Google Cloud Next After Hours | Venture, AI, and Customer Conversations
About Event
AI is no longer the question.
The shift now is how it shows up in real workflows
— lead intake, customer conversations, follow-ups, and support.
We’re bringing together a small group of founders, operators, and investors who are actually working on these problems day to day.
This is not a surface-level panel.
It’s a room of people building and operating in it.
⚡ What’s happening
10:00 AM – 10:30 AM Arrival, Coffee, and Introductions
10:30 AM – 11:15 AM
Google Cloud Perspective — From Cloud Next to Real Business Impact
Key takeaways from John Alioto (Startup Evangelist, Google) about Google Cloud Next and what actually matters for teams building and operating today.
11:15 AM – 11:30 AM Break
11:30 AM – 12:00 PM - Panel 1 What’s Actually Working in Customer Workflows
A candid discussion on how AI is being applied in real workflows. What’s working, what’s breaking, and how teams are improving customer engagement in practice.
Moderated by Ken Yeung (Founder, Wati)
Ethan Zheng — CEO, Jobright.ai
Roxanne Alaniz — Founder & CEO, Alaniz Marketing
Junyu Huang — COO, Novita.ai
Laliv Hadar — SVP Marketing, Invision
12:00 PM – 12:30 PM Panel 2 - What’s Real vs Hype in AI
A broader view on where the market is heading, what’s actually delivering value, and what’s still noise.
Moderated by Warren Li, Head of VCBD, Google
Grace Gong — AI Investor & Operator, Founder & CEO
Benny Liao — VC & ex-Founder, Acorn Pacific Ventures
12:30 PM – 2:00PM Lunch Networking & Peer Exchange
Open discussion with a curated group of founders, operators, and investors working on similar problems.
👀 Who should be in the room
Founders building AI products
Marketing and growth leaders
Operators managing customer workflows
Investors and ecosystem builders
⚡ Why join
Most AI conversations are still high-level.
This one is not.
You’ll hear what’s actually working, what’s breaking, and how teams are improving real outcomes like response, conversion, and efficiency.
And more importantly, you’ll meet others working through the same problems.
Speakers Bio:
John P. Alioto is a Startup Ecosystem Advocate at Google Cloud with over 25 years of experience in AI, machine learning, and software engineering. Previously, he led developer ecosystems and evangelism at Microsoft, Samsung, and Viv Labs. As a three-time successful tech founder himself, John specializes in helping technical founders leverage cutting-edge AI to build, scale, and succeed.
Benny Liao is a Principal at Acorn Pacific Ventures, an early-stage fund focused on AI and B2B software, where he leads all AI investments. With over 10 years of experience spanning entrepreneurship and venture capital across Asia and the U.S., Benny previously built and scaled a fintech startup in Southeast Asia to a 140-person team with a successful exit. At Acorn Pacific, he has invested in over 20 companies in the past two years across AI infrastructure, enterprise SaaS, and consumer tech. Notable portfolio companies include BentoML (acquired by Modular), Groq (acquired by NVIDIA), and Reddit (IPO). Benny is a Chicago Booth alumni.
Grace Gong is the founder of Smart Venture Media and host of two VC podcasts — Smart Venture Podcast (SVPpro.com) and Venture with Grace, a daily show — as well as an angel investor in AI, super angel and venture scout for Alumni Ventures, Advisor at Berkeley SkyDeck, founder of Smart AI Summits and G Fellows, and a #1 Bestselling Amazon author in the VC category. Her podcasts have featured C-level executives and VPs from companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Snowflake, Salesforce, Reddit, DoorDash, and more, alongside Managing Partners from top funds on the Forbes Midas List and unicorn founders from companies like Craigslist, Square, Loom, and Glean. A LinkedIn Top Voice in Finance with a background in venture capital and private equity, Grace regularly shares insights on tech, VC, and entrepreneurship — connect with her at @GraceGong.
Junyu Huang is COO at Novita AI (www.novita.ai), where he works across product, go-to-market, partnerships, and operations to help developers deploy and scale model inference and agent workloads. Previously, he co-founded Toma.com (backed by Y Combinator and a16z) and worked on the AI infrastructure team at Scale AI.
Yudian Zheng is the CTO and Co-founder of Jobright.ai, an AI-powered job search platform with 2M+ registered users. With a team of fewer than 10, Jobright has surpassed $6M ARR and achieved profitability. Yudian leads all technical strategy across product, ML/NLP, and infrastructure. He holds a PhD in AI and database systems, with prior experience at Twitter and Newsbreak. He also shares startup and AI insights to 50K+ followers on LinkedIn.
Laliv Hadar is SVP of Marketing & Brand at Invision, a 35-year experiential agency, where she leads global marketing strategy and brand across a portfolio of Fortune 500 clients. In addition to driving go-to-market strategy and execution, she focuses on operationalizing AI within marketing workflows—enabling more scalable, efficient execution across her team and supporting adoption of AI-driven processes across the broader agency. A seasoned B2B marketing and sales leader, Laliv has built and led high-performing teams across Fandom, Yahoo!, AOL, Time Warner, and venture-backed startups. She specializes in turning strategy into execution—developing programs that drive revenue, strengthen customer relationships, and deliver measurable business outcomes.
About Wati (https://www.wati.io/)
Wati is an AI-native customer engagement platform backed by Tiger, sequoia and shopify venture, built around WhatsApp Business API, helping businesses manage marketing, sales, and support conversations at scale. It serves more than 16,000 customers globally and enables teams to automate customer engagement across WhatsApp and other channels from a unified platform.
About Google Cloud Google Cloud provides the cloud and AI infrastructure companies use to build and scale modern products, including generative AI applications and agents through Vertex AI and Gemini. It focuses on helping businesses bring AI into real-world workflows quickly, responsibly, and at production scale.