Embracing the unpredictable: Ben King's journey to leading Google Singapore

If you told Ben King when he was a University of Sydney student that one day, he’d be the managing director at Google Singapore, nobody would be more surprised than him.  

 “I didn’t even really know what I wanted to study,” says King of choosing a media and communications degree at the University. “I knew I liked languages, history, and writing.”

He’d also been on campus quite a bit, playing cricket against the University team while in high school. “At 18,” he says drily, “I was nowhere as deliberate as I am now.”

These days, King says his job is to “bring the best of Google to a country.” He heads up a team across South East Asia and the APAC region. This, he says, “spans working with customers to help them deliver on their ambitions, working with the government to ensure we have the right programs in place to drive the digital ecosystem forward, and working with smaller teams across the region on influence and alignment and leading two smaller teams focused on travel and media agencies with APAC wide scope". It’s an expansive role, but King says one of the best parts of working in the local office of a global company is that the approach can be custom.

“Having a tailored approach to a local market is critical in terms of serving users the right way,” he says. “When you’re working to help solve some of the largest challenges in a country, you really need to think local.”

Some of these challenges have included bringing communities online for the first time in Thailand (as well as teaching web safety) and reskilling 3000 displaced Singaporeans during the COVID-19 pandemic.

King came to Google in a circuitous fashion. After taking a gap year with his now-wife, Yvette (also an alumnus and the host of E! News Asia), King played cricket in England for six months (“Can you call that a job?” he asks, laughing). A friend who worked in sports marketing suggested King look into “new media”, or digital media. “I searched online, found a job listing in advertising, had a coffee with the managing director and got offered the job on the spot.” Once again, he adds, “it was not entirely calculated”. His role at the start-up didn’t last long, but it did help him leap to another organisation, which was funded by Microsoft. Both roles helped King learn to build relationships, how to position a product for sale and how to be “scrappy and malleable".

The Kings had been in Singapore for a few years when Ben, who had just turned 30, was approached by the head of Google South East Asia. “He asked what I wanted to do, and I said ‘Give me the hardest problem you are trying to solve right now.’” King was sent to Thailand, followed by Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, on short “apprenticeships”, solving various problems for the tech giant. In 2015 he became country manager of Google Thailand, and when a role in Singapore opened, King grabbed it. “My career has been a path filled with risk, mobility, and an appetite to explore difficult problems and vastly different things,” he says.

The most difficult part of his role, says King, is the constant pace of change and growth in the tech world. 

“The Google I work in now is fundamentally different to the Google I started at 12 years ago,” he says, “and it will be very different again in another 12 years. Staying abreast of those changes, while managing the balance between short-term execution and long-term business durability is not always easy. We are not alone in this though.” Everything, says King, can turn on a dime - from government regulations to technological advancements to the competitive landscape. “You have to be agile, as well as able to plan for the future,” he says. “It’s a balance of long-term investment, continuous learning, managing risk, working with stakeholders…it’s a rollercoaster.”

Still, he adds, the benefits far outweigh any challenges. “I get to work in a company with incredible products that improve people’s experience of the world,” he says. “If we get it right, that can be very powerful.” South East Asia itself “is an incredibly exciting region, but also one with a lot of need”, meaning that there is a runway for growth and innovation.

While King’s road hasn’t always been straightforward, he says his best advice is, in fact, not being afraid to start at smaller companies. “A lot of people want to enter directly into one of the big tech companies, but smaller businesses will equip you well in terms of understanding of fundamentals, and how to succeed without the backing of market-leading products,” he says, adding that “development is a lifelong process".

“So many roles that are critical now didn’t even exist when I started my career,” he says, listing roles like app developers, cloud infrastructure engineers and social media managers. “Evolving is critical to being successful,” he says, “as well as investing in evergreen assets such as critical thinking, reasoning, negotiation or leadership.”

With all that constant progress, one thing King is adamant about is that he’s actually no tech whiz. At least not on all topics. 

“That’s the funniest thing about my job,” he says. “Everyone thinks we know everything about every one of our products and platforms. Mostly my job is to make sure the right people are speaking to the right people, making decisions when I am the subject matter expert, or when I am indeed best person to make them, and more importantly, knowing how to delegate or tie break a decision when I am not the best person in the room to make it. All that doesn’t help me at a dinner party though, when someone has an issue with their Gmail!"

Ben King recently shared her insights with the Sydney Alumni Community on LinkedIn as part of the 'Ask Me Anything' alumni series. Join today to connect with fellow alumni.