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.
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.
