Tag: funding

Accel Partner Ping Li notes, The advent of cloud computing, which began in earnest with the launch of AWS in 2006, kickstarted an era of unprecedented new tools for developers — from minimizing operational overhead with IaaS to bypassing operations altogether with serverless services like AWS Lambda.

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.

More often than not, it takes a community of people and resources to push startups onto a path that offers even a shot at glory, says Riku Asikainen, a Finland-based angel investor and long-time entrepreneur. “It is not the lonely wolves game,” says Asikainen, who sits on the board of the European Trade Association for Business Angels (EBAN), a community of more than 4,000 people investing in the European startup ecosystem.

First Round Capital’s Hayley Barna and Boldstart’s Ed Sim look back on the startup landscape in 2017, and toward the trends powering the year ahead.

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.

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.

2017 has been a great year for Kathryn Petralia. In the past twelve months, Kabbage, the financial services and small loan company she co-founded with Rob Frohwein nine years ago, raised $250 million from Softbank.

Listen on for global insights from Reshma Sohoni, the co-founder and managing partner of London-based investment fund Seedcamp

Before pitching yourself as a machine learning startup, you better be one, says Matt Hartman of Betaworks.

according to venture capitalist Charles Hudson, a partner at Precursor Ventures, such playbook tactics have gotten stale. As he recently told a roomful of attendees at the AWS Startup Day in San Francisco, technological and financial advancements have finally reached a point where the old rules should no longer be treated as gospel.