[cactus2093]

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?

[vasco]

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

They've chosen to go with 2.

[xenospn]

I got $20k in AWS credits just by insisting. I was bootstrapped at the time.

[weka]

How?

[xenospn]

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.

[derivagral]

That assumption is exactly the point, isn't it?

[vincentmarle]

> 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.

[ksec]

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.

[chickenpotpie]

$100k is another employee for free. That's a significant sum for an early stage startup.

[icheishvili]

Why should startups backed by powerful institutional capital get more credits from AWS than ones that are bootstrapped and hurting for cash much more?

[avianlyric]

Because they’re more likely to succeed and spend real cash with AWS later.

Amazon’s a business, not a charity.

[harryh]

AWS credits aren't charity. They're an investment by Amazon that they hope will lead to future AWS revenue.