This Google Executive Spends His Days in the Cloud

Before taking on his current role, Steven Kan (’06) ran strategy for Google’s AR and VR products division. Before that, he worked in business development for a variety of products, including Android (both hardware and software applications), the Chrome browser, Chrome hardware, Google Drive and Google Hangouts. His entrée into Google came when the startup he was working for was acquired. “Google acquired us and then, for the last 10 years, it’s been roaming the halls of Google,” says Kan.

As an MBA student, alumna Kelsey Anderson (’22) served as president of the Technology Business Association at Anderson (AnderTech). She spent the summer of 2021 interning at Amazon and is now a senior program manager of video games.

Q: I’d love to hear a little bit about what your current role is and about your work history.

Google is a big place, and I feel like I’m in one of the most exciting parts of the company. Currently, I’m in the Cloud division, the enterprise division; and, specifically, I work with the AI and industry solutions team. My function is a strategy and operations role. We also tacked on the title “chief of staff,” and that includes goal-setting and long-range planning, internal communications and looking at the health and happiness — including the organizational and the individual happiness — of the team.

It’s a fun role.

Q: What attracts you to the most progressive areas of tech? Or better, how do you attract yourself to those spots?

That’s an interesting question. When I first joined Google, they said, “Let’s make sure you’re in the best place for you. What do you love? What are you passionate about?” I told them, when I think about working in venture capital and when I think about working at a startup, it’s all about working with amazing entrepreneurs, amazing technologists, amazing product managers to help them, as the business person, launch new and exciting products and services. That has absolutely been a common thread.

I have had the great fortune within Google to also continue that work. My first assignment, I met some incredible entrepreneurs. They were getting Google Drive up and running and I said, “Hey, how can I help?” From there, I worked on Chrome OS and Chrome Books with an incredible group of people who were trying to do something that happens very rarely in a tech career, launch a new operating system, a new computing platform. There were lots of opportunities to do partnerships and look at retail distribution.

That led to AR and VR. The lead product manager for AR and VR happened to be responsible for Google Drive and Gmail. He had a passion for 3D, AR and VR technologies. I thought, “That sounds really cool, that sounds really fun,” and asked, “How can I help?” That’s kind of the guiding light for me.

Q: What excites you most about the cloud space and where Google is going with it?

The addition of the cloud as a primary platform for all computing is an incredible industry trend. I deliberately choose not to describe it as a “movement to the cloud” because I do believe that there’s going to be a mix of environments, with some very secure data that lives in a directly controlled data center.

To me, it is one of these large industry trends that comes along like mobile did, like the internet did before that. Career-wise, this is a great place to park myself and be a part of it for a while.

There’s a ton of interesting problems to solve. What is the differential advantage of having something posted, run and managed as a service in the cloud versus on-prem? How you can meet customers’ needs, where traditionally they’ve done stuff on prem? How do we help them identify the applications or the data that could have advantages when hosted in the cloud? As you keep peeling the onion, you see more ways to optimize a company’s infrastructure.

And at this time, with the developments happening on chatbots and generative AI, there is incredible potential to use these new AI technologies to help people be more productive and creative. There is a big responsibility as well to avoid misuse that would detract from these kinds of benefits.

Q: Do you have advice for incoming students to make the most of their time at Anderson?

The first thing is to be courageous and to map out your long-term career aspirations.

Really think about “What is my Plan A?” It can be super ambitious. Put that out there and then use that as your guidepost as you go, because every choice that you have at Anderson is important. Should I take these courses? Should I join that club? Should I listen to this talk or participate in this activity? Each of those things can help you move toward your long-term goal. It’s really important to remember that it’s not a straight path between here and there. What you want to be doing is generally moving in that direction, but it’s very hard to know when you’ve got myriad choices. You don’t need to be laser-focused, but you need to have some kind of aperture that’s broad enough, that says, “I want to go this way, not that way.”

The second thing is that I have rarely seen anyone’s Plan A from when we were little kids — “I want to be an astronaut” or “I want to be a supreme court justice” — play out exactly. Sometimes it works out, and most of the time it doesn’t. It’s always okay to pivot. Every time you’re moving in one general direction, you’re gaining more information about what you like and what you don’t like, and from there you can refine. So, the first thing to do is figure out that long-term aspiration, think about the steps that you want to take, then always be comfortable to move toward some other area.

The most important thing is, give Anderson your all, give it your full attention, give it your full energy. Get to the point where you feel like you’re involved in a little bit more than you can handle because it’s a really brief two years. And I guarantee, the more you put into it, the more that you stretch yourself in this relatively safe environment, the more you’re going to get out of it.

Q: What’s the one piece of tech you can’t live without?

Oh, great, now the readers are going to get a glimpse into my soul.

It’s not hardware. I really wanted to pick hardware, that’s my first instinct. But when I think about it, it’s entertainment, it’s videos, it’s podcasts, it’s music and it’s reading. The ability to download a book on demand, for me, is huge. I’m constantly able to feed my brain with interesting ideas that I want to explore. The opportunity to watch great shows these days — there’s some really amazing content at our fingertips. All of that digital media being available on demand has really enriched my life.

Q: What’s the book you’re reading right now?

There is a book called Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson that has really begun to change my thinking about race, about social economics dynamics in the United States. The book deliberately pulls from the notion of caste as it exists in India and evaluates the United States class system and race system through that lens. It has changed how I think about what race means as a social construct and about the impacts of economics and economic class on how we interact with each other. So that’s been awesome.