AWS Startups Blog

AWS is headed to Chicago for the annual Radiological Society of North America Conference to showcase the work of our cutting edge medical imaging customers to the 50K+ attendees.

Boston-based Toast is a cloud-technology platform that was “purpose-built for the restaurant industry,” says Aman Narang, President and Co-founder of Toast. We recently sat down with Narang to chat about restaurant industry trends, why they picked Boston to headquarter in, what challenges they’re facing, and what’s on the roadmap ahead.

Open Solution, a Beijing-based cloud services startup, is on a mission to help both new and established companies integrate with the cloud to make better sense of their data.

This past year, I was lucky enough to work with a number of different seed funds and seed stage startups, helping them to grow and succeed on AWS. This journey took me to many conferences, and private and public events, such as the seed enterprise summit Flight 2019. Organized by Crane Venture Partners, the summit featured a string of successful entrepreneurs and early employees sharing their experience and insights. Below are the seven most important lessons I took away, that I’d love to share with you:

The harsh reality is that building a great product, even the best product on the market, is only one part of creating a successful company. What are other ways to increase your chance of success? Per Jonno Southam, Venture Capital Business Development Manager at AWS, and Matillion Founder & CEO Matthew Scullion, partnerships can play a key role in helping your startup scale.

There is no question that the amount of choice in platforms and building blocks for software engineers is exploding. Traditionally, what was handled by separate teams with purpose-built hardware has now shifted to code (and infrastructure as code). This represents a fundamental shift in software architecture and responsibility that software engineering teams have to maintain.

Historically, the legal industry benefited from a “that’s just the cost of doing business” attitude regarding its lack of transparency into billing. That’s all changing now however, with Dublin-based BrightFlag leading the way.

The Startup’s Guide to re:Invent includes of the key moments from the overall re:Invent schedule and the startup-specific sessions.

In the modern era, “no competitive corporation in the world can succeed without taking design seriously,” declared WeTransfer Chief Innovation Officer George Petschnigg Tuesday afternoon. Speaking on a panel about “UI and the future of the customer experience” at the annual Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Petschnigg added that the biggest power that designers have nowadays is collaboration.

“Alexa revolutionized daily convenience as we know it,” explained Rohit Prasad, VP & Head Scientist for Amazon Alexa, Nov. 5 at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal. “The cognitive load shifted from customers to AI. You talk, Alexa answers back.”