In 2015, Khawaja Shams was recruited from within Amazon Web Services to join the Seattle company’s newest acquisition, a Portland company called Elemental Technologies.
He was already toying with the idea of starting his own company, but the pitch from Elemental’s late co-founder and CEO Sam Blackman changed that.
“(Blackman) was trying to convince me to come to Portland and join Elemental. He told me doing a startup is a big leap and maybe if you don’t want to go directly from a big company like Amazon into a startup you can come and learn what it was like and learn from key people that made Elemental so successful and take those lessons to do a startup,” recalled Shams.
That plan is finally coming to fruition with Shams, along with his former Amazon colleague Daniela Miao, launching the startup Momento.
The company is based in Seattle, where Miao is located, but the team is fully remote. Shams is in the Portland metro along with most of the engineering team, he said.
What Momento does
Momento’s product is directed at software developers to help them include a cache function in their serverless applications. For nontechnical folks, this means their product helps end users of applications avoid buffering.
“We accelerate the data used by devices. On the back end inside the cloud we make data available quickly,” he said. “We made it simple to add a cache.”
The product has been in development for about a year. The company has been building quietly and working closely with early customers such as CBS, NTT Docomo and Wyze Labs. Several of those early users are paying customers now and the product is being used in production with those customers.
The team is 25 and has deep infrastructure roots. Shams and Miao worked together to build Amazon’s DynamoDB, one of the world’s largest fully managed database services. Before that, Shams spent seven years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab leading a team that oversaw image processing from Mars Rovers.
Shams and Miao are backed by a $15 million seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures. The round also included The General Partnership and angels Mariana Tessel, CTO if Intuit; Don MacAskill, CEO of Flickr and Smugmug; Neha Narkhede, co-founder of Confluent; Tom Killalea, for CISO at Amazon; and John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla.
The company is hiring for several roles.
Starting a company? Do what you are good at.
Shams didn’t get into details about the fundraising timeline, but said it happened some time ago and that the current environment is difficult.
He did note the duo’s strategy solidified after they landed on the current product. The two initially set out to build a consumer-facing product, but they quickly realized they needed to be building within their expertise, which is business-to-business infrastructure.
“We got humbled,” Shams said of that initial consumer product pitch. It was also when learned about the importance of “founder-market-fit.”
The idea of product-market-fit is well known to those in the startup world, but he said just as important to investors is whether the founders fit in the market they are targeting.
“Most investors we talked to said, ‘You have no business doing consumer stuff,’” he said, adding that they tried to push back and argue the team has the chops to figure it out. “What we learned in these investor meetings, they were sharing insights we hadn’t even thought about. When the investor knowns more about the market it’s a bad sign.”
But, all those investors told them to call them back should the team decide to get into infrastructure.
So they did.
Shams' advice to other founders: “Find what your unfair advantage is and double down on that.”
