Our colleague Liz Gannes has “a story today on Gigaom”:https://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”:https://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?*
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