AWS Startups Blog
Author: Michelle Kung
Michelle Kung currently works in startup content at AWS and was previously the head of content at Index Ventures. Prior to joining the corporate world, Michelle was a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, the founding Business Editor at the Huffington Post, a correspondent for The Boston Globe, a columnist for Publisher’s Weekly and a writer at Entertainment Weekly.
What is an Engineering Manager?
I have held many titles in the tech industry: Engineer, Lead Engineer, Head of Engineering, VP of Engineering, and CTO. You would think that each of these titles would be self-explanatory, but as I’ve transitioned from one company to another, I’ve been surprised by how differently these roles are interpreted by different organizations.
gridX’s Andy Booke on Giving Solar Panel Users the Power of Data
gridX co-founders Andy Booke and David Balensiefen came up with the idea for their IoT startup, gridX, while travelling in Ecuador, where the stability of the power grid left something to be desired.
Sansan Co-Founder Kenji Shiomi on Why Business Cards Are Still Necessary
In 2007, Kenji Shiomi co-founded Sansan, a company that focuses on providing an alternative contact management solution that uses business cards as its building blocks. Sansan offers both B2B and B2C products and counts over 7,000 corporations as its customers, including the Japanese government.
With Tricella, the Future of Family Caregiving Is an Easier Pill to Swallow
Tricella is a digital health start-up that launched in 2014.
Fiverr Relies on SageMaker to Streamline and Simplify Machine Learning Models
When it came time for Fiverr to analyze the data around user behavior on its platform, the freelance services website did what many modern businesses do in terms of recruiting the right tool for the task: they engaged Amazon Web Services’s SageMaker. Amazon SageMaker is an API that enables developers and data scientists to readily build, teach, and position machine learning models to serve any need and at any scale.
Zoona CMO Lelemba Phiri on the Challenges of Being a Businesswoman in Africa
Lelemba Phiri, the Chief Marketing Officer for mobile payment platform Zoona, says many African businesswomen prefer to simply grow their companies to a “subsistent” level, because if their businesses get too big, they are seen as “not being marriage material.”
ReCactus Founder and CEO Bernard Tan on Engagement Advertising
It’s safe to say that Gen Y and Gen Z are intimately more connected to their peers—and social influencers—than previous generations and are less connected to cold advertising. “Advertising that just pops up? They don’t watch it,” says ReCactus CEO and Founder Bernard Tan.
Venture Garden Group’s Nichole Yembra on Why Investors Should Bank on Female Founders
Nichole Onome Yembra is the CFO of the Lagos, Nigeria-based Venture Garden Group and the managing partner for Greenhouse Capital, VGG’s investment arm.
How Anapi Is Pushing Insurance into the Future
To reinvent insurance for the age of digital, George Kesselman founded Anapi, which provides a set of API-first technology tools that function behind the scenes of any digital platform to seamlessly bring in relevant protection for their customers.
How Casper Delivers from New York to the North Pole
For shoppers who buy a mattress from Casper, all they have to do is hit the “place order” button and a few days later, a mattress shows up on their doorstep. Easy. But for Site Reliability Engineer John Spencer and the rest of his extended team, getting a mattress from order to delivery is a far more complicated process.