Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by mrandish » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

throwaway-cdo wrote: post #130

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…

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.

> "The scale idea has been floating around within the company since 2015/2016."

So much this.

As a former startup founder now acquired into a Top 10 valley tech company, few people understand just how many nascent projects, features and ideas a huge, successful tech company has in development. At least for our active product domains, I never saw a feature from a competitive product that we didn't already have on a list and usually in development somewhere.

When I first started, I would sometimes see a "neato" new feature publicly demoed in some competing product and bring it to the relevant PM's attention, only to be sent back a two-year-old internal video of a similar feature already working and either queued for shipping, dropped in market testing due to weak response or deferred to the "next version" queue due to resource prioritization.

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

#222

Post by jessaustin » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #210

jessaustin wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That argument seems to prove too much? It's sort of an Efficient Market Hypothesis for government regulation, and it would apply just as much to e.g. FTC and DoJ with respect to anti-trust violations as to Congress (as thread parent would like) or DoJ or whomever with respect to fraud or illegal wiretapping. Maybe it would be better investigated by a class-action plaintiffs' attorney, but even the mightiest firms might hesitate to wage the discovery battle that would be required against such deep pockets.

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

#223

Post by webo » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

jasonjayr wrote: post #217

count wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

DO doesn't have a great track record for customer trust. I run personal workload but couldn't recommend it over AWS to a larger company.

  - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117660
  - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169

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

#224

Post by dastx » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:13 PM UTC

Have a colleague who said the same. They had come in for reasons I can't remember, and shortly after launched a product that worked strangely similar to their offering. People got laid off, including my colleague, not long after that.

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

#225

Post by Ijumfs » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:14 PM UTC

8note wrote: post #197

tankenmate wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that comparable to the owner of a mall watching who goes in and out of which shops to decide what stores to add to the mall?

Isn't it more like the mall owner opening a clone of your store right next to yours while charging themselves no rent in order to gain an advantage, all the while promoting their own store they opened to steal your business on the ad boards situated around the mall?

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

#226

Post by abfan1127 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:32 PM UTC

paulgb wrote: post #57

former-googler wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my google experience. They do say not worrying about patents, but that's because searching for patents could indeed make you liable as you were influenced by prior art. Nobody at google even remotely mentioned "we will drown them in legal fees". If anything, I have a huge respect for google legal. Disclaimer: former googler.

Lots of anon accounts (reasonably) in this thread, so I want to back up as a non-anon former Googler that your experience matches mine. It wasn't "ignore patents", it was "don't look up patents so you aren't influenced by them".

I worked at Medtronic and currently work at Qualcomm. Both companies had policies matching this. Don't search patents so you are not influenced by them.

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

#227

Post by jariel » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:35 PM UTC

pal_9000 wrote: post #154

jariel wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I dont think its just about playing by the book of law. I'm sure they also consider optics and trust in the brand.

As a company they do, and that's how policy is set.

But individual actors are individual actors, in a company of 100 000 people, some will go astray.

They are pushing their 'white label' stuff agressively, I have no doubt the PM's have zero qualms about using Amazon.com sales data to their advantage.

But I also submit that retail PM's actually getting access to private S3/EC2 is totally rubbish, at least by any policy or scale.

They could be sued for billions in each case of that breach, and the resulting PR fallout would be impossible.

Imagine you are the VP of AWS - you make all the profit for Amazon.

Are you going to somehow allow some dirty Retail PM access to your customers data?

When your customer finds out, and tells the world, and it gets in the press, what happens?

If your ABC startup had evidence that Amazon was creeping on your data as policy, you'd have to dump them instantly.

They could say goodbye to every government contract.

If you are Bezos - would you risk the entire Brand and the cash-cow to move some low-margin pair of shoes and USB hub?

So no, I think the firewall between AWS and Retail is systematically legit.

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

#228

Post by jconley » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #89

Isn't this just what you would expect a company of this size to do? "We want to launch a product in category X" "Ok, should we roll it ourselves, or buy something?" "Well, let's interview a few companies, see if there's any we like, and if not, we'll make it ourselves"

Yeah, given the resources, I'd want to pursue all the possibilities in a promising product/market in parallel. They may have even had working prototypes for some time or even be near launch and they are just feeling out whether the startup would be competitive and/or complementary. Doubt it's anything evil. Just sounds like business minded people at work.

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

#229

Post by dodobirdlord » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #192

yandie wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work for AWS and had to deep dive into IAM to build a feature. Basically Everytime you touch AWS your session is tagged with your credentials and has a unique ID. So everything downstream you touch has your session ID associated with it. Now say somebody from Redshift wants to access the customer's data. They will then need to access to the encryption key in KMS. The trail will be there since KMS lives in t…

This is about as bad a revelation as the original one. So the encryption key is fair game without explicit customer approval?

I think perhaps you misunderstand the architecture of KMS. KMS master keys are used to remotely decrypt the symmetric encryption keys for encrypted data that are stored alongside the encrypted data. KMS master keys don't ever leave the KMS servers themselves, and servers can't be accessed directly by anyone. AFAIK they don't have open ports except for handling production traffic and are hardened against opening a shell. An engineer on a different team with access to a host running a customer workload could potentially run off with a temporary customer credential being used by the customer workload, which they could then use to call KMS to decrypt encryption tokens for as long as the credential lasted. But they couldn't get at the KMS key itself or retain access past the expiration of the stolen credential, and all of the aforementioned audit logs would report all of the activity of the stolen credential.

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

#230

Post by luizfelberti » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

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.

I'm sorry but what you just said is patently false:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-29/capital-o...

Quote:

Capital One Financial Corp. said data from about 100 million people in the U.S. was illegally accessed after prosecutors accused a Seattle woman identified by Amazon.com Inc. as one of its former cloud service employees of breaking into the bank’s server.

While the complaint doesn’t identify the cloud provider that stored the allegedly stolen data, the charging papers mention information stored in S3, a reference to Simple Storage Service, Amazon Web Services’ popular data storage software.