Author: Michelle Kung

VICE had a large-scale problem to solve. Their ecosystem had become too large in terms of the number of brands they supported—they currently have sites in 35 different countries in 18 languages, which read in different characters and directions—and their engineering team wanted to make sure the reading experience worked well for everyone.

Indonesia, the fourth largest country in the world with 262 million people, is a fertile ground for startups. But that wasn’t always the case. 

In 2007, Chuck Slaughter launched his new social enterprise, Living Goods, in Uganda, “borrowing from the Avon playbook.” But instead of going door-to-door selling lipstick and hand creams, Living Goods’ community health workers arrive on local doorsteps offering medical services, health education, medicines, and health products.

Growing up in Bahrain, Esra’a Al Shafei saw the damage that authoritarian regimes could inflict on minority voices, political outliers, and the causes of social justice. From a young age, she felt an enormous sense of responsibility to take action.

Sam Parnell has been an AWS evangelist most of his career. While Chief Technology Officer at popular sports news site Bleacher Report, he ran the company “100 percent on AWS.” When Turner Broadcasting acquired Bleacher Report in 2012, Parnell got involved with aspects of the media giant’s infrastructure, and again started moving critical operations into the cloud.

The Startup’s Guide to re:Invent includes of the key moments from the overall re:Invent schedule, and the startup-specific sessions. We’ve asked some re:Invent veterans (and newbies) to offer their game plan for the days they will be in Vegas for the conference. Finally, we’ve identified some re:Invent sessions, picked from the main catalog, and grouped them based on a particular need, or type of startup product and focus.

In today’s capital-fueled startup market, it’s easy to feel behind the curve when it comes to keeping up with the most recent tech products. New companies launch, fly, or fail faster than even the geekiest of us can keep up with, sometimes slipping under the radar amid crowds of hopefuls looking for their big breaks. “I think building successful companies and products relies a lot on speed,” says Ryan Hoover, founder and CEO of Product Hunt, an online informational hub for and about startups. “It’s a matter of just how quickly can you figure out which ones will work and which ones won’t.”

83,000. That’s how many security vulnerabilities HackerOne has fixed to date thanks to hacker-supplied reports to their platform. “The data speaks for itself,” says Reed Loden, HackerOne’s director of security. “The types of vulnerabilities, the complexity to the vulnerabilities, the cleverness to the vulnerabilities is stuff that you’re just not going find from paying just a variety of security consultancy firms…  it all comes down to number of people.”

When it comes to transforming floods of raw data into clear, decisive business intelligence, Periscope Data remains on the cutting edge. To keep their commitment to their consumers, Periscope Data has developed a machine learning solution that leverages Amazon SageMaker as a core part of its machine learning workflow.

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.