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Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

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Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#51

Post by jacquesm »

dboreham wrote: post #47
jacquesm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the longest time (more than a decade) I ran a small company ( All that time I thought: next week someone else is going to clue in to this, it is so obvious. But nobody ever did. You can read more about it here: https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-several-million-dollar-bug/ So I totally believe that the seed for the idea came from somewhere else.

Isn't this more to do with how TCP and the socket interface is implemented (or more accurately its intended semantics) than a bug in browsers? Not draining any inbound data on a new connection prior to sending my request doesn't sound like a bug.

Yes, that's the practical reason. But a browser could of course have implemented HTTP in the way described in the RFC, instead they all took the easy and obvious way out. That's also why the bug was present in all browsers that had marketshare, it was the obvious thing to do, it is not as if they independently made the same mistake, they independently decided that it wasn't important enough to implement the protocol to the letter.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#52

Post by KorfmannArno »

whoisjuan wrote: post #40
rckoepke wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What types of AWS data would be trawled? Are we talking about data inside S3 buckets, database schemas, particular architecure styles, the fact that a product is consuming {x, y, z} amounts of cloud resources, or simply "spending $m / year" in gross?

I can confidently tell you that Amazon's employees cannot see customers data inside S3 buckets or EC2 instances. They are extremely serious about that stuff since they know that will erode their customer's confidence. But there's probably other superficial business data that's helpful to evaluate that.

1. Did you work on a team at Amazon in the likes of what user throwaway_aws mentioned?

2. What measures that you know of is Amazon implementing to make sure no employees across all teams are having access to said resources?

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#53

Post by bg24 »

rckoepke wrote: post #23
former-aws wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cannot up vote this enough. During my time both at Retail and AWS it was perfectly normal to trawl production customer data and come up with ideas to launch competing products. Prices were always set lower or free offering justified as data-driven and customer obsession. I hated the gas lighting their customers and left in disgust of the company and its leadership which encourages that behavior.

What types of AWS data would be trawled? Are we talking about data inside S3 buckets, database schemas, particular architecure styles, the fact that a product is consuming {x, y, z} amounts of cloud resources, or simply "spending $m / year" in gross?

Can speak for AWS. Only the later. Basically the usage information for cloud resources. This constitutes the foundation for billing. BTW, this is be true for any cloud, any SAAS.

There is no way an employee can look into customer data. There's enough trail inside AWS to prove that without any doubt.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#54

Post by seizethecheese »

Amazon announced a copycat of us pretty quickly after we went through YC. I suspect it’s not some sinister top-down thing (unless they are actually reading all YC company descriptions). Most likely, the copycats are ambitious, unoriginal PMs pitching some budget.

We facilitate subscriptions using a smart scale, and it works way better than a Dash button (Bottomless.com, YC W19). I’m actually surprised they haven’t launched yet and are taking so long.

It’s pretty wild, the hardware on their launch page is exactly like ours, only they're so slow that it’s a copy of two versions ago and hasn’t even hit the market.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#55

Post by kaesar14 »

whoisjuan wrote: post #40
rckoepke wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What types of AWS data would be trawled? Are we talking about data inside S3 buckets, database schemas, particular architecure styles, the fact that a product is consuming {x, y, z} amounts of cloud resources, or simply "spending $m / year" in gross?

I can confidently tell you that Amazon's employees cannot see customers data inside S3 buckets or EC2 instances. They are extremely serious about that stuff since they know that will erode their customer's confidence. But there's probably other superficial business data that's helpful to evaluate that.

Amazon is a massive company. How can you know this with confidence? Are you in the C-Suite?

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#57

Post by paulgb »

former-googler wrote: post #41
ggl_thorwaway wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was at Google, we were encouraged by our lawyers not to worry about patents or unique parts of any product. If there ever will be a claim, they will drown the company in legal fees, so nobody is going to dare to sue us. Patents were used, in many cases, as a form of research into a new area.

Not my google experience. They do say not worrying about patents, but that's because searching for patents could indeed make you liable as you were influenced by prior art. Nobody at google even remotely mentioned "we will drown them in legal fees". If anything, I have a huge respect for google legal. Disclaimer: former googler.

Lots of anon accounts (reasonably) in this thread, so I want to back up as a non-anon former Googler that your experience matches mine. It wasn't "ignore patents", it was "don't look up patents so you aren't influenced by them".

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#58

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

I think what is missing here is an insider's perspective.

The volume of concepts that are being actively worked on, let alone conceived, is pretty incredible. I've been in Amazon meetings with startups before/during talks of investing. Usually it goes something like this:

There are multiple principle engineers involved. There are multiple engineers from potentially related projects involved. Most of the decision making boils down to: - the obvious: would this investment likely be profitable? - does investing/acquiring this company enable us to ship sooner/gain a competitive advantage?

Often times Amazon prefers to acquire companies not directly operating in the space Amazon needs them to, and then steering them to do what Amazon needs. Often times it's just talent acquisition.

For all we know, Amazon already had competing products in the works (and let's be real, given how slowly Amazon moves, this is the most likely scenario) and decided that this investment wouldn't be worth it.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#59

Post by dcow »

If I’m reading commentary correctly, Amazon would invest in other companies using its Alexa fund in order to gain access to their data and then actively operate in a way that undermines the success of the company. Sounds like they’re essentially enjoying most of the benefits of purchasing a company but for a fraction of the price. Rather than spend their own capital to do the hard legwork of building and validating a product idea, they’re effectively spending others’ and then swooping in for the bait and switch kill.

If I were a founder or board member I’d be super skeptical about ever taking money from Amazon in light of this news.

If this isn’t illegal it at least seems wildly unethical. If it’s neither of those and considered an acceptable tactic, then perhaps companies are generally undervaluing themselves otherwise it wouldn't be financially feasible?

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#60

Post by TimSchumann »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #29
throwaway_aws wrote: post #12

"An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products" Maybe...but in the past, AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped & targeted customer list of those hosted products. In fact, I was on a team in AWS that did exactly that. Why wouldn't their investing arm do the sa…

Just ... wow. This is an egregious abuse of monopoly power and is exactly the kind of thing that antitrust laws are supposed to address. I was certainly naive when I heard about other big retailers who would refuse to allow any subcontractors to use AWS. "Surely Amazon has a Chinese wall" to prevent that kind of data sharing, I thought. Never underestimate the lack of morals in business is the right answer I guess.

> "Surely Amazon has a Chinese wall" to prevent that kind of data sharing, I thought. Never underestimate the lack of morals in business is the right answer I guess.

It’s remarkable to me how many competent programmers with years or decades experience in this industry don’t understand —- If you’re using AWS, Amazon has access to ALL of the data you put on AWS.

Not that they 'can' or 'want to', given the current state of technology they absolutely have to have access to all your data for AWS to function.

There isn’t currently a feasible technical way to work around this. And to head off all the ‘but FHE’ comments, see the ‘currently feasible’ above.

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