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Comment by kamikaz1k | Hacker News Reader

Short Explainer on the (potential) bloodsport tactics in play.[1]

> Amazon's coup against Flexport in the battle for logistics, in 12 months:

1. Dave Clark, 20+ year Amazon vet joins as CEO of Flexport

2. Amazon works out a deal with Shopify to partner on logistics, on the condition that Shopify exits logistics, i.e. sells Deliverr, a notoriously overpriced acquisition and unprofitable division

3. Dave buys Deliverr from Shopify, installs bureaucracyOS at Flexport

4. Dave leaves Flexport, same day Amazon announces its deal with Shopify

> Amazon removes Shopify as a fulfillment competitor and severely hobbles Flexport

I don’t know if Flexport is big enough to be a threat here, but would be some brutal shit if true.

[1] https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1699818506752287055?s=20

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Seems highly unlikely Dave Clark was a double agent installed by Amazon. Flexport only compete with a small part of Amazon, specifically Fulfilment by Amazon - hard to see them risking the massive blowback if discovered just to take down a company that doesn’t compete with either of their core businesses (amazon.com and AWS).

Much more likely he was just a bad CEO/bad hire. Often vets from mega-corps are terrible hires as C-suite types at startups, bringing all sorts of bureaucratic process and overspending, based on what they know from mega-corps.

Couldn't agree more with your comment. Sounds full conspiracy to think that Amazon would send in a double agent that somehow passed the filter for a small start up.

What is this world coming to that we think elections are stolen in a mass conspiracy or that large tech companies will somehow install puppet CEOs in a start ups in an effort to fight off a non-existential threat while negotiating a deal with a competitor at the same time (that would be contingent on this first deal happening).

People have too much time on their hands.

We live in a world where Crypto AG was a CIA front. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

Of regime changes in the 21st century over half of them were the result of some kind of coup (aka "conspiracy").

Or consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

Or: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Industry_r...

We live in a world where weird things happen.

Yeah and the timing is also easily explainable.

The board could have already had doubts, and when he lost a Shopify contract to Amazon, when arguably Shopify sells itself as the anti-Amazon, that only served to underscore he wasn’t the right person to lead the company.

Shopify may have been considering switching to amazon when they sold off deliverr. Otherwise, why sell it?

> a small part of Amazon, specifically Fulfilment by Amazon

Huh? FBA is a huge part of Amazon. It's one of the main reasons for Amazon existing without it you could only buy stuff that Amazon themselves stock ...

What? FBA is a key reason why Amazon.com is so dominant. It's the biggest part of their moat.

I wrote that tweet — what people are missing is that it doesn't have to be premeditated or explicit coordination to have the same result. The word "coup" probably ascribes too much intentionality.

1, 3, 4 are facts. The only item that is speculative is 2 but it seems obvious that Shopify would have used that lever in negotiating the partnership that was announced this week (buy with Prime + Amazon's logistics network).

In other words, you can draw your own conclusions about whether it was intentional, incompetence, or a series of selfish decisions that had the same emergent result.

Your tweet heavily implies intentionality.

To be clear, I don't think it was a conspiracy. Intentionality when applied to an organization on the scale of Amazon is weird. "Amazon" is not one thing, it's a million people each acting in their own self-interest and what they see being in the interest of the collective. The collective can respond to threats without explicit coordination, and destroy competitors completely incidentally.

I'm trying to think of a better word than "coup". Maybe it's just collateral damage.

I don't feel it's that weird? I think when people see references to [Company] taking an action, they understand it to mean the [Company] executive leadership.

Amazon is better thought of as a giant ant colony than a single organism.

Is bureaucracyOS a real thing or a metaphor?

It's a metaphor. For things like office politics, OKRs, etc.

And that starts as soon more than a dozen people work together. No ex Amazon excec needed.

OKRs are a good thing. They just get poorly implemented and turned into a political stew.

I know that sounds like the No True OKR paradox [1], but the truth is that it's not even that complicated. [2]

Write down the outcome you want, and then write down a few measurable milestones on the way. Make the whole thing ruthlessly concise. Make each key result objectively measurable. Go execute. Get together as a team occasionally to debate the whole thing and see if it needs to change.

That's the whole thing. No need to over-complicate it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ht_1VAF6ik, the whole system explained in 2 minutes by the OG himself

OKRs run into trouble as soon as they go from “this thing we’re already talking about looks like a good place to use OKRs—let’s come up with a couple to guide our effort” to “your business unit must produce and execute on X OKRs each quarter, and subordinate units must produce and execute on X OKRs supporting those parent OKRs, and you will all be judged based on the outcomes”.

The latter is what in-fact happens nearly everywhere, with predictable results that OKRs just end up as bureaucratic waste that distract from valuable work.

When tools become mandates, tools become obstacles. See also: agile.

> OKRs are a good thing

Our company ditched OKRs and we are running much faster. It turned out that people already knew, at any given point in time and to 95% accuracy, what's the most critical work to focus on. We didn't actually need to spend 3 weeks every quarter hammering out OKRs with dozens and dozens of goal-lists across teams (and then another 2 weeks at the end of the quarter doing OKR progress reviews), when the real thing to do was just to fix the Top N things that are broken, and then keep that short-list of top issues fresh every week.

"But, but... how can you make progress without quantitative quarterly goals?? That's outrageous!" Well, you know how those things that are always broken are now getting fixed? That's how.

In a small company that's relatively straightforward. In a small company you often will even be doing "decide what you want and measure progress against it" without putting a fancy name on it, though.

In a larger company the problem is connecting "person over here's day to day work in a thousand-person org among other orgs" with "CEO's goals for the year." And now you've got people problems that are harder to solve than "just get together and debate them" because it's near-impossible at that size not to have politics, and some people working in bad-faith because they're prioritizing personal objectives over company ones, etc. No need to over-complicate except for human nature.

The usual problem a startup hits of bringing in a big-company guy is that some of these execs have never seen the tools they like (whether it's OKRs or Agile or "make documents for proposals") outside of the context of the big company bureaucracy and politics and then they don't know how to implement them lightly and they end up bringing all the bloat with them which creates more politics than before.

> severely hobbles Flexport

everyone else seems to understand, but please explain to me how this set of events hobbles flexport? aside from the price, didn’t flexport just acquire a competitor in this process?

edit: oic, the chain of events is confused, like typical conspiracy theories are. #2 happened unbeknownst to flexport, with flexport thinking it’s all stock acquisition of deliverr comes with shopify as a significant customer.

https://apnews.com/article/shopify-fulfillment-flexport-ocad...

but it turns out shopify won’t be a customer of deliverr anymore.

why would shopify do that to themselves? since after the sale they own 15-18% of flexport, so hurting deliverr, hurting flexport, is self harm.

also, 13% (the purchase price) would represent about 1bn, half of the amount shopify acquired it for just a year ago

This sounds like the plot to an HBO show.

Afaik flexport does mostly freight forwarding which doesn't really compete with Amazon logistics.

Logistics is a weird, funny animal where companies compete against different companies in different arenas, and 3PL companies are sometimes also competing against their own suppliers.

But yeah, the major forwarders are places like Kuehne + Nagel, DSV, Expeditors, DHL Global Forwarding, DB Schenker, and UPS Supply Chain Solutions.

Curious if Clark had to give up any Amazon shares before taking the position at Flexport...

Sounds similar to how Microsoft killed Nokia.

The difference is that there’s no evidence that he did anything out of the ordinary at Flexport.

In the Nokia scenario, however, Elop published a memo which destroyed Nokia’s declining but still substantial business overnight (that memo alone probably cost Nokia hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in revenue…revenue they simply could not afford to lose), torpedoed the in-house effort Nokia had been working on and had ready to go, and worst of all, when choosing the external platform to depend on instead, chose the one that was not even close to being the market leader, did not allow Nokia anywhere near the same level of control or customization as the market leader, provided Nokia no input on the future of Windows Phone, and as a result predictably made Nokia phones almost exactly the same as rhe no name Chinese phones that were the only other phone makers using Windows Phone.

In Nokia’s case the simplest explanation for all these actions was a conspiracy. There’s no good way to explain Elop’s actions otherwise without doubting his mental acuity.

Nokia had far better cameras, etc. at the time. They wanted to compete on hardware quality.

It might have worked if Ballmer was still in charge. Nadella’s been heavily prioritizing cloud over operating systems platforms, though. It was unclear MS would do that back when Nokia bet on windows phone.

The Elop story is also a conspiracy theory.

Multiple then Nokia execs have come on the record about how while the decisions Elop made were in hindsight stupid, they at least made sense at the time.

Read "Transforming Nokia", "The Decline and Fall of Nokia", and "Operation Elop" to have a look inside Nokia at the time. Alternatively, talk to PMs and BDs who are ex-Nokia - there are plenty that still roam the Bay Area at top Infra, Cloud, and Security companies.

Please stop spreading unfounded rumors or speculation. Microsoft's failed partnership and acquisition of Nokia was not a conspiracy. My guess is the failure occurred because of bad luck, incompetence, and politics. I believe MS lost $7.5 billion on it.

Lol. This is small potatoes compater to the way Nokia was eloped

Hanlon's Razor seems appropriate here.

I think Amazon could have at any point just bought flex port if they had wanted. They are worth at most $10B right now, that’s Amazon pocket money.

Insane conspiracy level stretch of a theory.

Please do not make or spread these sorts of allegations without providing some VERY strong evidence.

The most likely explanation is the new CEO's strategy either did not work or the board and founder felt they had a strategy which would work better or have a better chance of working.

Basically, for better or worse, Dave Clark (the old CEO) and Flexport were probably just a poor fit.

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