Author: Richard Howard

If you’ve ever read anything about the internal processes of Amazon, you may know that Amazon eschews PowerPoint presentations in favor of written documents. There are a couple of different documents that Amazonians write, and they’re used for different things. In this post, I’m going to discuss the concept of the “Narrative” and how it can help startups think more clearly, set goals, and keep themselves accountable.

Because of his years of just getting it done, AWS Business Development Manager Richard Howard was stuck in the old way of doing things. What he failed to realize, however, was that to be really successful and help as many customers as possible, he needed to scale the impact he was having. Here’s what he did.

How do you build a product and hire technical talent when you’re a non-technical founder? Former founder and CEO Richard Howard, currently on AWS’ startup business development team, shares his thoughts.

Hiring the right people for your startup is one of the most important things that you will do as a founder. Beyond finding product/market fit, it’s probably the most important thing that you’ll do. Before joining AWS, I’d interviewed and hired a bunch of people as the CEO and Co-Founder of the live event startup Shortcut. Amazon, however, is the only employer that has actually taught and trained me how to properly interview and hire. I’d now like to share some of those lessons here because I think they are critical and particularly applicable to startups.