It gives me great pleasure to announce Bijal Nagrashna as a speaker in Startup Iceland 2019. Bijal is the Senior Startup Business Development Manager for Nordics and Baltics at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Her international business background spans from consulting to investment banking and M&A. She was also a founder and co-founder of three startups, one of which exited. In her role at AWS, she helps startups grow from tech to business, from team building to sales, and from local to global. She is directly responsible for helping startups scale on AWS across incubators, accelerators, unbacked and VC Partners, through mechanisms, mentoring, resource engagement, and connections across the Amazon.
Here is a brief abstract of Bijal’s talk. I am excited to learn about this topic, so should any startup founder. Building companies is always about scaling the scale of the scaling changes, people, process and technology are always the levers. Bijal has participated in Startup Iceland before as participant and mentor, I am happy to see her come back as a speaker and share her insights so founders can learn from her experience.
Keeping your Startup DNA as you scale your business:
For a startup the main focus is always on the customer discovery & validation with less focus on the execute phase, that is, customer creation and company building. This talk focuses on company culture within Amazon and startups such as Airbnb, Supercell etc. The audience will learn from concrete examples on how to define, build and keep the culture that helped these companies be successful in the first place. It doesn’t matter if you are a startup, SMB or an enterprise, everyone can take something away from this talk. You will learn how Airbnb organizes themselves and extend their culture to customers, partners and investors. You will learn about Amazon’s leadership principles and how it uses them to keep innovation a number one priority within the company – even though Amazon is not a startup it’s still Day 1 at the company.
