How Google Cloud’s head of startups thinks about building companies in the AI era

Even if we never reach the mythological one-person $1 billion startup, it's clear that AI coding tools have helped accelerate the software development process, making that part of startup building faster, cheaper and more efficient than ever before. But just because you can code faster, doesn't mean it's suddenly easy to build a business. All the other hard stuff? That's still there.

I spoke to Google Cloud's head of startups Darren Mowry ahead of Google Cloud Next recently. He argues that startups have a leg up these days, and that in turn has changed how companies think about fundraising. By reducing pure development costs, it’s easier to stretch those early dollars or spend them on other priorities. Mowry has also worked at AWS and Microsoft, giving him a perspective across all three major cloud platforms.

"AI code generation has absolutely changed the game," Mowry told FastForward. "If I were building a company, I wouldn't necessarily have to rush to hire a lot of developers the way we would have had to pre‑AI, and so I’m able to be much more critical about payroll." That enables founders to think about how to bring the right talent at the right time, at the right function.

It's so easy to code in fact, that there has been a growing belief that you can take short cuts when it comes to building a business. But Mowry says he's actually seeing a return to fundamentals. "There have been moments during the hype cycle where people were saying, let's throw the fundamentals out, but there's always a return to, do you have clarity of vision? Do you know who your customers are? Do you know what problem you're solving, and do you have a pathway to profitability? We always come back to that," he said.

Building enduring companies

If that’s the case, how do you build a long‑term company in a post‑AI‑coding world? It’s not just about building faster, because if it were, everyone would win since everyone has access to the same tools. AI coding tools are a double‑edged sword, giving founders a virtually unlimited palette that can also get expensive fast. Just as early founders were burning through cloud services five or 10 years ago, the danger now is burning tokens and realizing you’ve spent heavily before you’ve built anything customers actually want.

Mowry is acutely aware that his company benefits from that kind of undisciplined approach, but he also recognizes that if he wants startups to succeed long-term, it's going to take rigor. "I think the thing I keep in mind is that my job is to help founders create a business that is predictably growing strongly over time," Mowry said. "And I think the way that you do that is to help customers make good decisions, so that they don't have the unexpected spike and run out of funds."

That often means having human counsel beyond the tools. Yes, it's great to have powerful software that helps you build faster, but you need that human element to guide you, and he believes that's what his company brings to the table. "The human resources we're bringing to bear to founders right now are the ones that in my opinion are creating some of the most dynamic stickiness to Google," he said.

That may be marketing speak, but there's a strong element of truth to the idea that it takes a combination of humans and technology to come together to build a successful company, and if you think that AI alone will get you there, that's when you will get tripped up.

He believes the startups that will win will be those that build very specific agentic workflows on top of the major models, pointing to areas like healthcare, finance, customer support or back-office work. The companies that create these with the latest technology have a chance to be the next wave of big companies.

But companies who try to build thin wrappers around these models and kind of white label them will probably suffer in his view. The biggest lesson though is that you can't cut corners just because you can code faster. If anything that velocity puts pressure on other parts of the company like product, go-to-market and sales, who have to figure out how to keep up with rapidly-changing products. 

That's the challenge that all companies face in the AI era. Speed creates a whole new set of problems, and the first companies to reach the summit of success aren’t guaranteed to be the last ones standing.