Introduction: A Personal Tech Journey

In a world where staying connected is crucial, finding the perfect Wi-Fi solution for your home can be quite a quest. Just last week, I embarked on this tech journey, determined to discover a reliable and powerful solution that would meet the demands of my modern household. Little did I know, my search would lead me to the Gryphon AX – a revolutionary Mesh WiFi 6 Parental Control Router that goes beyond ordinary connectivity.

Part 1: Beyond Connectivity: Gryphon AX's Game-Changing Features

The Gryphon AX is not just another run-of-the-mill Wi-Fi router. It's a game-changer, a technological marvel designed to redefine your home network experience. Its ultra-fast Mesh WiFi 6 technology promises seamless streaming, lag-free video calls, and lightning-speed downloads. The days of frustrating buffering and slow connections are now a thing of the past.

Part 2: Empowering Digital Parenting

However, what truly sets the Gryphon AX apart is its emphasis on digital parenting and online safety. With the digital landscape becoming increasingly complex, keeping our children safe while they explore the internet is a top priority. The Gryphon AX comes equipped with built-in Parental Control features that allow parents like me to establish healthy boundaries and manage screen time effortlessly. In a world where our kids are more connected than ever, having the ability to filter content, block inappropriate websites, and even pause the internet gives us the peace of mind we need.

Part 3: Setting Up for Success

Setting up a new piece of technology can often be a daunting task, but Gryphon AX takes the hassle out of the equation. The user-friendly Gryphon app guided me through the setup process step by step. No technical expertise required – just a few taps, and my home network was up and running seamlessly.

Part 4: A Signal in Every Corner

We've all experienced those frustrating Wi-Fi dead zones that seem to plague even the most well-designed homes. Gryphon AX's mesh technology eliminates these dead zones, ensuring that every corner of your house receives a strong and reliable signal. Whether you're in the basement, the attic, or anywhere in between, Gryphon AX has got your connectivity covered.

Part 5: Elevating Your Digital Lifestyle

In conclusion, the Gryphon AX Mesh WiFi 6 Parental Control Router has transformed my family's digital experience. It's not just a router; it's a complete solution that offers speed, safety, and simplicity. From streaming your favorite shows without interruptions to having peace of mind knowing your kids are exploring the online world safely, Gryphon AX has truly elevated our digital lifestyle.

If you're tired of sluggish connections, concerned about your kids' online activities, or simply looking for a home network solution that adapts to your needs, Gryphon AX is the answer. Embrace the future of connectivity and parenting with Gryphon AX – where speed, security, and simplicity converge to create the ultimate home network experience.

My Year 2022 in numbers:

✅  1 incredible new role inside Riot Games thanks to my awesome X-Team.

I've had the amazing chance to work with outstanding engineers, Program Managers, Data Scientists, and Product Marketers who are very passionate about Gaming and Gamers

✅  Our little princess is growing like crazy (22 months old exactly until December 2022) and our 9 years old boy is getting interested in math and games. My wife is getting the bug of content creation as well.

Perhaps she will be with me in a future podcast? Who knows !!!

✅  617 subscribers and 2900 public hours until December 28th, 2022 in my YouTube channel.

2023 will be the year when I will be accepted inside the YouTube Partner Program.

I made a lot of videos this year, but one of my favorite ones is this called "Como prepararse para un layoff en 2023":

✅  I took the opportunity to work with the MotherDuck crew to launch a new monthly newsletter about everything related to DuckDB ecosystem in a month. 1 issue so far, but there will be more of them in 2023.
Thanks again to Ryan Boyd 🐤 and Tino Tereshko for the opportunity. Subscribe here if you love DuckDB: https://motherduck.com/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-one/

✅ I launched a new newsletter to help people to find amazing Data focused roles called "Interesting Data Gigs".

This one has been of my favorite things of the year, and it has evolved from a newsletter in Substack with 20 issues and 213 subscribers, to a copy of this newsletter here on LinkedIn with 1606 subscribers to a Talent Collective with more than 20 open roles and 18 active candidates ready for an interview.


✅ I was accepted into the AWS Community Builders program (Thank you Jason Dunn, Caroline Kerns, and the whole crew behind this work) and although I was accepted as part of the Data cohort; one of my goals was always to launch something related to AWS Graviton.

I'm a man of action, so I launched "AWS Graviton Weekly, a dedicated Amazon Web Services (AWS) related newsletter focused on AWS Silicon (Graviton, Inferentia, AWS Nitro, and Trainium) news, resources, videos, articles, and more.

Thanks to this work, I had the chance to interact with amazing human beings like Jason Andrews, William Koplitz, Liz Fong-Jones, Michael Fischer, Stephen J. Barr, Rahul Subramaniam, Jon Myer, Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu and many more. Thank you for your constant support. It means a lot

53 subscribers and 16 issues until this date.

2023 will be a huge year for AWS Graviton, so I'm more than excited to continue working on this.

You can subscribe here awsgravitonweekly.com

✅ I had the amazing opportunity to work with incredible products like Quickbooks, beehiiv, ConvertKit, Circle, Deel, Testimonial, SparkLoop and more.

✅ And one of the craziest things of 2022? One of my questions was picked by the "Beasties" of the All-In Podcast, in an iconic episode like the 100th.

You can watch it here:

Thank you Jason, David, Chamath, and David O. Sacks

✅  7796 professionals who are following my crazy rants on LinkedIn.

I just wanted to say THANK YOU to each one of you and let's have an amazing 2023.

One of my good friends here at LinkedIn asked me this very interesting and challenging question.

Why challenging? Because there are so many resources out there, I will try to put my favorite ones here.

Let's go.

“On Writing Well” by William Zinsser

As a Software Engineer, you don’t only write pieces of code, you write emails, commit messages, Pull Requests descriptions, Product Requirements Document (PRD), emails, blog posts, technical docs, etc.

Seriously: this is the most important skill you need to master as a Software Engineer: writing well.

“Psychology of Money” by Morgan Housel

As a Software Engineer, especially in the U.S, you can earn a lot of money in your professional life.

So, you need to be strategic and careful about it. This book can help to set the right mindset for it.

“The Ultimate Sales Machine” by Chet Holmes

BTW, you should check out the posts from Amanda Holmes as well, especially her Bootcamp.

Learn to sell, Learn to Build:

You must read this post from Naval Ravikant
https://nav.al/build-sell

“The One Thing” by Gary Keller

This book can teach you the power of focus. In these challenging times where we are working from home, this will be incredibly useful

“Personal Finance for Engineers” by Stanford and Adam Nash

In this course, you can learn so many things that could make a huge impact on your future income.

“Atomic Habits” by James Clear

I think I don’t have to speak a lot about this book

“Never Split the Difference” by Chris Voss and Michael Kramer

Everything in life is a Negotiation. If you learn to do it right, you can advance quickly in life. Period.

“Cultivate Culture” by Austin Belcak

If you want to learn how to actually get incredible jobs at FAANGs without applying, Austin is your guy.

One of the most interesting products there is definitely Chrome OS from Chrome Enterprise.

Let's analyze why.

Why? Because it allows small and big enterprises to have a secure and functional Cloud-focused operating system to work without any worries.

One of my favorite examples of the amazing capabilities of the product was when Nordic  Choice Hotels changed Windows for Chrome OS, after suffering a ransomware attack last year, using CloudReady, a product acquired by Google in 2020, which turns old PCs into Chromebooks:

Why this matters for Enterprises out there?

Because Chrome OS, read carefully: Zero reported ransomware attacks on Chrome OS devices. EVER

This is a compelling reason to use Chrome OS for your enterprise. Impressive right?

You can explore ChromeOS devices here:

• ASUS Chromebook Flip CX5
• 2022 Lenovo Chromebook 3
• HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook Enterprise

Time to upgrade now to Chrome OS.

Ted Lasso has taught us a lot of things, but one thing is more clear than others:

Ted Lasso is the ultimate giver and all relies in his leadership principles.

I let you here the top 10 Leassons that you can learn from Ted:

1. Believe in yourself
2. Doing the right thing is never the wrong thing
3. All people are different people
4. See good in others
5. Forgive first
6. Tell the truth
7. Winning is an attitude
8. Optimists do more
9. Stay teachable
10. Happiness is a choice

In the future, I want to be a Venture Capitalist but not for the title of VC, but for the privilege to help founders/builders/entrepreneurs to launch their ventures. But in order to do that, I want to "walk the talk":

I want to be in the field building a company from scratch.

This is one of the main reasons why I admire VCs from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), GGV Capital, Initialized, Greylock Ventures, Emergence Capital , First Round, Pear VC and many others.

You should be wondering why, right? It's very simple. Many of them have been so many times (some of them built one or 2 orgs) in the founders's shoes tackling the same problems:

• Hiring
• Raising funds
• Sales
• Setting the Go-To-Market strategy
• Building a new Category
• Creating a partner ecosystem

That's why, in order to do that, I want to build a company from scratch, at least as one of the founding members of the org or simply as an early employee.

So, it's time to build.

One of the key things you have to know when you will apply for a job at Amazon, you have to know about the Amazon 16 Leadership Principles.

Just today, Amazon has added new two leadership principles to the 14 that were part before.

Now the complete list is this one:

Amazon Principle # 1: Customer Obsession

Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

Amazon Principle # 2:Ownership

Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job.”

Amazon Principle # 3: Invent and Simplify

Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here.” As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.

Amazon Principle # 4: Are Right, A Lot

Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.

Amazon Principle # 5: Learn and Be Curious

Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.

Amazon Principle # 6: Hire and Develop the Best

Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.

Amazon Principle # 7: Insist on the Highest Standards

Leaders have relentlessly high standards—many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver high-quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.

Amazon Principle # 8: Think Big

Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.

Amazon Principle # 9: Bias for Action

Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.

Amazon Principle # 10: Frugality

Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense.

Amazon Principle # 11: Earn Trust

Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.

Amazon Principle # 12: Dive Deep

Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.

Amazon Principle # 13: Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit

Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

Amazon Principle # 14: Deliver Results

Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.

Amazon Principle # 15: Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer

Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.

Amazon Principle # 16: Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility

We started in a garage, but we’re not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them.

So, if you want to apply today for a role at Amazon, you should know these 16 Leadership principles from the company.

Time to shine, future Amazonian

5 Lessons I learned from a failed interview process with AWS

I interviewed with Amazon Web Services in October 2019. These are the lessons I learned from my failed experience.

Marcos Ortiz ValmasedaA Data-Driven Guy

Tax season is coming—it’s inevitable. Getting your books tax-ready ensures you’re compliant with the IRS recordkeeping requirements, meaning no late fees, no surprises, and a successful tax return that won’t cost you extra time later on (we know you’re busy).

Bench exists so you wouldn’t have to do your own catch up bookkeeping. But for the do-it-yourselfers, this step-by-step guide will help you get through your bookkeeping backlog in no time.

Step 1: Collect Receipts & Invoices

Start by collecting all receipts and invoices related to your business expenses. There are many different types, so we’ll outline the most important ones.

Customer Invoices

Review your customer accounts and double check that you’ve collected all customer invoices for the tax year. Depending on whether you’re using a cash or accrual method, you’ll record these differently.

Debt Collections

Review your customer accounts for any bad debt expenses. In order to deduct the cost of bad debt from your tax return, you will need to prove to the IRS that you have taken reasonable steps to collect the debt.

Bad debts can be claimed by using either the specific charge-off method or the nonaccrual experience method.

Business Expenses

Collect receipts from all business purchases you have made during the tax year. Use this handy list of small business tax deductions to double check that you’re tracking and claiming every deduction available to your business—because who doesn’t love saving on taxes?

Vendor Accounts

Review your vendor accounts to ensure that you have paid them all in full. Make sure you have a copy of every bill from each vendor activity and, if you don’t, contact the vendor and ask them to send you a copy.

Important to note: Vendor accounts include bills for business activities that are still currently operating in your business’s closing period.

Step 2: Reconcile Your Bank Records

Reconciling your bank records accomplishes two things: 1) It ensures you don’t miss any business expenses or important records from Step 1, and 2) It helps you catch any mistakes your bank may have made.

You can do this by comparing each transaction from your bank statement with the same transaction in your company accounting records. If the transactions don’t match, identify and fix any errors to ensure they balance out.

Step 3: Separate Personal and Business Expenses

Keeping your personal and business expenses in the same account is known as piercing the corporate veil—which may result in you being held personally liable for your business’s debt and actions.

The sooner you separate your business and personal expenses, the better. Learn how to open a small business bank account and keep your finances separate.

If you’re unsure about whether a purchase qualifies as a deductible business expense, learn how the IRS differentiates personal and business expenses.

Step 4: Create Digital Records

If you haven’t done so already, there are countless benefits to making your business paperless. As you process your paperwork, create digital records of receipts and important documents. Here are a few of our favorite tools to help you go paperless:

• Shoeboxed
• FileThis
• Evernote’s ScanSnap Scanner
  

Step 5: Submit Forms for Contractors & Employees

If you paid independent contractors and/or employees during the tax year, there’s a good chance you’ll need to file the following forms:

Independent Contractors: Form W-9 & Form 1099-MISC

If you paid an independent contractor more than $600 for work during the year, you’ll need to submit a Form W-9 and a Form 1099-MISC. A W-9 requests a contractor’s taxpayer information.

The contractor completes this and returns it to you. You then use the information on the contractor’s W9 to issue a 1099 to the IRS. If you’re new to the process, and unfamiliar with the deadlines, read How (and When) to File a 1099 first.

Employees: Form W-2

You’re required to file Form W-2 for all employees.

Step 6: Review Your Books With a Professional

When you’re a small business, doing it yourself is often the least expensive option. But tax professionals can help eliminate errors, help you claim all of the deductions available to your business—which may end up saving you money in the long run—and can also represent you in the event of an audit.

Developing a relationship with a financial pro, well before you need their help, will prevent last-minute scrambling and bring you peace of mind that your books are in order.

If you’re a small business owner who could use a helping hand—the expert bookkeeping team at Bench can get you up-to-date with their Catch Up Bookkeeping Service.

One of the most popular posts on this blog, it's this article where I shared my experience when I applied for a job at Amazon Web Services.

I tried to be objective in that article, trying to help as many people as I can to make a good impression in this difficult interview process with Amazon.

But people always asked me again and again which were the top resources to actually prepare for this interview process; especially for technical roles.

So, in this post, I will try to tackle this challenging task about organizing the top resources I found for it. Let's work on it.

Tip # 1: First Things First: Open An AWS Account and Actually Build Something

If you are applying for a Technical role, please: to have an active AWS Account is a must-have.

You have to know how to actually use the AWS Management console, and how to work with some services of the vast AWS product ecosystem.

There are many simple tutorials about how to open an AWS account on Internet, but I found this video about it. Simple and quick:

A Hard Truth Before Continuing with the post: If you are not familiar with these concepts right now, please don't apply for a technical role at AWS.

Study first and build things first for a least 6 to 8 months on AWS.

If you are already familiar with some AWS services, please show your expertise: write detailed technical posts about it, make videos about, build simple projects and share the code on GitHub or Gitlab.

Remember:

Actions Speaks Better Than Words

A quick example of this, is my public repository I have about how I built a simple Serverless Analytics solution on top of AWS, using Amazon S3, Amazon Athena, Amazon Glue, Lambda, SQS, SNS and Python.

You can find the code here;

Marcos Ortiz / MAN Digital Hub DE Task

This is the main repository for the MAN Digital Hub Data Engineering task. This repository will include the Lambda functions, AWS Athena DDL code of the tables, and...

GitLab

5 Lessons I learned from a failed interview process with AWS

I interviewed with Amazon Web Services in October 2019. These are the lessons I learned from my failed experience.

Marcos Ortiz ValmasedaA Data-Driven Guy

Tip # 2: Read carefully the Technical Job Description You Are Applying For and Make a Plan based on it

Let's work on this with a real example of a job description: let's read this Data Engineer open role based in Seattle, WA:

I will share the entire description here, because this job can be taken down from the Jobs page in a blink of an eye:

Looking for startup culture, high impact problems to solve and opportunities to grow?

Do you want to work in a well-funded startup in AWS on a game changer? AWS WW Revenue Organization (WWRO) is responsible to products and programs to enable AWS sellers become effective quickly. Our technologies have direct impact on the AWS’ top line! We are building a recommendation engine that will take data from multiple desperate source and make sense of it.

Scope of Impact & Influence

You will work with a team of scientists and engineers on variety of machine learning use cases and help the team unlock value from data. Key responsibilities include
· Data modeling to support machine learning model training and offline, batch inference workflows.
· Build data pipelines to feed machine learning models for real-time and large-scale offline use cases.
· Work closely with machine learning and data scientists to scale model training, explore new data sources and feature extraction.

Mentoring & Career Growth
Our team is committed to supporting new team members. We have a broad mix of experience levels and Amazon tenures. We prioritize thought diversity and have regular meetings within the team to collect ideas from all roles.

Work/Life Balance
Our team is diverse and geographically distributed. We understand that work-life balance is important. We offer some flexibility in how you structure your work to suit your other life commitments while adhering to core office working hours.

Inclusive Team Culture
Here at AWS, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have ten employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We have innovative benefit offerings, and we host annual and ongoing learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 14 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust

Location: This role open to these locations: Seattle & Dallas. Relocation offered from within the US to any of these locations.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

· 3+ years of experience as a Data Engineer or in a similar role
· Experience with data modeling, data warehousing, and building ETL pipelines
· Experience in SQL
· Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or a related technical discipline
· 4+ years of industry experience in software development, data engineering, business intelligence, data science, or related field with a track record of manipulating, processing, and extracting value from large datasets
· Experience using big data technologies (Hadoop, Hive, Hbase, Spark, EMR, etc.)
· Knowledge of data management fundamentals and data storage principles
· Knowledge of distributed systems as it pertains to data storage and computing

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

· 5+ years of experience as a Data Engineer, BI Engineer, Business/Financial Analyst or Systems Analyst in a company with large, complex data sources.
· Experience building/operating highly available, distributed systems of data extraction, ingestion, and processing of large data sets
· Experience working with AWS big data technologies (EMR, Redshift, S3)
· Demonstrated strength in data modeling, ETL development, and data warehousing
· Proven success in communicating with users, other technical teams, and senior management to collect requirements, describe data modeling decisions and data engineering strategy
· Experience providing technical leadership and mentoring other engineers for best practices on data engineering
· Knowledge of software engineering best practices across the development lifecycle, including agile methodologies, coding standards, code reviews, source management, build processes, testing, and operations

So, if you read carefully this job ad, you will find some keywords on it:

• Work with big datasets: You will work inside Amazon, so, you must assume that you will some with large datasets
• AWS Services/tools: EMR, Redshift, S3, SQL, Apache Spark, Hadoop, ETL
• Financial Acumen: You will work inside the AWS WW Revenue Organization (WWRO). So, you have to understand how Amazon Web Services generates its revenue. How to do that? Go to the Amazon Investor Relations page, and read at least the last 4 10Q reports and 10K reports there

So, it's time to make a plan even before actually applying for the role.

Using the same job description, you know that:

• You have to study how to work with at least 80% of the services mentioned in the job description. If you can build an use-case for this, even better. Alwasy go beyond with Amazon
• Read the Amazon Investor Relations, understand how the money is flowing among the different regions at global scale, and write a proposal about how to increase revenue in one particular region. Best tip here? Write as an Amazonian

If you need inspiration for this, read this insightful post from Sandy Carter, Vice President at Amazon Web Services:

7 Valuable Lessons from a New Amazonian

It has been just over 100 days since I began my new role at Amazon Web Services (AWS). I have received hundreds of LinkedIn questions, Facebook comments, and even DMs on Twitter asking what it is really like on the “inside” of one of the world’s most innovative companies.

Sandy Carter

Tip # 3: Organize the Top Resources to Learn About The Key Services Mentioned in the Job Description

So, you already know the top services you will use; now it's time to find the top resources to learn how to use them effectively.

Based on that job description, these would be the resources I would use to study and learn:

• The official AWS blogs
• AWS Well-Architected Framework, a must-read for anyone interested on AWS
• AWS Fundamentals course
• AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials
• Every course from Sthephan Maarek on Udemy. You can find them all on his personal website
• The DynamoDB Book, by Alex DeBrie
• Data Science on Amazon Web Services, by Chris Fregly and Antje Barth. BTW, this workshop is incredible
• Learning Spark book
• Best Practices for Data Warehousing with Amazon Redshift , by Ganesh Raja, Specialist Solution Architect at AWS
• Deep Dive and Best Practices for Amazon Redshift, by Tony Gibbs and Harshida Patel
• Serverless Design with AWS Lambda
• AWS Workshops
• Adrian Cantrill's courses
• A Cloud Guru
• AWS Stash: A collection of AWS related videos, podcasts, code repositories, whitepapers, and feature releases, all in a single, easy to search interface.

Tip # 4: Engage with the AWS Community in your local city and globally through Twitter

One of the benefits of working with some amazing technologies from AWS, is that there are a lot of people who share with you the same passion for these services and tools.

In many cities around the globe, there are AWS communities with people eager to share their knowledge about how to build efficient solutions on top of Amazon Web Services. So, my best tip here is to actually participate on these communities.

Here in Lime, we have a very strong AWS community, and I wrote about the experience here:

The AWS Girls Power Has Arrived in Peru to Stay for the Long Term

The past two weeks I had the pleasure to participate in the last event of the AWS Peru Meetup, and the name of the event was perfectly taken: AWS Girls, where its theme was precisely around the amazing women in the country; which are using Amazon Web Services heavily in their respective companies. O

Marcos Ortiz Valmaseda

So, search for your local AWS community and be an active member on it.

Tips # 5: Don't Forget about the 14 Amazon Principles

It doesn't matters if you are applying for a technical or non-technical role at Amazon: 14 Amazon Principles matters at Amazon.

Best tip here? Write at least two stories for every principle. It's not about memorizing everything, it's about storytelling using the STAR method: Situation, Task, Action, Results.

Conclusions

This post is a work in progress. I will continue to add more tips here in the future.

Whether it’s putting out small fires in the present or making big plans for the future, there are some tasks only you can tackle for your startup. For everything else, there’s automation.

Running your own business can feel like a 24/7 gig.

Automating humdrum tasks like payroll, tax filing, and invoicing frees up time, reduces stress, and lets you focus your unique talents on helping your business succeed.

Here are some of the best choices when it comes to automating your business.

Customer Support

In this special category, I can personally recommend two tools:

• Help Scout: which is a completed suite perfect for this. BTW, they have an special plan for Startups
• Testimonial.to: according to a Word of Mouth Report, 83% of consumers say these recommendations make them more likely to purchase a product or service. Social Proof matters, more than ever. This incredible tool developed by Damon Chen is perfect for this, because it can help your startup to collect video testimonials. Check it out here

Sales

The lifeblood of a business is Sales, especially in the B2B space; it's very hard to find leads for your startup.

Well, you can stop worring if you opt to use UpLead, which is a B2B Prospecting with 95% Data Accuracy.

Workflows automation

Zapier is automation made for SMBs. Connect your apps, automate your work, and have more time for what matters most.

Payroll

Onboarding. Retention. 1099s. Name all the tasks you have to tackle, and the care and feeding of employees starts to sound overwhelming.

Enter Gusto. This payroll and HR platform is super simple to use, and lets you handle all your employee management on one platform.

And you get a professional, remote HR team working for you—so, if you have any questions, it’s easy to reach out and get help.

Bookkeeping

Accurate, up-to-date bookkeeping is the key to tracking and planning your business finances. If bookkeeping tasks are keeping you up at night, or debits and credits give you a migraine, Bench is here to help.

With Bench, you get a remote bookkeeping team that tracks and records all your business transactions, and an intuitive app to help you pulse-check your finances on the go. Professionally prepared financial reports make it easy to track business performance.

And Bench will even file your taxes for you at the end of the year—one less job ticked off your to-do list.

One major benefit of signing up with Bench: They offer catch-up bookkeeping services.

So, if your day-to-day bookkeeping has fallen behind, your team at Bench will bring it up to speed.

Invoicing

Filling out templates, chasing down emails, sending reminders. If you collect a major part of your income by invoicing, you can end up working overtime just so you can get paid.

Freshbooks is an easy solution, and quickly becoming the industry standard for freelancers and the rest of the invoice crowd.

Freshbooks lets you create invoices on the fly, filling them in with saved client profiles and your most common line items. Track your paid, unpaid, and not-yet-sent invoices, send reminders with a click, and collect payment by credit card.

If you’re on the fence, Freshbooks offers a free trial. Trust us—once you try it, you’ll never want to go back.

Receipt storage

A paperless office is a tidy office. If you’re relying on fragile, easy to lose paper receipts to track your expenses, digitize them to cut back on clutter and make sure you can back up your deductions.

Shoeboxed turns your paper records into pure data. Stuff an envelope, send it in, and you’ll get a reliable, comprehensive expense report in the cloud.

Sales tax

Doing business in multiple states? Keeping track of sales tax can get you lost in a tangle of spreadsheets.

TaxJar sets you free. Easily integrating with your online store, it produces monthly “return-ready” reports. You always know how much tax you’ve collected, and how much you need to file.

Once you implement TaxJar, managing sales tax suddenly becomes much less taxing.

Travel plans

Hitting the road? TripIt takes the stress out of planning. The service scans your inbox for events, airline reservations, hotel bookings, and car rentals.

Then, it automatically builds an itinerary that you can reference from anywhere. Sharing and collaboration options let partners and team members hop on the ride as well.

Recruiting

When it’s time to fill gaps in your workforce, you want to find employees who are worth the investment. Your best bet is to post job listings as widely as possible.

ZipRecruiter saves you the hassle of making multiple postings on multiple job boards. Submit one listing, and ZipRecruiter automatically submits it to over 50 job sites.

Plus, through ZipRecruiter’s interface, you can manage al your job applications in one place.

Email sorting

Perfect posture. Total inner peace. Inbox zero. When you’re inundated with emails—business and otherwise—on a daily basis, a tidy inbox can seem like an impossible ideal.

Sanebox lumps together all your non-urgent mail into a daily or weekly digest. So you can review all your non-essential communications at a glance, and focus your energy on the stuff that really matters.

Design

It takes a lot of work to look good. If you’re thinking of hiring a designer for your business, but hunting down the right one seems overwhelming, Design Pickle is here to help.
For a flat monthly fee, the service lets you submit unlimited design requests. Suddenly, designers are looking for you—and not the other way around.

Social media

If you’re like most people with Facebook or Twitter, social media already eats up precious attention span during your off-hours. Don’t let it take over your work life, as well.
Semrush lets you run multiple social media accounts for your business all from one place.

Write and schedule posts in advance, and Semrush makes sure they reach your followers. So you can market your business on the timeline, while saving time for your most valuable one-on-one customer interactions.

Customer relations management (CRM)

Salesforce is the industry standard for managing customer journeys—from first contact, to sale, to repeat business. But because of its high price, Salesforce is a serious investment.

Many startups opt to use spreadsheets instead—and end up devoting more time and energy to CRM than they ever intended to.

monday.com is a robust alternative to Salesforce, offering much of the same functionality at a fraction of the cost. Here you can see how you can use Monday.com as a CRM:

Customer chat

Your FAQ can only go so far. Who can a prospective customer talk to if they have questions you haven’t already answered?

Pop-up chat boxes are an increasingly popular solution. Popping up right away on your website’s main page, they encourage users to reach out to you directly, rather than sending an email.

That means you can start interacting with a user immediately, cultivating them as a new lead, without cluttering your inbox.

Livechat, Inc is a well-rounded, free option. It’s quick and easy to set up, letting you monitor site visitors in real time. You can even set “shortcut” responses to common questions.

Meetings Automation

Th problems around meetings continued to pile up. Wasted time, lost appointments, inaccurate reporting, and a poor customer experience have all become business as usual.
You can avoid all using Chili Piper, who has spent the last four years helping industry leaders like Twilio, Gong, Gainsight, Airbnb, Expedia, and hundreds more get the most value out of meetings and meeting requests.

You can know more about it here:

What is Meeting Lifecycle Automation?

Meetings are the lifeblood of revenue teams. Yet very little technology has been applied to the processes, messages, and actions that need to happen before, during, and after a meeting... until now.

Toggle menubar Chili Piper Resources

It's time to save time on simple and mundane tasks and focus on the core of your startup business.

For many new business owners, filing taxes is intimidating, a ritual shrouded in mystery. Fair enough: The experience is different for every business, and even minor mistakes can have major repercussions—such as IRS fines.

However, there’s no need to worry. Break it into steps, and filing small business taxes isn’t that complicated.

Here’s how to do it in 10 simple steps, while avoiding any unfortunate mistakes.

Pressed for time this year? Talk to our partners at Bench.

Their all-in-one bookkeeping and tax filing solution will get you filed before the deadline, without missing out on any valuable deductions.

Organize Your Records

Before you get started, you need to make sure you have all your relevant business records gathered and organized.

Split your records into three categories: Basic info, earnings, and expenses.

Basic info is essential for filling out any kind of tax form.

You’ll need:

• Your SSN, date of birth, address, etc.
• Last year’s tax returns
• Your Employer Identification Number (find it on the IRS website)
  

Earnings information includes:

• Copies of invoices you’ve sent clients
• Records of any goods sold to customers
• Sales records that note money coming into your business
  

Expense info takes the form of receipts you’ve kept. That includes:

• Rent receipts for your small business
• Office supplies
• Employee salaries
• Client lunches
• Mileage records
  Different businesses need different records. Check out these small business tax checklists to keep track of yours

Bring your bookkeeping up to date

If you haven’t stayed on top of your bookkeeping, you aren’t ready to file your taxes. (If your bookkeeping is up to date, however, feel free to skip this section.)

That may sound harsh, but it’s a fact of life. If your records aren’t up to date, you just don’t have the information you need to file.

Luckily, you can still go back and do your bookkeeping retroactively, so long as you have complete records including expenses and earnings.

Here’s how to catch up on bookkeeping:

Record, categorize, and date every business transaction for the year

Going back to your receipts, invoices, and other records, make a note of all money you spent over the year. Start at January 1 of the year, and complete your records up to the current date. You can use accounting software, or an Excel template. Organize each expense according to date and category—when it happened, and how it was spent or earned.

Reconcile your books with your bank accounts

Cross reference your monthly business records with your bank accounts, and make sure that every transaction you recorded happened in reality. If you earned cash, when was it deposited? Which credit cards did you use, and for what? Where there are discrepancies, you’ll have to dig deeper and figure out what actually happened, then make a record of it.

Create financial statements retroactively

Each month of recorded transactions needs to be compiled in the form of financial statements—balance sheets and income statements. You’ll use these to determine your total amount of income and expenses for the year, and use those numbers to file your taxes.

If the prospect of retroactive bookkeeping fails to fill your heart with joy, consider getting help from professional small business bookkeepers. The folks at Bench can bring you quickly up to date. And if you opt for BenchTax, they’ll get your taxes filed for you too.

Stash away money to pay your taxes

Over the course of the year, you should be putting aside money to pay taxes on the profits you report. For many small businesses—especially sole proprietorships, partnerships, and S corporations earning over $1,000 for the year—you’ll have to pay quarterly estimated taxes.

Quarterly taxes are due in the middle of the months of April, June, September, and January.

Rule of thumb: Set aside 25% – 30% of all income for taxes. If possible, put it in a separate bank account that you won’t touch over the course of the year.

You’ve got two strategies for saving tax money:

• If your business has a steady stream of income: Set up automatic bank transfers to pull funds into a secondary savings account on a monthly or biweekly schedule.
• If your business has variable income: Make a habit of setting aside tax money every time you are paid by a client or customer.
  

It may seem like a hassle at first, but give it a little time, and this process will soon become second nature.

Review payroll taxes

Have employees? You’re responsible for the following:

• FUTA Federal Unemployment Tax (effectively a 0.6% tax on their salary)
• FICA (7.5% for social security and Medicare)
• Collecting and remitting employee income tax
• State and local tax (differs depending on where you are)
  

You can figure out how much federal payroll tax to withhold using IRS Publication 15.

Plan for sales tax

Sales tax is collected on the state level. Each state is different. This guide to sales tax can help you figure out how much to collect, and how to file and pay.

Choose the right form for your business structure

Once you’ve got your bookkeeping and records sorted out, and you know which taxes you need to pay, it’s time to start filling out forms.

The form you use to file your taxes will depend on your business structure:

Sole proprietorships and single member LLCs

Filing deadline: April 15, 2021 (the same as personal taxes)

Form: IRS Form 1040

Notes:

• Report net profit or loss on Schedule C
• Report itemized deductions on Schedule A
  

Partnerships and multi-member LLCs

Filing Deadline: March 15, 2021

Forms:

• Form 1065 for the business entity
• Schedule K-1 for each individual member
  

Notes:

• Each partner or member pays taxes on their individual earnings
• Partners can claim unreimbursed business expenses on Schedule E
  

C corporations or LLCs electing to file as corporations

Filing Deadline: April 15, 2021 (same as individual taxes)

Form: Form 1120

Notes:

• The corporate tax rate is a flat 21%
• You pay taxes for both the corporation and yourself as an individual
  

S corporations

Filing Deadline: March 15, 2021

Forms:

• Form 1120S
• Schedule K-1 for each individual shareholder
  

Notes:

• S corps do not pay taxes—shareholders pay individually on their earnings

Small businesses paying contractors

For each contractor you paid more than $600 during the financial year, you’ll need to file Form 1099-NEC. If it’s your first time filing one, check out this guide to filing 1099s.

Claim small business tax deductions

One of the nice things about working for yourself: There are many more tax deductions you can claim than if you were someone else’s employee.

The exact deductions you can claim will vary according to your specific situation, but these are some of the most common tax deductions for small businesses:

Startup costs

You can deduct any costs up to $5,000 you incur the year your business opens. Above that amount, startup costs can be amortized over 15 years.

Raw materials

The cost of products essential to running your business—pepperoni for your pizza restaurant, wool for your custom knit sweaters—can be deducted.

Office supplies

Small items that get used up—printer ink cartridges, for instance—can be deducted as office supplies. Larger items—like desks and chairs—aren’t deductible. (They’re considered capital goods.)

Commercial rent

Whether it’s an office or a storefront, the cost of renting your business location is tax deductible.

Home office expense

When you run your business from home, you can deduct a proportional amount of your rent, mortgage, and other expenses like utilities and insurance. For instance, if you use 15% of your total square footage as home office space, you can deduct 15% of the cost of your expenses.

Insurance

All ordinary commercial insurance premiums are deductible—such as insurance for buildings, machinery, or equipment.

Business travel

A lot of the expenses you incur while travelling for work are tax deductible. These include airfare, bus passes, local transportation to and from the airport, accommodations, and 50% the cost of meals while you’re travelling.

Salaries and benefits

All salaries and benefits you pay employees (including bonuses) are tax deductible.

File your taxes online

Once you’ve caught up on your bookkeeping, organized your records, and planned your deductions, you’re ready to file your taxes.

If you’re like 92% of Americans in 2018, you file your taxes online.

When you file online, you:

• Don’t have to fill out paper forms
• Get your return to the IRS faster
• Receive your refund electronically with direct deposit
• Use the most secure filing method available
  

Filing online, you have two options: Free File, and Free Fillable Forms. If your adjusted gross income (AGI) for the year is less than $72,000, you can use Free File. If it’s higher, you must use Free File Fillable Forms.

Here’s how to use each:

Free File

With Free File, you use online software to do your taxes and automatically send a copy to the IRS. It’s popular—about one in three Americans use Free File.

You have 13 providers, approved by the IRS, who you can choose to Free File with. Meaning, don’t go looking for Free File software on the IRS website; you’ll need to choose a provider, and sign up through their site.

For help choosing the right provider for your business, check out this breakdown by Fit Small Business.

Free File Fillable Forms

Unlike simple Free File, Fillable Forms is provided on the IRS website. Essentially, these are digital versions of paper tax forms, with a little automation built in. Once you fill out your main tax forms, you can attach others, like W2s and 1099s.

Once you complete the forms, Fillable Forms automatically calculates how much you’ll receive as a tax refund—or how much you owe the IRS. Then, you can enter your direct deposit information to automatically pay or be paid.

After completing Free File Fillable Forms and submitting them to the IRS, you have the option of printing out copies for your records.

Apply for an extension if you need it

If you won’t be able to file your taxes on time, apply for an extension ASAP, before the deadline. The farther past the deadline you go without filing, the bigger the penalty from the IRS. It’s better to get an extension now than to wait.

A tax extension gives you extra time to file your taxes—but you’ll still need to pay them according to your usual schedule, likely in quarterly estimated payments.

Pay your taxes

If you’re like most businesses, you pay taxes four times a year in estimated tax installments.

Want to know how much you’ll ower? Use Bench’s handy estimated tax calculator.

Visit the IRS Payments Gateway to pay online or over the phone.

If your business is a corporation, you’ll need to file payments through the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System.

Conclusions

Small business tax filing can be surprisingly simple, so long as you take a step by step approach. But if you’re behind on your bookkeeping, or struggling with an already busy schedule, the process becomes more complicated.

Check out Bench and Bench Tax, and see how easy tax season becomes when you have professionals taking care of it for you.

I always have a latent idea inside my head:

How I can help more Small Business owners to succeed online?

How can I help them to thrive in the Internet world?

This crazy year 2020 has disrupted a lot of industries and businesses, and many SMEs have had to reinvent themselves in order to survive.

Many of them have transitioned their respective businesses to the online world with the help of tools like Shopify, Bench, Namecheap and more.

But with all these new things, there are new problems and  new headaches with it. And one of the toughest problems today for Small Businesses in the online world is getting worse every year: Online Fraud.

Let’s discuss two scaring statistics here:

60 Percent Of Small Companies Close Within 6 Months Of Being Hacked

In fact, 60 percent of small companies go out of business within six months of falling victim to a data breach or cyber attack. With both the financial security and future of your business on the line, it’s crucial for organizations of all sizes to have measures in place to monitor suspicious network activity.

The second number I wanted to share is even scarier:

Cyber crime and payment fraud cost businesses an estimated $6 trillion in 2019.

As a Small Business owner, you should be worried about these staggering numbers and start to take countermeasures for all this.
Some of my good friends asked me several times about the simplest way to protect hard earned money as a Small Business owner, and potentially save a lot of money in the process.

The answer is here: It’s called Ramp.

Enter Ramp: The only corporate card that strengthens your finances

Yes, you are not crazy, I’m not writing this to deceive you, this is the truth: Ramp is a corporate credit card which actually helps you to spend less money.

Here’s the description of the company, according to the members of it at AngelList:

Ramp is building the modern financial stack that enables companies to accelerate growth without compromising on their finances.

We’re on a mission to uncover and eliminate waste before it can undermine our customer’s goals and make financial rigor easy by enabling real-time visibility and understanding of every dollar spent.

Ramp was founded by the same team who built, scaled, and sold Paribus to Capital One, enabling automated savings on online purchases and putting over $100 million back in consumers’ pockets every year.

We are backed by Founders Fund, Coatue, and Box Group, and more than 50 founders of leading companies.

Yes, Ramp is very well funded until today. According to Crunchbase’s data, they have raised $55 Million from Founders Fund, Coatue and many more Venture Capital firms.

And if you read some of the reviews of the product, you will see that they are on the right track.

For example, Robin Saks Frankel wrote this at Forbes about the product:

The Ramp Corporate Card could be a dream come true for an overwhelmed small business. The charge card earns 1.5% cash back on all spending and offers a robust suite of bookkeeping-related benefits that goes beyond what a traditional business credit card typically offers. The card doesn’t charge an annual fee for businesses with fewer than 50 employees, but larger companies will be on the hook for a monthly fee.

Or you read the reviews at G2.com about the product, you feel that you are in front of a unique product:

There are more rewards for using a Ramp credit card, but one of my favorite ones is actually working with another of my favorite teams out there: MainStreet, which could help to save even more money for your business in the form of tax credits:

If you use Ramp, you could save 25% off tax credits processing fees with MainStreet. What are you waiting for?

How Ramp can protect you from online scams and credit card frauds online

But, you should be wondering, how Ramp could help you to protect your business better when we make online purchases?

Ramp’s commercial credit card has a lot of features for your business, but there are two key features I want to highlight here: Unlimited Virtual card issuing and Ultimate Visibility.

Why can these two features can help you to fight back credit card fraud and online fraud? It’s very simple, actually.

With unlimited virtual card issuing, you can generate many virtual credits cards for your business and your employees, and actually give them a built-in spend limit.

This means, you don’t have to worry for a surprising charge in your account or the credit card of an employee; because you have put a limit to it; and with another feature of instant visibility; you can actually see what’s happening in real-time.

There are so many benefits of using virtual credit cards today, but one of the top ones is simple: they can’t be stolen because they are not physical cards, and if you see an unexpected behaviour with one of those virtual cards, you simply can cancel instantly.

The Ramp’s team highlighted some of the benefits in this detailed post here.

But there is more: If you actually want a physical card, you get a beautiful white Ramp Visa Commercial Credit Card:

And this is another benefit you can simply ignore: Visa’s fraud protection infrastructure is so good that you truly know you are in a giant’s shoulders.

And if you are still wondering about it, Ramp is actively hiring people for their Risk team to keep improving the tools to fight fraudsters out there:

• Software Engineer, Backend
• Data Scientist, Risk

Believe me when I say this: If I was in the United States, this could be a dream job for myself. Why? They are using some of my favorite tools: Flask (Python), PostgreSQL, Amazon Web Services, and many more tech gems.

So, apply today, don’t wait any second to be part of Ramp. I strongly believe they will have a terrific 2021. Mark my words.

BTW, if you want to know more about it, I’m encourage you to watch this interview with Geoff Charles (Head of Product at Ramp) and TK Kong (Product Design at Ramp):

Conclusions

There are many ways to protect your business from online fraud, but I have not found a simpler way than Ramp.

And if that comes with many other rewards, it’s time to sign up today.

So, if you need help with this from a Ramp representative, you can have a conversation with Max Freeman on Twitter or simply send him an email: max@ramp.com.

I truly believe he can help you better than myself to understand all the benefits behind Ramp’s credit card.

You can thank me later. I just want to help you to succeed.

Out…

Photo by Cris Ovalle on Unsplash

After several months working on a final approach to accomplish this task, I finally found one to do this in an efficient and fast way.

But, first, let me start with the requirements we got from one of our companies at Intercorp.

We are heavy users of Google Cloud Platform here, so as a Data Engineer; I have the pleasure to work with several of these companies to move their data to Google Cloud entirely.

So the requirements we got for this particular solution were the following ones:

• The data will arrive to a Google Cloud Storage bucket daily
• We have to apply some transformations to this data and then upload to their corresponding tables in BigQuery

In order to accomplish this task, we are using several services at the same time:

• Google Cloud Storage for daily records storage
• BigQuery for data analytics
• Cloud Run for a service API to get the last file in the bucket folder of Google Cloud Storage
• Matillion for BigQuery for the data transformation

I will divide this post in two parts:

• Part I: Cloud Run API to get the last file of Google Cloud Storage bucket
• Part II: Moving the data from Google Cloud Storage to BigQuery with their respective transformations
  

Part I: Cloud Run API to get the last file of Google Cloud Storage bucket

But you should be wondering why I’m talking about Cloud Run here. Let 's dive into why.

If you don’t know what Cloud Run is, I will give you a quick overview here:

It’s a platform to deploy entire applications on top of containers in a serverless faction.

The official description of the service by the Google Cloud team is the following:

Cloud Run is a managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via web requests or Pub/Sub events. Cloud Run is serverless: it abstracts away all infrastructure management, so you can focus on what matters most — building great applications.

I have to say it: Cloud Run is one of my favorite services from the entire Google Cloud ecosystem, and I use it almost daily to build fast REST-based APIs on top of Python, Flask and Firestore.

But, let’s stop the chat-chat and let’s dive in the code.

In order to deploy a Cloud Run application on Google Cloud, first, you need a Google Cloud account, a Google Cloud project, Python and the Google Cloud SDK.

Let’s start with the Google Cloud SDK:

• Download the SDK from this link and install it in your computer
• If everything is OK, you can test it with the following command: gcloud --version

It should get something like this:

Then, you need to install Python:

• Download it from here: https://www.python.org/downloads/
• Then test it:

C:\Python64\python.exe --version 

Then, it’s time to code the “last file API” in Python. We will need three files for this:

• app.py: the code of the Flask REST app
• Dockerfile: the Docker file for the image to be built
• sa.json: the Service Account file
• requirements.txt: the dependencies file

In order to start coding, you will some libraries first:

C:\Python64\python.exe -m pip flask gunicorn google-cloud-storage

The code for app.py is the following one:

import logging
from flask import Flask
from flask import request, jsonify, render_template
# from firebase_admin import credentials, firestore, initialize_app

from google.oauth2 import service_account
from google.cloud import storage
from bson.json_util import dumps

app = Flask(__name__)
storage_client = storage.Client.from_service_account_json('sa.json')

@app.route('/')
# API Version 1.0
def index():
   """Welcome to Last File API Version 1.0."""
   button_text = "Get Last File"
   return render_template('main.html', button_text=button_text)

@app.route("/last_file_m_individual/", methods=["GET"])
def list_m_individual_files():
    """List all files in GCP bucket."""
    bucketName = request.args.get('bucketname')
    bucketFolder = request.args.get('bucketfolder')
    bucket = storage_client.get_bucket(bucketName)
    files = bucket.list_blobs(prefix=bucketFolder)
    fileList = [file.name for file in files if '.' in file.name]
    last_file_pep = fileList[-1]
    last_file_p = last_file_pep.split("/")
    last_file = last_file_p[-1]
    return last_file
    
@app.errorhandler(500)
def server_error(e):
   logging.exception('An error occurred during a request.')
   return 'An internal error occurred.', 500
   
if __name__ == "__main__":
   app.run(debug=True,host='0.0.0.0',port=int(os.environ.get('PORT', 8080)))

Then the Dockerfile file:

# Use the official lightweight Python image.
# https://hub.docker.com/_/python
FROM python:3.8-slim

# Copy local code to the container image.
COPY . ./

RUN pip install -r requirements.txt

ENV PYTHONUNBUFFERED True

# Run the web service on container startup. Here we use the gunicorn
# webserver, with one worker process and 8 threads.
# For environments with multiple CPU cores, increase the number of workers
# to be equal to the cores available.
#CMD exec gunicorn --bind :$PORT --workers 1 --threads 8 --timeout 0 app:app
CMD gunicorn --bind :$PORT app:app

And lastly, the requirements.txt file:

Flask
gunicorn
pymongo
google-cloud-storage

Then, you will need a Service Account here (the sa.json file).

This Service Account must have the permissions to read the files in the bucket you will be querying from this API.

After this, you have to enable the Cloud Run API in the Google Cloud project you are using. In order to do that, you have to do the following:

• Visit: https://console.cloud.google.com/
• Then, you have to search the Cloud Run API

Then, it’s time for enabling the API:

If everything is OK, then you need to deploy your API to Cloud Run.

To do that, we will use three commands:

gcloud config set project project-name

This will change to the Google Cloud project we are using for this.

Then, you need to build the Docker image with this command:

gcloud builds submit --tag gcr.io/project-name/service-name

This command will build the Docker image inside the Google Cloud infrastructure with all the requirements.

If everything is OK, it’s time to deploy the service:

gcloud run deploy service-name --image gcr.io/project-name/service-name --platform managed --region us-central1 --allow-unauthenticated

IMPORTANT: This command will deploy the application in an authenticated mode. This is recommended for development only. In order to deploy to production environments, it’s better to deploy with an authentication token; but this will be covered in another post.

If everything is OK, you can visit: https://console.cloud.google.com/run and see if your service is deployed there.

Cloud Run will generate a random domain name for your app using the following way: https://service-name-randomlettersnumbers-region-.a.run.app

Then, to test the API, you can use this code:

import requests
 
url = 'https://service-name-randomlettersnumbers-region-.a.run.app/last_file/'
bucketname = 'bucketnameaa'
bucketfolder = 'bucketfolderaa'
url_for = '{0}?bucketname={1}&bucketfolder={2}'.format(url, bucketname, bucketfolder)
r = requests.get(url_for)
result = r.text
print(result)

The API must return the last file in that bucket and in that particular folder of the bucket.

Now, let’s actually move the data from Google Cloud Storage to BigQuery

Part II: Move the daily data from Google Cloud Storage to BigQuery with Matillion

If you don’t know what is Matillion, here is a quick description:

Matillion ETL is an ETL/ELT tool built specifically for cloud database platforms including Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Snowflake and Azure Synapse. It is a modern, browser-based UI, with powerful, push-down ETL/ELT functionality. With a fast setup, you are up and running in minutes

You can deploy Matillion on Google Cloud using the Google Cloud Marketplace:

In Matillion, there are two types of jobs: the orchestration job and the transformation job.

In this case, we will use an Orchestration job to move the data from Google Cloud Storage to BigQuery.

In order to do that, inside Matillion and create a new orchestration job. I will let an example here:

The main components here are two:

• Python script
• Google Cloud Storage Load

The Python script component will query the API we built in order to get the last file of a folder inside the designated bucket, and it will fulfill a variable inside the Matillion environment.

Then, that variable will be used as a parameter for the Cloud Storage Load component.

Here’s the example of the Python Script component:Then, inside the Cloud Storage Load component, you need to use the variable prm_last_file_iden_party to get the last file, and upload it to the table in BigQuery.

Then, inside the Cloud Storage Load component, you need to use the variable prm_last_file_iden_party to get the last file, and upload it to the table in BigQuery.

The key here is the Google Storage URL location. It must have the following format:

gs://bucketname/bucketfolder/$variablename

With this format, you will get the last file in the bucket folder, and upload it to the BigQuery table.

And voilá, in that way you can upload daily data from Google Cloud Storage to BigQuery using Matillion.

If you have any assistance with this, just send me an email and I will try to help you with it.

There are thousands of Venture Capital firms just in the United States. This is one of the most fierce industries to be part these days; and every day you can see VC firms that go out of the market.

My aspiration one day is to be part of a top firm to help entrepreneurs out there, not to change the world; but actually to change people's lives out there.

So, I wanted to truly understand how the top Venture Capital firms are distancing from the others, and maintaining an incredible track record of investments and exits.

How these firms are arriving to the front faces of more founders every day? Simple:

They are making amazing content to be helpful as possible, even before taking about a possible investment.

The objective of these series of posts is to analyze some of the top firms in the United States, and see how they are using the "Content Spear" to gain more investment deals.

I will analyze four of my favorite Venture Capital firms out there: Emergence Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (best known as A16Z), Greylock Partners and First Round Capital.

First Stop: Emergence Capital

For those who don't know about this Venture Capital firm, I will make a quick profile of them here:

Emergence Capital is a thesis-driven Venture Capital firm founded by Gordon Ritter, Jason Green and Brian Jacobs in 2003.

According to Crunchbase, they have raised 6 funds, including the last one called Emergence Capital Partners Fund V where they raised a total of $435 Million in 2018.

They have invested in companies like Salesforce (CRM), Veeva Systems (VEEV) (I love this one so much I made a video on my YouTube channel), Zoom Video Communications (ZM), SalesLoft, Bill.com (BILL), Box (BOX) and many more.

Emergence Capital makes 5 to 7 investments per year, so they are very diligent in their investing approach.

That's they say in their website:

We don’t make bets. We make commitments.

Emergence Capital's Golden Approach to Content Marketing

Like I wrote before, Emergence Capital is a thesis-driven investment firm. They are very focused on certain topics and industries to invest in, and when they write about these thesis, they go deep.

Right now, they are focused on 5 thesis:

• Coaching Networks/A.I: We don’t view artificial intelligence as a threat that replaces us, but as an asset that helps us unlock our full potential as people. Our prediction: the consumer internet is about to radically transform into a framework that rescues us from passive addiction and places human creativity, productivity, and brilliance firmly at the forefront of the future.
• Collaboration
• IoT
• Deskless Workforce: 80% of the global workforce doesn’t sit at a desk to do their job. As sophisticated devices enable valuable applications to be deployed into deskless environments such as healthcare, construction, retail, and transportation, we predict that deskless workforce applications will become a bigger priority for the Fortune 500.
• Industry Cloud: We believe that focused cloud applications can solve the challenges of an industry better than horizontal software designed to solve a function.

You can watch this video about it:

So, they write deeply about these topics with great assesstment.

For example, this article from Gordon Ritter explains in great way what is an Industry Cloud company:

The Five Hallmarks of an Industry Cloud Company

Emergence is a top enterprise cloud venture capital firm. We fund early stage ventures focusing on enterprise & SaaS applications. Emergence is one of the top VC firms in Silicon Valley.

Gordon RitterFounder + General PartnerThe Five Hallmarks of an Industry Cloud Company

I truly believe that they are writing these articles to answer the most pressing questions for a CEO working to scale his/her company from the ground, on topics from hiring global talent, how to scale enterprise sales, how to do sales compensation, and more.

They have created several series of articles using this approach:

• Built to Last
• Emergence's Guide to Enterprise Sales
• The 5M’s: How Emergence Evaluates Series A Pitches
• The Emergence Secret Playbook
• The CEOs Series

The last one hasn't have a tag for them, but you can find this kind of articles in their Thoughts section.

Some examples of them are:

• The Secrets of Zoom's Success featuring Eric Yuan
• Bill.com: Lessons from the Road to Wall Street, featuring Rene Lacerte
• Don’t try to be the CEO you think you should be, featuring Peter Gassner  

The core idea?

Write highly targeted articles for SaaS entrepreneurs out there

Emergence Capital's Newsletter: Another Golden Opportunity to Spread the Word About their Investments

When you visit Emergence Capital's website, you can see in the bottom of every page this form:

When you sign up for their Monthly newsletter, and you start to read it; you just see another opportunity to help the founders and their respective companies to spread the word about it, their products and news:

The core idea behind this? Email still matters as a Marketing channel, and Emergence is using this to help the companies to spread the word. You never know if this email reaches a possible deal for one of them.

The Emergence CEO Summit: An event to embrace Founder to Founder Learning

This annual event was created by Emergence Capital to help every founder of their portfolio to learn the nuances of company scaling, hiring, sales and more challenging topics from other successful entrepreneurs inside Emergence Capital's ecosystem of companies.

I truly believe that this kind of events are incredibly helpful for them, because you can ask directly to "other people who has walked the talk"; true entrepreneurs who has scaled their companies from zero to Billions like Peter Gassner, Eric Yuan, and many more.

There are some of the videos public in the Emergence's website.

One of my favorite ones is part of the post called "Category design is what creates legendary companies", written by Christopher Lochhead, a well known Marketing executive, co-author of the Play Bigger book, and host of the podcasts Lochhead on Marketing and Follow Your Different.

One of the reasons I admire the Emergence Team is because they share my belief that the companies and people who make the biggest difference do so by design—they don’t create more of the same. What legendary companies—such as Apple, Salesforce, Tesla—do is design a whole new category and open the world up to a new way of thinking.

The ability to compete in a market category is one skill, but the ability to create the category and design the market is a fundamentally different skill.

A guest post from Christopher Lochhead on category design and radical marketing.

Viviana FagaOperating PartnerThe ability to compete in a market category is one skill, but the ability to create the category and design the market is a fundamentally different skill.

Emergence's Rhetoric is Everywhere with the Same Message

When members of the firm chat openly about their investments or the topics they are interested in; they have a single core message everywhere.

Two examples of this are the participations of Jason Green in the SaaStr events. Emergence is well known as a SaaS investor, and Jason makes this clear in every way:

Or using the same phrase of Category Creation, Viviana Faga made an incredible interview in the CMO Conversations Podcast from Drift:

The Results of This Outstanding Work in Content Marketing

The results are very simple but powerful: When a SaaS founder wants to know more about how to make a good pitch presentation, they take everything from The Emergence Secret Playbook, and you think for a moment; its opportunity to be funded is just one email way: joe@emcap.com or hello@emcap.com.

Or when they want to revamp their Enterprise Sales process in the normal reality with COVID-19, they could take everything shared by Doug Landis about this topic. And again: the funding is just one email or a Tweet away.

Emergence Capital is simply making easier and easier for SaaS founders to chat with them for the incredible pack of insights they have shared in their website.

That's why a highly targeted Content Marketing strategy focused to solve Enterprise entrepreneurs's doubts is paying off.

Well done, Caitlin and the whole Emergence's team for this work.

When I sit to think about the incredible things I did this year, it’s a little overwhelming; but at the same time, I’m proud of that.

Hello Work-Life Peru

Actually I arrived to Peru in November, 2018; but on January 7th, finally I got an amazing role as a Data Engineer at Indra; one of the biggest consulting companies of the world.

This was a big achievement for myself and my family, because this proved my point: “If you define your goals and make a plan to get them, you will get them.”

It was very difficult to me because: first, I’m an immigrant from another country, and in many companies out there, you are tagged, even without talking to you are not qualified for the job, because you are an immigrant.

Fortunately, Indra is not one of these companies. The day I interviewed with Indra, my future manager at that time said to me: “I just need someone who wants to work and to learn. Someone that is not afraid to fail, someone who wants to do the best job of his life. It doesn’t matter if you are Peruvian or not for me, if you are that guy, I want you on my team”.

We had a great discussion that day, and then, they gave the big news: “You are in.”

I believe I can’t thank enough to this team. They teach me a lot of things in that time I was part of Indra's team inside RIMAC Seguros. We built incredible things together there on top of Amazon Web Services, and I strongly believe that this team is one of the best I’ve ever worked with in my entire life.

So, thank you, Cesar and the whole Data Lake crew for giving me the opportunity to be part of this outstanding crew. I will never forget the opportunity you gave me. Never.

And a big thank you to the “Channels Army”: It was a big pleasure to work with you guys, and I know that our paths will cross again Gianmar, Paola, Patty, Sarita, Miguel, Luis, Richard. The best of luck for you.

Farewell Indra, Hello Intercorp

Then, in September; I had the opportunity to build something from scratch in one of the biggest conglomerates of the country. It was a tough call because the team was very new and they were just creating the office when I was to work.

I chatted with my wife about this because this new opportunity presented a bigger growth and learning experience for myself. Thank you, baby.

I discussed with Iván about what he wanted to achieve with the Data Office, and we chatted for about an hour about this. After this conversation, I already knew I wanted to be part of the team.

It was a difficult time because I loved what I was working with the “Channels Army” at RIMAC. But after several conversations with them, they convinced me to pursue this unique opportunity with Intercorp.

Then, I officially entered at Intercorp Management on September 4th, and I have to say it: It’s simply amazing to get inside a room with Data Scientists, BizOps people and Data Engineering folks (that’s my role) when 80% of the time you don’t understand what they are talking about.

This presents an amazing opportunity to learn more about this, and how we could actually apply Data Science in the diverse business units inside Intercorp.

Let’s work for a better 2020 together.

Opportunities are Everywhere, You just have to Know Where to Look

The last four months of the year were incredible. I enjoy my work as a Data Engineer at Intercorp, but I believe in the power of multiple income streams.

So, searching for these opportunities, I did several things:

• I revived my YouTube channel, to help more Hispanic people to find great investments opportunities out there
• Migrated my personal blog from Medium.com to a Ghost based blog hosted on DigitalOcean, and was accepted as an Affiliate Marketer for several brands: FreshBooks, Namecheap, Siteground, ConvertKit and many others
• Signed seasoned partnerships with companies like Divvy (the leading spend and expense management platform for business out of Utah) and CleverTap (a powerful mobile marketing solution that brings together user data from online and offline channels on one centralized platform); to help them to find great clients. A  big thank you to Trent and Ankur for the confidence

My Unconventional Entrance to the Venture Capital world

But I believe that one of the biggest achievements I got this year was to be accepted as an Indie.vc Scout. Bryce and his crew at Indie.vc have built a different kind of Venture Capital firm, where they encourage to the founders full ownership and built real and profitable ventures:

The idea is to help Indie.vc to find more incredible entrepreneurs out there, wherever they are in the world; and to dot that the firm has built an incredible network of Scouts.

I was skeptical to apply because I’m not based in the U.S; but we live in times of actions, not words. I said: “What the hell? I lose nothing with applying. '' And I did it.

Fortunately, Bryce cares about the network and the quality of deals, not about your location, and in November 26th, I was officially accepted as a Scout.

My motto as an Indie.vc Scout is:

Yes, I will be paid for this work, but I want to do more. So, when someone contacts me on Twitter (the majority of the deals has come in that way) about an introduction to Indie; I always try to do more than that: I shared their work, I give my honest feedback about the platform and the business opportunity and try to connect them with the right people for their ventures.

I just want to think as an actual investor in a company, so if can support them with capital, I can help them with my network. Who knows !!! This could be an opportunity to find a new client, a new partner, etc.BWT, my role models as Venture Capital firms are five: Indie.vc, Emergence Capital, Ridge Ventures, Founder Collective and Union Square Ventures. Why?

Because they always try to do what is right for the company they are investing in.

So, if you want Indie.vc involved in your company, just let me on Twitter or to my email. I will be more than happy to get you an introduction.

Conclusions

2019 was an incredible year, but I know that the next decade will be even better. I’m excited waiting for the next year. My message to all of you:

Happy New Decade for Everyone