>Startup credits require multiple follow-ups, meetings, etc. And these reps have weird incentive structures (so they are trying to bypass each other to meet their quotas or whatever).
Man, I tried going for the credits. I've organised meetups and conferences for Google, gave talks, been a part of Google Startup campus for years now, have been invited to participate in GDE program, and as I'm making a GenAI startup I decided "well, maybe time to try getting those 300k cloud credits, I've given them so much I'll surely get it".
Well, the first person I talked to, said I'm denied, because they didn't even check the websites I added in the description. They said oh I need to add it to another field for their team to see, told me to update it, but there is no way to update it. Then we had a second call, they said it's okay I can ignore that and pointed me to another person who will be my "account manager".
That person was absolutely uninterested into what we're doing, what we want and what we plan to do. They did not even care about helping us much until we reached 15k monthly spend or so, giving a holier-than-thou attitude and sounding like they're making lunch during the call. I'd rather have the call with an LLM at this point.
Then even though our website says our product relies on AI, it is impossible without AI and I explained to him how and why we train custom models and use their GenAI products - the person decided we are not an AI company and can only get 2k in Cloud credits.
The interaction left such a sour taste in my mouth that I will _never_ use Google Cloud in our product, as I do not want to have to deal with the Account Manager.