Tag: Hiring

How do you build a product and hire technical talent when you’re a non-technical founder? Former founder and CEO Richard Howard, currently on AWS’ startup business development team, shares his thoughts.

Jonno Southam leads Venture Capital (VC) business development for AWS in Europe. He is also an Amazon ‘Bar Raiser,’ a role dedicated to maintaining the high hiring bar. Here, Jonno shares his thoughts on the hiring process and his experience at AWS.

Hiring the right people for your startup is one of the most important things that you will do as a founder. Beyond finding product/market fit, it’s probably the most important thing that you’ll do. Before joining AWS, I’d interviewed and hired a bunch of people as the CEO and Co-Founder of the live event startup Shortcut. Amazon, however, is the only employer that has actually taught and trained me how to properly interview and hire. I’d now like to share some of those lessons here because I think they are critical and particularly applicable to startups.

Our panel of experts at our AWS Loft in New York discuss why culture is vital to any startup that wants to survive past its early days.

At a recent VivaTech 2019 panel, “What Works: How the Best Entrepreneurs are Building Their Startups,” Julien Crochet, VP of sales strategy and enablement at AB Tasty, and Carles Sistare, head of engineering at Ogury, laid out their best tips for how to get things done when you’re a new, growing business with employees all over the world.

Jeremy Johnson, Co-founder & CEO of Andela, a startup that builds and trains high-performing distributed engineering teams, joins us at the AWS Loft NYC to share how startups can build a solid recruitment strategy that attracts top players.

I have held many titles in the tech industry: Engineer, Lead Engineer, Head of Engineering, VP of Engineering, and CTO. You would think that each of these titles would be self-explanatory, but as I’ve transitioned from one company to another, I’ve been surprised by how differently these roles are interpreted by different organizations.

During a recent founders panel at the AWS Loft San Francisco, four founders shared hard-won insights on startup culture, how they’ve evolved as leaders, launching versus scaling, growth strategies, and the perennial pursuit of the elusive concept of work-life balance.

While a minority of founders know that they immediately want to start a new company, most need time to step back, grieve (if necessary), and evaluate what there is to do after thinking about one business exclusively for any number of years.

“I’m actually an unusual tech co-founder,” Polina Montano says. And it’s true: while Montano’s isn’t exactly a rags-to-riches story, it is a gas-stations-to-striking-tech-gold story. Coming from a retail background, Montano was a small business owner for most of her life—starting with a fashion store and moving up to a chain of gas stations—before the inspiration for Job Today struck. In fact, Montano says, she started pondering the concept of Job Today in earnest thanks her hands-on gas station experience