The AWS Startup Podcast

These are not the times to try and dance around the realities of what it takes (and costs) to run a startup, says Emma Weston, CEO and co-founder of Sydney, Australia-based AgriDigital. AgriDigital straddles the worlds of farming and fintech, offering a platform for buyers and sellers of commodity crops like grain and cotton to do business with more speed and transparency. It’s exactly how Weston and her farming co-founders, are building their startup.

Georg Petschnigg doesn’t think of himself as purely a designer, yet he has spent a career building products like Paper and Paste that helps us all create more beautiful things in the course of our work and fun. “It’s human potential,” says Petschnigg. “It’s always been about augmenting the human and their capabilities.” Where Petschnigg has come at design over the course of his career at Microsoft, at the startup FiftyThree which he co-founded, and now as part of WeTransfer, is from the vantage of point of a trained engineer. “I come from the church of tech,” he says. “I believe in technology from stick to stone, to printing press, to servers in the cloud. Technology is a huge enabler. For me the driving force has always been is technology should enable a richer human experience. “The most important thing it means to be alive is to create. So, supporting people’s creative pursuits, in whatever shape or form they come, is the best application of my engineering training.”

Fred Destin, founder of London-based Stride.VC, has been in the venture business for more than two decades, and what he sees now in the startup investment world is not surprisingly a substantially tightening economic picture. Startup valuations are falling by 30-50%. Volume of deals getting done are down by 30-50%. “Half of our portfolio’s (business) pipeline is doing ok, the other half is getting obliterated, and it’s true for almost every company,” Destin says. “The good news … startups are kind of designed to perform fairly well in environments of chaos."

Matt Clifford, co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneur First, takes a global view when investing in people and their ideas. Not surprisingly, to hear Clifford tell it, there is practically no place on earth where startups and their investors are conducting business as usual. So, what should founders anticipate as they look to raise their next round, and whom should they place their trust in as they navigate the months ahead?

Data practically runs through the veins of Steven Mih, CEO of opensource data orchestration startup Alluxio. He's a serial startup CEO with more than two decades in the distributed data world. At Alluxio, Mih was brought in as CEO to take an opensource project that came out of U.C. Berkeley’s AMP lab, and help scale the software and the startup around the world. The best way Mih has found to work with his team to do just that, involves trust, over-communication, and a little email hack that reminds him to follow-up on just about everything in his busy life.

Serial startup founder, angel investor, and college dropout George Burgess founded exam prep startup Gojimo when he was an undergraduate student at Stanford. Burgess was seemingly living the founder dream, but as his dorm-room startup found an audience Burgess found it was too hard to juggle both school and building his company. So, he left Stanford, and that is where his entrepreneurial education really began.

As an angel investor Richard Fearn has met thousands of entrepreneurs, and there is a streak that runs through the best, he says. “They do have a restlessness and a resourcefulness to continue, even when it gets terribly hard.” And when you pitch Fearn, you better make him believe that you are going to change some of the significant problems the world faces today.

Investors don’t want to hear about your optimistic and unrealistic path to an exit. Save that for your own private, magical thinking. What angels want to see is that you have the right team and a massive market. And critically, if you are a newbie in the startup world, demonstrate that you are open to receiving mentoring.

Sage Franch and her co-founders at Crescendo have all faced their own set of barriers in their work lives, whether that discrimination was based on gender, race, or any number of other cultural biases that can be endemic to many workplaces. They founded their startup to help companies learn about -- and improve — their cultural competency, with software designed to promote diversity and inclusion.

Eamonn Carey from TechStars London walks us through the reasons you might want to apply to an accelerator. Beyond the network, beyond the technical and business help, Carey says, there is the forcing function of just getting an MVP ready for demo day.