The AWS Startup Podcast

The AWS Startup Podcast

Get the inside view from startup founders across the globe who reveal the tools that work, the leadership practices that make a difference, and the lessons you can only learn by building a company. And one more thing, what startup jockeys do with a very rare item – their downtime.

Episodes

November 11, 2020 49 mins
For being home to the fifth largest population in the world, Pakistan has a comparatively small startup community. That said, the country is hitting an inflection point, with internet and smartphone usage becoming more and more common. It’s not dissimilar to the technology adoption spikes seen in other countries across Southeast Asia, like Indonesia and Vietnam, that led to a wave of high-flying tech startups. Bykea, a Pakistani st...
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Looking back on the past decade, one of the most notable shifts has been the rapid spread of mobile technology, especially in Southeast Asia. But while consumers and startups were quick to make that shift, older companies found it difficult to quickly pivot to the new standard. Jirnexu was founded to bring those two parties together, specifically in the financial services sector.
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They say that with startups, timing is everything. Being early, or late, is the same as being wrong. This year has brought about more change than we can count, but with change comes opportunity for some. And for Johnny Boufarhat and the team at Hopin, the worldwide move to remote conferencing as a result of the pandemic accelerated a trend that they had seen coming for years.
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The music industry has gone through massive changes in recent decades. Gone are the days of being able to track each week’s new releases. Now, over 40,000 tracks are uploaded on to music platforms each day. While new technologies have led to a creative explosion by lowering the barriers to record music, this new wave has somewhat overwhelmed companies in the industry, per Musiio co-founder and CEO Hazel Savage.
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Fintech as a sector has been exploding for the better part of a decade now. Fueled by mass amounts of new data and powerful algorithms, startups around the world have sprung up to innovate within a once stagnant industry. Within fintech, peer-to-peer lending quickly emerged as one of the biggest opportunities—Lending Club saw marked success in North America, as did ANT Financial in China. Validus is on a mission to bring that same ...
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The rise of e-commerce companies in recent years has made it easy to forget about in-store retail. But, in many parts of the world, physical stores still make up for the lion’s share of money spent. Fave, a startup based in Kuala Lumpur, is looking to connect the two industries by offering offline retailers new-age tools that historically have been only available to online businesses.
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When users head to Oway’s website to book travel in and out of Myanmar, they arrive at an easy-to-use portal where planning a trip end-to-end is within a few clicks. Much like U.S.-based Expedia, the 8-year-old startup offers up flight, hotel, car, and activity options for anyone wanting to get away. That said, the road to building and launching such a platform in Myanmar, a country of over 50 million where less than 1% of the popu...
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From large metropolises like Singapore to smaller villages in places like Thailand, water is a constant need that flows through any community. And with climate change accelerating, the demand to properly manage this vital utility has never been higher. SpaceAge Labs, and CEO Deepak Pitta, are on a mission to help solve this growing problem by applying that latest in machine learning and IoT sensors, bringing an antiquated industry ...
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It began with a table that Zwende co-founder Innu Nevatia couldn’t find. She had this image of the perfect piece of furniture, but it didn’t exist anywhere outside of her head. No one was making quite what she wanted. In the process of scouring the flea markets and pop-up design shows in and around her home base in Bengaluru, India the idea for her startup was born. “I was meeting all these incredible artists in this quest to find...
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For Kalsoom Lakhani, investing in the future of the Pakistani startup ecosystem was something of a homecoming. Having grown up in Pakistan before moving to the U.S. for university, Lakhani watched as her native country began to assemble the pieces necessary to support would-be startup founders in the fifth largest market in the world. Leaning on the lessons learned in other regions that have recently seen success in building strong...
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August 14, 2020 26 mins
Binh Tran, the founder of Klout and a partner at VC firm 500 Startups, looked out over time and geography and saw in Vietnam a place with a steadily growing engineering culture, and a population ready for an economic breakout. The question he needed to answer was this, did Vietnam and Southeast Asia broadly meet his criteria for investments? Could the region deliver those 100X-plus returns that keep venture capitalists in the hunt?...
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August 13, 2020 34 mins
The power of the open source software movement is how it harnesses the collective power of many developers to solve a shared problem. Raghav Kapoor, CEO and co-founder of startup Smartkarma, is looking to apply that same sense of collaboration to remake the investment research market.
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July 27, 2020 30 mins
It was not by chance that Kamarul Muhamed combined his financial background and drone obsession into an AI-powered drone services startup. Aerodyne is Muhamed’s fourth startup, so he can spot a great opportunity. But even he didn’t fully appreciate that if developing technology is your only focus as CEO -- you will fail.
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As every startup founder or would-be founder knows, there is an endless supply of ideas for the next great product, or the next great company. It is uncanny (but maybe not surprising in our information-at-warp-speed lives) that what may seem like an original invention is often not only occurring to some number of people in the exact same way, but at the exact same time. The key to leaping ahead, of course, is converting your ideas ...
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Michael Musandu grew up in Zimbabwe and South Africa before heading to the Netherlands to study computer science as an undergrad and then in graduate school. While shopping for clothes online Musandu had the experience, as many do, of never seeing someone like himself in the smiling fashion scenarios that were presented on his phone and laptop. For Musandu, it was yet another example of the lack of diversity and inclusion in the wo...
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Rahul Vohra already knew there was a startup CEO + productivity love connection at his first startup, Rapportive. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have built the contact management email extension. What he didn’t know was how much that affinity would create a customer acquisition flywheel for Rapportive, and how, given the right product and target customer, it could be engineered. The good news? You can do it too.
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Anna Gong was brought into Perx Technologies in late 2014 as CEO to lead the Singapore-based lifestyle app company through its next stage of growth. But instead of scaling things to greater heights, Gong found herself shutting down the core business and turning what was a consumer-focused business into a full-tilt enterprise SaaS platform. Why her plan worked so well.
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Telecom software maker Metaswitch Networks was bootstrapped for the first 25 years of its profitable existence before the team decided to take outside investors including Sandhill Road standout Sequoia Capital. A few years after Sequoia invested in the London-based company, Chris Mairs, who was Metaswitch’s chief scientist, asked a Sequoia partner what the key requirements were for investing in a company. As Mairs recalls the conv...
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The time and cost it takes to build things has come way down for all kinds of startups. So, unless you are deep in the R&D game, the answer to, “How long have you been working on this?” takes on deeper significance, says Seedcamp’s Reshma Sohoni. The speed to market, and the speed with which competitors also crop up, has vastly increased since Sohoni co-founded the London-based seed investment in 2007. “Particularly in the worl...
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Southeast Asia is on the verge of an economic breakout, says VC Olivier Raussin. So how can founders building in these tough times be ready to hit the accelerator? Conserve cash, conserve cash, and take some time for yourself.
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