AWS Startups Blog

This year Startup Central is headed to the Aria Quad at AWS re:Invent and we’ve designed a series of technical talks, speed networking activities, mentorship opportunities, and straight-up fun, for those of you planning to join us in Vegas.

Growing up in Bahrain, Esra’a Al Shafei saw the damage that authoritarian regimes could inflict on minority voices, political outliers, and the causes of social justice. From a young age, she felt an enormous sense of responsibility to take action.

The need for Fast, Secure Delivery of Business-Critical Applications has never been greater: Snapt’s disruptive software-only Applications Delivery Controller (ADC) Solution ensures best performance.

Sam Parnell has been an AWS evangelist most of his career. While Chief Technology Officer at popular sports news site Bleacher Report, he ran the company “100 percent on AWS.” When Turner Broadcasting acquired Bleacher Report in 2012, Parnell got involved with aspects of the media giant’s infrastructure, and again started moving critical operations into the cloud.

The Startup’s Guide to re:Invent includes of the key moments from the overall re:Invent schedule, and the startup-specific sessions. We’ve asked some re:Invent veterans (and newbies) to offer their game plan for the days they will be in Vegas for the conference. Finally, we’ve identified some re:Invent sessions, picked from the main catalog, and grouped them based on a particular need, or type of startup product and focus.

If you ask a developer what they think of marketing, it’s unlikely you’ll get a very positive response. Why? For the most part, they’re tired of marketers telling them how awesome a product is. They have a healthy skepticism, in that they just don’t believe the messaging. But what if your target market is developers? How do you attract them to—and keep them using—your platform?

VERO’s infrastructure was hosted in a Rackspace data center in London. After facing some capacity and scalability issues with Rackspace, VERO had decided to explore external options. This migration was critical for the customer.

In today’s capital-fueled startup market, it’s easy to feel behind the curve when it comes to keeping up with the most recent tech products. New companies launch, fly, or fail faster than even the geekiest of us can keep up with, sometimes slipping under the radar amid crowds of hopefuls looking for their big breaks. “I think building successful companies and products relies a lot on speed,” says Ryan Hoover, founder and CEO of Product Hunt, an online informational hub for and about startups. “It’s a matter of just how quickly can you figure out which ones will work and which ones won’t.”

So, what are the secrets to investing in DeepTech? While there are likely many, a tolerance of a longer time-horizon for returns and the ability to source deals from anywhere are things interested investors should keep in mind.

83,000. That’s how many security vulnerabilities HackerOne has fixed to date thanks to hacker-supplied reports to their platform. “The data speaks for itself,” says Reed Loden, HackerOne’s director of security. “The types of vulnerabilities, the complexity to the vulnerabilities, the cleverness to the vulnerabilities is stuff that you’re just not going find from paying just a variety of security consultancy firms…  it all comes down to number of people.”

What are two main things that all SaaS companies need to be sure to think about? While there is likely a laundry list of such items, a culture of creativity and security should be top of mind, at least according to Adam Fitzgerald, Head of Worldwide Developer Marketing at AWS, and Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder and CEO of Algolia.