AWS Startups Blog

In my career as an entrepreneur, I’ve had the opportunity to close the first deal at three different startups. There is no better feeling than when a paying customer has validated your concept and recognized your product value. That first deal has the potential to spring your company to the next 10 deals that can set your business scaling to the stratosphere. Within those first few deals lie the clues to a successful business or the pitfalls to your startup.

During a recent fireside chat at the AWS Loft in San Francisco, Greylock Partners’ Josh Elman Elman shared with the crowd of founders and entrepreneurs that he had just wrapped up a recent investment in a startup. While he declined to name the company just yet, he did stress that the dynamics of that deal applied equally to all of his investments. One aspect in particular that Elman stressed is how he and the founders built a relationship over time. Elman didn’t invest the first time he met these folks, but he kept tracking the team, and just as importantly they kept Elman in the loop.

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.

Josh Elman, a consumer specialist at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, couldn’t have been blunter about “acquihiring,” the practice of big companies paying big bucks for startups to hire teams for their expertise. “There was this funny little period time where that seemed like it was a thing,” Elman recently told a crowd of startup entrepreneurs at the AWS Loft in San Francisco. “I think that’s gone.”

That doesn’t mean big companies aren’t buying startups, Elman continued. In fact, it turns out that acquihiring didn’t translate to getting better talent than just hiring—it’s just more expensive.

In just a few short years, cloud computing has literally changed the entire IT landscape. And with this paradigm shift, there has been a great upheaval in the cybersecurity world. Security vendors have rushed to overhaul their product roadmaps because their traditional data center security products lack the agility, compatibility, and scalability needed for the cloud.

Panos Panay wants to change the mindset of music students—and as the Vice President of Innovation and Strategy at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, he’s in a great position to do so. At Berklee, Panay says, students are not only learning about music theory and composition, but they are also developing entrepreneurial skills he believes will help them become better musicians. “For musicians, it’s important to have the mindset of a startup,” says Panay, who is also the founder of Sonicbids, a startup that connects bands, music promoters, and brands on one online platform. “Most music colleges are focused on skill development, and not necessarily the mindset that you will need to embark and develop a successful career, however you define it.”

Amazon supports startups through a number of programs like AWS Activate, Amazon Launchpad, and Handmade, designed to boost the go-to-market efforts of entrepreneurs. Today, we’ve added the AWS Marketplace for Startups program to these, helping launch an ancillary channel for EMEA-based startups interested in building sustainable revenue streams.

AWS’s annual re:Invent conference may not traditionally be known for its startup scene, but at this year’s iteration, Global Startup Evangelist Mackenzie Kosut took advantage of the massive event to chat with five hot startups for his Startups on Air video series.

Based in Lisbon, Aptoide is an alternative app store where anyone can create a channel and share what they’ve been downloading with family, friends, and followers in their social timeline. Aptoide CEO Alvaro Pinto says he co-founded the company because he wanted to create a more social app store experience, rather than settle for the algorithmic method other popular app stores use.

As part of the Diversity Series organized by the Amazon Web Services We Power Tech program, AWS Technical Evangelist Tara Walker led a panel at re:Invent 2017 to discuss how best to champion diversity and inclusion in tech.