Google has done this and worse. Some of you may remember this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
This. There are other instances too. Short story is that you need to be extremely careful talking to G/A/F/M
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
#202This is business tactic 101.
Yes, they were definitely naive if they shared confidential data easily.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#203You could replace Amazon with Kodak or Open Text or 100 other names and hear the same story. It happens to customers and suppliers.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#204Earlier 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.
This frankly doesn't match my experience and I have to say I find it unlikely. Before going into our AWS production S3 buckets, looking at our databases for customer lists AWS seems to be pretty careful to get an OK. Now we are being told that production customer data was normal to trawl? How in the HELL are they passing all their certs with all production data so wide open. I do customer managed keys - I mean, this…
My understanding is that Customer Managed CMK in KMS only means that the customer has control over the key operations - like rotation, key policies, IAM policies, etc. AWS still has actual control over the KMS system and full access to the HSM.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#205"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.
Considering that OP created this account today and that they're admitting to what would be a felony and against Amazon's own privacy policy, I doubt this statement is true.
Even if the customer had a misconfigured S3 bucket that was exposed to the public, it would still constitute as accessing customer data you're not meant to see.
As other users have provided insight on, everything you do as an Amazon employee basically leaves a trail with your employee ID, even if you had access to private information (which you wouldn't basically because it's locked behind several layers of security). Fireable and sueable offense which Amazon would definitely not allow, let alone endorse.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
"perfectly normal to trawl production customer data" It's not. And there are plenty of trainings inside of Amazon to make you aware of that. It is your fault, in the end, to not report your team. I have been on several teams at Amazon and this would always be an absolute no-go. It's already difficult to even get basic ideas about customer data, things that you would consider "essential" to improving the customer expe…
>> It is your fault, in the end, to not report your team Talk about all time gaslighting. It's the managers/directors job to ensure compliance, not normal employees.
If you see another employee committing a crime, you're obligated to report it under US law. You can be considered an accessory if you don't.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#207There'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.
To try and sell it to them.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#208I'm a serial tech startup founder who has seen all sides of this up close. I've had startups I founded or co-founded IPO, be acquired by a Top 10 valley tech giant, acquire smaller startups, and (of course) go bust. I've self-funded, VC funded, angel funded and had corporate investors. In the acquisition, I ended up working for the Top 10 valley tech company for over a decade reporting directly to a key C-Suite exec…
Your particular experience does not mirror that of others.
The risk here isn't Big Co Exec. It's the aspiring PM who wants to make a name for themselves at the Big Co.
NDA's aren't worth the paper they are printed on; when it comes to that, you'll just discover that Big Co has retainers in place with all the law firms you'd want to work with.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#209Amazon 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…
Throwaway to avoid being ID'd. I was on the team that was peripherally involved in building the Amazon Dash collection of products. The scale idea has been floating around within the company since 2015/2016. It takes long to do this at scale and a cost-effective point. There were also other similar products that were scrapped because there was no way we could sell them at a reasonable price.
Try saying this one three times fast: Smart Sally in Sales scales sales from a smart scale.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#210Earlier 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.
Neither "traction of products hosted on its platform" nor "customer list of those hosted products" are typically public information. They are information to which a trusted vendor might have access. There seems to be a fine line between trusting Amazon to sell and ship one's products and services without using its position to sell competing products and services, and trusting AWS to host one's confidential data witho…
You're right - but this isn't the first time we've heard about this exact practice. It's been reported on extensively, so if anyone was going to investigate something illegal, it would have happened.
It is however, good ground for an Anti-Trust case. Using your position as a market maker to push your own products is literally illegal anti-competitive behavior and can trigger a court order to break up the company.