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Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
161–170 of 385 posts
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#162Am I the only one who thinks this is to be expected? Stealing good ideas is literally amazon biggest strategy in retail. They monitor best selling products, then launch their own brand and crash the competition. Why anyone expected them to change strategy with business ideas? This strategy served them well.
If nothing else, it doesn't come as a surprise because amazon consistently operates in an anticompetitive nature. I see this as building public understanding of why amazon should be broken up.
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Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#163Almost every established VC is a potential competitor as much as a potential backer, because they already have backed ventures in/near your market, you won't get approached by one without expertise in your market. Any of their other backed ventures might be mulling over a new strategic goal and doing indirect research on you via their sponsors. Before you say NDA, it's practically unenforceable, you can't stop a VC c…
No startup is so good they can’t get steamrolled by a company with Amazon’s resources.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#164It's weird how questions of "is what we're doing, wrong?" can be so easily and inevitably obliterated by the profit motive.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#165"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.
I want to be careful here, as I respect that you worked at AWS (that is, most likely), while I never have, and don't know what goes inside the company.
But it would be helpful if you broke that down a little more than 'trawling customer data', because at the most innocuous, if they're just looking at what's publicly selling on Amazon, what goes into sales rank, that seems acceptable, to me anyway.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#166"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…
When I was at Google, we were encouraged by our lawyers not to worry about patents or unique parts of any product. If there ever will be a claim, they will drown the company in legal fees, so nobody is going to dare to sue us. Patents were used, in many cases, as a form of research into a new area.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is called a residuals clause, and it’s increasingly common. Be really careful looking for these - I won’t sign a vague/broad one, unless I am out of options. (e.g., acquisition or fail)
Ah, so that has a name? It was in the middle of the document in a fat paragraph. I was delighted to find it--kind of like picking up a big seashell on a crowded beach.
https://www.everynda.com/blog/beware-residuals-clauses-nda/
We ended up signing it, but I went back and forth with their counsel to neuter this clause so that it was significantly safer:
Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained in this Agreement, Recipient may use Residual Knowledge, subject to Provider’s valid patents, copyrights[, trade secrets], and mask work rights. [For the avoidance of doubt, no license is granted to the Recipient for any of Provider’s Confidential Information, patents, copyrights, trade secrets, or mask work rights.] "Residual Knowledge" means any information that is retained in the unaided memories of Recipient's Representatives who have had access to Confidential Information of Provider[, without specific or intentional memorization or reference to any written or electronic information or documentation. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Residual Knowledge may only be used for internal purposes by Recipient, and Recipient may not disclose Provider’s Confidential Information to third parties under any circumstance except as outlined elsewhere in this Agreement.]
The parts in [ ] were added by me. We tried to neuter the clause as best we could; they really wanted to have one in there, for whatever reason, so my focus was on neutering it rather than arguing to remove it. There are always other concessions in a negotiation from the other side. :)
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#168Earlier 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.
> 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.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#169Earlier 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.
> 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…
Also, it is possible to build systems such that, no, there isn't a 'root' or 'unlimited permission' or whatever. Or that there is, but it's a multi-person credential.
This is one area where AWS takes things MUCH more seriously than it's competition, and they don't talk about it enough publicly.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#170Amazon 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…
Of course they’re reading the new startup descriptions. That’s the sort of market research due diligence that’s expected of any PM. They fly in startups for presentations to get a glimpse into their inner workings, you think they aren’t taking the time to read about what everyone’s doing first?
Well, no I didn’t think they were doing that much research on startups. Do you know this from experience?