Category: Startup Spotlight

Work with enough startups and you’ll inevitably witness (or experience) the unexpected departure of a co-founder. So how do you protect your company, prevent disruptions, and make sure you can get moving forward again if a founder leaves?

AWS Summits is a free, global event series that brings the cloud community together and next week, AWS will be in Mexico City where Stephen Orban (General Manager, New Initiative, AWS Marketplace) will be delivering the keynote. The intent of the summit is to provide educational value to attendees and also demonstrate how one can […]

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.

Halloween and New Year’s Eve are among Uber’s busiest nights of the year. According to Matt Schallert, a site reliability engineer at Uber NYC, those days can see 50-100% extra trip volume over the rest of the year. See how Matt and his team rely on AWS to make sure they are fully prepared to handle the volume of requests that come through on such ride-share heavy holidays.

In less than two weeks, 17,500 attendees from across the globe will descend on Helsinki for Slush 2017. A not-for-profit global event dedicated to the startup community and run entirely by an army of volunteers, it’s been described as “Burning Man meets TED.” With a mission to “help the next generation of great, world-conquering companies [come] forward,” the event, in just a few short years, has expanded beyond its flagship event in Helsinki to locations in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Singapore.

For Reshma Sohoni, the co-founder and managing partner of London-based investment fund Seedcamp, the window for which startups can go global is getting shorter and shorter. What she tells companies funded by Seedcamp, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, is that before they decide to grow internationally, they need to know who or what they […]

As the CEO and co-founder of Peanut, a social networking app for new mothers, Michelle Kennedy knows a thing or two about growing a company from scratch. Not only has the app—which only launched in February 2017—already struck a chord with countless mom groups online and with the media, but it’s also facilitated over 10 million […]

Regulators are people too. That’s what Monika Liikamaa, CEO of Enfuce Financial Services, wants to remind other founders who complain about meeting the strict standards of financial services regulators. “You have to be able to understand their concerns,” she says. “People are people, and they just want to feel secure that if they give a person a ‘go,’ the person they say okay to knows what they’re doing.” With Enfuce, the first infrastructure payments platform to run banks and financial institutions in a public cloud, Liikamaa’s solution to navigating the compliance process is doing her homework. For more from Liikamaa, including how she decides what features Enfuce should build and how she sees the banking industry evolving, listen here.

Lisbon is stepping up its game when it comes to attracting startups. Following the country’s $83 billion bailout by the European Union in 2011, the city—now in its second year of hosting the popular European tech conference Web Summit—is welcoming back the youth that fled the city during the downturn and encouraging new entrepreneurship with […]

“App discovery is fundamentally broken,” says Jeroen Bouwman, the CEO of marketing startup Get Social. With 5,000 apps entering the Apple store a day and only a tiny percentage of those apps being featured a year, banking on Apple to promote your app is foolish. “Hope is not a strategy,” he notes. With paid user […]