Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

What’s astonishing and few other than those who lived it as startups (I launched my second startup in this era) realize is how profound of an impact that rise of Amazon AWS (S3 & EC2) had on the startup market. The “A Round” of my startup in 1999 was $16.5 million and my A Round in 2005 was only $500,000 (and that’s all I ever raised).

Venture Capital 328

Venture Capital Invest Seed Funding Startup 328

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 5, 2010

As I write these words I’m aware that I could practically change the words AOL and Facebook for much of this section and with a few factual tweaks it might not be noticeable to the reader which of the firms I was talking about. At the bottom end of the stack is storage (S3) and processing (EC2).

Social Network 318

Social Network Networking Web 2.0 Startup 318

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 9, 2010

Our chief architect, Ryan Lissack, wanted to store our data in Amazon’s new (at the time) storage product called S3 that enabled us to store all our data in their facility and we’d pay by the MBs uploaded / downloaded. So we only had to raise $500,000 to get going and again hardware ate just over 10% of the round.

Startup 343

Startup Technical Review S3 Services 343