From NASA to AWS to Momento: Seattle startup’s journey to reinvent cloud caching
We are in a world where we are consuming interactive applications and content from our mobile devices. But we rarely think about the technologies that make this happen.
Caching is a big part of how low latency interactive applications like live sports, streaming apps are enabled — it is a necessary but unglamorous piece of cloud infrastructure.
Khawaja Shams is co-founder and CEO of Momento, which sees itself as powering interactive applications with boring but highly reliable software. With a background that spans from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to Amazon Web Services, Shams is on a mission to revolutionize how developers interact with caching services.
In a recent episode of the Startup Project podcast, Shams shared insights into Momento’s origin, how he discovered the problem while building products at AWS, its approach to cloud caching, and the lessons he’s learned as a first-time founder. Momento raised a $15 million round led by Bain Capital Ventures earlier this year.
Listen below, and continue reading for highlights from his comments, edited for context and clarity. Subscribe to Startup Project and hear more episodes at thestartupproject.io
From Mars Rovers to Cloud Computing
Shams’ journey to cloud entrepreneurship began in an unexpected place: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There, he worked on image processing for Mars rovers and communications for interplanetary missions. It was during this time that he first encountered Amazon Web Services (AWS), using his personal credit card to prototype solutions on the then-nascent cloud platform.
“I got to work on that,” Shams recalls. “I moved our entire image processing pipeline onto AWS, took advantage of the elasticity. There weren’t a lot of services in AWS back then, this is back in like 2008, 2009 time frame.”
This experience led Shams to join Amazon, where he eventually ran product and engineering for AWS media services. It was here that he identified the pain points in existing caching solutions that would later inspire Momento.
Simplifying Caching for Developers
Momento’s core value proposition is simplicity. Shams explains, “If you need to do 10 million transactions per second, you don’t have to learn what instance type, the number of shards, the number of replicas, a lot of the knobs that you have to deal with with the traditional database.”
This approach resonates with developers who want to focus on building their applications rather than managing infrastructure and learning the nuances of managing infrastructure needed to power their applications. Momento collapses multiple components of a typical caching architecture into a single SaaS endpoint, handling scaling and optimization behind the scenes.
Finding Focus in a Broad Market
As a first-time founder, Shams admits to initial missteps in Momento’s go-to-market strategy. “I used to go around telling my team, we’re building a cache. A cache is like selling a water bottle, every vertical, every customer needs a cache,” he reflects. This led to a broad, unfocused approach that proved challenging for a small startup.
Momento has since refined its focus, targeting industries with unpredictable, spiky workloads where outages have significant financial impact. Media and entertainment, gaming, and certain areas of fintech have emerged as key verticals for the company.
Building a Culture of Customer Obsession
Drawing from his Amazon experience, Shams emphasizes the importance of customer obsession at Momento. However, he’s careful not to simply transplant Amazon’s culture wholesale. “Momento has to define its own culture in its own unique ways,” he says. “We have the opportunity to start with a clean sheet of paper.”
This customer-centric approach extends to how Momento builds its product. The company actively seeks “design partners” — customers willing to provide feedback and collaborate on solving real-world caching challenges at scale.
Looking Ahead: AI and the Future of Infrastructure
While Momento isn’t positioning itself as an AI company, Shams sees significant opportunities in supporting the infrastructure needs of AI applications. “As more AI applications are formed, the undeniable truth, the axioms that are always going to be true: people are going to want more interactivity, and that interactivity has to be fueled by the latest data,” he explains.
By focusing on providing fast, real-time data access, Momento aims to be a crucial enabler for the next generation of interactive, AI-driven applications.
Lessons for First-Time Founders
Reflecting on his journey, Shams emphasizes the critical importance of focus for early-stage startups. “Focused effort on everything from engineering to GTM just makes such a huge difference,” he advises. He encourages founders to identify a few key goals and align their entire team around those objectives.
To hear more about Momento’s journey and Shams’ insights on cloud infrastructure and startup leadership, check out the full Startup Project podcast episode here.