AWS Startups Blog

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.”

Oil and Gas companies are trending toward automation and intelligent, interconnected systems to improve their businesses. One startup at the forefront of this movement is Osprey Informatics, which develops and provides cloud-based intelligent visual monitoring solutions for the oil and gas industry.

Founded in 2015, WebEye specializes in helping these Chinese companies, most of which leverage a mobile-first strategy, tackle their main problems faced, including effective user acquisition, monetization, advertising, and cloud services.