Why are people surprised by this? There was a period of time in the VC world (~2001) where this was di-rigeur. You were caught between a rock and a hard place, as pitching literally meant potentially enabling a competitor.
Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
71–80 of 385 posts
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#72"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…
The Echo Show was conceived before the first Echo was ever released. I think I even saw a demo in 2014/2015. Source: I worked on the first Echo.
Agreed. I worked on the first Echo and was one of the participants in the conversations about what became the Echo Show in 2012/2013.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#73"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…
And that's why existing businesses joining the cloud pick azure.
What makes you think Microsoft would behave differently?
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#74Earlier 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.
1. Did you work on a team at Amazon in the likes of what user throwaway_aws mentioned? 2. What measures that you know of is Amazon implementing to make sure no employees across all teams are having access to said resources?
As I said below this is something that they will talk a about like every freaking day. They talk about customer’s data as the most important thing to take care of.
Basically is preferable to get a bullet in the head than to ever reveal or tamper with customer’s data.
I cannot answer your question about who has access or not but I’m telling you what’s the culture when it comes to customer’s data.
At the end of the day I was just another IC doing menial work so probably not a good reference, but that was my experience
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s the thing they tell you the most when you work there. Like in a a obnoxious way. Most infosec training is about that. If someone has access to customer’s data for their work they have to do a bunch of extra training and do other stuff. Potentially sign some things and there’s probably a different way to authenticate. I really don’t know because I never had to do that and nobody I knew had that type of access but…
But then what about other commenters saying that this is exactly what their sectors of the company do? Do you think it's impossible that a massive company like Amazon that controls an ungodly amount of the Internet would break those rules? Especially when the government of their home country hasn't pursued an antitrust case in God knows how long
Yeah I don’t know. It’s possible that there’s some evil stuff happening. I’m just relating my experience as a pawn employee. They parrot this incessantly.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#76Earlier 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 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 started anyway.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#77Silicon Valley is clearly not a comedy: https://youtu.be/JlwwVuSUUfc
I wonder if founders are as petty as Gavin Belson
I would imagine it's common. There was an article on here not too long ago about how the entire Amazon HQ2 fiasco came about because Bezos was jealous that Elon Musk was getting more govt subsidies than him. If one of the most successful people in the world can be so focused on petty grudges, I imagine there are plenty of others doing the same.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#78Earlier 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…
Yeah. True. I guess what I meant is that just a handful of employees have access to that and they need to have legitimate reasons.
Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
#79Yes, this is often times how business operates.
Guess what, we meet with potential competitors in our market and sometimes even contract with them to provide services on our behalf, and use that to gauge the market and current solutions!