May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month —a time for us to come together to celebrate and remember the important people and history of Asian and Pacific Island heritage. This feature highlights three AAPI founders from the Google For Startups community.

Read on to learn how these three founders built their businesses, leverage Google tech, and suggestion they have for aspiring entrepreneurs.

CultivatePeople 

Founder: Lola Han

Description: CultivatePeople’s compensation software, Kamsa, provides global market pay rate data and helps companies make data-driven salary decisions so they can attract and retain their most valuable asset: employees. 

Why GCP: “CultivatePeople began using GCP when integrating SSO/SAML authentication after  our SaaS product became a high priority. We were able to exceed our clients’ expectations and increase their level of trust in our platform’s capabilities. We’re currently investigating additional machine learning products, such as Cloud AutoML, that will allow us to quickly deliver exciting features.” 

Note from the Founder: “I grew up with immigrant parents who value stability and are risk-averse. My parents discouraged me from starting my own company because they didn’t want to see me struggle financially or see my health suffer (due to stress). I felt strongly about what CultivatePeople could do, so I started the company as a sole founder in 2017 and watched it double in size year over year since. While the ones I love most may not have cheered me on initially, it was important for me to hang on to the encouraging words of former bosses, executives, and founders to keep me focused on my mission. 

My advice for other AAPI founders is to be a “silent assassin” and believe in the mission and values of your organization. Always remember to stop along the way and: 

 1) Enjoy the journey by celebrating wins and giving yourself credit;

2) Follow your intuition—it’s (almost) always right; 

3) Recognize and invest in your people regularly (ie. give increases more than once a year, if warranted);

4) Give regular words of affirmation to employees on even small achievements.”

Swit

Founder: Josh Lee and Max Lim

Description: Swit is a team collaboration platform that seamlessly combines team chat with task management by allowing teams to turn their conversations into trackable tasks and share tasks to chat with simple drag-and-drop functionality, ensuring everyone is on the same page and projects get done faster.

Why GCP: “Swit is a cross-category hybrid work tool for chat and tasks. This functionality requires more complicated and heavier architecture for performance. So, configuring and managing virtual machines was really challenging to scale up our systems, while handling occasional unexpected traffic surges and frequent updates. Eventually we divided our monolithic architecture into 35 microservices when we launched our official product. The migration to GKE took around one month, and it turned out to be well worth the effort—our systems became able to offer high scalability and enough resilience to keep its uptime no matter what happened. Now we’re operating 84 workloads and 252 microservices with high stability with remarkably low downtime – less than 0.00001%/year.”

Note from the Founder: “As an AAPI founder based in Silicon Valley, I feel proud of the work ethics and diligence fellow Korean American entrepreneurs and professionals have long demonstrated here. Especially with K-pop breaking into the mainstream, I feel even more proud of our culture that strives toward an absolute perfection molded through years of training and dedication. The mission-driven culture of Silicon Valley coupled with Google’s edging technology and creativity really helped us build a product that not only encompasses verticals but also transcends cultures. Swit is growing at an unprecedented rate, and we hope  to join the long list of successful AAPI entrepreneurs here. Swit’s close network with the AAPI community wouldn’t have been possible without Google support. We are grateful for this collaborative environment, and we hope to become the next-generation ambassador for collaboration after Google.” 

Check out more from Swit in their founder story.

WISY 

Founder: Min Chen

Description: Wisy develops technology to bring digital efficiency into the physical world, supporting consumer products businesses and making them thrive in the new economy. All of us have a bad experience when we can’t find the product we want to buy. That is a $1.9T problem in the consumer-packaged goods industry that Wisy is solving with AI and analytics to help manufacturers and retailers sell more by reducing out-of-stocks and waste at a global scale.

Why GCP: “GCP has an intuitive, easy to use interface, was lower cost, and offered preemptible instances with flexible compute options. Some of the reasons why Wisy decided to use GCP include instance and payment configurability, privacy and traffic security, cost-efficiency, and Machine Learning.

Wisy has been able to advance quickly with product development, as well as collaborate better and iterate faster in the creation of our AI models, while reducing costs by 40%. At Wisy, we are solving a problem that affects everyone who shops at a store.“

Note from the Founder: “Two years ago, I moved to San Francisco to expand my second startup, Wisy. This is when I learned that my name ‘Min’ stands for ‘minority.’ I was born in China, raised in a Black community in Panama, received scholarships to attend both Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley. I worked for 20 years in several countries, but I have never felt so discriminated against due to my race, ethnicity, gender and age than during my time in Silicon Valley. However, this is also the place I learned that my diverse life experience is my competitive advantage. My background enables me to recruit and relate to people in different countries, create scalable and flexible products for multinational customers, and run global operations efficiently.

My recommendation to AAPI founders is to find strength in their multicultural background. Don’t hide what makes you unique, do not limit yourselves, and do not let others limit you. You will lose your edge when trading authenticity for validation. Be proud and own your story.”

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our Startup Program application page here and sign up for our monthly startup newsletter to get a peek at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.To learn more about how you can help #StopAsianHate during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and beyond, visit their website here.

In our conversations with technology leaders about data-driven transformation using Google Data Cloud –  industry’s leading unified data and AI solution – , one important topic is incorporating continuous intelligence to move from answering questions such as “What has happened? to questions like “What is happening?” and “What might happen?”. The core to this evolution is the need for an underlying data processing that not only provides powerful real-time capabilities for events happening close to origination, but also brings together existing data sources under one unified data platform to enable organizations to draw insights and take actions holistically. Dataflow, Google’s cloud-native data processing and streaming analytics platform, is a key component of any modern data and AI architecture and data transformation journey, along with BigQuery, Google’s internet-scale warehouse with built-in streaming, BI engine and ML; Pub/Sub, a global no-ops event delivery service; and Looker, a modern BI and embedded analytics platform. One of the key evaluation factors is potential economic value of Dataflow to their organization, particularly in the context of engaging other stakeholders is key for many of the leaders that we engage with. So we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a comprehensive study on the impact that Dataflow had on their organization by interviewing actual customers . 

Today we’re excited to share our commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, the Total Economic Impact™ of Google Cloud Dataflow, which allows data leaders to understand and quantify the benefits of Dataflow, and use cases it enables. Forrester conducted interviews with Dataflow customers to evaluate the benefits, costs, and risks of investing in Dataflow across an organization. Based on their interviews, Forrester identified major financial benefits across four different areas: business growth, infrastructure cost savings, data engineer productivity, and administration efficiency. In fact, Forrester found that customers adopting Dataflow can achieve a 55% boost in developer productivity and a 50% reduction in infrastructure costs. In fact, Forrester projects that customers adopting Dataflow can achieve a range of up to 171% Return on Investment (ROI) and a less than six months payback period. Customers can now use figures in the report to compute their own Return on Investment (ROI) and payback period.

“Dataflow is integral to accelerating time-to-market, decreasing time-to-production, reducing time to figure out how to use data for use cases, focusing time on value-add tasks, streamlining ingestion, and reducing total cost of ownership.” – Lead technical architect, CPG

Let’s take a deeper look at the ways that Forrester found that Dataflow can help you achieve your goals and unlock your business potential. 

Benefit #1: Increase data engineer productivity by 55%

Developers can choose among a variety of programming languages to define and execute data workflows. Dataflow also seamlessly integrates with other Google Cloud Platform and open source technologies to maximize value and applicability to a wide variety of use cases. Dataflow streamlined workflows with code reusability,dynamic templates, and the simplicity of a managed service. Engineers trusted pipelines to run correctly and adhere to governance. Data engineers avoided laborious issue-monitoring and remediation tasks that were common in the legacy environments such as poor performance, lack of availability, and failed jobs. Teams valued the language flexibility and open source base.

“Dataflow provided us with ETL replacement that opened limitless potential use cases and enabled us to do smarter data enhancement while data remains in motion.” — Director of data projects, financial services

Benefit #2: Reduce infrastructure costs by up-to 50% for batch and streaming workloads 

Dataflow’s serverless autoscaling and discrete control of job needs, scheduling, and regions eliminated overhead and optimized technology spending. Consolidating global data processing solutions to Dataflow further eliminated excess costs while ensuring performance, resilience, and governance across environments. Dataflow’s unified streaming and batch data platform gives organizations the flexibility to define either workload in the same programming model, run it on the same infrastructure, and manage it from a single operational management tool. 

“Our costs with our cloud data platform using Dataflow are just a fraction of the costs we faced before. Now we only pay for cloud infrastructure consumption because the open source base helps us avoid licensing costs. We spend about $120,000 per year with Dataflow, but we’d be spending millions with our old technologies.” – Lead technical architect, CPG

Benefit #3: Increase top-line revenue by improving customer experience and retention with payback time of < 6 months

Streaming analytics is an essential capability in today’s digital world to gain real-time actionable insights. Likewise, organizations must also have flexible, high- performance batch environments to analyze historical data for building machine learning models, business intelligence, and advanced analytics. Dataflow enabled real-time streaming use cases, improved data enrichment, encouraged data exploration,improved performance and resiliency, reduced errors, increased trust, and eliminated barriers to scale. As a result, organizations provided customers with more accurate, relevant, and in-the-moment data-backed services and insights — boosting customer experience, creating new revenue streams, and improving acquisition, retention, and enrichment.

“It’s already been proven that we are getting more business [with Dataflow] because we can turn around results faster for customers.” – VP of technology, financial services technology

“When we provide data to our customers and partners with Dataflow, we are much more confident in those numbers and can provide accurate data within a minute. Our customers and partners have taken note and commented on this. It’s reduced complaints and prevented churn.” – Senior software engineer, media

Other benefits 

Eliminated administrative overhead and toil

As a cloud-native managed service, all administration tasks such as provisioning, scaling, and updates are automatically handled by Google Cloud. Teams no longer need to manage servers and related software for legacy data processing solutions. Admins also streamlined processes for setting up data sources, adding pipelines, and enforcing governance.

Saved business operations costs for support teams and data end users

Dataflow improved the speed, quality, reliability, and ease of access to data for insights for general business users, saving time and empowering users to drive better data-backed outcomes. It also reduced support inquiry volume while automating manual job creation.

What’s next?

Download the Forrester Total Economic Impact study today to dive deep into the economic impact Dataflow can deliver your organization. We would love to partner with you to explore the potential Dataflow can unlock in your teams. Please reach out to our sales team to start a conversation about your data transformation with Google Cloud.

Commercial trucks often travel partially empty because many shippers don’t have enough cargo to fill an entire container or trailer. Although offering available space to other shippers helps minimize carbon emissions and reduce operating costs, most trucking companies can’t efficiently schedule, track, or deliver multiple freight loads.

Companies have always struggled to ship over-the-road freight efficiently. However,recent economic events have created an unprecedented logistics and transportation crisis that continues to disrupt supply chains, delay deliveries, and significantly raise the price of basic goods. Since some stores can’t keep their shelves fully stocked, many people across the country are finding it more difficult than ever to buy the things they need at an affordable price.

Although exacerbated by the pandemic, many of these supply chain issues have existed for decades. That’s why, in 2015, Flock Freight was started with the mission of reducing waste and inefficiency from the supply chain by reimagining the way freight moves. First to market with advanced algorithms that enable pooling shipments at scale, we create a new standard of service for shippers, increase revenue for carriers and reduce the impact of carbon emissions through shared truckload (STL) service.

Our technology helps lower prices compared to full truckload (FTL) by enabling shippers to only pay for the space they need—and maintain full control over pickup and delivery dates. Flock Freight also optimizes travel routes to speed up deliveries compared to traditional less than truckload (LTL), while eliminating unnecessary shipping hub transfers to minimize damage to cargo.

Today, thousands of shippers and trucking companies across the U.S. use Flock Freight to schedule shared truckloads, lower shipping costs, quickly deliver and track goods, and reduce their carbon footprint by up to 40%. Flock Freight further offsets carbon emissions by buying carbon credits for every FlockDirect™ guaranteed shared truckload shipment—at no extra cost to shippers.

Moving Flock Freight to Google Cloud

We founded Flock Freight with a small team based in southern California. We soon realized we needed a more scalable and affordable technology stack to support our rapidly growing platform and team. After joining the Google for Startups Cloud Program and consulting with dedicated Google startup experts, we decided to move all our data and applications to Google Cloud.

The highly secure-by-design infrastructure of Google Cloud now enables thousands of Flock Freight customers to move their freight faster, cheaper, and with less damage than traditional shipping methods. Specifically, we rely on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to support the combinatorial optimization and machine learning (ML) algorithms and services that identify, pool, and schedule shared truckloads. We also leverage GKE to rapidly develop, deploy, and manage new applications and services.

In addition, we leverage Cloud SQL to automate database provisioning, storage capacity management, and other time-consuming tasks. Cloud SQL easily integrates with existing apps and Google Cloud services such as GKE and Pub/Sub. Lastly, we use Compute Engine to create and run virtual machines, optimize resource utilization, and lower computing costs by up to 91%. These cost savings allow us to shift more resources to R&D and rapidly develop new solutions and services for our customers.

Building a greener, more resilient, and responsive supply chain

The Google for Startups Cloud Program and dedicated Google startup experts were instrumental in helping us manage cloud infrastructure cost and maintaining very high SLAs, helping Flock Freight to focus on developing a comprehensive shipping platform that powers shared truckloads and drives positive industry change.

We especially want to highlight the Google Cloud research credits we relied on to launch Flock Freight and make rapid progress toward transforming the shipping industry. To this day, we continue to work with Google Cloud Managed Services partner DoiT International International to further scale and optimize operations on Google Cloud.

We’re proud of the results we’re delivering for our customers. For example, a home improvement importer now enjoys faster, safer, and easier shipping with 99.9% damage-free service and a 97.5% on-time delivery rate. A packaging supplier continues to maintain a 99% on-time delivery streak and decrease carbon emissions by 37%, while a mineral water company consistently reduces delivery expenses upwards of 50%.

Nationwide demand for shared truckloads continues to increase as the shipping industry works to lower costs and alleviate supply chain disruptions. With the Flock Freight platform, companies are building a more sustainable and resilient supply chain by efficiently combining multiple shipments into shared truckloads.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

Editor’s note: To kick off the new year and in preparation for NRF The Big Show, we invited partners from across our retail ecosystem to share stories, best practices, and tips and tricks on how they are helping retailers transform during a time that continues to see tremendous change. Please enjoy this entry from our partner.

If you put a pot of water on the stove, it doesn’t heat up instantly. It simmers slowly at first, eventually picking up steam to reach a rolling boil. The retail landscape is not so different. Capgemini’s research shows the sector has evolved over four generations, from the early days of fragmented outlets to omnichannel and customer-centric focuses, with a fifth generation on the horizon that promises to be centered on consumption.

• Generation 1: Fragmented outlets
• Generation 2: Chain concentration
• Generation 3: Omnichannel
• Generation 4: Consumer-centric
• Generation 5: Consumption-centric

Although incremental change allows companies to experiment and iterate during their digital journeys, the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly accelerated the evolution of online and contactless shopping. Evolution became a revolution, with most Consumer Product and Retail (CPR) companies still mastering the omnichannel generation of their digital transformation to create a seamless shopping experience. Companies that are more digitally mature are already aspiring to the consumer-centric phase, embracing opportunities made possible by technology such as personalization and automation.

What consumers want

Customers have more choices in how they shop and engage with brands. This has made it harder for brands to predict and anticipate needs across customer journeys. And that’s convincing some companies to innovate more quickly as consumer demand drives the need for speed and scale.

Think about your own online behavior. Say you’re shopping for an item and searching online for the closest store in your neighborhood. Google is likely your go-to for finding that information. Looking to troubleshoot an issue with a product or seek out a service? Again, you’ll likely hit up Google first, not even considering going directly to a brand’s website for answers.

Both scenarios point to a disconnect between virtual and physical worlds, a gap technology can bridge in numerous ways such as breaking down silos and integrating fragmented media channels. Interestingly, though, not everything will be centered online all the time. In our recent study on consumer behavior, The great consumer reset, Capgemini discovered 57 percent of shoppers plan to return to brick-and-mortar stores post-pandemic, which is basically unchanged from the 59 percent who often interacted with physical stores before.

But business as usual? Not even close. Consumers have come to expect a frictionless shopping experience (buy online, pick up in store) or an immersive one (products displayed online using augmented reality), and are not content to return to in-store lineups, empty shelves, or a one-size-fits-all approach. Moreover, customers want personalized interactions while ensuring their data and privacy are protected.

So the role of the store is changing. In fact, many online-only brands are opening brick-and-mortar establishments to drive customer experience. In our research on “smart stores,” we found the majority of consumers (66 percent) believe automation can improve their shopping experience by solving the challenges they face at retail stores.

From personalization to serendipity

Retailers must recognize that they have to win consumer trust and confidence. Many consumers believe retailers’ use of tech is focused on reducing costs rather than easing friction. And they’re right. That same Capgemini research found that only one-third (35 percent) of retailers consider “solving customer pain points” as the most important criteria when deciding which automation use cases to implement.

“Retailers are largely in the early stages of adopting automation, and that’s an opportunity to rethink how they’re using technology, not just to smooth out friction and engender consumer trust but to build unexpected consumer benefits,” says Neerav Vyas, Head of Customer First, Co-Chief Innovation Officer, Insights & Data, North America, Capgemini. “We’re trying to move towards this idea of delivering serendipitous experiences to bridge the physical and digital divide.”

The focus is not solely on shoppers seeking out a specific product. “When consumers are in an exploratory mood, retailers can recommend products and services customers didn’t even know they wanted,” says Vyas. For example, business teams that use personalization platforms as part of an integrated media strategy can optimize algorithms against outcomes such as improving conversion and driving engagement.

Vyas says the elevated experience from “personalization to serendipity” fosters trust in the ability of recommendation architectures to persuade and influence consumers’ choices in beneficial ways. A case in point: our research found that half (52 percent) of spending by millennials goes towards experience-related purchases. As always, the key is to meet consumers where they are. Even better, according to Vyas, is to anticipate and understand when signals like customer intent are changing.

How to create value throughout the customer journey

One solution companies can implement right now is an integrated media spend platform that incorporates reporting, planning, and strategy across the entire customer journey. This offers value throughout the customer journey by using technology to reduce friction along the way. Think of it as starting with the customer looking for a product (search and discovery), moving on to the purchase (omnichannel basket, “shoppable” screens) and pick up/delivery (QR code scan in store), and through to post-purchase engagement with the retailer (Google Contact Center AI).

Such a holistic approach also accelerates data acquisition, integration, and reporting using advanced analytics to break down silos and emphasize the importance of privacy and first-party data. This in turn guides end-to-end interventions across customer journeys that enable optimized media spend, empowers businesses to analyze their spend distribution, fine-tunes owned and paid tactics with agencies, and promotes stewardship to support audit efficacy.

A culture of experimentation

With this data-driven focus, CPRs can create a 360-degree perspective of the customer. That intelligence can be used to enhance and humanize automated shopping experiences by putting the customer in control, whether online, in store, or across company brands. Moreover, by using Google Cloud’s emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), we help companies accelerate value across the spectrum, from supply-chain optimization and customer innovation to consumer experience.

Building a culture of experimentation is a team effort. “It’s not ever just one person who had a big idea. It’s all incremental steps,” says Jennifer Marchand, Google Cloud COE Leader, Capgemini. “Finding the right use case and timing is everything.” Take Google Glass Enterprise, she continues. For greater consumer experience, it can enable in-store associates to better serve with hands-free checkout, customer personalization and recommendations, and special offers. At the same time, Computer Vision and Smart Shelves can help prioritize tasks for employees, notifying them of low stock or a spill in the store.

Marchand points out that companies and consumers alike might not be ready to fully adopt some technology like facial recognition, but since almost everyone has a smartphone these days, they can benefit from automation with ease. “What’s interesting,” she adds, “is the way Google thinks about these types of problems, solving them for the long term.”

The store of tomorrow

Imagine a truly frictionless shopping experience, where state-of-the-art computer vision and AI identifies the products you pick up, put back, and keep, allowing you to head home, completely bypassing the checkout, with a 99 percent accuracy rate and receipts sent directly to your mobile app. That utopian experience is already taking shape at CornerShop, Capgemini’s live experimental store in London, UK.

Jamie MacLoud, Transformation & Strategy Consultant at frog, part of Capgemini, describes the retail space, which runs on Google Cloud, as the store of tomorrow, and not the distant future. It’s an experiential space where retailers and brands can explore, develop, and test technological shopping innovations in real-time. The outcome is a clearer understanding of how digital innovation can enable new ways to progress the customer experience, improve in-store operations, and help consumers to rediscover the joy of in-person retail through new ways to shop and engage with brands.

“We build, test, and learn about store concepts of tomorrow that we believe could be implemented into actual stores in the next one to two years. Getting these experiences in front of real customers in the CornerShop allows us to generate tangible learnings that we can share with our clients and use to shape future store strategy” says MacLeod. CornerShop was opened to the public in two eight-week stints, which allowed real-time testing to see what technologies resonated with customers, which brands can adapt and scale. Frictionless checkout, not surprisingly, was a big win for customers, but the technology underpinning the “virtual try-on” of clothing was deemed more suitable for the store of the future.

So, unlike an innovation lab, CornerShop lets companies experiment risk free, speeding up the process from hypothesis to full-scale implementation. It’s also another step toward solving the challenges customers face, while delivering those serendipitous experiences that build brand loyalty and longevity.

Learn more about how Capgemini is partnering with Google Cloud to help retailers create next-generation shopping experiences today.

We would like to acknowledge Jamie MacLoud, Transformation & Strategy Consultant at frog, part of Capgemini and Neerav Vyas, Head of Customer First, Co-Chief Innovation Officer, Insights & Data, North America at Capgemini who supported with invaluable insights and subject matter expertise in the writing of this blog post.