I am often asked about what has changed in Venture Capital and how that has impacted startups. Inevitably I answer that the right place to start when looking for impact on startups is Amazon. My line is: “Amazon has done more for startups than all early stage investors combined.” Why? Because founders can now generally get a service up and running on AWS with a close to zero upfront investment. And of course once you have something fundraising gets a lot easier and you probably have to sell a lot less of your company.

And now I am thrilled to see Amazon go one step further by offering their Amazon Activate program. In addition to all the stuff you can already get in the free usage tier they are throwing in a bunch of support and training. But where the numbers really start to get interesting is if you qualify for what they are calling the portfolio package – you have to be part of an incubator or accelerator or early stage portfolio. This program includes up to $15,000 in promotional credit, which is a fair bit of computing.

So if you are a startup in one of the qualifying programs I would highly encourage you to apply. And this is definitely a reason worth considering if you are thinking about joining an accelerator in the first place. Everyone running an accelerator or seed investing should make sure their portfolio qualifies (at USV we don’t do much seed investing but we are part of this nonetheless).