Tag: getting started

As Reid Hoffman says, starting a company is like “jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down.”  It’s hard. Very, very hard! And being an entrepreneur can be one of the loneliest places on Earth, especially when you’re staring down a challenge that you’ve never seen before and don’t know who to turn to. That’s why AWS and Masters of Scale are partnering to create this unique opportunity for startups to help startups. 

Because of his years of just getting it done, AWS Business Development Manager Richard Howard was stuck in the old way of doing things. What he failed to realize, however, was that to be really successful and help as many customers as possible, he needed to scale the impact he was having. Here’s what he did.

How do you build a product and hire technical talent when you’re a non-technical founder? Former founder and CEO Richard Howard, currently on AWS’ startup business development team, shares his thoughts.

Jonny Ayers, Co-founder and SVP of security startup Socure, describes the challenges of legacy identity verification that Socure hopes to solve, how the team finds customers, and why machine learning is essential to the company’s success.

Chris Cochran, CEO of ProsperOps, chats about how the software startup works. As a two-time founder and mentor at Capital Factory, he also shares insights into the current startup environment.

Jonno Southam leads Venture Capital (VC) business development for AWS in Europe. He is also an Amazon ‘Bar Raiser,’ a role dedicated to maintaining the high hiring bar. Here, Jonno shares his thoughts on the hiring process and his experience at AWS.

Hiring the right people for your startup is one of the most important things that you will do as a founder. Beyond finding product/market fit, it’s probably the most important thing that you’ll do. Before joining AWS, I’d interviewed and hired a bunch of people as the CEO and Co-Founder of the live event startup Shortcut. Amazon, however, is the only employer that has actually taught and trained me how to properly interview and hire. I’d now like to share some of those lessons here because I think they are critical and particularly applicable to startups.

Gain insights into BARK’s wins and losses and how they were able to build a successful recurring revenue model with Co-founder Carly Strife.

Ellie Wheeler, partner at Greycroft Partners, shares best practices and tips on how to get started and funded through a VC.

Global Head of Executive Compensation & Benefits for JP. Morgan, Robert Barbetti, and VC Partner at Lerer Hippeau, Graham Brown, help you become equity smart by sharing the fundamentals to a successful startup equity and compensation model.