Mackenzie is the Global Startup Evangelist at AWS. His days are spent traveling the globe to meet startups, share their stories, and connect engineering teams together. Every day there are a large number of startups launching on AWS across every imaginable industry. It’s Mackenzie’s mission to find stories of startups that are helping to improve the world and share these stories with a wide audience.
Prior to joining AWS, Mackenzie was the Head of Technical Operations at Betterment, the world’s largest independent robo-advisor based in NYC which manages over $8B in assets. Mackenzie was a founding engineer and Head of Technical Operations at Oscar Health, an insurance startup also based in NYC, helping to grow the company to over 400+ employees and a $2.7B valuation. Before Oscar, Mackenzie was one the original engineers at Tumblr where he helped scale the infrastructure to 20B page views a month eventually selling to Yahoo! for $1.1B. He’s worked in a diversified set of industries including global media (MTV/Viacom), global Shipping (DHL), and more. He also holds numerous advisory roles at companies providing technical and business guidance around the world.
Mackenzie is the Global Startup Evangelist at AWS. His days are spent traveling the globe to meet startups, share their stories, and connect engineering teams together. Every day there are a large number of startups launching on AWS across every imaginable industry. It’s Mackenzie’s mission to find stories of startups that are helping to improve the world and share these stories with a wide audience.
“A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front-page ad.” – Richard Branson
While paid media and press releases can help drive traffic to your startup, it’s costly and out of reach for many early founders. Plus, throwing money at the problem can only get you so far. Earned media coverage – free news stories, magazine write ups, blogs, etc., is what truly helps a startup scale.
Join our panel of journalists and public relations experts as they break down how to score free media coverage. Gain insider secrets on what inspires the media to cover a founder, or a startup, and how to build relationships with journalists in order to lean on them when the time is right. They’ll share why they chose certain startups, over others, to cover along with the great and bad ways to pitch them.
What you’ll learn:
- What is News and what makes your startup, or founder, a valuable news story
- How to build a scalable press strategy & when to engage outside PR help
- Ways to leverage hot topics, trends, and breaking news to generate PR for your startup
- How to get warm intros and develop relationships with reporters
- Free to low cost PR tools and alternatives for founders on tight budgets
Networking and drinks to follow.
Based in San Francisco, Harry McCracken is technology editor for Fast Company, where he covers everything from the world’s largest tech firms to intrepid startups. Prior to joining Fast Company, McCracken was editor at large for TIME magazine, where he wrote about consumer technology for the print publication and its website. He also founded his own award-winning website, Technologizer, and spent five years as the editor in chief of PC Worldmagazine.
Connie Guglielmo is editor in chief of CNET. She's responsible for overseeing a global team of talented reporters, editors and photographers who look at the world through the lens of tech: that includes the ideas, products, companies, people & cultural, political, social, privacy & other issues bringing change. Since tech touches every aspect of how we live, work, play, dream and engage, we write about what we think matters.
She's a veteran tech reporter & editor who's worked in and around Silicon Valley for MacWeek, Wired, Upside, Interactive Week, Bloomberg News and Forbes. She covets her original nail from the HP Garage, her BMUG tie-dye T-shirt, her iPod version 1.0 & desk chair from when NeXT closed shop.
Becky leads Battery’s marketing program, overseeing firm branding, communications, content and events. She also works closely with Battery’s portfolio companies to provide both strategic and tactical PR counsel. Becky joined the firm in 2013 after running her own strategic-communications practice providing branding, positioning and media-related services to Silicon Valley investment firms and high-tech startups.
Prior to that Becky worked for many years as a business journalist, including ten years at the Wall Street Journal in its New York, San Francisco and Hong Kong bureaus.
Michelle Kung currently works in startup content at AWS and was previously the head of content at Index Ventures. Prior to joining the corporate world, Michelle was a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, the founding Business Editor at the Huffington Post, a correspondent for The Boston Globe, a columnist for Publisher’s Weekly and a writer at Entertainment Weekly.
