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Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

axios.com

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Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#31

Post by ritz_labringue »

mav3rick wrote: post #15
whoisjuan wrote: post #6

Zoox raised almost a billion so terrible exit for the investors, who basically just parked their money for several years. Zoox likely ran out of money and nobody wants to keep dumping money in this space given the anemic progress in the last couple of years. But here is an interesting take. Amazon is an formidable acquirer and probably the only big-tech that knows how to squeeze from their M&A activity. They probably…

This is clearly just cherry picking. They did NLP + Echo + Alexa in house. Cloud / servicification on their own.

Your parent is specifically talking about greenfield projects that are not customer facing. Alexa/Echo is customer facing.

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#33

Post by opportune »

diiaann wrote: post #9
remolacha wrote: post #2

Did anyone ever figure out why the original founder/CEO of Zoox was removed?

https://www.axios.com/zoox-fired-ceo-tim-kentley-klay-fe6f06... His previous experience was running an animation studio in Australia...so there's that too...

I always find it amazing that people like this are able to finagle their way into meaningful positions in SV (this is also partially in response to the bloomberg article sibling comment).

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#34

Post by [deleted] »

broken_symlink wrote: post #11

I work in an office that shares space with Zoox. I've never told anyone this but I find them incredibly annoying. Whenever they take their cars out for a test drive, they sit in the middle of the road in the parking lots. If you aren't going to be driving around anytime soon, just pull into a parking spot, instead of blocking all the empty spots and making it more difficult for people to drive around you.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#36

Post by WoahNoun »

mav3rick wrote: post #15
whoisjuan wrote: post #6

Zoox raised almost a billion so terrible exit for the investors, who basically just parked their money for several years. Zoox likely ran out of money and nobody wants to keep dumping money in this space given the anemic progress in the last couple of years. But here is an interesting take. Amazon is an formidable acquirer and probably the only big-tech that knows how to squeeze from their M&A activity. They probably…

This is clearly just cherry picking. They did NLP + Echo + Alexa in house. Cloud / servicification on their own.

>Amazon buys text-to-speech software company Ivona

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-ivona/amazon-buys-...

>Amazon to acquire Yap, move into speech recognition?

https://www.theverge.com/2011/11/9/2550764/amazon-acquires-y...

>Amazon has reportedly acquired Evi for voice-guided search

https://www.engadget.com/2013-04-17-amazon-may-have-quietly-...

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#37

Post by Gatsky »

anon102010 wrote: post #12

Interesting. These guys are supposedly launching their ride hailing fleet this year on public roads. "unorthodox entrepreneurial zeal of Kentley-Klay, an Australian native with no prior automotive experience." was the key mover on all this and "touted Zoox’s strategy of building its own vehicles for full autonomy as wiser than the standard approach of retrofitting existing cars that Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and others a…

Apparently he added the ‘Klay’ to his name because he wanted to add a ‘maker’ element to it.

I mean, this a bad prognostic sign if there ever was one in an engineering company.

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#38

Post by whoisjuan »

discodave wrote: post #28
whoisjuan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s customer facing. Read my comment again. I’m talking about non-customer facing / utilitarian technology that is used to facilitate their customer facing services and products.

Annapurna is customer facing now with Graviton. Also, we don't know how much they invest after acquisition. I think Annapurna was more strategic than you think. * James Hamilton in 2010: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/10/datacenter-network... * Annapurna acquired in 2015. * In 2017 they reveal that every EC2 server has a Nitro (Annapurna) chip for networking: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec…

Yeah. I guess you could say that’s customer facing. In any case is not a purely customer-facing acquisition like for example AWS acquiring Cloud9 so they could offer a Web IDE.

Chips are peculiar because they matter a lot in a customer facing way but they are not a 100% transparent feature. I think AWS customers couldn’t care less what their instances are powered by as long as they are 1) Fast 2) Cheap 3) Secure. But the chip happens to influence those things heavily, so they become almost like referential values to aggregate those characteristics in a way that’s easy to market.

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#39

Post by mkhpalm »

opportune wrote: post #33
diiaann wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.axios.com/zoox-fired-ceo-tim-kentley-klay-fe6f06... His previous experience was running an animation studio in Australia...so there's that too...

I always find it amazing that people like this are able to finagle their way into meaningful positions in SV (this is also partially in response to the bloomberg article sibling comment).

Isn't that kind of the dirty little secret of SV?

Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

#40

Post by onion2k »

opportune wrote: post #33
diiaann wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.axios.com/zoox-fired-ceo-tim-kentley-klay-fe6f06... His previous experience was running an animation studio in Australia...so there's that too...

I always find it amazing that people like this are able to finagle their way into meaningful positions in SV (this is also partially in response to the bloomberg article sibling comment).

In the SV investor mind he went from running a company of creative people to running a different company of creative people. What those people actually do doesn't really matter. "CEO skills" transfer between companies quite well.
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