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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

#171

Post by seizethecheese »

2sk21 wrote: post #114
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…

Indeed, as a startup you do typically have a speed advantage!

Hardware is hard for startups though.

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

#172

Post by pier25 »

akerro wrote: post #117
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…

Amazon does it also with popular independent sellers. I know a motorcycle shop that was selling top quality products. Amazon representative contacted him if he would like to sell on Amazon, showed him offers how to stock and sell items. Amazon started a brand with the same name and their products were higher in search, were poor quality China made, jackets that were falling apart within a year. For the same price! An…

This reminded me of the time Amazon started selling diapers at a loss to price-battle diapers.com. They won and ended up buying the parent company.

https://www.vox.com/2017/3/29/15112314/amazon-shutting-down-...

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

#173

Post by riazrizvi »

relaxing wrote: post #163
riazrizvi wrote: post #153

Almost every established VC is a potential competitor as much as a potential backer, because they already have backed ventures in/near your market, you won't get approached by one without expertise in your market. Any of their other backed ventures might be mulling over a new strategic goal and doing indirect research on you via their sponsors. Before you say NDA, it's practically unenforceable, you can't stop a VC c…

No startup is so good they can’t get steamrolled by a company with Amazon’s resources.

The decision isn't made by a trillion dollar 'Amazon'. It's made by a person inside Amazon with a limited budget, whose ROI is critical to their personal financial success. At the end of the day, the decision to compete will be an ROI question, Is it better/cheap enough to roll-my-own, or is it has this outfit done a good enough job that it is better to partner? Outstanding people are a precious commodity, so if the startup is really good, why wouldn't you partner with them? And if mediocre when you are really good, why would you?

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

#174

Post by kartayyar »

You as as a startup should be fully aware that a big player can enter the space at any time they want. This is not Amazon's problem. It's your problem.

Also, it's a flawed abstraction to view large companies as a monolith: the investing arms are usually very separated from product teams.

TLDR: If a large company wants to enter a space, that's their choice. Accept this as a fact of life if you want to go work on a startup.

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

#176

Post by pyrrh0tech »

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.

Hey it's me pyrrhotech, and upon some additional reflection decided that I was wrong and maybe there are some issues with copycats. Just wasn't thinking straight before.

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

#177

Post by jonplackett »

Not from Amazon but this happened to me when I had an app in the top 10 of the AppStore. This a-hole from Silicon Valley flew over to London, asked me loads of stuff, saying he wanted to buy it, offering large amounts of cash and then just launched his own version and some copies of other things I’d made. I’m still not sure if it was his plan all along or not - He did try and recruit me to his company at one point but when I refused, his parting words were “if someone offers you a seat on a spaceship, don’t ask which seat”. Really glad I didn’t take that seat.

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

#178

Post by tankenmate »

Kudos wrote: post #120
rattray wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't sound like GP was saying their team did anything illegal – they accessed _public_ information about the companies they were copying. It definitely feels scummy, but it didn't sound like GP had access to evidence of a crime. IANAL.

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

It's not just anti-trust, it's also trade secret laws. A customer of AWS has a reasonable expectation that the information it keeps on AWS's VMs are confidential.

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

#179

Post by kerng »

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.

This is incorrect, at least from a logical POV and why it's hard to trust what cloud vendors say. A statement like this is either naive (most likely) or actively attempting to mislead.

Technically, its absolutely possible. Most likely you'll just need a support ticket or bug, and then you can troll around as engineer.

Also, security teams also usually have access to stuff when things get interesting.

Better to say that access is strictly on a case by case basis and monitored thoroughly.

Ideally customer is notified each time it happens - that would be cool, but likely technically not possible since data ends up in so many systems (like logs, SIEM, telemetry, debug files, backups, data scientist desktops,....)

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