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Comment by yashap | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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?

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