Biggest Wins for Startups at re:Invent

What is moving the needle for startups at AWS?

It seems like eons ago when I attended a huge conference. In fact, it was over a year ago in Singapore attending the Singapore FinTech Festival and SWITCH when over 60,000 attendees came together to learn all about the latest in FinTech innovation and meet with rising startups. I thought it was too big at the time, but now I would give anything to be among a huge throng of random people pushing their way through the crowds to attend sessions.

I have never been to AWS re:Invent, but I have heard it is the same vibe. The biggest difference is that it is all about cloud, even more people attend, and it’s in Las Vegas. As opposed to most vendor oriented events, re:Invent is a learning conference for the global cloud computing community.

The very first re:Invent was a smaller affair. That was in 2012 with 6,000 attendees mostly from startups and emerging technology partners. Back then, only startups were on the cloud for the most part. Enterprises treated cloud as a mere novelty.

Last year’s re:Invent was on a different scale. There were over 65,000 attendees taking over a good portion of Las Vegas for a week. Though there was a startup program, the heavy emphasis was on enterprise cloud migration and adoption of AWS. The content…