Author: AWS Admin

AWS was honored to join hundreds of entrepreneurs, investors, educators, government officials, and business representatives in Hyderabad, India for the 7th Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) last November.

Life after founding a company comes with lots of options. As an entrepreneur, you’ve learned what it means to scale, that execution is paramount, what it means to be scrappy and that resilience is half the battle—all important skills that make you valuable to any number of companies. While a minority of founders know that they immediately want to start a new company, most need time to step back, grieve (if necessary), and evaluate what there is to do after thinking about one business exclusively for any number of years.

Anand Jain, co-founder at CleverTap, explains how his company processes—in real time—55 billion data events per month and sends out over 10 billion messages per month.

In my career as an entrepreneur, I’ve had the opportunity to close the first deal at three different startups. There is no better feeling than when a paying customer has validated your concept and recognized your product value. That first deal has the potential to spring your company to the next 10 deals that can set your business scaling to the stratosphere. Within those first few deals lie the clues to a successful business or the pitfalls to your startup.

In just a few short years, cloud computing has literally changed the entire IT landscape. And with this paradigm shift, there has been a great upheaval in the cybersecurity world. Security vendors have rushed to overhaul their product roadmaps because their traditional data center security products lack the agility, compatibility, and scalability needed for the cloud.

We’re in it together. That community-driven sentiment was in full-effect as more than 200 entrepreneurs gathered at the AWS Loft in SoHo for New York’s first AWS Startup Day. Machine Learning? Check. How to tell your story? Covered. Cronuts? Inhaled. “Everyone wants to help everyone else to succeed,” said Future Lab’s Craig Wilson, one of the day’s speakers. “We’re here to be a part of that.”

Honesty is the name of game for Ruth Penford, the director of talent acquisition for Shazam. In fact, Penford believes honesty is so critical for recruiting, the first thing she did after joining the music sharing startup was to invite in a group of consultants to ask current employees about how they felt about the company. What Penford found was that employees were filtering themselves “like Instagram filters,” she says, externally presenting a rosy view of the company and its roadmap to job candidates, as opposed to acknowledging known issues concerning their legacy tech and the need to tear it out and rebuild.

Assigning credit risk to people who apply for business loans, credit cards, and home mortgages has mostly been done by weighing some 10 or 20 attributes. Take those attributes—and we’re all familiar with some of the things that make our credit scores rise and fall, including timeliness of payments, debt to income ratio, and defaults—and crank them through your favorite logistic regression model or scorecard. The result is your assigned credit risk, and depending on the number, you either get your loan or you don’t.

When Antoine Blondeau, the co-founder and chairman of Sentient Technologies, first began working with artificial intelligence, the concept was still known as “algorithmic science.” In the decades since, AI has evolved into a much sexier topic because, according to Blondeau, when operating on mission speed and plugged into the right workflow, AI will learn quicker and faster than humans—resulting in business models that can evolve at machine speed. “That is the revolution,” notes Blondeau.

In less than two weeks, 17,500 attendees from across the globe will descend on Helsinki for Slush 2017. A not-for-profit global event dedicated to the startup community and run entirely by an army of volunteers, it’s been described as “Burning Man meets TED.” With a mission to “help the next generation of great, world-conquering companies [come] forward,” the event, in just a few short years, has expanded beyond its flagship event in Helsinki to locations in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Singapore.