Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
wsj.com
wsj.com
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 same?
To be honest, I didn't think of it as anything sinister at that time. AWS had such high octane culture to move fast and innovate that I actually felt what they had done was quite smart. It was a super competitive culture and people did whatever was needed to build new things. On a day to day basis the only pressure was to build... I don't remember instances where ethical guidelines were brought up. So, in a way, the outcomes were a result of what people were rewarded on.
Only after I left AWS I started thinking it was ethically iffy. I still believe Amazon is an amazing company and my time at AWS was one of the best learning experiences.
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 that I think don't operate very ethically. It's amazing what you can ignore as an outlier because the alternative is uncomfortable or means you have to make a large personal change.
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.
aka, we did not sign an NDA with the party across the table
If you blatantly ignore and NDA, and then make a lot of money from it, then the 'small startup' will have a ton of money because the prize is huge, i.e. a % cut to lawyers who can work pro-bono.
Imagine you have a $10B company and some bonehead PM steals info from some small startup, for some stupid small project - it puts everything at risk.
In most case, I think you have boneheaded actors, usually not acting in the best interest of the company.
But there's probably other superficial business data that's helpful to evaluate that.
2. What measures that you know of is Amazon implementing to make sure no employees across all teams are having access to said resources?
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
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 I heard when you do you have to put with more things.
i don't see anybody claiming that amazon is harvesting data from inside their customer's infrastructure. amazon has a lot of data that's "amazon's data" that would tell them about businesses that are operating on AWS that might be ripe for competition.
For example, they know what your AWS bill is, and how it's been trending. If you pay a huge bandwidth bill and it goes up 50% each month, they know you've got a business model that's working and that they can undercut you on one of your big expenses.
However, metrics like AMI popularity is Amazon's data... and that definitely informs first-class AWS product development. Once the company identifies a business opportunity, different teams often investigate "build" and "buy" options simultaneously.
Same goes for retail - Amazon works backwards from high-margin categories to identify opportunities, then pursues investment in existing brands versus spinning up products under the company brands.
This all feels very monopolistic to me, but regardless it's worlds apart from the accusation of stealing private information through faux investment offerings.
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.
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
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117660
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-error-exposed-godaddy-serv...
Those people are jealous of AWS.
https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/an-update-on-last-weeks-cu...?
They recognized that their processes were too mechanistic and inhuman, and introduced a lot more compassion and open communication into them—and even chose to spend more money on hiring people to reduce ticket queue wait times.
I'd say that speaks volumes in DigitalOcean's favour.
Source: Worked at AWS for several years including working on systems that had audit requirements for [secret project where I could not know the name of the customer because I don't have TOP SECRET security clearance].
And there are lots of things that many folks at the big cloud providers don't know about their internal threat management and monitoring. Source: Audited most of them for that customer you weren't allowed to know the name of. :)
This is one area where AWS takes things MUCH more seriously than it's competition, and they don't talk about it enough publicly.
That's not necessary unless SOMEONE includes computer programs.
Yes, when things go very seriously wrong, I believe AWS can have literal people override that permission, which will leave a mile long audit trail and likely accompanied by an internet scale outage.
I don’t want to devolve into audit logs and permissions and multi user key signing and wether they actually do or not.
The statement that ‘they can’t’ is 100% false, full stop. That’s all I’m trying to get across.
It’s probably not a good idea to make a system with no human fallback, but it IS possible with current, non-magic technology.
Amazon does take privacy and security very seriously, but these systems are run by people. Attacks like the recent Twitter attack could work for various AWS services.
Source: I used to work in EC2 Networking.
and you def cant see in s3 buckets or instances. hell if a customer sends you a link to an object in their s3 youre not supposed to open it
The raw billing information, oh motherfucking yes.
Technically, its absolutely possible. Most likely you'll just need a support ticket or bug, and then you can troll around as engineer.
Also, security teams also usually have access to stuff when things get interesting.
Better to say that access is strictly on a case by case basis and monitored thoroughly.
Ideally customer is notified each time it happens - that would be cool, but likely technically not possible since data ends up in so many systems (like logs, SIEM, telemetry, debug files, backups, data scientist desktops,....)
You're underestimating the investments that AWS (and Amazon at large) make in to security, confidentiality, and auditing. You're also missing a fundamental implication of building AWS on AWS primitives.
As a relevant example there is only one AWS IAM and one CloudTrail. It's a core tenant of AWS IAM to put that control and root of trust in to the customers control. That means when developer support is helping with your ticket they do so via your accounts AWSServiceRoleForSupport role. That means you can control whether that role exists, which principals can assume it, the capabilities it has, and you can see those same API calls in your CloudTrail logs. Although it would make support difficult you're welcome to delete that service linked role and prevent support.amazonaws.com from assuming said role in your account.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awssupport/latest/user/using-ser...
I'm not talking about Amazon SSH into your EC2 instance - but of course they can do that also - at will, without you authorizing it.
Lower level disks, logs, hypervisor, telemetry, etc.. are accessible beyond your control.
Of course there are lower level primitives. And if the public documentation and observed behavior is insufficient I encourage you to inquire more about the various compliance, certification, and third party auditing programs in place https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/programs/. However at some point this approaches solipsism and I can’t prove a negative in a HN thread.
> I'm not talking about Amazon SSH into your EC2 instance - but of course they can do that also - at will, without you authorizing it.
No. Extraordinary claims need evidence. Either you have serious non public information counter to many AWS statements ... or you misunderstand some fundamentals of SSH and public key cryptography.
> Lower level disks, logs, hypervisor, telemetry, etc.. are accessible beyond your control
I would encourage you to read the AWS data privacy statements https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/. Particularly the definitions of “customer content” and the “shared responsibility model.”
Depending on how the infrastructure is built, or what the particular service set up, it may not even be possible to gain access to specific data without extraordinary means, possibly involving replacing physical hardware.
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.
AWS customers that want to avoid this vulnerability should disable IMDSv1 as per https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/defense-in-depth-open-...
The EC2 instance credentials via the metadata url is public documented functionality. Its how things like the SDK “just work.”
The S3 bucket policy, instance creds, and (inferred) overly permissive IAM policy is all public documented functionality. This looks like a simple case of an initial intrusion being escalated via permissive configuration and controls. There would be no story if the suspect had not been employed by AWS in the past.
Disclaimer: Im a Principal jn AWS but have no direct or inside knowledge of this incident. Everything I know or have stated here is public record (eg the indictment) or public AWS docs.
There is no way an employee can look into customer data. There's enough trail inside AWS to prove that without any doubt.
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 the customer's account (you can audit your own access). And for production services, human actors cannot access these keys - only production credentials can. An engineer who can log into a prod host in theory can grab the temporary credentials there but it expires in 15 minutes so your trail will be rather visible. Also access to prod host has a high bar - only senior people can do it.
Now in theory somebody can coordinate with a malicious user in KMS team - but the bar is high. Also the actual master key never leaves the premise for KMS so your attack surface is very limited.
Of course there are some core teams like IAM and KMS where if they become vulnerable the whole thing falls apart. But that's a big stretch for those systems since they are the core to the business.
What the technical implications are is moot, the process that hands out these credentials should not be accessible to anybody but the customer. It implies that AWS personnel can impersonate customer representatives or processes run on behalf of those customers. That's a serious problem.
In all the years that I've been co-locating I do not remember a single instance where a representative of the hosting facilities that I've used gained access to our data or hardware without my very explicit permission.
As for audit logs: they are only as useful as those inspecting them, and more often than not are entirely passive until required for evidentiary purposes.
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
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.
In short IAM controls everything, there is no “back door” or universal admin access, and KMS is used to perform sensitive operations NOT handing secrets to arbitrary (internal or external) consumers.
Rather than being a serious problem I think it's more on an obvious fact. AWS personnel build services that specifically exist to act on the customer's behalf with delegated credentials. Any time you configure a managed service to run with an IAM role, that service assumes the role and acts with the credentials granted to the role. AWS personnel have access for emergencies to the systems running their services, and by their very nature those services are in possession of customer credential sets for the IAM roles that the service is configured to use.
For example, a Lambda Function can be configured to run with a particular role. When the Lambda service goes to run the function, it fetches the role credentials from IAM and makes them available to the running Function. It could not be otherwise, because the purpose of a managed service like Lambda is to carry out actions on behalf of the customer. The role's credential set is as much a piece of data as the code of the function to be executed.
But leaving all of this aside, of course AWS personnel can access any and all data you store in their systems. They are legally obligated to turn whatever you have stored over to the courts in response to a warrant. So not only could they gather up your data by this roundabout method of misappropriating credential sets, they must have a way to simply access all of the data directly in a way that doesn't appear in audit trails. I assume for simplicity that the IAM service simply has an endpoint accessible to the company's lawyers that will serve up forged customer credentials on demand.
KMS is very clear about it's usage and what it involves. It's obvious that with Symmetrical Encryption AWS obviously needs to know the other end of the key at some point so that it can decrypt the data.
However, as customers can't even export these keys and the whole system is based on using KMS to actually perform the decrypt operations it is a non-starter. It's a lot more secure than most infrastructure which probably encrypts locally but is stored in a broom cupboard with a $10 lock.
Its worth noting that even symmetric keys dont imply direct access to the secret itself. You can instead use the highly controlled secret material to derive less sensitive material. For example a hash derived from a known input + the secret. A third party can use this to prove that two other parties both have/had access to the shared secret. But the third party never needs to access the secret itself.
Theres a great example of this in the chained hashes that make up an AWS sigv4 API request signature. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/sigv4-calculat...
In order for AWS to comply with LEO's they must have some way of accessing data, that is NOT to say they do this for business purposes.
And of course, you're always vulnerable to someone with access to the physical host of an EC2 instance where your workload is running. Only GCP AFAIK offers an encrypted-in-processing compute service, and it's like a week old.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/int...
We had access to absolutely none of that information. We flew blind, relying entirely on the fact that we gave our customers enough hand-holding support that they would willingly volunteer information about their workloads so we could help them optimize it/save money.
No one even attempted to get more detailed customer information AFAIK because it would have been extremely against company culture. That isn't Earning Trust or having Customer Obsession. The idea of reading data in someone's S3 bucket or inspecting what is happening inside of someone's EC2 instance in any way was unthinkable. Amazon is huge and imperfect, but from what I saw AWS takes data privacy extremely seriously.
In this case, tech investing and online retailing are not the same industry. Amazon is using a dominance in one to fund the other, which then it uses to either drive valuations of potential competitors down or to simply outcompete them.
And that's a plausible antitrust problem.
I'm normally not in the Amazon haters camp. Most of the time I'll defend them against the typical charges of unfair competition. Not this time. This is sketchy.
It's not. And there are plenty of trainings inside of Amazon to make you aware of that. It is your fault, in the end, to not report your team. I have been on several teams at Amazon and this would always be an absolute no-go. It's already difficult to even get basic ideas about customer data, things that you would consider "essential" to improving the customer experience.
Talk about all time gaslighting. It's the managers/directors job to ensure compliance, not normal employees.
That is totally false.
Conspiracy requires two elements: an agreement to commit a crime, and an act in furtherance of said crime. There is nothing unlawful about looking the other way. You might be a scumbag, but that's a different problem.
The elements of criminal accessory require one to harbor, conceal, or act in such a way as to help someone avoid or escape arrest or punishment (CA law here, other states may be different). Again, merely "looking the other way" is not an act. Otherwise, anyone who merely witnessed a crime could be charged with criminal accessory.
That said, corporate policy might be quite different. If I look the other way while a colleague violates customer security policies (and I'm aware of such violation), I can justifiably be fired.
*Not giving legal advice, seek licensed counsel in your jurisdiciton.
Before going into our AWS production S3 buckets, looking at our databases for customer lists AWS seems to be pretty careful to get an OK.
Now we are being told that production customer data was normal to trawl? How in the HELL are they passing all their certs with all production data so wide open. I do customer managed keys - I mean, this is a HUGE backdoor.
Either Amazon is lying about AWS security (and has fooled a bunch of others) or routinely trawling AWS customer production workloads for data is a false statement.
How are they trawling through all our buckets and databases without codepaths for access?
Again, they aren't talking about amazon data (ie, billing, support inquiries etc). They are talking about customer production data.
This isn't amazon billing data etc (obviously I expect they analyze that carefully given they bring in billions from billing). To ROUTINELY go through AWS customer production datasets is beyond all reason.
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.
Even if the customer had a misconfigured S3 bucket that was exposed to the public, it would still constitute as accessing customer data you're not meant to see.
As other users have provided insight on, everything you do as an Amazon employee basically leaves a trail with your employee ID, even if you had access to private information (which you wouldn't basically because it's locked behind several layers of security). Fireable and sueable offense which Amazon would definitely not allow, let alone endorse.
That might be true in retail, but it wasn't anywhere close to true in AWS. When I left most engineers still had SSH access to the production hosts (and a not-insignificant portion of operations relied on that fact).
There are many easy mechanisms to audit and monitor SSH sessions. So... no?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
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 power to withdraw consent over how our labour will be used and, as software developers, we've got a strong enough employment market that we have real power to help make companies behave better - power that folks working in the warehouse are absolutely deprived of.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/03/why-amazon-paid-no-federal-i...
There's specific credits/exemptions in the tax code that they are able to exploit (and perhaps they can only exploit some of them _because_ they are a big company), but it really isn't about their size.
Can we please stop arguing like influencing is only true if it is done in the most direct way (similar to the quid pro quo debate). Obviously if big company lobbyists try to get tax law in their favour they are not pushing for "please write a law which exempts companies over N employees from taxes." They push for laws that sound innocent but only they will be able to take advantage of, just like it is at the moment. The outcome is still the same they pay less or zero taxes.
You're a fish, eat other fish and evolve into a shark, you eat other sharks and become a whale shark, you start eating everything and then become godzilla.
A whistle blower isn't going to fix this. This is the system. The system MAKES godzilla sharks like this.
Oh yeah sure a whistle blower will do what? Get amazon fined for how much? Then they just change tactics. Outsource. Make agreements and partnerships and farm out doing the same thing just with different proxies. I mean come on man this is a company that can buy other countries.
And let's not forget Microsoft was pulling the same shit until they got put under the same charges and then all of a sudden years later after Bill got tired of stabilizing his empire and making sure it would live without him he became a saint all of a sudden. Cuz like yeah if I was richer than 99% of the people on the planet yeah I could start being a nicer person and shit too.
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.
Don't ask someone to admit to felonies over email. Tech employers have a LOT of power to investigate their employees' digital behavior.
How about this instead: https://www.nytimes.com/tips
Previous discussion of Amazon releasing a Basics version of an item at half the price:
Patents were used, in many cases, as a form of research into a new area.
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.
There's no legal reason to worry about being influenced by a patent. The only concern might be boxing your creativity where you can't think of alternative solutions to a problem once you've seen one solution. That doesn't seem like a strong enough reason for a blanket policy.
IANAL but this confuses me.
https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2016/06/supreme-court-u...
https://www.ip-watch.org/2016/07/26/us-high-court-restores-t...
(Of course: not a lawyer, this is not legal advice)
Your experience matches mine. I think it might even be somewhere in the mandatory periodic training.
Doing a patent search as a software engineer can only hurt you. Better just to route any questions to product counsel.
I've heard the same thing in startups and other companies. This is not something unique to Google.
Unfortunately the way patent law works now, make patents usually not work unless someone is ignoring the law.
Patents were created to give a reason for people to publish their "secret sauce" in a public manner, so anyone could read and copy them or create new products based on the patent.
If you DON'T want your product copied, the correct course of action instead is make it secret, for example this is what Coca-Cola does (they rarely, if ever, patent their products, and they hide the best they can their recipes and processes)
Contemporary article: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/06/business/06coke.html
More dramatized version with info from court proceedings: https://thehustle.co/coca-cola-stolen-recipe
I was certainly naive when I heard about other big retailers who would refuse to allow any subcontractors to use AWS. "Surely Amazon has a Chinese wall" to prevent that kind of data sharing, I thought. Never underestimate the lack of morals in business is the right answer I guess.
It’s remarkable to me how many competent programmers with years or decades experience in this industry don’t understand —- If you’re using AWS, Amazon has access to ALL of the data you put on AWS.
Not that they 'can' or 'want to', given the current state of technology they absolutely have to have access to all your data for AWS to function.
There isn’t currently a feasible technical way to work around this. And to head off all the ‘but FHE’ comments, see the ‘currently feasible’ above.
Access records for public services have a very detailed iam audit trail that logs people who accessed what at what time, and service teams don't get to just jump around that. Maybe they can see some metadata but certainly not actual data in an S3 bucket somewhere.
Even with ‘enclaves’, from what admittedly little I know about them, you still have to have the key to decrypt things on the machine somewhere, which means whoever is running that machine for you has access to your unencrypted data, and we’re back where we started.
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 that.
But to look at s3 data would risk the entire empire.
It's rational for people to be a bit skeptical, and so Walmart can say 'no data on AWS' but it's also an easy thing to do.
Now - is it possible that new retail PM, who used to be an AWS PM, and who for some reason still had access to things he shouldn't - went ahead and did that? That could happen. And maybe his boss finds out and looks the other way but calls IT and tries to have the loophole closed quietly. Etc.
As a policy are they trying to copy your product and even ask you for information and aggressively pursue customer data? Yes.
As a policy are they looking at your S3/ec2 data - no.
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.
I think the original Netscape folks would disagree with your assessment of M$ sherlocking competence.
How would a startup that was concerned of Amazon copying it be certain to avoid such surveillance other than running its own data center?
It's not just my experience. Talking to startups and warehouses in Canada, the stories are all about how Shopify invites for friendly talks and then stonewalls you once they have got the required information
https://www.wsha.org/policy-advocacy/legislative/u-s-congres...
(ignore the odd source of the link. it's the only place I could find her CoS and District Director's email addresses.)
It definitely feels scummy, but it didn't sound like GP had access to evidence of a crime. IANAL.
See this helpful FTC page: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
This is where End User Agreements may be worth checking. There may be a specific clause AWS customers agree to.
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.
*typo
I read it as they scraped user databases to get email addresses and the like.
Violating Anti-trust statues isn't criminal...but it is still illegal. Anti-trust violations also aren't the only potential laws this would violate. It sounds like it would violate unfair trade practices as well (most states has statues/laws/codes on point).
The above statement may be "true" if you redefine what is confidential. The Amazon MNDA in past years basically said that they could use any information they remembered from the meeting. I read non-disclosures carefully. I've never seen anything like it.
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. :)
https://www.vox.com/2017/3/29/15112314/amazon-shutting-down-...
The economic and reputation cost Amazon would take in ever accessing customer data to come up with some competing B-list product (say ElasticSearch as a managed service) is astronomical compared to potential profits. One thing I know about that company... they care about optimizing profit and are long term focused.
Please provide evidence for your extraordinary claim.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/amazon...
1. This article is behind paywall, but thanks for posting.
2. EVERYONE should ask for evidence for any/all unsubstantiated claims, no matter where on the opinion spectrum they sit.
1. Someone needs to pay the people who write stories. If proof is important you should not object to contributing to the people who work on your behalf.
The customer data on Amazon Retail is Amazon's, not the seller's , just like the customer data when you buy shampoo from Walmart is Walmart's, not Procter&Gamble's
How is that confidential information if it's hosted on their own servers?
We mostly only do CI type stuff there, so that didn't work so well for them, but if most of our revenue & operational use was through AWS, you bet I'd be worried about what they could infer.
For example, my previous company brought our 6DOF MonoSLAM SDK, 3D model processor and OpenGL viewer to Amazon from 2014-2017 pitching the "AR View" functionality that they eventually put in 2017 [1].
Was that a result of us coming and pitching it? Probably not because that use case and stack wasn't a novel concept even back to 2010. So the concept and stack was certainly there for them to do on their own.
What we DID provide to Amazon however was a significant data point (based on our user velocity/interaction metrics and the rate of increase of 3D model generation from retailers) about whether the market was ready for that feature - and so they said ok it's probably time to do this. It just so happened that the cost of implementing it crashed to basically "trivial" in 2017 with the introduction of ARKit and so it was a no-brainer for them to roll out for a few years.
What's the takeaway? These big companies aren't dumb, your idea isn't that novel and they probably have the team and technology to do it better than you for cheaper.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/1/16590160/amazon-furniture...
This is only partially true. The thing is that even if your idea _is_ novel, giants like AWS can launch a similar product after seeing yours and thats a problem, imo.
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 launched yet and are taking so long.
It’s pretty wild, the hardware on their launch page is exactly like ours, only they're so slow that it’s a copy of two versions ago and hasn’t even hit the market.
Unfortunately someone like Amazon using their size and market power to produce copycats is the opposite of perfect competition since they can operate at a loss or at cost and starve out any newcomers.
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.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=20657644011
It might not be hitting market due to lack of interest. The way I "solve" this today is to just send myself an email when I think I need to order something, then order it next time I check my email... works pretty good.
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?
What a bunch of conceit. I don't remember our team discussing DefinedCrowd even once. We focused on the many other more interesting players that are doing the same thing, and researching them by trying out their service etc. like anyone normally would.
I'm sure someone talked with DefinedCrowd 4 years before that. Amazon, like all other tech companies, routinely has NDA conversations with startups that never go anywhere.
I can't speak to the rest of the article, but the very first example is totally false. WSJ is looking for an angle, and this startup is probably looking for a way to blame Amazon for their own execution problems.
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, and then started building a direct competitor while still presumably having both access and influence over that company. Doesn't seem responsible or ethical to me.
"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"
A) copy; B) buy; C) sue
you're always violating some patents by IBM and the like, sometimes they don't want to compete with a product only to get you off the table... and sometimes they can do that easily
Oh, and there is the enterprise variation (option D?): talk with the costumers and demand that they stop working with the competition
I've definitely seen the same thing happen – an org that isn't sure it can build function X well might invest in a startup building X just in case.
Of course, they may or may not take advantage of that situation by misusing confidential information.
Either way the startup could lose (or just not have much negotiating power).
So yeah, sounds like this may not be a case of AMZN misbehaving. But I'm still not sure I'd want to talk to them if I were a startup, at least until I know they really need us and are willing to pay a lot.
I suspect, but don't know directly, that this investment was more about trying to jumpstart an ecosystem of third-party Echo devices rather than hedging bets.
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 got access to Nucleus’s financials, strategic plans and other proprietary information, these people said. Eight months later, Amazon announced its Echo Show device, an Alexa-enabled video-chat device that did many of the same things as Nucleus’s product.
Nucleus’s founders and other investors were furious. One of the founders held a conference call with some investors to seek advice. He said there was no way his small company could compete against Amazon in the consumer space, according to people on the phone call, and began brainstorming ways to pivot his company’s product.
An Amazon spokeswoman said that the Alexa Fund told Nucleus about its plans for an Echo with a screen before taking a stake in the company. Several people on the Nucleus side of the deal disputed that.
Before Amazon introduced its product, the Nucleus device was sold at major retailers such as Home Depot, Lowe’s and Best Buy. Once the Echo began selling, those sales declined sharply and retailers stopped placing orders, said two people involved in the deal.
Nucleus threatened to sue Amazon, which settled with Nucleus for $5 million without admitting wrongdoing, according to people familiar with the settlement. Both sides agreed not to discuss the matter.
Nucleus reoriented its product to the health-care market, where it has struggled to gain traction, some of those people said."
Wow, Gavin Belson must be furious.
life imitating art
If I were a founder or board member I’d be super skeptical about ever taking money from Amazon in light of this news.
If this isn’t illegal it at least seems wildly unethical. If it’s neither of those and considered an acceptable tactic, then perhaps companies are generally undervaluing themselves otherwise it wouldn't be financially feasible?
To me, that sounds like the startup just wasn't able to perform well enough to beat an AWS-built solution, in the eyes of an executive.
Of course, if I were doing a startup that played in AWS's space, I'd view them as a pretty formidable competitor and I wouldn't expect to get a great deal from an investment or acquisition from them, since unless I have a really special sauce they can probably build whatever we've done and sell it better.
It's shitty, IMO, and probably drives startups away from a field in which they could sell to AMZN – since they know they won't get an awesome deal. Probably reduces innovation in the field overall.
I believe it was the very first (much copied) automatic face swap app
A-hole’s app: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/face-swap/id555094868
Bit of background to making the app in this interview if anyone’s interested: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/face-juggler-6f79cf6f...
Lol what a jackass
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.
Short story: Amazon representative tried to trick influencer into sending their traffic without compensation.
Long story:
At the time, I commercially represented an influencer (largest in a mainstream niche with an active targeted fanbase) who had been approached by Amazon to sell access to our online course on Amazon (as in: let customers buy a coupon code for our content platform). The paperwork we received to sign did not reflect the terms we had negotiated. It included some kind of fees etc. that had never been mentioned, basically shifting percentage in favour of Amazon using fine-print. This felt dishonest.
We decided to do it anyway due to their promises of considerable sales for our program including projections. Then the representative showed us a listing of a direct competitor and told us the number of sales this competitor was able to generate. While it's nice to be on the receiving end of such information, it's unethical. Who knows how truthful the numbers were anyway.
But then the week of deals started and nothing happened. No sales.
This could have had many causes but instead of revisiting the offer or the listing or just say "bad luck", the representative kept insisting that the influencer send their traffic to Amazon which is usually a business transaction but that wasn't part of the deal. They kept insisting anyway, even a second representative.
I'm not keen on doing business with Amazon after that encounter.
The sour grapes here seem to be coming from those who thought they “owned” having an idea but failed to fully execute on it. The winner is the one who actually does it.
When you want to buy a company it's because you want to launch yourself into that field.
It's a common mistake to be lured into talks that drag out for weeks and months.
If they are serious it will start with an offer.
RFP, then build in-house.
I mean, I'm betting Facebook's "Small Business Grant" program is going to harvest that data and put it to use too.
As a startup, if your only defensibility is that you had a head start in product development, that's not much of a moat.
s/pretty/petty/Is that still the case?
I've seen people try to play this game. They'll pretend they want to buy you/partnership/invest/be a client and then ask pointed questions: "What dependencies are you using on your backend for XYZ ... have you found any issues with that? If you were going to rewrite it, how would you approach it?"
In the weeds questions about detailed implementation. "Do you have a detailed architecture diagram?" etc. People who haven't seen it are like "boy they are serious. Look at their diligence"
These people need to up their street smarts game: "Nah bro, they're just stealing shit."
How do you know? Check who's in the room/on the call. Ask yourself what kind of decisions these people would make. Find out who they are.
Amazon has been actually pretty light with this practice. They're pretty picky but the right people have been in the room and they haven't really gone deep into the spy questions. The real nasty violators are companies like uber and microsoft. I wouldn't be surprised if they had actual corporate spy departments.
We had GM try to do it but they were bumblers. It was kinda cute. It also seems to be mostly American. I've dealt with a lot of Japanese and Chinese businesses and they were all genuine. If they said they wanted a partnership for reason X, then they indeed want a partnership for reason X.
If they want to steal the tech and go to other markets then there's clear nonexclusive and rights parts of the contract. It's not the "100% lies all the way down" of Uber.
You can't stop someone seeing what you offer, and it's hard to prevent competitors from seeing how successful you are, especially giving the lack of privacy in consumer space. In this article, we don't know if Amazon used any IP, we are told they just copied the offering, which anyone is free to try.
I bet the problem with DefinedCrowd is not so much they revealed too much, rather they revealed too little. How so? The VC dance is really about demonstrating to the uncertain backer-competitor that you are so good, it's not worth competing. That's a main point to inviting outside parties in. I imagine these guys were just so weak, they made competition more appealing that partnership.
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.
Also I get that Amazon has much more resources but if they there able to copy it after one meeting... Was your project really that valuable? And would not be copied then you launched?
They look if they should buy or build.
Ideas don't really mean much if you don't have excellent, industry leading execution.
At the time, this was referred to as a "brainfuck" of smaller companies for their IP.
The volume of concepts that are being actively worked on, let alone conceived, is pretty incredible. I've been in Amazon meetings with startups before/during talks of investing. Usually it goes something like this:
There are multiple principle engineers involved. There are multiple engineers from potentially related projects involved. Most of the decision making boils down to: - the obvious: would this investment likely be profitable? - does investing/acquiring this company enable us to ship sooner/gain a competitive advantage?
Often times Amazon prefers to acquire companies not directly operating in the space Amazon needs them to, and then steering them to do what Amazon needs. Often times it's just talent acquisition.
For all we know, Amazon already had competing products in the works (and let's be real, given how slowly Amazon moves, this is the most likely scenario) and decided that this investment wouldn't be worth it.
In all that time I never saw any hint of anything even remotely unethical involving investments or M&A at my acquirer/employer. The company always played strictly by the rules, sometimes to an almost excessive degree (avoiding even the possible appearance of impropriety). This was both innately cultural, constantly preached from the BOD to CEO on down, as well as tactical since the reputational cost of negative perception was simply considered too high. Word gets around the valley fast. The invisible cost of the potential partner or startup that chooses to pass on meeting with us due to reputation could be very high.
That said, we would negotiate hard and do our due diligence, gathering public information in every legit way possible as we evaluated potential markets, product areas, acquisitions, partnerships and investments. Tons of startups were always contacting us to meet regarding investment, licensing, partnership, etc. So many that we'd actually meet with far less than 1 in 10, and even we'd usually just send a junior staffer to the mtg for a "first pass".
Those first mtgs were almost always set up as NNPI (No Non-Public Info). We'd actually have the startup sign a doc in advance stating that they wouldn't share anything with us that wasn't already public info. This was then re-iterated at the beginning of the mtg. Afterward the junior staffer would then circulate a brief memo on the mtg outlining if there were any areas of interest and recommending whether there should be any follow-up with actual business unit or tech people with domain expertise. Most such mtgs had no follow-up. In the cases where there was follow-up, before mtg again we'd internally specify what our possible interests were (acquisition, investment, partnership, etc) and if acquisition or investment we'd have at least a first-pass thesis on what our interest was, usually at the level of "interesting tech", "good talent", "cool product - might slot into XYZ product line."
Back when I was a fledgling startup founder on the other side of all this, it was sort of mysterious and I remember my first mtgs with Big Cos (including Google, Apple, Intel, Microsoft, etc). It was all very exciting until I realized that most of these 'first sniff' mtgs are with junior people and never go anywhere.
Even if my acquirer/employer was unique in being highly ethical, the reality is that any startup founder who isn't intensely aware of the risk of Big Co becoming a competitor is incredibly naive. If senior Big Co execs are taking time to meet with you (vs junior Big Co staffers), it's because they are interested in something. As a founder, your job is to figure out what why they are interested. Sometimes they are just making small investments to foster an ecosystem their primary business relies on. Or they might be interested in acqui-hiring your startup. Or they might be looking at moving into the emerging market you're in and doing a Build vs Buy analysis or even considering a roll-up of smaller firms. Or they might be looking at buying one of your competitors and doing market due diligence. As a Big Co exec, I'd usually just tell a startup founder point-blank what my interest was, as it tends to save everyone time.
Often the startup founders I'd talk to as a BigCo exec were actually too guarded, to the extent they'd hesitate to even informally have a 'get acquainted' drink at a conference or trade show. It's good to be cautious but at the same time, many of my most lucrative exits and deals began with such meetings. As a founder, I also often learned invaluable info from Big Co people at such informal mtgs. After all, Big Co folks tend to hear all the industry scuttle-butt and they actually subscribe to ALL those $10k market data reports us startup guys could never afford.
Bottom line: when engaging with Big Cos, ask good questions, rationally evaluate the benefits vs risks, plan for the worst and hope for the best.
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.
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.
Its the job of Amazon to guesstimate your worth.
A billionaire will get away with shit, if they can.
Yes, they were definitely naive if they shared confidential data easily.
No one should trust the big three. (AWS, GCP, Azure)
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!
Also, it's a flawed abstraction to view large companies as a monolith: the investing arms are usually very separated from product teams.
TLDR: If a large company wants to enter a space, that's their choice. Accept this as a fact of life if you want to go work on a startup.
All that time I thought: next week someone else is going to clue in to this, it is so obvious. But nobody ever did.
You can read more about it here:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-several-million-dollar-bug/
So I totally believe that the seed for the idea came from somewhere else.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/content/story-behind-wwcom-camar...
This seems to work:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/story-behind-wwcom-camaradescom/
I agree though that it’s not as sinister as it initially seems. Companies create competition at times to stimulate product development even though it’s a shitty operating mode for the ground soldiers involved. In that case though they’re spending entirely of their own resources and not leeching off other investments to actively undermine a successful exit.
Perhaps startups are undervaluing their IP if this behavior is able to manifest easily. And in light of this news I’d be super hesitant as a board to allow any money from Amazon whatsoever.