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Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

wsj.com

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

#351

Post by stepstop »

devindotcom wrote: post #259
aws_pmthrowaway wrote: post #136

I was a senior manager on the very first product the article talks about. I was closely involved in designing the service and presenting it to Amazon senior leadership. WSJ quotes the CEO of a startup called DefinedCrowd as accusing us of stealing their ideas from a meeting 4 years earlier. What a bunch of conceit. I don't remember our team discussing DefinedCrowd even once. We focused on the many other more interest…

DefinedCrowd is pretty successful actually, just so you know this isn't sour grapes. And it isn't about a meeting 4 years ago, the very first line of the article says that Amazon was an investor (at seed stage, probably a few hundred K). So the problem isn't that someone heard about DefinedCrowd and decided years later to make something like it. Amazon made a significant investment in an early player in this space, a…

This comment chain appears to answer you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23930812

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

#352

Post by discodave »

mcqueenjordan wrote: post #337
discodave wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some group of people on the S3 team likely have root access to the machines where your objects are stored. If you don't have encryption turned on...

You keep making factually incorrect statements. I'm not going to go into detail to refute them, because I don't feel comfortable sharing internal design details and security mechanisms, but your comfort in confidently asserting falsehoods is disconcerting, to say the least.

If you work in AWS security, then you of all people know about the litany of service teams who don't meet their security goals every year.

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

#353

Post by pylua »

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…

Seems like copycats are not allowed as per iOS store policy ?

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

#354

Post by discodave »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #338
discodave wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some group of people on the S3 team likely have root access to the machines where your objects are stored. If you don't have encryption turned on...

I find it funny that none of the people here arguing really understand what data is important from a strategic sales point from view and what's not. The customers databases and other crap they store on the cloud. Not really important. The raw billing information, oh motherfucking yes.

Agree. The billing data gets explicitly or implicitly discussed when various orgs talk about their successes, annual planning etc.

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

#355

Post by curious_fella1 »

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…

> his parting words were “if someone offers you a seat on a spaceship, don’t ask which seat”

Lol what a jackass

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

#356

Post by yandie »

throwawaybkhv wrote: post #283
jacquesm wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand my concern. What I'm missing in the above scenario is that a resource that should be 100% under the control of the customer and nobody else can be accessed by AWS personnel to open up a door that should be closed unless the customer permits access. What the technical implications are is moot, the process that hands out these credentials should not be accessible to anybody but the customer. I…

some1 with the right access to the kms service could change a key policy to allow access to a bad guy. in theory. bcuz some1 has to have access to key policies since customers lock themselves out of their keys all the time. but no 1 can export the private key itself. and key policy changes are vry heavily audited by aws (and can be by the customer, too). this is all proven by the 3rd party audits aws receives

Yes, they can. However, that will leave their trails in their KMS service CloudTrail - unless they manage to exploit CloudTrail as well. That's a lot of barrier to bypass, especially because accessing all these services require you to be in the correct permission group with a hardware MFA token.

Somebody can access the key hardware but they can't extract the actual key out of that. However, I've never met anyone with that level of access - and AFAIK you have to go through various security clearance and approval before such human intervention is permitted.

There's no such thing as perfect security - but KMS is as solid as I can see with centralized key management at the moment. And customer can roll out their own key server as well that is managed in your own data center.

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

#357

Post by munk-a »

burtonator wrote: post #301
munk-a wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's hard to do when you're making good money and would be going against co-workers. But, if you see something, say something. This crap continues because there are too many folks that are happy to help support immoral business practices for some extra scratch. This isn't all on you in particular but when google folks started raising hell about Chinese censorship the company was forced to move. We all have the…

I mean the problem is corruption begets corruption. They WANT do to these things because you're going to get a massive bonus when the product you 'invented' does well because you stole the idea from an Amazon customer. Amazon needs to be properly taxed so that this crap doesn't happen anymore. The idea that they shouldn't pay taxes simply because they're large should absolutely enrage everyone.

The current zeitgiest is that taxes are Unamerican and tax evasion is American. Until that is fixed proposing solving problems with taxes is a pretty empty approach since people are happy to elect tax evaders to the highest office in the country and joyfully utilize services that are offered by companies that are famous for their tax evasion (Apple, Amazon, everyone honestly).

I think taxes aren't really a solution anyways - fines might be but taxes would hurt honest players just as much as dishonest ones. What they did is (AFAIK) illegal and needs to be punished, if it isn't then there is no incentive for them to correct their action.

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

#358

Post by kbenson »

tekknik wrote: post #296
kbenson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair. I wish we went into this in much more detail in high school when covering economics and ethics (if the school even bothers to teach ethics). It should be a prerequisite in any capitalistic economy (but not only those, it can easily be extended to other things). I've also worked in industries…

A large personal change like going hungry? Not feeding your family?

Well, yeah. Or just having to look for a new job that may or may not pay as much. But I wasn't really going that far as saying people (myself, at one point, if you notice what I wrote) staying at a company they feel is acting unethically, but actually just noticing and accepting the company as doing unethical things instead of attributing it to an outlying situation that isn't indicative of how things are normally done.

Companies and people sometimes do shitty things. It isn't always on purpose (misunderstandings, one bad person, etc), and there isn't always a good way to fix it afterwards. I don't condemn people and companies because of this, and there's a tendency to assume this when you see something and work at the company. It can take a while before you start seeing a pattern and accept that it might just be how things are done sometimes and the management is fine with it. If you don't have a lot of options, I think there's a tendency for people to not look closer either on purpose or subconsciously because they might not like what they find, and then they've put themselves in a harder situation, where they must choose between what they believe is right and a hardship.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss, and the human mind is very complex. That's all I'm saying.

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

#359

Post by notSupplied »

jjeaff wrote: post #327
ampersandy wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I said quite clearly there are no exemptions due to their size. There's a difference between an exemption for companies with N+ employees and tax credits/exemptions you can capitalize on because you are a company that makes billions of dollars and can afford to take on different behaviors to take advantage of them. That's not the same thing at all.

I see what you are saying, but I think that if things exist in the tax code that can only be taken advantage of by large companies, it is -effectively- the same thing as a big company exemption.

He’s not talking about effectively what happens. He’s saying textually there is no “large company tax break” and if you tell legislators to repeal “large company tax breaks” they’d all give you confused looks. Textual precision is important if you want to start fixing the problem. What exactly are the test breaks that work for big companies and not small ones? Why do they exist? What was the original intent? What are the side effects?

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

#360

Post by daiwaka »

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…

if you are ever of the mind to share, i am of the mind to listen. my email is dai.wakabayashi@nytimes.com
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