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Wonder how much bitcoin an unscrupulous person could mine with that $5k of credits.
Less than $5k
Bitcoin is designed to cost the price of electricity when mining on dedicated ASIC miners.
AWS costs are covering enterprise hardware with extra services, electricity is not one tenth of that, and AWS is using general purpose CPU (maybe GPU instances) which are not one tenth as efficient as ASIC.
Wonder how much bitcoin an unscrupulous person could mine with that $5k of credits.
Source: A previous employer got a notification that our instances had been flagged as mining cryptocurrency, and they wanted to invalidate a low-six-figure amount of credits, and back-bill. Note that no cryptocurrency was actually being mined, and I don't know what heuristic they got caught in (although I have suspicions).
An important takeaway is to "send out any email at all". Like the time with our first startup in YC W06. Our first client was the result of me just cold emailing a CEO of a startup I saw featured in Wired magazine. "Hey I like what you're doing. Maybe we can find something to do together." Short. Not expecting much. No pitch. Just genuine appreciation and interest in brainstorming a collaboration. And it unexpectedly…
> Over and over in my career I was amazed at what happened when I just bothered showing up. Just remember to acknowledge how exceedingly well this works for white guys and the uphill battle faced by others.
> Stripe monitored the developer community enough to see our initial posts If I can't trust that I'll get the benefits promised by a service unless my complaint about not getting the benefits reaches a certain threshold of virality in the community, I have to assume I'm not getting them. I'm glad that they did. Maybe I'll get lucky as they did with "an email" and maybe I won't, but I certainly can't rely on it.
Ultimately it is up to AWS's activate team to approve or deny the credits.
In our experience, we were denied extra credits by the AWS activate team and the perk program we had joined specifically for the credits gave us a full refund.
I don't think anyone is saying to "rely" on free money - but if you have a shot at it then at least send the email.
An important takeaway is to "send out any email at all". Like the time with our first startup in YC W06. Our first client was the result of me just cold emailing a CEO of a startup I saw featured in Wired magazine. "Hey I like what you're doing. Maybe we can find something to do together." Short. Not expecting much. No pitch. Just genuine appreciation and interest in brainstorming a collaboration. And it unexpectedly…
> Over and over in my career I was amazed at what happened when I just bothered showing up. Just remember to acknowledge how exceedingly well this works for white guys and the uphill battle faced by others.
With all the bonus programs and scholarships for women and minorities, this is probably even more true for them.
For example, the top 5 women graduating each semester in informatics from my university receive a grand of 5000 Euro. We do not have more than five women graduating each semester (it's a small faculty, to be fair). Just showing up once after completing your bachelors degree can net you 5000 Euro.
An important takeaway is to "send out any email at all". Like the time with our first startup in YC W06. Our first client was the result of me just cold emailing a CEO of a startup I saw featured in Wired magazine. "Hey I like what you're doing. Maybe we can find something to do together." Short. Not expecting much. No pitch. Just genuine appreciation and interest in brainstorming a collaboration. And it unexpectedly…
> Over and over in my career I was amazed at what happened when I just bothered showing up. Just remember to acknowledge how exceedingly well this works for white guys and the uphill battle faced by others.
If you're not surrounded by people who have had success in their careers / education, it's hard to know which opportunities are available to you. Often, you only know about your parents and their career choices.
Also, the problem isn't entirely that some people don't understand the value of "showing up". It's that they don't always where and when to "show up" in the first place. For instance, I know a first-generation college student whose parents, while he was in high school, didn't even realize college was an option for him until his teachers started pestering everyone about college apps. He was lucky to attend a school where most students go to college, but I can imagine that in a poorer area he would've missed the opportunity entirely, thinking that he's not smart enough (which he certainly was!).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Over and over in my career I was amazed at what happened when I just bothered showing up. Just remember to acknowledge how exceedingly well this works for white guys and the uphill battle faced by others.
It's sad that this comment is down voted to oblivion but it's very true. Just showing up doesn't work for everyone, and I've personally seen it not work at all for black and Latino founders.
"Just a reminder" isn't a good way to start such a conversation. It implies that there is already a consensus on the issue when there isn't.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Less than $5k
But 5k in credits is worthless to someone who doesn't need them, so even if it's 1c, that's something. (Or really, so long as it's more than you can sell the account for.)
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 th…
This seems very backward, because you also don’t really need those credits anymore at that point.