. So really excited to welcome you today.

Darren Mowry  03:02

Yeah, thanks so much. I feel like it’s only yesterday that you and I were working in Microsoft together. I’m so thankful we’ve stayed connected. Yeah, I

Vince Menzione  03:09

feel like it was yesterday, we had a meeting. Oh, that was in your office. It was one of the offices. And I watched this meteoric rise over the years. So it’s just been great to watch. So for our listeners that may not know you. Can you tell us more about Darren?

Darren Mowry  03:24

Yeah, I’m happy to so listen vents. So I’ve spent the last 25 years and Ouch, that hurts me to say that number. But 25 years or so, in the high tech space. I started my career in the Washington DC area. In the large scale systems implementation and consulting world at beltway bandits, Anderson Consulting, pre Accenture, I joined the Microsoft partner ecosystem back in the internet boom. And that company went through a process of being sold to Dell professional services, which gave me this leap into Microsoft and my first role over in the pure software world. And if you can remember this, which I know you will, my job, believe it or not, then was to convince the world that Windows Server Active Directory and exchange were for real that they were enterprise class. And I think back now, as I’m sure you do, then some kind of laugh at some of the discussions we used to have when Lotus Notes was the collaboration platform and HP and IBM and Oracle ran the shop. So those early days to me were super special. We were on a mission to really change the way the world thought about technology. And I spent about 10 years at Microsoft in various roles all within the enterprise business before taking on a really special role, frankly, at this ecommerce book selling company that wanted to do something crazy from a cloud computing perspective. And obviously, that was Amazon Web Services or AWS. And I had a wonderful 10 year journey at AWS as well events where I started in North America. I then had an incredible opportunity to move to Europe, where I spent a number of years opening and leading some new markets I led business development for Europe, Middle East and Africa. I run some of the largest businesses outside of the US. And now I find myself hitting my six month anniversary at Google.

Vince Menzione  05:07

Wow, wow, that’s a lot to cover there. So first of all, I remember those days at Microsoft when the competition with people like IBM and Lotus Notes crazy. And then certainly I watched, I got to watch the 10 years, we kept in very close contact. During that period of time, I got to see all your social posts and your amazing family and your adventures around the world. And again, watching the meteoric rise of AWS during that time. And now six months, six months went by fast didn’t I remember, we reached out just when it happened at Google. So I really want to dive in here. There’s a lot of great conversation because of your unique, I’ll call it purview to this community that we talked about. So six months enroll Nash, and national sales are like Google responsible for the commercial business. And I want to deep dive on that. Can you share with us the why, what and the outcomes you hope to achieve in this role?

Darren Mowry  06:00

Yeah, sure events. And I’ll give you an idea of what I’m doing over here, and why I’m so jazzed and excited about it. So I’m leading what we’re calling the corporate segment for North America. So the United States and Canada and this business for Google Cloud is made up of two customer cohorts essentially, on one hand, we have the digital natives and the startup business, an area that I absolutely love to be a part of, because these companies, as they’re fast moving their founder and engineering lead, they’re very, very forward leaning when it comes to advanced technology. And these companies have flipped the economics of tech, right? I mean, that is, when you and I were working in Microsoft, in the old days, we would always equate the total opportunity to the largest customer in terms of employees and sockets, if you will, if you remember us using those terms.

06:45

It’s the only way we sold in fact,

Darren Mowry  06:48

absolutely absolutely in the cloud has created this incredible flipping mechanism that allows us to see 100 person gaming companies, generating hundreds of millions of dollars of consumption and spend, gone are the days where you can only make a coverage and a strategy decision based on the size of your customer, you’ve got to think a little bit more intelligently. And that digital native and startup space is a really, really special part of my business. The other side is what we call our regional enterprise business. So consider that the middle market, if you will, right companies that are anywhere from a few 100 million in revenue to a couple of billion dollars in revenue. Those companies have enterprise requirements. They have very, very hard business and technical challenges. And yet, many of the cloud platforms themselves have kind of skipped over that market. And yet, when I’ve done some research on that market potential, the mid market in North America generates $12 trillion into the GDP annually. There’s 42 million employees in the mid market in North America. And in fact, if we could put our arms around the middle market, you would find that it would be the sixth largest economy on Earth. And so the opportunity in the enterprise space that regional enterprise space can be underscored. It’s critically important and super exciting as well.

Vince Menzione  08:02

But you touch on two really important points here. First of all, I’ll call it the SAS economy. My friend Jamie McBain has been on the podcast multiple times coming back again. And there’s about 185,000, SAS software companies, they fall into that one category you’re talking about. And as you and I talked about, like Netflix wasn’t managed by Microsoft. Let’s get that on the table here. I mean, huge opportunity. The next Netflix is going to drive the economy of this specific transformation that we haven’t even recognized yet. Exactly.

Darren Mowry  08:32

No. I mean, Vince, when I’ve read some articles that I’m sure you have that says that at least 65% of the Fortune 500 didn’t exist 10 years ago. So if you put that in the context of where we are now, my mission back to what you said on that digital native side, my mission and my team’s mission, is to find the next fortune 500. And what a pretty incredible opportunity. That is.

Vince Menzione  08:53

Absolutely. And I love, like I said, I love the focus here. I love the focus on the mid market, because those are also the organizations that have the highest level and propensity to grow. Exactly right. This podcast focuses in on partnering Ultimate Guide to partnering and in fact, is the top rated podcast. In fact, we were in the top 100 pretty much the entire month of May. And your leader Thomas Kurian, has made significant investments in partner led sales growth. And in fact, Thomas recently came out and committed to 100% partner attach to Google’s b2b deals. It’s a big deal. What can you tell us about Thomas’s commitment and the company’s investment in partners?

Darren Mowry  09:34

Yeah, well, first of all events, I want to just congratulate you on what you’ve built here. And as you said, we’ve been fortunate to use the internet and social media to stay in touch over the years. But the approach that you bring to this, it’s the person you’ve always been at Microsoft and through the journey through now the focus you’ve had on partners and on understanding that this is all about shared outcomes comes out loud and clear in the work that you’re doing. So just first of all, congratulations for the work that you’re doing. I No, a bunch of us get a lot of value from that. And in terms of your question, that’s a great one, Thomas and our entire leadership team has made the decision that the path ahead is with partners period, we’re not going to build a competing professional services org and in our experience, that can create confusion for our partners and for our customers. And we believe that we’re at this really interesting point where we want to be known as creating amazing technology. And we want need our partners to bring this big scale this broad reach industry and technical specialization that our customers are demanding from us every single day. So this isn’t just an idea, this wasn’t just a headline for Thomas to get out in the press. As someone that’s running a complete partner driven and partner led business. We’re deploying programs and systems and even compensation models that make this real for the folks that show up every day and meet with our customers, as well as for our partners. So what I can say is, there’s wood behind that era events in a big way.

Vince Menzione  10:55

Well, and compensation is where the rubber meets the road, right? It drives the behavior we hope to see in this economy in this digital world that we work in. So we went out this past week, and I polled our listeners as to what they’d like to know from today’s interview. And one of our listeners came back and we leave from crayon, a top Microsoft and Google partner said, as we’re driving our go to market and doing the heavy lifting to bring deals to Google, in this new plant, does it encourage the field sellers to qualify leads and share them in reverse? In other words, share them back to the partners, and what expectations should Google’s partners have about their field sellers, about Google’s field sellers, driving qualified opportunities, and CO sell along with the partner?

Darren Mowry  11:50

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I know it’s the panacea of partnering right at the end of the day. And I’ll tell you a few things here. One, it’s great to hear from crayon. Quick aside, I had some great experiences with crayon in Norway. As a matter of fact, when we were building the business in the Nordics, so huge fan of crayon and glad to hear from them. What I’ll tell you is that as I said, we the structures, the compensation, and the motions really matter. And so in my business in North America, we’re going through this prioritization exercise, if you will, where we’re using internal and external metrics, as you would expect us to do is to assess of the 1000s and 1000s of organizations that are within our business, how do we make sure that we’re identifying and doubling down on the organizations that we think are going to have the most significant growth, right, a very common and normal thing for us to do, what’s important is that we’ve embedded partners in all of the aspects of this motion, we’re not just saying that the quote, tier three, it’s going to be where we engage partners, right? That’s no way to build a partner ecosystem. And all of my experience working with you and other partner leaders over time, proves to me that you have to feed a partnership, especially early on, you really have to fuel that partnership so that over time, you can have the kind of trust based relationship and joint success models that are important for both organizations. And so what we’re doing is, as I said, structuring the way partners engage with our highest, most successful highest potential customers, what is our joint selling opportunity, where, frankly, neither of us are incumbents? And what are we going to do around joint marketing and joint persona marketing? And then also, as I said, How do we lean in and provide investment, not only from a marketing perspective, but I’m providing significant amounts of investment, millions of dollars of investment, in fact, directly into partners to go experiment with customers build proofs of concepts and essentially offset the cost of the partner that they need to operate and grow. But to also not pass that on to the customer that I’m trying to win at the beginning as well. So that combined with some interesting compensation models that we’ve introduced in my business this year, that are very much about new logo acquisition, and market share gains, really allows us to, I think be uniquely positioned. In fact, I was in Florida last week, I had the chance to meet your son. And we were all around the table with a few dozen services partners, managed services partners, ISV partners, consulting partners, and it was a very energizing and inspiring few days to not only see partners speaking to each other, even when their competitors around what they see from Google, but to have Google with that table, lean in and walk away with a set of actions gives me that very high level of competence events, that these aren’t just words and very much kind of an operating model that we’re implementing,

Vince Menzione  14:32

while the investments are striking. And by the way, for those who don’t know, my son in full disclosure is in the Google ecosystem. He works for one of Google’s top partners SADA Systems, which I think might have been met that table. But it is very striking to see the level of investments in terms of resources, the millions of dollars you quote here in terms of investment dollars to help organizations help partners grow the business with Google, in fact, and then did you say 10s of 1000s of opportunities? How are you tracking all of that? Yeah, absolutely.

Darren Mowry  15:04

So my business in North America is that quote named account business, right. So we haven’t we’ve ringfence where we believe the opportunity is for the year. And that alone is over 8000 organizations. And so if you think of no matter how large and how quick I tried to hire, it’s just a necessity, frankly, right in the sense that partners will and absolutely are key to helping me reach all of those customers. And as I said, not just reach, but provide relevant outcome based engagements and customers, right. I think that is sometimes the overlooked perspective, when I think about partnerships that we very quickly go to partners and say, hey, help us go talk to customers that we either don’t have time, or we don’t have resources to go to. And while that is interesting and important to the partnership, what’s really fascinating for me is the depth of experience specialization and expertise that these partners bring

Vince Menzione  15:54

to us. It’s striking to see the investments. But I want to shift a little bit here, because as I said earlier, you have a unique perspective, several years, 10 years as a leader of Microsoft 10 years on that rocket ship. And you were there at the early days, when AWS was investing, you were one of the early leaders in that organization, and now over to Google. And so you’ve gotten to see that across these three hyperscalers. Is it fair to ask you to compare and contrast the three? It’s fair?

Darren Mowry  16:25

I’ll tell you events that you can imagine that it’s a question I get asked very, very often from partners, but also from customers, right that I go in, they see my LinkedIn profile. And it’s something that I’m asked very, very, very often, especially as you said, after spending 20 plus years, at kind of the three major cloud platforms, I’ll tell you, I really don’t spend a lot of brain cells comparing what we’re doing here at Google, to what I experienced at AWS and Microsoft, I, I do have some observations that are based on what I’m hearing from customers and what the markets telling me, and I absolutely will share those with you. The first thing that I’m finding is the market opportunity for cloud actually is so much larger than what we’re all realizing at the moment, whether it be these industry analysts or financial analysts, the estimates for just public cloud for this year alone, of the total available market, north of $750 billion, with a be right reaching a trillion dollars in the course of a single year. So while many folks want to compare the revenue of the three of us, Google, Microsoft, and AWS, I’ll tell you that I and my leadership team are staying focused on getting as big as we can, as fast as we can, and really servicing customers. And we want to be a very, very large company over time. And we’re on the trajectory to do just that. Secondly, I will tell you that customers are leaning in with us, because we’re taking a very kind of different approach to what we believe is this next wave of cloud computing, and I’ll share with you a few of these points vents that one of these pillars for us is data. Google, as you’re probably not surprised, brings a tremendous amount of heritage and expertise around data. And so this concept of the data cloud that we’re bringing to our customers to help drive large scale analytics, very, very complex data based workloads, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, is a very different and unique value proposition in the cloud space at the moment. And that data cloud for Google is a huge, huge investment area for us. Another pillar of our mission is around open cloud. And so when you think of what open means, it doesn’t just mean that Google, for example, is investing millions and millions of lines of code into the open source community, we’re very active in that developer ecosystem. And what we find is, rather than having a very kind of closed off black box product development process, we want to share what we’re learning. And we want to gain value from the incredible amount of innovation happening outside of our walls. So this open cloud, not only with open source, but the concept of being hybrid. And multi cloud is a very unique value proposition for us when compared to some of the other hyperscalers. Our third piece, which you’re very familiar with is our collaboration aspect. So the collaboration cloud from Google started years ago with Gmail, and grew into G Suite has evolved into what we call workspace now. And the workspace for us is this multifaceted, very sophisticated set of collaboration tools that are very much at the heart of the future of work. I mean, for God’s sakes, we’ve just come through this very, very challenging period. And frankly, I think we still have some challenges to go and some evolution around what work will look like in the future than the fact that Google and Google Cloud is so well positioned with a cloud based collaboration stack is I think, again, a unique differentiator. And then lastly, and you would expect me to say this events is just the trusted cloud. So the concept of we absolutely must have security as job zero priority zero as we say, the concept of having a zero trust model ensures that the products that we build meet our customers security requirements, but also the amount of work we’re doing with partners with customers to ensure that the final applications and workloads are secure, are absolutely critical as well. Last thing that I share when I think about my own observation is, I’m really humbled, frankly, by what I’m seeing is the humanity that we at Google, are seeking to inject back into the cloud. And so many people believe that hyper growth and massive scale means kind of removing the uniqueness of the customer and the employee at times from the growth equation. So we’re trying to make everyone looking at the same because when they looking at the same, you can drive scale, what we’re finding is we can invest and we can engage with people, whether it be customers, partners and our employees in a way that’s very unique and bespoke to what those customers need, what those partners need, and to what our employees need. And so I’m constantly reminding myself that it’s actually the people power aspect of Google, that’s going to allow us to continue to grow and I think be a big player in the space,

Vince Menzione  20:57

you did cover quite a bit of ground, I just want to reflect on this for a moment. So the pie is getting bigger. This transformation has impacted things like we never expected to see in these last two years, right? This wasn’t just the lift and shift of existing applications, right, we talked about the 185,000, SAS software companies going to a million by the end of the decade. And so everything in our lives is are changing to your point, the pie will continue to get bigger. You talked about data. And it reminded me of a conversation with Eric Rosencrantz, on Google’s differentiation on the engineering side. And it is striking, I think a lot of us understand that just certainly every day when we Google things, and just Kubernetes. And we can just go on and on and on about some of the engineering prowess within the organization that now reflects back into this enterprise world. You talked about open cloud hybrid, and certainly an area it makes a lot of sense. We are heterogeneous society, heterogeneous, enterprise world, and everyone has a play in this world. So having that is amazing. The collaboration aspects to I come back to the fact that I think one of the things that anchors Microsoft into accounts has been the collaboration play, and there really hasn’t been a contender over the years up until what was called G Suite. Now is workspace right, that platform will continue. If we look at the millennial generation, many of them are much more comfortable in that world. And I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen in 10 to 15 years, I think there’s going to be a shift there

Darren Mowry  22:23

completely with you. Yeah, I have two teenage now enduring college daughters and ones already in college ones entering college. And you’re exactly right, that the tool sets that they use, but even more than the tool sets, the way they think and the way that they approach work is so different than the way you and I did definitely at their age, but even 510 years ago, so I think I’m thrilled and excited about this kind of revolution that’s coming by your son, my daughters, I think the future is in their hands, and I’m really excited about what that’s going to mean for technology.

Vince Menzione  22:53

It’s exciting. It’s gonna be exciting the rest of our lives. So um, buckle up here we go. Exactly. I’m so excited to welcome athletic greens as the latest sponsor to ultimate guide to partnering friends who know me well know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement, part of my health ritual for over 20 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being. About five years ago I added athletic greens. And now their product ag one has become my go to green drink supplement. I take this literally every single day. Ag one is packed with 75, high quality vitamins, minerals, Whole Foods source superfoods, probiotics and antigens. It literally is replaced every vitamin in my cabinet. I take it at the start of the day, and often have a second serving on days when I really need it. If you’d like to give ag one a try. Athletic Greens is giving away a free one year supply of vitamin D, and five travel packs with every new purchase. Check them out at athletic greens.com forward slash Vince M. And you tell us about trusted cloud we all we know what we’re living with. From a security perspective, I can share some of my own personal issues with being breached recently and how that almost impacted a major financial transaction from a client. I want to dig in on the last comment though about humanity and uniqueness and people power. Can you maybe peel back a little bit more of our listeners there? Yeah, absolutely.

Darren Mowry  24:35

And so this is something that maybe it’s more of a personal reflection that I’ve had, as I’ve come into Google I have found Google and alphabet overall, to be a very human organization. Does that mean that we’re perfect? No, because guess last time I checked we as humans or anything, but perfect. But what I found is the amount of genuine care then says the term that I’ll say then and the investment that’s put into the organization In itself, the health of the organization, the mental health of the organization, the diversity and the equity and the inclusion, the fact that we have formal processes and mechanisms and review boards that ensure that before we lease products, we actually have organizations that say, can this be used for ill for evil, and if so, we will not release that product. So to work for a company that is so large, and doing so many different interesting things, from autonomous driving to geospatial to augmented reality to the cloud, to be a part of alphabet that’s driving a very human values based kind of work is new. And it’s different for me. And it’s actually six in six months and a couple of weeks into this journey. It’s something that I feel very thick in a very thick way, day by day. And I would like to think that our partners feel that it’s the sense of uniqueness and individualism and the ability to bring who you are to work every day, and the organization is enabling you to be that person versus creating scale and reach through kind of sameness. You get my point. And so it’s been a fascinating set of observations. As I said, I’m still going through it personally. But I think there’s great power in that model. I really do.

Vince Menzione  26:12

Absolutely. And I’m a huge proponent of diversity, equity and inclusion. So I was glad to hear you mentioned Google’s investments there. So I’m a partner. What would you say you you mentioned the differentiation. But what about the approaches to partnering between the three?

Darren Mowry  26:27

Yeah, so my mission here at Google is to make the best cloud platform for partners and customers, frankly, Ben says, my personal mission, the mission of my team, and we’re building this partner ecosystem, where our success is literally built on the success of our partners. And so one thing I would call out loud and clear, again, is this business that I’m running in North America is built with partners, when I say the percentage that I can’t share with you openly, but I’ll say it’s a very, very high significant percentage of my business that either comes through partners or is influenced by partners. But it’s really proof to show that we’re not trying to build a direct model, where we triple partners in we’re trying to build a partner enabled partner led growth machine in the cloud. And from what I can tell, and from my own experience, that is very unique, and very different to put partners in such a core growth element of who we’re going to become. And again, that’s why I spend a significant amount of my own time with partners, whether they be our established partners, or whether they be our emerging partners. So the organizations that are beginning to explore what a Google cloud journey would look like, I’m spending at least 25 to 35% of my time, directly with leadership teams and partners to help them understand why I’m energized and what that market opportunity would look like. But also helping steer and provide feedback and take feedback to make sure that we’re being the best possible partner that we can be.

Vince Menzione  27:50

It’s a huge area of differentiation. And we know we won’t go into each of the three hyperscalers. We know Microsoft as a huge investment ecosystem around partnering. AWS came at it, let’s face it, at it from a direct model with a credit card. And I will say not bolted on but added partner and enterprise selling later. And I think the investments that are very striking coming out of the Google organization will say that so you’ve been around these partners for your entire career. I can’t believe it’s been 25 years. Darren, you look, you look too young.

Darren Mowry  28:22

I look good for my age events. Yeah, I told myself that in the mirror every morning, good DNA

Vince Menzione  28:26

and gene pool. So what attributes have you seen from the best of the best?

Darren Mowry  28:31

Yeah, it’s a great something that I’ve thought about often. And there’s a few things that jumped to mind for me. So one is an open and frank relationship, meaning sharing good and bad feedback in both directions is really, really critical. I can’t stress enough that we’re building over here, we’re on a journey at Google Cloud, we’re far from being who we’re going to be when we grow up. And so the corrective and developmental feedback that I’m getting from the partner ecosystem is literally helping me pivot the strategy of this business, right, completely take left or right turn so that open communication is key. I mentioned that this concept of being experienced and focused. So really selecting the things that you do well, and being the best at those things, versus trying to show up and being too many things to too many people I think is a common trap, and something that I think it continues to prove true in the cloud. I really enjoy partnerships that are diligent and fact based. And so as I’m finding some of the partners that I’m building relationships with now, that may be a little different, frankly, it may be a little different than even in Google Cloud. But I like to use data and I like to use information to draw insights to make better decisions jointly. And so I tend to spend a lot of my time digging into the mechanics and the triggers and the signals in my business. And I’m finding that that’s helpful in a very powerful way with partners. And then last but not least, is balancing inputs and sprite and this is, I think, a partnership pillar also just a good growth and sales pillar in the sense that You can’t just focus on the revenue at the end of the day, the revenue is an outcome of all the good work that you’ve done to get to that point. So I love partnering with organizations that want to start at the very beginning of that customer buying journey. And we want to think about what are those critical steps along the way? And how do we both play important roles in all those inputs? It’s this concept of you can manage inputs, but you can measure outputs. And it’s important that we don’t get those two things confused. Does that make sense?

Vince Menzione  30:26

I love what you have to say here. I’m going to repeat back to you because I think it ties into some of the principles that I talked about, first of all this corrective and developmental feedback, often, partners just aren’t open in their communication. I say it not being aggressive enough in their communication, like they just sometimes it’s just the status quo. It’s the happy talk, we never really get down to the conversations, I apply OKRs to what I do, and I believe applying an approach that says how do we get to green? How do we get to the objectives that we have agreed to, and we’re measuring against that you mentioned the data factor of that as well. And then the focused approach, right, we’re gonna go back to OKRs here a little bit because we need to stay focused, we can’t solve the world we used to, we used to say, boil the ocean and Microsoft, right? Do we we can’t boil the ocean, we have to pick the one or two or three things that we can do together that are had the highest impact. And you mentioned balancing inputs and outputs, which to me comes back to what is it? What is the area that we are going to focus on? And we are coming together as two organizations? What’s that better together look like? Is that what I thought I heard from you?

Darren Mowry  31:31

Absolutely. I think you nailed that. Absolutely.

Vince Menzione  31:34

So there’s quite a bit of talk about ecosystem. It’s striking, and I’m so happy my friend Jay McBain who’s coming back to the podcast, again, has described this, he’s coined in fact, this as the decade of the ecosystem, think back to like 2009, way back, then throw 50% of your investment dollars in marketing, basically, you wouldn’t know where it went. And then we got Marketo and Eloqua, and some of these other platforms. And today we know dance with signs, right? How many clicks, we’re going to get him how that’s going to translate into sales, qualified leads, and what that what our output and our win ratios are gonna look like at the end of the day, we’re starting to see this whole emergence of an ecosystem approach to partnering. And I feel like a lot of organizations are still struggling in terms of how do I get there, right? We’ve talked about some of these SAS software companies, some of them still have a direct sales model. And they’re trying to figure out how to partner with organizations like Google. And I’ve seen this firsthand. So what advice would you give to partner organizations about the investments they need to make in their organizations? These are a lot of the this is that client base, you talk you’re talking about here, right? These digital native organizations, what investments that they didn’t need to make to fuel the growth?

Darren Mowry  32:48

Yeah, I think it’s, again, a really great question vents, in my view, the days have passed, where we can bring one service or value prop to the market and think we can thrive in splendid isolation, right, I think there was a time for that those times are gone, in my opinion. And really, from my perspective, the cloud market requires that there’s this very unique coexistence, where we find these best outcomes for partners. And sometimes those best outcomes for partners and customers come by partnering with a competitor, right, it actually comes by identifying solutions and companies that can not only fill the stress, cracks and fractures that you may have in your own business, but really augment and turn up the volume of the power of whatever solution you’re bringing to the market. And I find there’s this massive opportunity for partners with the right scale and breadth to be an ecosystem in and of themselves, believe it or not, and really be an even greater part of an even bigger ecosystem. And what I mean by that vents is some of our partners are creating these multiple disciplines within their own businesses to be able to resell the cloud, they’re able to provide support and manage services on the platform. They’re able to innovate and deliver new products and new outcomes for customers. And they’re even able to inject ISV solutions when it makes sense. And so they’re almost creating their own ecosystem within their own boundaries, and then plugging themselves into an even broader ecosystem. And what I think is really wonderful about the market climate that we’re in at the moment is that those partners who maybe don’t yet have that size, or desire to operate in the way of creating their own ecosystem, well, you can choose to be great at a few things and fit into a very tight ecosystem of partners that are seeking to deliver all of these great outcomes. And so the the market itself changed dramatically. And I remember the early days of cloud where we’d be in meetings, and we would be told them that there’s really no such thing as a private or public cloud, there was only one cloud, and anything running in a colo or a customer data center was just servers. And then I remember when we tried to convince ourselves that hybrid and multi cloud was not a thing. And yet here we are, with even our fastest growing startups, selecting multiple clouds to get the best of breed versus committing to one platform. So What I’ll say here events is times are going to keep changing. And in my opinion partners that are focused on being flexible, ever changing, and really realizing that they’re a part of a broader ecosystem, those partners are going to prove to be very, very powerful. And that different differentiations going to absolutely show up for customers,

Vince Menzione  35:18

you are speaking my language because I speak about seven principles of successful partnering, the last of which is agility. And you just, you just nailed that right there. That exactly is it it is organizations need to be agile, especially during this time, right? You need to be we know some successful partners, both of us that know how to apply agility to their businesses, and pivoting when they need to, and understanding what the opportunity areas are intuitively knowing where the markets are going to go, or at least having a listening mechanism within their own organizations, so that they’re paying attention to these, these feedbacks. So Darren, if you don’t mind, I’d love to pivot the conversation. As you might know, this podcast focuses in on leadership principles, and the career journey. As I said earlier, I met you several years ago, you’re earlier in career, I want to understand like you had already gotten to a pretty significant point in the Microsoft ecosystem. Was there a spark or a pivot that propelled Darren?

Darren Mowry  36:22

Yeah, that’s a good question, Benson. So I actually spend a lot of time thinking about that myself, frankly. But I think the last time we did see each other, I can promise you, I had a lot less gray hair than I do now. But there are a few things that when I think about my career in my own journey that kind of jumped out at me. So first, just to be very frank with you, I found out that I get bored really quickly, right. And if my role is to operate and run a business in a steady state way, I’m not the best leader for that business. And I, it took me some time to come to that realization. But I came to that realization and have embraced it. And so the need to, and really, the desire to build and grow teams and businesses is an addiction. For me, it literally is something I truly love to do this book, the founders mentality, which you may have heard of is a great read that speaks to this concept of insurgency and incumbency, when you’re a leader in an organization. And I’ve had the pleasure of being at three companies that were insurgents and mission driven companies changing the world at one time or another. And I’m super thankful for all of those journeys. I also found that curiosity is a superpower. And so my move to AWS from Microsoft actually stemmed from just early curiosity about Hosted Exchange hosted SharePoint, you remember the days of B pause, and I was having calls and meetings with people seeking to understand what was the shift going to be like for customers? And how would we think differently about monetizing, and that curiosity ultimately created the opportunity for me to go to AWS. But it also created some really amazing life experiences for me and my family as that desire to be curious. And I’m so thankful to have a family around me that shares in that curiosity. And it took us to Sweden and it took us to London and it unlocked this entire world outside of work. But for my family and my daughters were able to grow up multilingual and seeing the world and now feel so empowered for their next experiences. And I’m so thankful for the companies that empowered that move, but also for the curiosity, right that we had as a family. And then lastly, I’d say I’ve had the pleasure of working for and with people who I really deeply respect and I’ve learned from, they’ve taught me how to be a leader from a vision and an energy perspective, while also having really high expectations for myself and for everyone around me, but also enabling the people around me to be supported and encouraged reach those high expectations. And I’ve really, again, been on this journey to be a results driven kind of high energy visionary leader, but also trying to be as genuine a human leader as possible, meaning I am far from perfect. I’m constantly trying to show and tell my team that the way we show up is our power, right? Life and Work are not always easy, but how we engage with the people around us has a direct correlation to what we get in return, as you know, events. So I think it’s those three things as I think about my own journey that have been super powerful. I’m still on this personal journey. I don’t know what I’m going to be when I grow up. And that’s thrilling for me.

Vince Menzione  39:18

You mentioned a book founders mentality, but we’re gonna provide a link for our listeners in the show notes. Is that the book that you mentioned,

Darren Mowry  39:24

it is by Zook and Alan Z. Okay, and Alan a ll. E and great one.

Vince Menzione  39:29

Awesome. So was there a best piece of advice? Like you talked about these three points? Was there someone that helped drive the spark? Or was there a best piece of advice you got along the way?

Darren Mowry  39:41

So I’m so thankful as you heard me say just previously that I had been able to work with some just Rockstar leaders, and I’m so blessed and thankful for that. But there’s one particular point that I will call out here, you may remember suncat character, right, who was gm of Microsoft in mid Atlantic. st get to this day, he and I stay in touch and he’s going went on to do some super exciting things. But he at one point, we had a one on one. And he challenged me with three questions and these questions, then one, when you wake up in the morning, what do you love to do? The second question was, what are you really good at? And the third question was, what does the company or the community around you need for me? And what I found was the intersection of the of the answers to these questions makes for an amazing career, right? So how often can you wake up in the morning and have the chance to be compensated be paid to do something that you’re really good at, that you really enjoy? That’s having an impact. And we’ve all had moments in our career where we’re higher on one of those questions or lower. But for me, I’ve actually scheduled quarterly personal reflection days for the last 15 plus years where I take time by myself, I asked myself these three questions, and it’s allowed me to constantly pivot and make sure that I don’t get lost in the work and the mission that we’re on every single day. And so I think back to that one on one lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant outside of Philadelphia was st get as a real game changer for me that I still apply today. And I share with everyone that I’m coaching and mentoring, we’re

Vince Menzione  41:11

going to share that in our show notes. And sang cat has been a guest on this podcast. Oh, good. I

Darren Mowry  41:17

love saying cat. I’m credible leader,

Vince Menzione  41:18

I love him as well, we’re gonna put out we’ll put some kudos and shout outs to Sangkat in this episode. So I would just love to have I would like to have a little bit of fun with you. Darren is this is my favorite question. I save it for the end of the podcast. And it’s a trick question for a lot of people. Some it’s not, but you’re hosting a dinner party. And you can invite any three guests to this amazing dinner party that you have. You might have this, I don’t know, maybe Sweden, maybe the UK, maybe Washington DC, not quite sure yet. But wherever you decide to have this amazing dinner party, these three guests that you invite can be from either the present, or the past. Who would you invite Darren? And why?

Darren Mowry  41:59

You know what you may think this is a hard question vents. I didn’t have to really think long and hard about this one. And I’ll give you the the three answers really quickly. So one, you may know I went to the University of Alabama for undergraduate school. And so Nick Saban, who’s the football coach at Alabama has this concept that you may or may not know, called the process, right. And it’s something that he applies to recruiting and training and development of the young men that are on that football team. And I’ve read about the process often. And I found that it applies to life, it applies to business. And I’d love to have Nick at the table and have that conversation. So definitely Nick’s got to be there. Secondly, and this is maybe sounds like a cliche, but Albert Einstein has to join us. And there’s a few reasons. One, my favorite quote is an all is an Einstein quote where he says nothing happens until something moves. And again, I thought about the fact that physics has all to do with business, right? It’s how can we put contributing forces behind what we’re trying to get done, and remove the force of the things that are in front of us. And by doing that, we create forward momentum, right? So I’d love to have Albert and Nick talk about physics and the process. And I’d love to watch that and observe and then last but not least, Tom, you’re the lead singer of Radiohead. That is a band that I believe in deeply I use for personal meditation, true blend of science and art, I think would bring a little class to the table. So Nick Saban, Albert Einstein, Thom Yorke, that would be one heck of a dinner party events, what a dinner party another but I’ll invite you to you can be the fourth person so you can

Vince Menzione  43:30

I would love that. I would love that. I was going to least invite myself for a glass of wine, but perfect. I like that. So Nick Saban, I’ve never got to meet him personally. But my good friend Don Diego has been a guest on the podcast is a good friend of his and has spoken to his his football teams many times. And then Albert Einstein. So I was just thinking about Nick and Albert Einstein having a conversation. Wouldn’t that be striking? Can you imagine that conversation? And then Thom Yorke from Radiohead. So this is so favorite Radiohead song, anything in particular? Absolutely. Everything

Darren Mowry  43:59

is in its right place. Everything is in his right beyond the shadow of a doubt. Yeah. Okay. Everything is in its right place. Yeah, that is by far the go to song when I not only need to be charged up, but when I needed to kind of slow myself down. That’s a great, great song.

Vince Menzione  44:16

Terrific. We’re gonna share that in our show notes. So Darren, you have been an amazing guest. I just love reconnecting with you. I’m so glad you’re back here in the US. And I hope to see you in person soon. But for our listeners, most of them are partners. Most of them are people in our ecosystem, a lot of people that you and I both know, any closing words of advice on optimizing their success working with Google?

Darren Mowry  44:39

Absolutely Vince. And as I said, It’s really thrilling to be on this. I can’t believe you. You invited me it’s flattering, but it’s also just so great that we’ve been able to stay connected over the years. But here’s what I would leave the listeners with. If I were to give some guidance. One focus really matters, right? There’s lots of opportunities and frankly, there’s lots of potential roadblocks and stumbling blocks. Run being distracted or dazzled by the next shiny thing. And while I do think we need to look around corners and anticipate what’s coming, focus and delivery and excellence today is really important. Secondly, mindshare. There’s more and more growth and more and more opportunities in the partner ecosystem around Google. And it’s really important that we as Google Cloud, lean in and get mindshare and awareness as to what our partners are doing. But also, frankly, we need to make it easier for our partners to get the mindshare of our sellers. And I personally am committed to that, as is our partner organization that mindshare really matters. You want to be the partner that people know and trust, and they know you stand for something. And so mindshare is critical. And then lastly, events, I would ask that all of our partners think past the transaction, and really focus on customer outcomes, as we talked about, and you mentioned with the software as a service trends, the cloud is not perpetual software anymore, right? Where you can add software to an agreement and just hope that a customer uses it over time, we have to re win these customers every 24 hours. And that means that we have to always be focused on outcomes and the value that our customers are getting from the technology. And that means think past the purchase. And think about this ongoing stream of outcomes and workloads. That’s the way we have to show up for our customers. And there’s no way we can do that without our partners. So Vince, it’s been an absolute pleasure to reconnect with you today. And I do look forward to seeing you in person really soon.

Vince Menzione  46:26

Such great advice, Darren, and it has been an absolute blast. I’m so happy to have you here today and wish you amazing success in this role.

Darren Mowry  46:35 Thank you.

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