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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

#131

Post by ajross »

former-aws wrote: post #20
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…

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.

I think there's a difference there, though. Retail sales and reselling are parts of what most people broadly consider the "same industry". I mean, a small seller making a deal with Amazon to resell something that they know Amazon could sell on its own is at least always aware of the competition.

In this case, tech investing and online retailing are not the same industry. Amazon is using a dominance in one to fund the other, which then it uses to either drive valuations of potential competitors down or to simply outcompete them.

And that's a plausible antitrust problem.

I'm normally not in the Amazon haters camp. Most of the time I'll defend them against the typical charges of unfair competition. Not this time. This is sketchy.

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

#132

Post by RhodesianHunter »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #118
seizethecheese wrote: post #54

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 la…

There's nothing sinister about a copycat. It just feels that way selfishly for the original creator. Capitalism works best in the long run with near perfect competition, copy cats are great for everyone except the first guy with the idea.

> Capitalism works best in the long run with near perfect competition

Unfortunately someone like Amazon using their size and market power to produce copycats is the opposite of perfect competition since they can operate at a loss or at cost and starve out any newcomers.

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

#134

Post by samfisher83 »

newyankee wrote: post #46
toyg wrote: post #13

Silicon Valley is clearly not a comedy: https://youtu.be/JlwwVuSUUfc

I wonder if founders are as petty as Gavin Belson

You should listen to Michael Jordans hall of speech to see how pretty he was. He is considered the greatest basketball player in the world and he spend the whole speech belittling people.

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

#136

Post by aws_pmthrowaway »

I was a senior manager on the very first product the article talks about. I was closely involved in designing the service and presenting it to Amazon senior leadership. WSJ quotes the CEO of a startup called DefinedCrowd as accusing us of stealing their ideas from a meeting 4 years earlier.

What a bunch of conceit. I don't remember our team discussing DefinedCrowd even once. We focused on the many other more interesting players that are doing the same thing, and researching them by trying out their service etc. like anyone normally would.

I'm sure someone talked with DefinedCrowd 4 years before that. Amazon, like all other tech companies, routinely has NDA conversations with startups that never go anywhere.

I can't speak to the rest of the article, but the very first example is totally false. WSJ is looking for an angle, and this startup is probably looking for a way to blame Amazon for their own execution problems.

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

#137

Post by AndrewKemendo »

There's no way to really know how true this is but it certainly feels true if you're on the startup side - however most startups just aren't being realistic with themselves, and thinking they are special.

For example, my previous company brought our 6DOF MonoSLAM SDK, 3D model processor and OpenGL viewer to Amazon from 2014-2017 pitching the "AR View" functionality that they eventually put in 2017 [1].

Was that a result of us coming and pitching it? Probably not because that use case and stack wasn't a novel concept even back to 2010. So the concept and stack was certainly there for them to do on their own.

What we DID provide to Amazon however was a significant data point (based on our user velocity/interaction metrics and the rate of increase of 3D model generation from retailers) about whether the market was ready for that feature - and so they said ok it's probably time to do this. It just so happened that the cost of implementing it crashed to basically "trivial" in 2017 with the introduction of ARKit and so it was a no-brainer for them to roll out for a few years.

What's the takeaway? These big companies aren't dumb, your idea isn't that novel and they probably have the team and technology to do it better than you for cheaper.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/1/16590160/amazon-furniture...

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

#138

Post by mritchie712 »

seizethecheese wrote: post #54

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 la…

what launch page, this?

https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=20657644011

It might not be hitting market due to lack of interest. The way I "solve" this today is to just send myself an email when I think I need to order something, then order it next time I check my email... works pretty good.

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

#139

Post by pixelbash »

philwelch wrote: post #127
Kudos wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not super familiar with antitrust laws, but it feels like they might apply here.

Is AWS a monopoly?

Isn't the important factor whether it's trying to become one? Windows and IE were never the only possible options.

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

#140

Post by foobar_ »

jariel wrote: post #104
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amazon does not access private S3/Ec3 data for retail competitive purposes. The comments above indicating 'well someone has access' - yea, obviously, it's data hosting. Someone has access. But the amount of conspiracy here is frustrating. Amazon will play very aggressively within the bounds of the law, meaning, if they can glean public info about something, or look at their own sales data for a product, they will do…

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