Orbit - An Hg software leadership podcast16 Tammi

The corporate immune system: Google Cloud's Daniël Rood on building Europe's first AI team

Daniël Rood, director of AI go-to-market at Google Cloud, offers a masterclass in navigating transformation from inside a tech giant. Building Google's first European AI team when gen AI was still "a PhD science project," Rood reveals the hidden resistance mechanisms that plague even innovative organizations. His concept of the "corporate immune system"—the culture that protects success for all the right reasons but resists dramatic shifts—explains why customer success stories, not internal advocacy, are what actually move leadership. His hiring philosophy centered on "intellectual humility" and "teams of translators" who bridge technology and business offers a blueprint for staffing AI initiatives moving too fast for anyone to be an expert. The conversation reveals Google's quiet dominance: AI Mode has already reached 1.5 billion monthly active users, nearly double OpenAI's reach. But Rood's most provocative insight addresses vertical SaaS: he predicts the shift to "expertise as a service," where repetitive professional work gets commoditized and deep human judgment becomes "an API on top of the platform." His framework for the new reality is stark—culture trumps strategy, three-year horizons are irrelevant, the world is "tokenizing," and sales cycles collapse through proof-based processes. By 2030, he argues, AI will have moved so deeply into the background that having a Chief AI Officer will seem as obsolete as having a Chief Mobile Officer today.

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Jaksot(62)

Patrick Debois on why context is the new code: A conversation from the Hg Digital Summit

The inventor of DevOps explains why AI needs engineering rigour and human collaboration. The engineer who coined "DevOps" in 2009 thinks he is watching the same pattern play out again, only faster. I...

28 Touko 30min

Jonathan Sanders, CEO of Light: fear is not a strategy

When Jonathan Sanders pitched Light to investors, the reaction was unanimous: rebuilding ERP would take a decade and a hundred million dollars. He did it in two years, with AI at the core. Today Light...

15 Touko 54min

Evan Goldberg of NetSuite: 3 decades and 2 platform shifts

Evan Goldberg co-founded NetSuite in 1998 with a five-minute phone call to Larry Ellison when his "graphics stuff" wasn't going great. He pioneered cloud computing before SaaS existed, sold to Oracle ...

23 Huhti 31min

Marjorie Janiewicz of Mistral AI: flipping the adoption curve - why SaaS with data can win in an AI world

Marjorie Janiewicz has sold enterprise software through every platform shift for three decades: Oracle, MySQL, SAP, MongoDB, HackerOne. Now as Chief Revenue Officer at Mistral AI, she's taking a Frenc...

17 Maalis 51min

The race for alpha: Varun Anand of Clay on inventing a new role and why GTM needs a new AI strategy

Most B2B software founders don't spend four years working on presidential campaigns. Varun Anand did - on Hillary Clinton's 2016 run - and he argues that startups and political campaigns share the sam...

3 Maalis 22min

Everything, everywhere, but not all at once: Hg’s Matthew Brockman on what's really happening in software right now

In this rare internal conversation, Matthew Brockman, Hg's Chief Investment Officer, offers an insider's view on what's actually working versus what's still hype. Far beyond speculation, this is priva...

20 Helmi 38min

A certain level of chaos is healthy: Franz Faerber on fighting bureaucracy and the importance of deep domain knowledge in AI

Franz Faerber, co-founder and CEO of Everest Systems and former architect of SAP HANA, challenges Sam Altman's vision of throwaway software, arguing humans crave stability, while making the case for w...

17 Helmi 52min