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Comment by milesward | Hacker News Reader

This is such a dick move. Ex-AWS superstars built https://www.soracom.io/, made AWS folks aware, who balked at a deal. Example 1198170892703973...

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Amazon is known for doing this to early startups. They "partner" with a small team, learn what they do, and then copy it which screws the original team.

They have teams of lawyers so suing them does no good.

EDIT: I assumed this was a partnership. I have no clue if they partnered here. Just speaking broadly after watching a couple of my founder friends get screwed by Amazon.

Have they "partnered" with Soracom?

https://partners.amazonaws.com/fr/partners/001E000001In3e0IA....

Maybe it doesn't count as partner, maybe it does.

Tons of companies are in this space, e.g. https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-business-launches...

So it seems odd to call out AWS that they should have partnered with soracom or they aren't being ethical.

I think the idea is that AWS is slimy for rejecting a deal with a startup and then launching a competitive product. There's a difference between independently coming up with an idea versus transparently copying someone else's idea. Of course, we can't be certain that the AWS folks who launched Private 5g were even aware of the Soracom deal offer, but the optics certainly aren't favorable.

... a startup founded entirely by prior successful team members, all friendlies.

I don’t really follow you here. Is soracom entitled to 100% market share?

It seems odd that some HN folks think idea is patentable

Soracom's offerings look to resemble those of Particle's[1]. How are they related to AWS Private 5g?

1. https://www.particle.io/

Interesting, didn't Soracom end up going to KDDI in 2017? Is KDDI even getting rid of them / are they even for sale now or was this an old deal?

$187M for an exit is not that large. Were they offering a price in that range to AWS?

It feels a bit like some of the AWS IoT offerings are throw stuff at wall style.

No, the balk happened then, in 2017 AFAIK.

OK, that makes sense. That exit was not huge, would be interesting to compare price they wanted from AWS vs market price they got. AWS may have missed out if they were willing to go with AWS for less than they got.

I'm not THAT blown away by AWS offerings, they feel like copies of a couple of players offerings and at least when I last looked not THAT polished up. That said, plenty of folks will use AWS because they are already there. But it does feel like space for other still here maybe.

Disclosure: I work for AWS, but I don't work directly on AWS Private 5G.

I mean, it sounds like they / their investors were shopping and the KDDI offer of what was reported [1] to be $180 million won? Who's to say if AWS participated in that or not (I, speaking only for myself, have no knowledge on this). I don't understand at all why you think that this is anything unusual or nefarious, and it seems like the founders got a good exit regardless?

[1] https://thebridge.jp/en/2017/08/kddi-to-acquire-soracom

These aren’t even the same offering. AWS’s main selling point here is that they provide the 5G hardware like antennas, etc and create your own 5G network. Soracom just provides you a SIM and piggybacks off of existing 5G networks.

As in, I'd love to see how much english from the marketing/docs/etc are just straight lifted from Soracom.

Well for one Soracom's homepage doesn't mention 5G (or private 5G) once...

Probably not as inexpensive, and not a great deal, as the original Redshift was, I guess.

Yup, Ken is not an ignorant negotiator. Happily they had a very good exit with KDDI, but it just sits with me wrong. Hugs Simone!!

Amazon is the scummiest of the major tech companies, this is well known.

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