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Reading recommendation: Startup Stories by Amazon Web Services

Reading recommendation: Startup Stories by Amazon Web Services

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We at tech.eu love a good story and do our best to give as many of them as possible to our readers with our news and feature pieces, newsletters, and the podcast. Recently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has started to collect and put together a treasure trove of stories of its customers—startups that are changing the world around them to the better.

The Startup Stories series comes as a free interactive e-book, with chapters being released about once a month. You can already read three of them, dubbed “Pioneers,” “Disruptors,” and “Innovators.”

In the first issue, the leaders of TransferWise, Elaia Partners, Freigeist Capital, Pipedrive, and Collibra talk about getting to where they are, often from very humble beginnings. The second chapter features Seedlegals, JUNIQE, Pixellot, Lunar Way, and YEAY with extremely interesting stories to tell. The fresh issue brings you the learnings and stories of Metail, Tinyclues, Powtoon, Satispay, and Bring!

“I often say we’re privileged at AWS, because we get to work with some of the most inspirational minds within the business,” wrote Fatih Mehtap who leads Startup Marketing for AWS in EMEA. “Our startup customers are the best in the industry, spearheaded by vanguards who are taking ground-breaking ideas and showing us what can be achieved with hard work and tenacity.

“We live in an era of technology democratization like no other, so there’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. Each month we’ll be releasing a new issue of founder interviews to accompany our Pioneers, introducing you to the Innovators, Disruptors, Challengers and Changemakers of our times.”

To give you a glimpse of the gems to be found in the series, here are a few excerpts of the published chapters:

I delayed working with venture capitalists because I was worried that they would damage our creativity. That was an irrational fear. My advice would be to not be afraid of VCs. David Bessis — Founder, Tinyclues

I run to work most days, even in my busiest periods. That’s essential downtime for me, where I can step away from the minutiae of growing a company and figure out how we’re tracking against the longterm view. …At TransferWise, we’ve just introduced a paid six-week sabbatical for employees who’ve hit four years. Everyone, not just founders, gives so much to building the company, so it’s important they have time out. Taavet Hinrikus – Co-founder, TransferWise

Through networking, I met someone I trusted who thought Metail was an investable business idea. It inspired me to keep pushing on to find funding, so I took out a bank loan for £10,000 ($13,000). I pretended I was going to use it to buy a car, because they wouldn’t have given it to me for business! Tom Adeyoola - Founder, Metail

I belonged to the local computer club and used to hang around the Apple store in Cape Town. It was the 1980s and computers were very limited; so for fun, I started making plug-in electronic boards to extend memory and make processing faster. When I took one into my local Apple store, one of the guys who worked there said: “This is amazing, we’ll buy 20.” Anthony Rose — Co-founder, SeedLegals

The Pioneers, Disruptors, and Innovators chapters are available for free on the AWS website. The two concluding issues—Challengers and Changemakers—will be available in October and November, featuring Codemotion, Ryte, Bynder, Mapillary, Detectify, Babylon Health, Immersive Labs, Firefly, Sendy, and Aerobotics.

Download the e-book today and make sure to spend some time reading—it's certainly worth it.

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