AWS Startup Day Virtual Event

About the Event

Join us on December 11, 2019 for AWS Startup Day, a day designed for entrepreneurs ready to take an idea and turn it into a business.

If you’re still at the ideation stage of building your startup, Startup Day will help you acquire the knowledge and tools needed to test and validate your approach. For founders who’ve already made progress towards starting their venture, you’ll learn more about how to take your startup to the next level.

At AWS Startup Day, expect to hear from AWS technical experts, your fellow startup founders, and leading figures from the startup community, who’ll offer opinionated advice and recommendations for how to go from intellectual spark to MVP and beyond. You'll get insights into some of the business challenges you'll face early on, and how you should be thinking about problem-solving. Most importantly, you'll have the opportunity to meet other entrepreneurs, who'll share their stories, ideas, and inspirations to encourage you to keep moving forward.

What to Expect

AWS Startup Day is a free event aimed at delivering educational content, practical learnings, and networking opportunities for startups looking to accelerate their innovation and growth.

You’ll hear from subject-matter experts, who’ll talk about:

- The go-to-market programs AWS has available for startups
- How you should be thinking about innovation and company culture
- Technical tools for building your prototype or MVP
- Fundraising essentials and when it’s the right time to pitch
- Talent and customer acquisition strategies for your startup

Who Should Attend?

This event is primarily targeted towards early stage entrepreneurs who are pre-seed or bootstrapped, and interested in learning how to scale their venture through practical business and technical guidance.

Agenda

9:00AM – 9:30AM PST	Welcome to Day 1 More startups have launched on AWS than anywhere else in the world. There's a reason why the biggest names in the startup world have been building on AWS for the past 13 years. Startups take on enormous challenges with limited resources. They leverage the latest technology to make a team of 1 perform like a team of 10. These startups have paved the way and have helped pioneer the technological path for the next wave of entrepreneurs. We've learned a great deal helping these companies reach their 100 millionth customer, process their first billion orders, or help get their first satellite into space. Learn how startups today are building on AWS, why now is the best time to start building, and why partnering with us will give your idea the best chance at becoming the next big thing. Speaker: Mackenzie Kosut, Startup Evangelist, AWS

9:30AM-10:00AM PST	Tools for Building your MVP on AWS Two of the most critical technical decisions for founders are correctly scoping what comprises an MVP and how to make pragmatic decisions on how to build it. Getting these things right will put your product in front of customers faster and give you vital feedback on how to guide your development. In this session you will get practical advice on 1) how you can make good decisions on which features should go in to your MVP, avoid scope creep, prioritize features, and determine what is the "minimum" to build, and 2) how to choose the right development approaches and select the right infrastructure options that can enable you to develop your product with high velocity and at a low cost. Speaker: Alejandra Novack, Technical Evangelist, AWS

10:00AM-10:45AM PST	Before you Build: Customer Driven Development "Before you build anything, you should know who you're building for, in what market, and if your solution solves a problem they have.” This was Steve Blank's insight that later spawned the Lean Startup movement. In this session we'll look at the first two parts of Blank's methodology for discovering customers, and validating that enough of them will buy your product to create a viable business. Speaker: Mike Apted, Startup Solutions Architect, AWS

10:45AM- 11:30AM PST	How to Build a Serverless Startup from Scratch in just 30 Minutes In this session, we demonstrate how to build a serverless online shop with a static React.js website using Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront. For the dynamic content, we use a GraphQL endpoint with AWS AppSync and Amazon DynamoDB for our database. We also need user management, which is provided by Amazon Cognito and AWS Amplify. After we bootstrap this application, we provide a more detailed introduction to the different services and explain how to utilize them for your own projects. Speaker: Daniel Geske, Solutions Architect Startups and Mobile, AWS

11:30AM-12:00PM PST	Break

12:00PM - 12:45PM PST	Fundraising Essentials for Every Entrepreneur We’ll start with a key question: Is raising Venture Capital right for you? Then we’ll go into the process that serial founders execute with fundraising: How to prospect the right investors, how to make contact and frame a fundraise narrative and how to generate a sense of urgency with investors to close your round as quickly as possible. Make sure you can fundraise like the most experienced founders and avoid dragging it out. Speaker: Mike Wilner, Pre-VC Development Associate, AWS

12:45PM- 1:30PM PST	The Pitch: Essentials for Success, and Blunders to Avoid There's no perfect pitch deck. However, there are elements every investor will be looking for, and that your deck better have. If you are in the school of, “Why do I need a pitch deck at all?” it's time to change your thinking. A spiffy series of slides won't magically get you investors, customers, or those critical early hires. But it's a way in, especially for novice entrepreneurs. In this talk we'll cover what’s critical to have in a deck, what’s best left out, and how to combine everything to tell a compelling story about yourself and your startup. Speaker: Denise Quashie, Startup Growth Programs, AWS Speaker: Russ Heddleston, CEO, DocSend