YMMV. I've been in the same FAANG-to-early-stage position, and I found:
1. It was easy to find people interested in startups at Google, but the quality of those interactions tended to be pretty low. The vast majority of people really did not have any experience with how startups actually functioned, and most people I talked to were more taken with the prestige and fantasy of being a founder than with actually seriously thinking about running a startup. I'm sure there are great and experienced operators at Google who are very competent and pragmatic startup folks - but those were generally not the people you found at internal events geared towards "people interested in startups".
2. I learned a lot cross-functionally when I joined my current team (which was < 5 people at the time). I was talking to customers in sales and support calls, helping to think about product and market strategy, and generally helping out on a variety of interesting things. You're definitely right that I wasn't talking to investors (at least, not on a regular basis - as an early employee, sometimes investors still want to chat to learn more about how things are on the ground) nor was I spending my days prospecting and finding BD partnerships, but I did learn a surprising amount about deal dynamics, selling B2B, and thinking about markets and customers in general. That said, this may have been because of the extraordinarily open and competent sales folks I worked with.
When I look on my list of "people I would co-found with", the vast majority of those people are the incredibly intense and competent folks I met working at the (now no longer early stage) startup I moved to. In general, I think about finding a co-founder less as "cast a wide net to find your one true partner" and more as "work alongside the most aggressively competent people you can find, and hopefully some of those people will mesh with you well enough that you would consider co-founding with them" (with the corollary that, if you find yourself in a job where you feel like you're mostly coasting, this is probably not a good environment for finding co-founders (although it certainly may be a good environment for you for other reasons)).
As usual, grain of salt - I was basically a new grad when I joined Google, and I expect the experience would be very different if I had a strong, senior network there. I also come from a position of unusual privilege - my parents are both engineers and I have lots of friends in engineering and I'm good at what I do, so I am unusually risk tolerant because "running out of money" or "being unable to easily find a job" is just not a thing I worry about.
1. It was easy to find people interested in startups at Google, but the quality of those interactions tended to be pretty low. The vast majority of people really did not have any experience with how startups actually functioned, and most people I talked to were more taken with the prestige and fantasy of being a founder than with actually seriously thinking about running a startup. I'm sure there are great and experienced operators at Google who are very competent and pragmatic startup folks - but those were generally not the people you found at internal events geared towards "people interested in startups".
2. I learned a lot cross-functionally when I joined my current team (which was < 5 people at the time). I was talking to customers in sales and support calls, helping to think about product and market strategy, and generally helping out on a variety of interesting things. You're definitely right that I wasn't talking to investors (at least, not on a regular basis - as an early employee, sometimes investors still want to chat to learn more about how things are on the ground) nor was I spending my days prospecting and finding BD partnerships, but I did learn a surprising amount about deal dynamics, selling B2B, and thinking about markets and customers in general. That said, this may have been because of the extraordinarily open and competent sales folks I worked with.
When I look on my list of "people I would co-found with", the vast majority of those people are the incredibly intense and competent folks I met working at the (now no longer early stage) startup I moved to. In general, I think about finding a co-founder less as "cast a wide net to find your one true partner" and more as "work alongside the most aggressively competent people you can find, and hopefully some of those people will mesh with you well enough that you would consider co-founding with them" (with the corollary that, if you find yourself in a job where you feel like you're mostly coasting, this is probably not a good environment for finding co-founders (although it certainly may be a good environment for you for other reasons)).
As usual, grain of salt - I was basically a new grad when I joined Google, and I expect the experience would be very different if I had a strong, senior network there. I also come from a position of unusual privilege - my parents are both engineers and I have lots of friends in engineering and I'm good at what I do, so I am unusually risk tolerant because "running out of money" or "being unable to easily find a job" is just not a thing I worry about.