> Stripe monitored the developer community enough to see our initial posts
If I can't trust that I'll get the benefits promised by a service unless my complaint about not getting the benefits reaches a certain threshold of virality in the community, I have to assume I'm not getting them. I'm glad that they did. Maybe I'll get lucky as they did with "an email" and maybe I won't, but I certainly can't rely on it.
I can't think of any other company that bends over backwards to please engineers who use their platform (and, by extension, the people who visit this site) more than Stripe. Back in 2013, when my co-founder and I started a company and later got into YC, my co-founder went thru every circle of hell in order to fix all the mistakes we made when we incorporated. If Stripe Atlas had existed back then and we'd used it, this would just be a non-issue. Unless you're an expert in the technicalities of startup incorporation/bylaws/etc, the value Stripe Atlas provides is huge and it just doesn't make sense to me why someone would pass on it.
The issue here is really with AWS. These credit promises are all over every startup perk program - paid or free.
Ultimately it is up to AWS's activate team to approve or deny the credits.
In our experience, we were denied extra credits by the AWS activate team and the perk program we had joined specifically for the credits gave us a full refund.
I don't think anyone is saying to "rely" on free money - but if you have a shot at it then at least send the email.
An important takeaway is to "send out any email at all".
Like the time with our first startup in YC W06. Our first client was the result of me just cold emailing a CEO of a startup I saw featured in Wired magazine. "Hey I like what you're doing. Maybe we can find something to do together." Short. Not expecting much. No pitch. Just genuine appreciation and interest in brainstorming a collaboration. And it unexpectedly lead to them signing a 5 figure deal with us which was everything to a tiny startup not making anything :)
Over and over in my career I was amazed at what happened when I just bothered showing up.
It's sad that this comment is down voted to oblivion but it's very true. Just showing up doesn't work for everyone, and I've personally seen it not work at all for black and Latino founders.
The trouble with the post wasn't the information, but the way it was presented. The HN guidelines state "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Just a reminder" isn't a good way to start such a conversation. It implies that there is already a consensus on the issue when there isn't.
While I agree with your first point, I think you are giving an uncharitable reading of the comment. "Just a reminder", to me, sounds like it is trying to append a relevant point, rather than disagree with/discredit the original point.
A version of the comment excluding that ("Acknowledge how exceedingly well this works for white guys and the uphill battle faced by others.") sounds like an aggressive accusation.
Your second paragraph proves my point that it's a rather contentious statement. "Just a reminder," beyond implying that it is already known, is partly just an introduction to the main point. And the main point is an aggressive accusation.
"Doesn't sound good" contributes nothing to the discussion, other than betraying your lack of understanding. Ethics does not depend on personal preferences, and it's ridiculous to suggest I "like" Jews more than I "like" white people. As it happens, in certain circumstances the substitution you seem to intend as some sort of reductio ad absurdum would make perfect sense. Since I recently watched "Uncut Gems" and I love "Snatch", I'm thinking of the diamond industry in New York and Antwerp. Doesn't it seem fair to say that someone from those particular communities would have a leg up in that business?
The centuries-long struggle for increased equality in USA has little to do with whom one "likes" or not. Your fixation on personal preference shows how little of this you understand.
"Doesn't sound good" contributes nothing to the discussion.
It's racist and discriminatory, I just didn't deem it necessary to use such direct, harsh language about what many consider a touchy subject.
it's ridiculous to suggest I "like" Jews more than I "like" white people
I used Jews as an example because Post-WW2 teachings of Jewish suppression would make the comparison more relatable to most people. That plus their relative per-person power distribution is more comparable to whites than, say, African Americans, making the comparison more fair. Use whatever group you like in substitution. The point is that you interpret such messages differently if the person is part of your "tribe."
Your fixation on personal preference shows how little of this you understand.
This moves into personal attack. That's unproductive.
In fact, I am a white Caucasian but I am not a Jew. At this point, one such as myself would have to have his head up his ass not to realize that racism exists in USA, and it manifests among other ways in the privilege enjoyed by many (but of course not all!) white people in USA business contexts. "Racist" isn't a bad word. Many aspects of our society are actually racist, and we need a word to describe that situation.
You write as if the worst thing one can do when one observes racism is to call it by its name. In fact that's just about the only good response we have. If you think someone is being racist then tell them about it. Just be prepared for laughter when they discover that what you're really whinging about is being reminded that privilege exists. If you really were e.g. a white handicapped high school dropout from eastern Kentucky, you wouldn't be surprised, because you'd see thread parent's privilege just as clearly as any minority sees it.
If you think someone is being racist then tell them about it. Just be prepared for laughter when they discover that what you're really whinging about is being reminded that privilege exists
Sure, but the way to do it isn't to scream "You're privileged!!!" That's not productive and makes people defensive. Same for the poar above. The way they presented it was unproductive.
Just remember to acknowledge how exceedingly well this works for white guys and the uphill battle faced by others.
The delicate flowers who are made defensive about that completely reasonable and unremarkable advice are terrible people, and this nation is worse for their continued presence here. Such people should take a long look in the mirror, and they should try to be better humans.
Racism(defined as discrimination due to race) is not reasonable. The post above was racist, so warranted a rebuke in my opinion.
By 2048, whites will be the minority in the US. If our culture allows anti-white discrimination between now and then, then there will be major conflicts within the country. I think it would be good to try to avoid that.
> Just remember to acknowledge how exceedingly well this works for white guys and the uphill battle faced by others.
With all the bonus programs and scholarships for women and minorities, this is probably even more true for them.
For example, the top 5 women graduating each semester in informatics from my university receive a grand of 5000 Euro. We do not have more than five women graduating each semester (it's a small faculty, to be fair). Just showing up once after completing your bachelors degree can net you 5000 Euro.
In my experience, I think the biggest problem is that due to structural and historical racism, race is correlated with economic status in the United States. It sucks to be poor, no matter what color you are.
If you're not surrounded by people who have had success in their careers / education, it's hard to know which opportunities are available to you. Often, you only know about your parents and their career choices.
Also, the problem isn't entirely that some people don't understand the value of "showing up". It's that they don't always where and when to "show up" in the first place. For instance, I know a first-generation college student whose parents, while he was in high school, didn't even realize college was an option for him until his teachers started pestering everyone about college apps. He was lucky to attend a school where most students go to college, but I can imagine that in a poorer area he would've missed the opportunity entirely, thinking that he's not smart enough (which he certainly was!).
Correlation is definitely an important factor, but there are multitude of studies demonstrating an important inherent race/gender/origin bias in many important decisions, from hiring to housing to financing and more.
It comes to mind an experiment carried in France where they sent fake housing applications where the only difference between two sets of applicants was a Muslim-sounding name vs a Christian one. The results showed a much higher response rate for the latter, despite everything else being equal. I can't find the original, but found this similar one working with job applications (https://www.pnas.org/content/107/52/22384).
Not to negate the main point about "showing up", but there's more to it. When I've had the chance to hire someone and there are two similar candidates, I preferred to choose the one with the lower ranked school credentials. My thinking is that if this person has reached the same level of achievements with less environmental help, they probably have more grit and get-it-done in them than the candidate from the top school. Much more than that can be done in a systemic way, but it's a start.
I think it's important to consider the effect size when we talk about race or class bias. My personal feeling is that class (money) plays a much larger role than race (at least in the U.S. , I can't comment on France). I believe that now, when certain minorities have lesser outcomes than the white majority, it is primarily due to a higher prevalence of poverty.
Consider East Asians, a minority who have historically been victims of racial injustice in the U.S. As recently as 1945, Japanese people were placed in internment camps in the United States. Despite all of this racism, they have better economic and health outcomes than the white majority. Why? I believe it is due to class.
If we were to spend more energy fighting economic inequality I think we would see better outcomes for racial minorities. That is not to say that racism doesn't exist today, and that it's not important to fight against racial injustice. Both are important, but I tend to see much more discussion of race than class.
This works both way. Another study in France asked by associations about anonymous résumé was made. The surprising result was that with anonymous ones, the non-white people were discriminated more. Why? Because more often than not, when a recruiter was looking at a foreign sounding name, he was more lenient about gap-year, not-the-best-school etc. So in the end the idea of imposing anonymous résumé was ditched.
"Cold calling" emails are color blind. A good product is a good product, no matter the color of the email sender. The OP's point was to "get out there and sell", which also is a color blind message.
Except it's been shown over and over again that even something as innocuous as your name can invoke inherent bias. For example, see https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/5494/black-sound... for a study comparing certain names and how they suggest a more or less muscular/aggressive person.
Then change the name in your email. You're missing the point of the OP though - NOT emailing people will lead to 0 sales. Emailing people MAY lead to unexpected sales.
People make all sorts of impressions on a person just by their name, or many other signals (such as email address, the time of day it was received, et cetera).
I experienced agism for the first time when I turned 40. What used to be pretty much a guaranteed first interview after applying, turned into getting lost in the stack of resumes and never getting callbacks.
I decided to take a break from tech a year and a half ago after the worst burnout of my life. And with COVID-19, I've decided to extend that another year or two. There are just too many systemic problems in tech and I don't like the direction it's all going (survival of the fittest, dog eat dog, hyper-competitive, etc etc etc). So I've decided to do service work in the meantime in the areas that I've neglected, which right now is handyman work, moving towards renewable energy. I've always felt inspired by Jimmy Carter's work with Habitat for Humanity.
I knew about the various forms of prejudice in tech (that evolve from a feeling of being a reject growing up) but hadn't experienced them personally yet. So many young men especially have this feeling that everyone else is mistaken, and that they can do no wrong because they are the uber geek. Which clashes with their real-life experience of never being able to get a date, being broke all the time, working dead end jobs, etc. So they tend to overlook people who don't fit their expectation of what an expert looks like. Some of them grow out of it, but sadly a lot of us get trapped perpetuating the same patriarchy/misogyny/bigotry and similar systems of control without even realizing it. That's why I think it's so important to actively work towards justice and equity once we become aware of these issues.
> Just remember to acknowledge how exceedingly well this works for white guys and the uphill battle faced by others.
This isn't as straightforward as you make it sound.
It definitely isn't straightforward for white guys with poor parents either.
And unlike certain other groups there aren't anyone standing up for them. If they cry out they'll only make it worse for themselves as people will laugh at these "insanely privileged white guys whining".
So can we stop this, or at least be a little more nuanced; stop pretending that just because someone is a white male they are automatically playing life on easy mode as someone said? Because it isn't true.
Cannot agree more with the concept of just showing up. It's remarkable what you can get done by being, friendly, open, honest, just asking, and then delivering.
This applies to so many things. It's incredible how far you can get with a simple question. Worst case scenario, you get a "no", and nothing changes. Best case, you can get something like 5K from AWS.
But 5k in credits is worthless to someone who doesn't need them, so even if it's 1c, that's something. (Or really, so long as it's more than you can sell the account for.)
IIRC credits are non-transferable for exactly this reason, and also why billing information is required (even if you have credit). "Selling" a full account with credits (or access to that account to use the credits) would be super risky since it's still tied back to you, you will definitely be selling for less than the credit amount, and you would be on the hook if AWS invalidated those credits after-the-fact.
Maybe in the order of $50 rough estimate, that is 2 orders of magnitude less.
Bitcoin is designed to cost the price of electricity when mining on dedicated ASIC miners.
AWS costs are covering enterprise hardware with extra services, electricity is not one tenth of that, and AWS is using general purpose CPU (maybe GPU instances) which are not one tenth as efficient as ASIC.
More to the point, as-far-as-I-know this activity is monitored for, and using promotional credits for these purposes will invalidate your credits and you'll receive a large bill.
Source: A previous employer got a notification that our instances had been flagged as mining cryptocurrency, and they wanted to invalidate a low-six-figure amount of credits, and back-bill. Note that no cryptocurrency was actually being mined, and I don't know what heuristic they got caught in (although I have suspicions).
In case anyone doesn't know this, for just about any venture-backed company that has gone through YC or another incubator or raised from an early-stage VC, you can pretty much automatically get $100k of credits from Google or AWS.
Good on Stripe and Atlas for making this more available to more bootstrapped companies like the one in this post, but there's certainly a huge difference between $1k or $5k and $100k.
On the one hand I understand why cloud providers have to limit this, they're trying to buy lock-in and have to choose startups that they think have a larger chance of growing big enough for this to be profitable. Even a successful bootstrapped company will normally not grow as large as a successful VC-backed company, and will probably be smarter with their money as well and not rack up enormous AWS bills so quickly.
But on the other hand, this is an almost invisible example of the kind of gatekeeping that helps those who are starting from a position of privilege (i.e. have the connections to raise a large seed round) and gives them a leg up over everyone else. If as a tech community we're striving to make starting a company more meritocratic and make sure there is a low barrier to entry for everyone, I wonder if there's a better way to distribute these kinds of perks?
> In case anyone doesn't know this, for just about any venture-backed company that has gone through YC or another incubator or raised from an early-stage VC, you can pretty much automatically get $100k of credits from Google or AWS.
This seems very backward, because you also don’t really need those credits anymore at that point.
The whole point is to get you hooked in the first place.
Scenario
1. You succeed, your startup is now worth something ( big or small ), you will be dealing with scaling issues, people issues, marketing issues, profits issues or gazillion of other small things, the last thing you want is switching your infrastructure provide.
2. You failed, or burn through those cash, but not to worry, since your are backed by incubator or early stage VC, the likely hood of you getting another round of funding is high. And those will be used on AWS anyway.
There are very little downside to AWS but lots of upside.
My friend is a solutions architect at AWS. He put me in touch with whoever is responsible for the plan. Had a 5 minute phone call with them and got approved for the credits.
Judging by how big AWS is, I'm sure everyone knows someone who works there.
It's just a way to have free vetting. If you have a bunch of cash to deliver to startups in order to reap the rewards of lock-in a few years down the line, which do you do?
1) Ask for applications and pay people to mass review applications to pick which startups are more likely to succeed
2) Have 1) be done by proxy for you for free, by only giving it out to startups who a professional "startup success predictor person" has already invested in
when I worked for a startup, an email got us $250K in credits. That was enough to run the compute for the company for at least a year. Now, we had a nice deal with our VCs, and AWS really liked us, but it really was a "asking made the difference".
> Send that one last email. Even if it seems like a bit much, or things are settled, just be sure you ask and give the other person a chance to help you in ways you can't predict
Good lesson for budding founders or indie devs.
Shows you the power of "Just ask". If you don't ask, the answer is always no.
This type of infrastructure credits can really accelerate a bootstrapped startup, unfortunately almost every major provider of such freebies have now moved on to 'Contact your nearest Accelerator/VC' type model.
Google was the first to move that way, now Microsoft has cancelled its Bootstrap program and even Facebook has done away with its Startup Accelerator program in favour of 'Contact your nearest Accelerator/VC we approve of' model.
I was personally benefitted by Facebook's aforementioned Accelerator program. I applied for my previous startup's privacy focused chat-app-network dating platform for their bootstrap phase, but they directly approved it for their Accelerator phase through which I received $80,000 worth benefits incl. $15,000 AWS credits on which I ran my product; these kind of help makes life or death difference for a disabled soloprenuer from a village in India running bootstrapped startup(Facebook doesn't know this).
Now anyone in my position is at the mercy of some Accelerator or VC.
I understand that your situation mandates a bit of pragmatism in order to survive.
If that is the case, why are you painting a target on your back?
Do you seriously think nobody at Facebook reads this?
You just admitted, with your REAL NAME, that you basically lied to Facebook about information that actively poses a liability to them and took their money.
I am seriously baffled as to why you think this comment was a good idea.
I am not trying to antagonize you, but highlighting the fact that you are vulnerable while publicizing information that exacerbates the situation does not align here.
I think you might be overreacting to this, he said Facebook didn't know his situation, that doesn't mean he lied about it. It's not really necessarily relevant where he's from or what disabilities he has.
I told Facebook doesn't know "I'm disabled" that's all, To imply I got selected meritoriously.
Obviously everything about my Startup was part of my application details, since my application was hosted on Facebook platform(messenger app) it knew the statistics as well and I believe that's the reason it got selected.
Then again, its Facebook we are talking about here, it might even know what I had for breakfast the day I applied.
But I believe you made that comment out of concern of my well-being, I appreciate that and I apologise if my sentence formation caused unnecessary confusion.
P.S. I use my real name here to own accountability of the things I write here and to ensure I don't compromise my integrity in the lure of anonymity/pseudo-anonymity(No offence to anyone who don't use their real name, I understand).
Understood. Definitely an overreaction on my part. Just a little weary from how exclusive these applications can be and what the consequences can look like.
Nice to hear Stripe actually caring for their customers.
Besides that, I think your product serves a wonderful niche. Had the exact problem of hosting a static site for a customer and actually needed to host a full Python backend eventually to receive form submissions. In the future I'll just use formcake.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadIf I can't trust that I'll get the benefits promised by a service unless my complaint about not getting the benefits reaches a certain threshold of virality in the community, I have to assume I'm not getting them. I'm glad that they did. Maybe I'll get lucky as they did with "an email" and maybe I won't, but I certainly can't rely on it.
Ultimately it is up to AWS's activate team to approve or deny the credits.
In our experience, we were denied extra credits by the AWS activate team and the perk program we had joined specifically for the credits gave us a full refund.
I don't think anyone is saying to "rely" on free money - but if you have a shot at it then at least send the email.
Like the time with our first startup in YC W06. Our first client was the result of me just cold emailing a CEO of a startup I saw featured in Wired magazine. "Hey I like what you're doing. Maybe we can find something to do together." Short. Not expecting much. No pitch. Just genuine appreciation and interest in brainstorming a collaboration. And it unexpectedly lead to them signing a 5 figure deal with us which was everything to a tiny startup not making anything :)
Over and over in my career I was amazed at what happened when I just bothered showing up.
Just remember to acknowledge how exceedingly well this works for white guys and the uphill battle faced by others.
"Just a reminder" isn't a good way to start such a conversation. It implies that there is already a consensus on the issue when there isn't.
A version of the comment excluding that ("Acknowledge how exceedingly well this works for white guys and the uphill battle faced by others.") sounds like an aggressive accusation.
ISTM a general statement about the world accuses no one in particular of anything.
> Just remember to acknowledge how exceedingly well this works for Jews and the uphill battle faced by others.
The above comment doesn't sound good and shouldn't be accepted by the community. Neither should the comment against whites.
The centuries-long struggle for increased equality in USA has little to do with whom one "likes" or not. Your fixation on personal preference shows how little of this you understand.
It's racist and discriminatory, I just didn't deem it necessary to use such direct, harsh language about what many consider a touchy subject.
it's ridiculous to suggest I "like" Jews more than I "like" white people
I used Jews as an example because Post-WW2 teachings of Jewish suppression would make the comparison more relatable to most people. That plus their relative per-person power distribution is more comparable to whites than, say, African Americans, making the comparison more fair. Use whatever group you like in substitution. The point is that you interpret such messages differently if the person is part of your "tribe."
Your fixation on personal preference shows how little of this you understand.
This moves into personal attack. That's unproductive.
You write as if the worst thing one can do when one observes racism is to call it by its name. In fact that's just about the only good response we have. If you think someone is being racist then tell them about it. Just be prepared for laughter when they discover that what you're really whinging about is being reminded that privilege exists. If you really were e.g. a white handicapped high school dropout from eastern Kentucky, you wouldn't be surprised, because you'd see thread parent's privilege just as clearly as any minority sees it.
Sure, but the way to do it isn't to scream "You're privileged!!!" That's not productive and makes people defensive. Same for the poar above. The way they presented it was unproductive.
Just remember to acknowledge how exceedingly well this works for white guys and the uphill battle faced by others.
The delicate flowers who are made defensive about that completely reasonable and unremarkable advice are terrible people, and this nation is worse for their continued presence here. Such people should take a long look in the mirror, and they should try to be better humans.
By 2048, whites will be the minority in the US. If our culture allows anti-white discrimination between now and then, then there will be major conflicts within the country. I think it would be good to try to avoid that.
Jeez wow, I didn't realize that the existence of white privilege was so hotly controversial here on HN.
With all the bonus programs and scholarships for women and minorities, this is probably even more true for them.
For example, the top 5 women graduating each semester in informatics from my university receive a grand of 5000 Euro. We do not have more than five women graduating each semester (it's a small faculty, to be fair). Just showing up once after completing your bachelors degree can net you 5000 Euro.
If you're not surrounded by people who have had success in their careers / education, it's hard to know which opportunities are available to you. Often, you only know about your parents and their career choices.
Also, the problem isn't entirely that some people don't understand the value of "showing up". It's that they don't always where and when to "show up" in the first place. For instance, I know a first-generation college student whose parents, while he was in high school, didn't even realize college was an option for him until his teachers started pestering everyone about college apps. He was lucky to attend a school where most students go to college, but I can imagine that in a poorer area he would've missed the opportunity entirely, thinking that he's not smart enough (which he certainly was!).
It comes to mind an experiment carried in France where they sent fake housing applications where the only difference between two sets of applicants was a Muslim-sounding name vs a Christian one. The results showed a much higher response rate for the latter, despite everything else being equal. I can't find the original, but found this similar one working with job applications (https://www.pnas.org/content/107/52/22384).
Not to negate the main point about "showing up", but there's more to it. When I've had the chance to hire someone and there are two similar candidates, I preferred to choose the one with the lower ranked school credentials. My thinking is that if this person has reached the same level of achievements with less environmental help, they probably have more grit and get-it-done in them than the candidate from the top school. Much more than that can be done in a systemic way, but it's a start.
Consider East Asians, a minority who have historically been victims of racial injustice in the U.S. As recently as 1945, Japanese people were placed in internment camps in the United States. Despite all of this racism, they have better economic and health outcomes than the white majority. Why? I believe it is due to class.
If we were to spend more energy fighting economic inequality I think we would see better outcomes for racial minorities. That is not to say that racism doesn't exist today, and that it's not important to fight against racial injustice. Both are important, but I tend to see much more discussion of race than class.
As far as resume studies go, here is one that shows significant bias based on class: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000312241666815... .
I experienced agism for the first time when I turned 40. What used to be pretty much a guaranteed first interview after applying, turned into getting lost in the stack of resumes and never getting callbacks.
I decided to take a break from tech a year and a half ago after the worst burnout of my life. And with COVID-19, I've decided to extend that another year or two. There are just too many systemic problems in tech and I don't like the direction it's all going (survival of the fittest, dog eat dog, hyper-competitive, etc etc etc). So I've decided to do service work in the meantime in the areas that I've neglected, which right now is handyman work, moving towards renewable energy. I've always felt inspired by Jimmy Carter's work with Habitat for Humanity.
I knew about the various forms of prejudice in tech (that evolve from a feeling of being a reject growing up) but hadn't experienced them personally yet. So many young men especially have this feeling that everyone else is mistaken, and that they can do no wrong because they are the uber geek. Which clashes with their real-life experience of never being able to get a date, being broke all the time, working dead end jobs, etc. So they tend to overlook people who don't fit their expectation of what an expert looks like. Some of them grow out of it, but sadly a lot of us get trapped perpetuating the same patriarchy/misogyny/bigotry and similar systems of control without even realizing it. That's why I think it's so important to actively work towards justice and equity once we become aware of these issues.
This isn't as straightforward as you make it sound.
It definitely isn't straightforward for white guys with poor parents either.
And unlike certain other groups there aren't anyone standing up for them. If they cry out they'll only make it worse for themselves as people will laugh at these "insanely privileged white guys whining".
So can we stop this, or at least be a little more nuanced; stop pretending that just because someone is a white male they are automatically playing life on easy mode as someone said? Because it isn't true.
Bitcoin is designed to cost the price of electricity when mining on dedicated ASIC miners.
AWS costs are covering enterprise hardware with extra services, electricity is not one tenth of that, and AWS is using general purpose CPU (maybe GPU instances) which are not one tenth as efficient as ASIC.
Source: A previous employer got a notification that our instances had been flagged as mining cryptocurrency, and they wanted to invalidate a low-six-figure amount of credits, and back-bill. Note that no cryptocurrency was actually being mined, and I don't know what heuristic they got caught in (although I have suspicions).
Good on Stripe and Atlas for making this more available to more bootstrapped companies like the one in this post, but there's certainly a huge difference between $1k or $5k and $100k.
On the one hand I understand why cloud providers have to limit this, they're trying to buy lock-in and have to choose startups that they think have a larger chance of growing big enough for this to be profitable. Even a successful bootstrapped company will normally not grow as large as a successful VC-backed company, and will probably be smarter with their money as well and not rack up enormous AWS bills so quickly.
But on the other hand, this is an almost invisible example of the kind of gatekeeping that helps those who are starting from a position of privilege (i.e. have the connections to raise a large seed round) and gives them a leg up over everyone else. If as a tech community we're striving to make starting a company more meritocratic and make sure there is a low barrier to entry for everyone, I wonder if there's a better way to distribute these kinds of perks?
This seems very backward, because you also don’t really need those credits anymore at that point.
Amazon’s a business, not a charity.
Scenario
1. You succeed, your startup is now worth something ( big or small ), you will be dealing with scaling issues, people issues, marketing issues, profits issues or gazillion of other small things, the last thing you want is switching your infrastructure provide.
2. You failed, or burn through those cash, but not to worry, since your are backed by incubator or early stage VC, the likely hood of you getting another round of funding is high. And those will be used on AWS anyway.
There are very little downside to AWS but lots of upside.
Judging by how big AWS is, I'm sure everyone knows someone who works there.
1) Ask for applications and pay people to mass review applications to pick which startups are more likely to succeed
2) Have 1) be done by proxy for you for free, by only giving it out to startups who a professional "startup success predictor person" has already invested in
They've chosen to go with 2.
Good lesson for budding founders or indie devs.
Shows you the power of "Just ask". If you don't ask, the answer is always no.
Google was the first to move that way, now Microsoft has cancelled its Bootstrap program and even Facebook has done away with its Startup Accelerator program in favour of 'Contact your nearest Accelerator/VC we approve of' model.
I was personally benefitted by Facebook's aforementioned Accelerator program. I applied for my previous startup's privacy focused chat-app-network dating platform for their bootstrap phase, but they directly approved it for their Accelerator phase through which I received $80,000 worth benefits incl. $15,000 AWS credits on which I ran my product; these kind of help makes life or death difference for a disabled soloprenuer from a village in India running bootstrapped startup(Facebook doesn't know this).
Now anyone in my position is at the mercy of some Accelerator or VC.
I understand that your situation mandates a bit of pragmatism in order to survive.
If that is the case, why are you painting a target on your back?
Do you seriously think nobody at Facebook reads this?
You just admitted, with your REAL NAME, that you basically lied to Facebook about information that actively poses a liability to them and took their money.
I am seriously baffled as to why you think this comment was a good idea.
I am not trying to antagonize you, but highlighting the fact that you are vulnerable while publicizing information that exacerbates the situation does not align here.
Obviously everything about my Startup was part of my application details, since my application was hosted on Facebook platform(messenger app) it knew the statistics as well and I believe that's the reason it got selected.
Then again, its Facebook we are talking about here, it might even know what I had for breakfast the day I applied.
But I believe you made that comment out of concern of my well-being, I appreciate that and I apologise if my sentence formation caused unnecessary confusion.
P.S. I use my real name here to own accountability of the things I write here and to ensure I don't compromise my integrity in the lure of anonymity/pseudo-anonymity(No offence to anyone who don't use their real name, I understand).
No need to apologize.
Wish you well.
Besides that, I think your product serves a wonderful niche. Had the exact problem of hosting a static site for a customer and actually needed to host a full Python backend eventually to receive form submissions. In the future I'll just use formcake.