AWS Startups Blog

Tag: Company Profile

The Smallpdf team at their offices in Zurich, Switzerland.

How to Run a World-class Website with a DevOps team of Two

At last count, Smallpdf, the PDF conversion startup I work for, had roughly 13 million monthly users. As for the number of employees currently running our website? That would be 10—with only two employees focused on the backend and infrastructure. You might be curious to learn how we run such a processing intensive website with such a small DevOps team. Our little secret stands in automation and delegation.

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Braze logo

Braze Co-Founder on How Tech Humanizes Communications

Whether it’s via phones, cars, speakers, or even watches, brands have an ever-increasing number of places to reach consumers. The catch, however, is that consumers are getting savvier—and more demanding—about how brands are engaging with them. “Customers have high expectations… that brands are going to deliver relevant, personalized, and important messages to them that add a lot of value,” says Braze co-founder and chief technology officer Jon Hyman. For the most part, consumers don’t understand—nor care—whether they are getting a discount or new product notice from a brand’s email or app team. “All they care about is: is it delivering a great product experience, is it valuable to me, is it adding value, and is it relevant to me,” he says.

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Pouch Co-founder Vikram Simha on Seizing (Dragon’s Den) Gold and Scaling Customers

You know the story. Plucky band of adventurers make off with the dragon’s loot, only to suffer some tragic ending because they neglected to take seriously some key bit of information. Usually it falls along the lines of said-dragon treasure being cursed, or so heavy it sinks the boat, or originally belonged to a foul-tempered Orc king now out for blood. The point is, things end badly. There was no way Pouch cofounder Vikram Simha was letting any of that happen.

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Rent the Runway Puts Your Closet in the Cloud

How Rent the Runway is Moving Your Closet to the Cloud

While most people know Rent the Runway as the country’s leading lender of LBDs and workwear, the nine-year old startup also happens to be the country’s largest dry-cleaning business. As Rent The Runway CTO Josh Builder notes, the company turns around, on average, 50,000 to 55,000 items on a daily basis—over 65,000 during peak seasons and holidays—and 100% of that inventory comes back to them.

As veritable stylists and dry-cleaning experts, Rent the Runway must keep track of not only the latest fashion trends, but also a wide variety of inventory and chemical mixes to keep their clothes in red-carpet shape. To do this, RTR is shifting many of their operations to the cloud. Watch to see how they pulled it off.

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Figma Design Product

Figma CEO Dylan Field on Cloud Computing and Design

Initially released on February 19, 1990, Adobe’s Photoshop has long been the doyen of design. However, after nearly 30 years, Photoshop’s licensing model is being challenged by several startups looking to democratize the design industry and make it easier for all people, and not just professionals, to create. One such startup is San Francisco-based Figma. Founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, the open design platform—which just raised a $25 million Series B—features a cloud-based screen design tool, which helps teams achieve a shared understanding around design without worrying about syncing, exporting or installing software. We recently caught up with Field to talk about how the cloud has made life easier for designers.

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