scottallison

While Twilio and Amazon Connect have some integrations it does not appear that Connect is built on top of Twilio. The Amazon FAQs says that all telephony services are charged separately by "AMCS LLC" which I'm guessing is a telco they've set up to do this at the lowest possible margins. If they went through someone else their pricing would be higher.

Great post. It was last year that there was a lot of chatter from everyone, worrying that we were in a bubble. Since then the talk of bubble has apparently decreased but the real signs of a bubble have accelerated, in particular, crazy living costs.

Very worried to read that this is still happening:

"Companies raising money at $15MM+ plus valuations with no traction and no real vision..."

This is awesome for a weekend hack! Good fun :)

500 has always been about startups with some degree of traction. Out of our batch, all bar 2 had a product, and over half had revenue already.

Actually I'm fairly sure there were 2 teams with single founders at the time of application. All had a team though, that's the most important thing.

This is cool. We currently host our app with Engine Yard and there's been a number of times when we've wanted to put in extra capacity for short bursts but it's impractical to do it. It's not the cost of upgrading for me that's the problem but the hassle of having to configure a new instance, and migrate to it. So I love the approach of dragging a few sliders and it magically happening. Go GoScale :)

Which makes me think of customer development... And how difficult it can be to sort through which feedback matters and is worth iterating around and what you should ignore. I think the biggest successes of recent times, Inatagram and Facebook just had an innate sense of what their users wanted.

Before I moved to silicon valley, I used to come here a couple of times a year, visiting as a Scottish person living in London. I would deliberately schedule any important meetings at the end of the trip, knowing full well that it would take me a while to get into the valley mindset and start thinking bigger. Unfortunately there is a pessimistic and sceptical mindset in Scotland which is extremely unhelpful.

By the way, if you'd just inflated your numbers that wouldn't have worked either; you need to believe them.

I think they don't want to make a noise because the next Air will have much of the power (but lacking the connectivity). This is literally one for the Pros. Can't see the line continuing beyond this iteration.