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Not for nothing, but these "American tech giants" offer huge credit programs for startups to use their platforms for free to launch. AWS offers $100k for a yea

Not for nothing, but these "American tech giants" offer huge credit programs for startups to use their platforms for free to launch. AWS offers $100k for a year if you've raised some funds, and I saw that Azure is offering $150k pre-funding (I don't know if or what the time limit is on the Azure credits). I'm sure GCP offers something similar, though I don't know the details. These are huge, and a smart startup could quite easily leverage these to skip an entire funding round (with some amount of luck). I'm not sure if you can daisy-chain these offers, but if you can, a quarter of a million dollars saved on engineering infrastructure cost is pretty much the polar opposite of "making life tough for startups". You might note use the full amount of credits, but if you've found a product/market fit (and if you haven't after the first year, that may be it's own sign), and you've not been particularly cautious about your code's efficiency, $100k is a godsend, at least insofar as you not having to actually fork over cash for your missteps in the first year. I don't know if those programs were offered when this article is written, but they're offered now so the title is no longer true.

systemvoltage 4y ago
Voluntary actions from big corporations don't cut the mustard. They can cancel it any time, for any reason and without warning. It's nice of them but that's not why they're in the business of giving away credits.
degrews 4y ago
I'm skeptical. I feel like any startup for whom 100k is "huge" is not at a stage where they'd be spending anywhere near that amount on cloud infrastructure.
- whymauri 4y ago
  Depends on the industry. At seed in computational biotech, we had a lean team. After validating our technology as much as we could, we played a lottery on AWS to get compounds. These workloads handled tens if not hundreds of billions of rows of data and part of the selling point was the parallelizibility, so we got badass instances to show we could turnaround results in minutes whereas other companies took months. We got a 100k and 150k AWS grant from AWS, and that was a big chunk of the computational budget. We were small, but the nature of HPC and our confidence in our algorithm meant we burnt the war chest on a YOLO and raised Series A.
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systemvoltage 4y ago

Voluntary actions from big corporations don't cut the mustard. They can cancel it any time, for any reason and without warning. It's nice of them but that's not why they're in the business of giving away credits.

degrews 4y ago

I'm skeptical. I feel like any startup for whom 100k is "huge" is not at a stage where they'd be spending anywhere near that amount on cloud infrastructure.

whymauri 4y ago
Depends on the industry. At seed in computational biotech, we had a lean team. After validating our technology as much as we could, we played a lottery on AWS to get compounds. These workloads handled tens if not hundreds of billions of rows of data and part of the selling point was the parallelizibility, so we got badass instances to show we could turnaround results in minutes whereas other companies took months. We got a 100k and 150k AWS grant from AWS, and that was a big chunk of the computational budget. We were small, but the nature of HPC and our confidence in our algorithm meant we burnt the war chest on a YOLO and raised Series A.

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