AWS Startups Blog

The anti-social downsides of social technologies are starting to be a big concern for tech companies these days. It’s a surprise, since Web 2.0 was all about building out the social capacity of existing tech offerings. But Brent Bushnell of Two Bit Circus isn’t worried. In fact, he believes he’s well positioned for the next big thing: bringing people back together again in public.

Ambition has never been an issue for Fedor Holz. When he was barely out of his teens, he beat out 183 other pros to scoop up nearly five million dollars at the 2016 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Now he’s the founder of Primed Mind, a tech offering that takes the experience of having a personal mindset coach and translates that into a series of two-part audio sessions.

Together with its in-house sports scientists, JOHAN Sports has developed analytics modules to interpret the data it receives from its sensor with GNSS and deliver information on the physical state of sports players and their progress, as well as risk profiles for injury prevention.

Over the past few years, the tech conversation has been dominated by references to AI and deep learning. Some people liken it to websites in 1995—everybody knew they needed one, but they didn’t all know what they were. Today, there are a lot of people talking about AI without having a real grasp on how deep learning works or even what it means. So what is it, really?

Ask any startup founder what their scarcest resources are, and without exception, they will list time and money. That’s because having the resources to focus on application functionality and experience can mean the difference between delighting—or disappointing—your customers. At MongoDB, we noticed a few years back that we able to help companies move faster and concentrate on delivering customer value by introducing MongoDB Atlas, our database-as-a-service offering.

Segment receives billions of events from our customers daily and has grown into dozens of AWS accounts. Expanding into many more accounts was necessary in order to best align with our GDPR and security initiatives. In order to continue scaling gracefully, we are centrally managing employee access to AWS with terraform and our identity provider. To organize the expansion into numerous accounts, we needed a mechanism to control our accounts, which accounts employees have access to, and each employee’s permissions in each account.

Life after founding a company comes with lots of options. As an entrepreneur, you’ve learned what it means to scale, that execution is paramount, what it means to be scrappy and that resilience is half the battle—all important skills that make you valuable to any number of companies. While a minority of founders know that they immediately want to start a new company, most need time to step back, grieve (if necessary), and evaluate what there is to do after thinking about one business exclusively for any number of years.

Steve Huffman knows a thing or two about rebuilding. In 2015, the co-founder of reddit returned to the online community as its CEO 10 years after co-founding the site with his college roommate Alexis Ohanian—and following a series of interim leaders and unsavory episodes involving hate speech. He has since worked hard to rebuild employee morale and the company’s image at a time when extremist views are center stage.

Chris Anderson has always loved using the latest technology on the relative cheap. Applying technology from what he calls the “peace dividend from the smartphone wars,” Anderson started building his own drones and in 2007, launched DIY Drones, a central resource for makers and amateur enthusiasts. He’s since gone on to launch DIY Robocars, a similar resource for robocar builders and racers.

We all know the stats around women entrepreneurs are a mixed bag. Access to capital remains a significant barrier, with just 2% of venture capital going to woman-led companies in 2017. The data is even worse for women of color. However, women are starting businesses at a higher rate than ever, and they have a $3 trillion economic impact in the U.S. alone.