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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

#211

Post by holidayacct »

It's entirely possible they launched competing products because they know something everyone else doesn't. Did anyone bother to investigate why they didn't acquire these companies?

I've worked at several startups and you'll be surprised at why some corporations don't purchase a startup.

Some of them have awful cultures of psychological abuse, you walk in the door and you know something isn't right because the founder(s) have a cult-like environment that includes abusing his/her employees to the point where they are all afraid to say anything.

Some startups have founders and employees that are lying about everything and when you actually dig into their source code and infrastructure they aren't doing anything they say they are doing.

Some of them have the worst infrastructure imaginable and/or they have such poor software engineering practices that they will never be able to scale to meet the kind of demand a company like amazon has.

Just because they have a good idea and a company doesn't mean they have an implementation that is worth investing in.

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

#212

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

If your business is so fragile that all anybody needs to do to out compete you is the description of your business idea, then I'd say you don't really have a business that is long for this world. If not Amazon, someone else is going to clone and eat you from San Francisco, Seattle, Hyderabad, or Shanghai.

Ideas don't really mean much if you don't have excellent, industry leading execution.

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

#213

Post by jjkaczor »

lloyddobbler wrote: post #34

History repeats itself. This is straight out of Microsoft's playbook from back in the day.

"back-in-the-day"?

How about last month... (Ok... over the last year)...

AppGet vs WinGet

Maybe not a buyout - but dangling a job possibility, with interviews where the candidate's brain was picked over...

https://www.techworm.net/2020/06/microsoft-appget-windows-pa....

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

#214

Post by [deleted] »

count wrote: post #168
TimSchumann wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can confidently tell you that Amazon's employees cannot see customers data inside S3 buckets or EC2 instances. From a technical standpoint, that statement is false. Every employee might not have the credentials to, but for AWS to function as it does, SOMEONE inside the company has to have those credentials. If you change 'cannot' to 'don't', well then we've just gotta take you at your word, which is where we star…

Except they get audited by 3rd parties on statements like that, and have controls tested. It's not like they're just ... digital ocean or somebody.

[deleted]

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

#215

Post by kapilvt »

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?

aggregated api usage stats, api client headers is often enough to identify competitor products and their traction, and is non-sensitive, coupled with account id to customers.

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

#217

Post by jasonjayr »

count wrote: post #168
TimSchumann wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can confidently tell you that Amazon's employees cannot see customers data inside S3 buckets or EC2 instances. From a technical standpoint, that statement is false. Every employee might not have the credentials to, but for AWS to function as it does, SOMEONE inside the company has to have those credentials. If you change 'cannot' to 'don't', well then we've just gotta take you at your word, which is where we star…

Except they get audited by 3rd parties on statements like that, and have controls tested. It's not like they're just ... digital ocean or somebody.

Do you have evidence of this claim re DO?

I worked with a DO on an technical issue, and they were steadfastly against me granting them temporary access to our servers even though it would have made the issue easier to diagnose. Cloud provider that verifiably get caught doing this will quickly lose the trust of all their large customers

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

#218

Post by 8note »

bigpumpkin wrote: post #2

"In 2016, a group of investors led by the Alexa Fund bought a stake in Nucleus, a small company that made a home-video communication device that integrated with the Alexa voice assistant. Nucleus’s founders and the venture-capital funds investing alongside the Alexa Fund had reservations about collaborating with an Amazon-backed firm, according to some of the co-investors. " "After striking the deal, the Alexa Fund g…

FaceTime was released in 2010 says wikipedia, and Siri launched in 2011. How is this concept different from putting your phone down on a table?

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

#219

Post by mrandish »

jcz_nz wrote: post #208
mrandish wrote: post #194

I'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.

Sure, that's why I said "Plan for the worst, hope for the best". It's always possible, even if mtg with an ethical company, the junior person you're meeting with that day could be a new-hire who's an idiot and tries to get actionable information.

NDAs aren't deterrents. At the same time, any secret that can be casually conveyed in a mtg, typically isn't all that valuable. If you have a strategic investor as an outside board member, a smart founder will ensure nothing disclosed in a board mtg or board materials is specific enough to be competitively actionable. If you do it correctly, they shouldn't gain any non-public info more specific than broad sales growth, and there are a lot of completely legal ways for interested Big Co competitors to get good intel on sales growth which are much cheaper and easier than investing.

That's why we generally passed on even evaluating most startup investments. They just weren't worth the time to manage plus if we really planned to be active in that space the legal exposure would require a formal "Chinese Wall" between our investment and our business unit, usually managed and audited by an outside law firm. If we were truly interested in the space, I'd always argue we should just acquire the startup now, buy one of their competitors or tilt up our own 'build it' version.

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

#220

Post by gt2 »

jonplackett wrote: post #177

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 bu…

Can you link your app? Or his?
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