On Tuesday, November 16, 2021, C2C hosted its first Google Cloud Startup roundtable event. This series, organized and planned specifically for representatives from startups looking to grow their businesses, brings these representatives together with Google Cloud Customer Engineers, Technical Specialists, and Startup Success Managers to lead discussions and answer questions on hot topics in the startup space. The first roundtable included group sessions for business leaders and technical staff as well as a Customer Engineer AMA, all exploring artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and the potential uses of each for startup businesses as they form and begin to scale.
After welcoming guests and introducing the Google staffers on the call, the event's organizers invited attendees to join breakout rooms based on whether they had come with technical or business questions to discuss. These breakout rooms were not recorded, but C2C North America Community Manager Alfons Mu�oz joined the technical discussion.
In this breakout room, startup founders from 86 Repair and Auralab brought their questions directly to Google's customer engineers. According to Mu�oz, "They were stating their problems or projects and getting an overview of how to approach these problems...and they had more than one overview, because we had more than one customer engineer, so they had more than one point of view. They also were encouraged to get in the community."
Most of this event's ninety minutes were spent in the breakout rooms, but after about an hour, the groups came together again for an AMA with all of the customer engineers on the call. In this session, the visiting startup founders revisited the topic that had dominated the conversations in the breakout rooms: data. In order to use ML effectively, an organization needs a platform that can store, host, and manage data reliably.
Google's Deok Filho offered a canny on-the-spot breakdown of the relative advantages and disadvantages of integrating different Google and third-party data management tools with BigQuery, bringing in Mike Walker to field follow-up questions from Ben Collins of Auralab and Daniel Zivkovic, founder and curator of Serverless Toronto, along the way. Check out a clip of the conversation below:
According to Munoz, in terms of connecting guests to the right Google staffers and getting their questions answered, this event was a success, but, in his words, "it's important to note that this is the first of many roundtables." Look for more of these events for startup founders in 2022, including the next AI and ML roundtable in January.
