Wow, so anyone without preferred shares (i.e. all employees) will get nothing in the deal.
Good deal though for Aicha Evans, I'm sure!
Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
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Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#42I 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.
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Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#43Interesting. 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.
what do you mean by 'add a maker element to it'?
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#44So some self driving car companies might not escape Covid. Not surprising, the space is saturated, expensive, and not market ready.
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#45Did everybody forget that Amazon invested $700MM in Rivian last year?
Whether or not Zoox is a bust from the investors perspective, the synergy with Amazon seems obvious.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/19/20873947/amazon-electric-...
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like a very large gap (200m) to provide a parachute.
Investors often have 2x liquidation preferences, if not more. Exceedingly unlikely common stockholders would have any value.
Sorry for the naive question, how is this not illegal? I would understand if you get 2X after all the capital raised has been cleared, but in this case? You get 2x while other people lose their shirts off?
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#47What’s Amazon’s plan? The article says something something Amazon delivers lots of things something, but I don’t see how building their own driving systems follows naturally from that. Further, I would think a firm promising enough to seed a self driving program to power Amazon’s delivery fleet would be worth more than a billion dollars. Would love to hear some thinking on this. Update: There’s a comment up thread to…
To me the future of SDC tech is clear:
General public expects driverless cars, car companies want level 3 automation, Google says there is only level 2 and 4 which is probably right, and the technology is going to stay level 2 for at least better part of next decade if not couple decades.
What’s working is Level 4 betas in Level 2 mode with driver monitoring for safety, what I would call a “driving simplification”.
“Simplification” applied to delivery vans offloads what used to require driver competence to machines thus improve consistency, and that will work for Amazon.
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#48Zoox 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…
> Also kind of interesting that they are an opportunistic buyer (almost vulturous) that most of the times only pulls the trigger when the acquisition target is in their lows. Unsurprising since Bezos himself worked in a Hedge fund. The Autonomous Driving hype train is slowing down, so this is the perfect opportunity for this move. Interestingly, with this move, Bezos can soon rival Musk for the next 'billionaire supe…
They both want a planet. Musk wants to take over Mars. Bezos wants to take over Earth.
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#49How did Zoox start?
In 2012, Kentley-Klay stumbled on a blog post about Google’s self-driving car project, then pretty much the only one in the field. He saw the company’s prototypes as unsightly half-measures.. Then, one day, he walked into his Melbourne office (animation, video production) and announced he was off to America to fulfill his driverless dreams.
In a move that some will call devious and others will call ingenious, Kentley-Klay reached out to some of the biggest names in the field and told them he was making a documentary on the rise of self-driving cars. The plan was to mine these people for information and feel out potential partners. His first “interviewee” was Sterling Anderson, then a robotics researcher at MIT and later Tesla Inc.’s self-driving car chief. “I played the oldest trick in the director’s book: the vanity card,” Kentley-Klay says. “I showed up at MIT with a Canon and a bullshit microphone and interviewed Sterling for two hours in a grassy field..."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-17/robot-tax...
Re: Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox
#50Zoox 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…
> Amazon doesn’t invest in greenfield projects that are not customer facing
I don't think this is very true, they are just very good at turning around and selling the internal tech.
The underlying technology for AWS was developed internally and it was not customer facing at first.
Similarly if you look at their internal data platforms, they have invested heavily even though it's not customer facing (yet, because eventually they will start selling services inspired by the internal systems via AWS).
I remember watching a presentation on how they invested large amounts of money into prototyping FC robotics technologies.
If you look at AWS Kinesis or EventBridge, the technologies were developed for internal usage before they were sold. There is also considerable investment into distributed consensus technologies that hasn't been turned directly into products (yet).
You're kind of right in that Amazon doesn't spend much time working on greenfield projects that don't have any forseeable business value (in contrast to say Google), but that is in many way a product of their organizational structure where two-pizza teams are supposed to do 'research' as part of their product work rather than having a pure R&D division.