Author: Michelle Kung

“I’m actually an unusual tech co-founder,” Polina Montano says. And it’s true: while Montano’s isn’t exactly a rags-to-riches story, it is a gas-stations-to-striking-tech-gold story. Coming from a retail background, Montano was a small business owner for most of her life—starting with a fashion store and moving up to a chain of gas stations—before the inspiration for Job Today struck. In fact, Montano says, she started pondering the concept of Job Today in earnest thanks her hands-on gas station experience

Readaar co-founder Matthijs van Til explains how his startup, which buys imagery and sells data, learned how to sell their product to local governments.

Artificial intelligence, one of the most promising technological developments of the past decade, has had a slow start finding wide use cases. Right now, it’s primarily being used by marketers and the military. But is that all it can do?

Whether it’s via phones, cars, speakers, or even watches, brands have an ever-increasing number of places to reach consumers. The catch, however, is that consumers are getting savvier—and more demanding—about how brands are engaging with them. “Customers have high expectations… that brands are going to deliver relevant, personalized, and important messages to them that add a lot of value,” says Braze co-founder and chief technology officer Jon Hyman. For the most part, consumers don’t understand—nor care—whether they are getting a discount or new product notice from a brand’s email or app team. “All they care about is: is it delivering a great product experience, is it valuable to me, is it adding value, and is it relevant to me,” he says.

While most people know Rent the Runway as the country’s leading lender of LBDs and workwear, the nine-year old startup also happens to be the country’s largest dry-cleaning business. As Rent The Runway CTO Josh Builder notes, the company turns around, on average, 50,000 to 55,000 items on a daily basis—over 65,000 during peak seasons and holidays—and 100% of that inventory comes back to them.

As veritable stylists and dry-cleaning experts, Rent the Runway must keep track of not only the latest fashion trends, but also a wide variety of inventory and chemical mixes to keep their clothes in red-carpet shape. To do this, RTR is shifting many of their operations to the cloud. Watch to see how they pulled it off.

Initially released on February 19, 1990, Adobe’s Photoshop has long been the doyen of design. However, after nearly 30 years, Photoshop’s licensing model is being challenged by several startups looking to democratize the design industry and make it easier for all people, and not just professionals, to create. One such startup is San Francisco-based Figma. Founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, the open design platform—which just raised a $25 million Series B—features a cloud-based screen design tool, which helps teams achieve a shared understanding around design without worrying about syncing, exporting or installing software. We recently caught up with Field to talk about how the cloud has made life easier for designers.

Looking to democratize design for everyone, Melanie Perkins co-founded Canva in 2014 to reimagine design for the Internet age.

Every day here at GIPHY, we have GIFs on GIFs on GIFs uploaded to our platform. In fact, we serve over three billion GIFs a day (that’s a lot of dancing cats!) to over 300 million daily active users. Every upload, however, brings new information and an increasingly large amount of data—this can become a lot to manage. Using database services like MySQL and DynamoDB, we’re able to organize this heavy amount of data in a high-performing way.

After selling his first startup to Salesforce when he was 21, Howie Liu could have focused his efforts on any number of subjects. Instead, he decided start Airtable, a collaboration platform that essentially modernizes one of the least sexy products around: spreadsheets.

What’s more fun than an all-night hackathon in Vegas? Why, a Vegas hackathon involving self-driving cars, of course. During AWS’s 2017 re:Invent conference, 25 teams were given kits to build an autonomous car that could learn how to drive around a track on its own.