Author: AWS Editorial Team

ReDI School is a startup social enterprise that teaches technical skills to refugees from all over the world. It is unlike any startup in the world, and yet its co-founders are working through the same issues that every startup faces.

Flip-flops in the office, tracking everything, driving out fear, and giving everyone visibility into everything are just some of ways Bridgement is building a very fast-growing fintech startup in one of the fastest growing markets in the world.

Spoiler alert: The only thing that matters is building something your customers love. But the trick as a startup CEO is staying close enough to customers to know that.

AWS is headed to Chicago for the annual Radiological Society of North America Conference to showcase the work of our cutting edge medical imaging customers to the 50K+ attendees.

This past year, I was lucky enough to work with a number of different seed funds and seed stage startups, helping them to grow and succeed on AWS. This journey took me to many conferences, and private and public events, such as the seed enterprise summit Flight 2019. Organized by Crane Venture Partners, the summit featured a string of successful entrepreneurs and early employees sharing their experience and insights. Below are the seven most important lessons I took away, that I’d love to share with you:

There is no question that the amount of choice in platforms and building blocks for software engineers is exploding. Traditionally, what was handled by separate teams with purpose-built hardware has now shifted to code (and infrastructure as code). This represents a fundamental shift in software architecture and responsibility that software engineering teams have to maintain.

The Startup’s Guide to re:Invent includes of the key moments from the overall re:Invent schedule and the startup-specific sessions.

In the modern era, “no competitive corporation in the world can succeed without taking design seriously,” declared WeTransfer Chief Innovation Officer George Petschnigg Tuesday afternoon. Speaking on a panel about “UI and the future of the customer experience” at the annual Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Petschnigg added that the biggest power that designers have nowadays is collaboration.

“Alexa revolutionized daily convenience as we know it,” explained Rohit Prasad, VP & Head Scientist for Amazon Alexa, Nov. 5 at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal. “The cognitive load shifted from customers to AI. You talk, Alexa answers back.”

I recently embarked on a journey to bring AWS Startup Days to Johannesburg, Lagos, Accra and Nairobi. Here’s what I learn about startups, founders, and investors as I engaged with some of the hottest startup ecosystems in Africa.