AWS Startups Blog

Michelle Kung

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.

Affirm’s Infrastructure Event Readiness Advice for E-Commerce Startups

From unanticipated service failures to load-related performance degradations, infrastructure event readiness planning is critical for handling seasonal traffic spikes gracefully and dynamically. Without proper preparation, your best sales day could become your last. Gain insights into how Elaine Arbaugh, Senior Software Engineer and SRE tech lead, at fintech startup Affirm managed the massive influx of activity during the 2018 Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday shopping weekend by building a scale-up, fault tolerant, database system that was able to handle 5x a normal day’s scale.

Bringing the Beauty Industry into the Digital Age with Slick Co-Founder Matt Millar

The ability to easily make reservations online for goods and services may seem ubiquitous, but many industries have not yet found the technology to match their needs. When Matt Millar and his colleagues found that 70% of the beauty industry was still running on pen and paper, he and his partners founded Slick, a salon management platform that helps hair and beauty professionals book appointments, manage calendars, and save money.

An Ocean of Data: Talking With Datameer’s Claudine Lagerholm

Oceans are made for exploration. That seems to be the subtext of the evocatively named Datameer, which uses Meer, the German word for ocean, to position itself in juxtaposition with data lakes. The name Datameer hints at the immensity and power of data, which shapes lives today in much the same way that ocean currents shaped those in previous centuries. It also hints at the sheer inscrutability of data. For most people, being presented with raw data and asked to interpret it is as bewildering as being presented with a view of a flat sea and told to list statistics about local fish populations. That’s where Datameer comes in.