Question of the Day: Can Amazon make a science out of launching statups?
By Carleen Hawn, September 13, 2007 — 3 CommentsOur colleague Liz Gannes has “a story today on Gigaom”:http://gigaom.com/2007/09/13/amazon-web-services-start-ups/ that raises a relevant topic for Found|READers, and it’s our Question of the Day:
Can the messy “black art” of starting up a company be streamlined into a science? And more, can it be outsourced to Amazon?
At events at Stanford and in San Francisco this week, Amazon is trumpeting its Web Services (launched in March) for its ability to turn the quixotic nature of entrepreneurship into a science. How? Simple, said Founder Jeff Bezos at Stanford yesterday: by automating “cheap and elastic storage, computing, message queuing, and payments”—all the stuff that gives founders a headache. Would that it were so. We’d all be as rich as Jeff.
But one of the great things about Amazon’s Web Services, apparently, is that Bezos has structured the billing so AWS won’t drain the coffers of cash-strapped startups, but rather help extend the runway to profitability.
”…you only pay when you have success,” said Jon Boutelle, CTO of startup SlideShare, an AWS customer since inception. He suggested AWS should use the unlikely motto “failure is an option.”
What do you expect from the guy who wrote the book on how to get rich off NOT making money? But it is nice to see that what goes around, comes around. As Liz reports, plenty of customers enthusiasticaly reviewed AWS at Stanford yesterday:
Joyce Park, CTO of Renkoo was able to build an app for the new Facebook platform… because of AWS, [the app, Boozemail] never had a chance to take down Renkoo’s servers and its main service.
SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill reiterated he’s saved $692,000 using AWS for his photo-sharing startup…
Startups seemed to be willing to hand over to Amazon just about every aspect of their backends, [saying] they’d pay for services, such as a content delivery network…
But, even if AWS is this good, is Angel investor Randy Komisar right when he suggests this tool set can make business plans irrelevant!?:
“We’re now at a point that business plans really don’t matter,” said VC Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “It’s an iterative process of quickly getting your ideas into the hands of others.”
Check out “Liz’s story”:http://gigaom.com/2007/09/13/amazon-web-services-start-ups/, and tell us what you think. From our perspective, the more tools there are out there that make founders’ technical and day-to-day managment tasks easier—freeing them up to focus on the hard stuff, like vision—the better. But is it really possible to take the dark art out of entrepreneurship?
About Carleen Hawn
Carleen Hawn is a business journalist based in San Francisco. Prior to editing Found|READ, she was an Associate Editor with Forbes, and the West Coast Bureau Chief and a Senior Writer for Fast Company magazine. Today you can find Carleen's articles in the pages of Financial Week, Business2.0, and Outside magazines, among others.
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Talk About This Story
(2 points)
September 13, 04:09 pm
AWS is really a great resource for startups. We were fortunate to get into the beta early on. It allowed our developers to work with it from the start and put the power of scale-up into our hands.
At a fraction of the cost of classic server setups, both EC2 and S3 are really compelling choices. While we are building, our server costs are minimal and we have the capability to quickly scale up in line with demand. That’s been huge.
Recently, AWS evangelists have been making the rounds and touting these benefits. It’s great because as a bootstrapped startup, more capital can flow into developing the product and less into underutilized server capacity.
(8 points)
September 14, 12:09 am
Its a great move by Amazon if you think about it. Paypal worked in by slotting themselves in the middle of payments skimming a few percent off the top. If Amazon can do the same for internet services, no matter the hype of one type of service or another if they fuel the architecture they will always have a piece of the cake. Smart move.
(15 points)
September 14, 05:09 am
I agree—at the end of the day where is a CEO’s time best spent: thinking about how to scale his servers due to a jump in traffic, or working with marketing to get even more traffic?
The only thing I’m waiting on is for Amazon to release some type of persistent database solution.