Announcing our founder video story series

We are taking a brief pause from our regular posts to share a video channel we launched to host the stories of founders talking about their startup journey!

Stories are a powerful medium of expression, well before humans used the written word. The way culture was formed, information shared, and tribal bonds were forged was through stories. These stories were the bedrock of civilizations as they got passed down generation after generation.

Today stories fulfill the same purpose, but now we have more channels to tell these stories. We have blogs, social media, podcasts, metaverses, and videos. Even in video, there are an abundance of options from YouTube and Vimeo to more buzzy ones like TikToks and Instagram Reels.

Short-form videos have taken off recently as they are fun, quick hits of knowledge. We love the tech TikToks, especially from awesomely talented folks like Linda Haviv, Brooke Jamieson & Viktoria Semaan. They combine creativity and engaging styles with solid tech knowledge that inspires and educates.

We are doing the same with our channel focused with long-form content on YouTube. We want to give more space for the founders to share their stories. Using a long-form channel provides the opportunity for us to dig deeper into the founder stories and for the founders to elaborate. We also like delivering lots of value quickly though, so we keep our videos under ten minutes.

So far we have stories collected of startup founders from Cape Town and Tel Aviv. We also have some exciting videos we captured in the field during the AWS Summit in Tel Aviv and AWS Startup Day Taipei. We are looking forward to sharing more founder stories covering various industries and markets as we continue to travel the globe supporting startups and startup communities.

We invite you to visit our channel, listen to some of the stories, and subscribe to receive updates when we post new videos. Hopefully you will come away both inspired and educated on what it takes to go from idea to scale.

Do you have an interesting story to tell about your startup and what you are building? What would you share that you feel would be valuable for other founders to hear?

Please do reach out and let us know. If you are building on AWS, we can feature you in our video series!

Mark & Basil

Have you heard of the latest social media sensation Threads from Instagram? In the course of five days, the app launched by Meta to be their Twitter killer (our words, not theirs) went from zero to 100 million users 🚀🚀🚀

Twitter has already threatened Meta with a lawsuit, so it remains to be seen what the future of Threads will be, but the enthusiasm for a new social media app caught many off-guard. Many other would be Twitter replacements such as Mastodon and Bluesky have failed to take any appreciable share from Twitter. Even the just launched Spill app may end up falling quickly back down to Earth after a brief period of hysteria of folks trying to get access.

Hype can be a massive boost for startups, but it can just as easily die. Clubhouse is a case in point. They took advantage of Covid lockdowns to get a fast jump into the live audio space and snag a $4 billion valuation from the likes of A16Z. Then just as quickly as it rose, it experienced a precipitous drop in engagement once people started meeting in person again.

Threads does have promise. It leverages the existing Instagram social graph and improves upon the best aspects of the Twitter experience. Despite some glaring feature and UX deficiencies (there is no feed of just those you follow and you cannot import connections from other social networks), the engagement has been strong.

Mark has jumped in head first to experiment with this new social network. You can follow him on Threads at @startupmarkb and excuse the excessive food posts in advance 🙏

We are Hong Kong bound! It has been four years since being in Hong Kong, in fact the last time was at the AWS Summit in Hong Kong even before we had joined AWS 😂

After Hong Kong, we head over to Vietnam to dive more into the startup ecosystem and reconnect with some old startup friends. If you are around, let’s plan to meet!

For our NYC friends, we have the AWS Summit NYC coming up on July 26 as well as a two day AWS Web3 / Blockchain Summit in the AWS Startup Loft starting on July 27. Sign up soon and let us know if you will be in town to attend!