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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

#181

Post by thoughtstheseus »

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…

This is likely disingenuous. Large corporations like Amazon systematically refuse to sign NDAs with small players, hence none of the info is “confidential”. The rationale is that large companies might have people working on the idea already and they meet so many people/companies it would be restrictive for them to agree to any confidentiality.

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

#182

Post by ryanmarsh »

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…

That is straight up some Darth Vader shit.

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

#183

Post by whoisjuan »

kerng wrote: post #179
whoisjuan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I already corrected my statement in another reply. You're right. I said probably only a handful of people can access customer data to do their job. I personally never met one. The goal of my comment was to illustrate that in my experience handling customer data there was a big deal. It's not like something you can casually query to see if a particular customer has a good business or not.

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

#184

Post by guessbest »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #137

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 res…

Why even pitch the idea to big companies then? Seems like a no brainer to just avoid discussing technology with anyone on the M&A team of any large company with an development team, unless you went to the same college as their executive staff.

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

#185

Post by throwaway_USD »

rattray wrote: post #102
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it happens, the Congresswoman who represents the part of Seattle that contains Amazon is on the House Judiciary committee, and may also very well be your member of Congress. Seems like something her office would probably want to know about if you could substantiate the claim. https://www.wsha.org/policy-advocacy/legislative/u-s-congres... (ignore the odd source of the link. it's the only place I could find her CoS…

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.

>It definitely feels scummy, but it didn't sound like GP had access to evidence of a crime.

Violating Anti-trust statues isn't criminal...but it is still illegal. Anti-trust violations also aren't the only potential laws this would violate. It sounds like it would violate unfair trade practices as well (most states has statues/laws/codes on point).

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

#186

Post by ApicalDendrite »

rattray wrote: post #128
ApicalDendrite wrote: post #67

I worked on the Echo Show team. The product had been in development for over a year when we invested in Nucleus. I remember thinking it was very strange that Amazon was investing in that company when we were building such a similar product internally.

Thanks, that's a really helpful perspective. I've definitely seen the same thing happen – an org that isn't sure it can build function X well might invest in a startup building X just in case. Of course, they may or may not take advantage of that situation by misusing confidential information. Either way the startup could lose (or just not have much negotiating power). So yeah, sounds like this may not be a case of A…

Nothing I saw indicated that the Echo Show was in any way influenced by Nucleus.

I suspect, but don't know directly, that this investment was more about trying to jumpstart an ecosystem of third-party Echo devices rather than hedging bets.

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

#188

Post by throwaway_USD »

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?

As others note you don't need to be a monopoly to violate anti-trust laws. However, as it relates to being defined as a monopoly this ability to leverage your market position to stifle competition is the exact type of behavior that would support a finding of monopoly...most non-monopolies can't leverage their market position to unfairly compete

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

#189

Post by billmalarky »

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…

Neat idea. I had the same thoughts a while back around a toilet paper tower/holder ("never run out of TP again"). It's a fun concept.
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