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Comment by trjordan | Hacker News Reader

It's not perfect, but what's a better way?

There's a million people who could use this $100k to mine bitcoins, run personal servers, do scientific calculations, or more. Google isn't interested in those people: they want to lock in companies and keep them there as they grow quickly. If you worked at Google, what would you propose to catch these long-term valuable customers, without giving away a ton of free infrastructure?

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As there is another million people bootstrapping their businesses. What they should do is to find additional criteria to augment the startup validation process. A very simple criteria would be to maintain a front-facing service that provides value to consumers, excluding: bitcoin mining, run malware, etc.

And who verifies these things? How often? And by what rules? And why bother, when just limited it to accelerator startups is much easier and most likely will pick up the majority of successful long term startups anyway? I don't like it either, but it's obviously a logical move.

By screening for "you are in an accelerator" you not only have ensured some due diligence has been done, but you also know someone else's money is on the line, so they will keep tabs on them.

University partnership? GSOC competition? AWS customers with high month-over-month revenue & traffic growth and less than 10 employees? There are many ways of triaging worthy candidates and involving the broader tech community, without further advantaging the already over-advantaged.

AWS customers with high month-over-month revenue & traffic growth and less than 10 employees?

Seems a little late to lure them into the Google Platform.

If a startup has baked in dependencies on AWS services, yes.

But if some startups have planned for portability and would rather stretch their OpEx runway instead of paying Amazon, switching could make sense.

I'm in the early stages of planning a startup that we'll likely bootstrap. I would use Google's cloud if this was a thing, and probably not switch later because our proposed design doesn't leverage much in the way of AWS stuff (about the only thing is SQS, but that's hidden behind an AMQP facade).

We have an email address on the landing page for folks like you -- cloudplatformstartups@google.com -- ping us, send us details, we'll get you over and take care of you. It's really more for recommending the intermediaries but it's a way to contact us -- so take the initiative :) The sentiment here is largely correct -- accelerators, VC's and others provide a great way to prevent fraud and other issues that programs like these deal with. We also offer $500 credit vouchers for folks who want to tinker and we are working on other ways (stay tuned) for people who want to evaluate for free to do so.

Hope this helps --

-Brian head of marketing, google cloud platform

Except for the fact the luring is the goal of the program.

Hum, yes, that's my point.

Where are you seeing evidence of lock-in? Compared to the financial lock-in of having plunked down $$ on servers, most cloud players seem pretty open to me.

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