AWS Startups Blog

As blockchain steadily advances and reaches mainstream acceptance, what can startups do to prepare for this financial revolution?

Joshua Builder, Rent the Runway CTO, shares insights into the technology system and tools that organizes and dispatches more than 100k items every day. Learn how Rent the Runway uses data to personalize offers for their customers and how they scale their infrastructure to manage large influx of traffic after major events like New York Fashion Week. Joshua also shares best practices on how to launch a successful subscription platform and how founders can build and rally a team of skilled technologist to build products and solutions for future growth.

Learn how Houtan Fanisalek, Chief Technology Officer of Felix Gray, an e-commerce startup, scaled their infrastructure and planned for massive traffic spikes using Amazon Aurora and Elasticache. He discusses best practices on how to scale your database with minimal downtime, find performance bottlenecks in your database driven application, and how to handle service failures gracefully. Houtan also provides real world examples of the challenges his team faced while scaling Felix Gray, and speaks to the common growing pains any tech startup will face as they scale in the cloud.

“Public transit is not reliable enough,” says Eitan Yanovsky, CTO of Optibus, an Israeli software startup. “People are suffering from delays and a lot of these are happening because of improper planning.” To help cities run their bus fleets more efficiently, flexibly, and economically, Optibus offers proprietary cloud-based software driven by AI machine learning that analyzes historical and real-time passenger data to optimize service. The ultimate goal is to cut cost and improve service, making happier municipalities and happier riders.

“Death by PowerPoint, yeah? A phenomenon known to all of us,” jokes Sven Hoffmann, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Powtoon, a cloud-based service that allows users to create their own professional-looking videos. But what other option do you have, if you want to present information in a visual way? According to Hoffmann, video is the way to go. Specifically, animated video. “[It’s] better to grab people’s attention and get your point across than a long, boring presentation.”

Janine Teo, CEO of Solve Education!, talks to us about what inspired her startup, how they use technology, who their customers are, and their roadmap for 2019.

Cash flow problems are among the most common that small and midsize businesses deal with. Regardless of industry or location, guaranteed access to funding is a primary concern. And according to Daniel Goldberg, CEO of Bridgement, the complications facing these businesses in South Africa can be especially high. On average, it takes five weeks for […]

Nearly 100 years ago, department store and marketing pioneer John Wanamaker famously said, “Fifty percent of my advertising spend is wasted, I just don’t know which fifty percent.” Today, many argue that the vast majority of advertising is wasted because of lack of relevancy and poor targeting, especially as advertisers and publishers increasingly rely on […]

No matter the industry or stage of a startup, there are common challenges and goals. While speaking with founders and technology leaders every day, I noticed common topics such as fundraising, profitability, hiring, regional expansion, and cloud architecture. In this post I’d like to share three technology-driven trends I’m seeing in consumer startups, which address new types of challenges.

Just call Shawn Carolan Menlo Ventures’ “mobility man.” Not only did the general partner champion the venture capital firm’s investments in Jump Bikes and electric scooter startup Skip, but Carolan was also among the earliest to understand how the transportation sector would unfold, backing connected-car and location-based services company Telenav back in 2005. That conviction […]