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Zoox raised almost a billion so terrible exit for the investors, who basically just parked their money for several years. Zoox likely ran out of money and nobod
by whoisjuan 6y ago
Zoox raised almost a billion so terrible exit for the investors, who basically just parked their money for several years. Zoox likely ran out of money and nobody wants to keep dumping money in this space given the anemic progress in the last couple of years.
But here is an interesting take. Amazon is an formidable acquirer and probably the only big-tech that knows how to squeeze from their M&A activity.
They probably saw this years ahead. Many companies were going to develop technology in this space and it was likely better to acquire one of those than to develop in-house. And the reason is very simple: Amazon doesn’t invest in greenfield projects that are not customer facing. Look it up. Almost all the behind the scenes impressive tech they have was acquired at certain time.
For example. AWS proprietary chips come from their acquisition of Annapurna Labs.
All their warehouse robotics come from their acquisition of Kiva Systems.
All their modern video tech comes from their acquisition of Elemental.
Their customer facing acquisitions also play a similar playbook but in a more -fill the market gap- kind of way. “We need a supermarket, let’s buy Whole Foods”.
“We need routers for the Alexa ecosystem, let’s buy Eero”.
Also kind of interesting that they are an opportunistic buyer (almost vulturous) that most of the times only pulls the trigger when the acquisition target is in their lows.
- mav3rick 6y agoThis is clearly just cherry picking. They did NLP + Echo + Alexa in house. Cloud / servicification on their own.
- yomly 6y agoThose are customer facing mostly no?
- whoisjuan 6y agoThat’s customer facing. Read my comment again. I’m talking about non-customer facing / utilitarian technology that is used to facilitate their customer facing services and products.
- discodave 6y agoAnnapurna is customer facing now with Graviton. Also, we don't know how much they invest after acquisition. I think Annapurna was more strategic than you think. * James Hamilton in 2010: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/10/datacenter-networks-are-in-my-way/ https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/10/datacenter-network... * Annapurna acquired in 2015. * In 2017 they reveal that every EC2 server has a Nitro (Annapurna) chip for networking: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtualization-2017.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtuali...
- whoisjuan 6y agoYeah. I guess you could say that’s customer facing. In any case is not a purely customer-facing acquisition like for example AWS acquiring Cloud9 so they could offer a Web IDE. Chips are peculiar because they matter a lot in a customer facing way but they are not a 100% transparent feature. I think AWS customers couldn’t care less what their instances are powered by as long as they are 1) Fast 2) Cheap 3) Secure. But the chip happens to influence those things heavily, so they become almost like referential values to aggregate those characteristics in a way that’s easy to market.
- re 6y ago> They did NLP + Echo + Alexa in house. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evi_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evi_(software)
- ritz_labringue 6y agoYour parent is specifically talking about greenfield projects that are not customer facing. Alexa/Echo is customer facing.
- WoahNoun 6y ago>Amazon buys text-to-speech software company Ivona https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-ivona/amazon-buys-text-to-speech-software-company-ivona-idUSBRE90N0T020130124 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-ivona/amazon-buys-... >Amazon to acquire Yap, move into speech recognition? https://www.theverge.com/2011/11/9/2550764/amazon-acquires-yap-speech-recognition-siri https://www.theverge.com/2011/11/9/2550764/amazon-acquires-y... >Amazon has reportedly acquired Evi for voice-guided search https://www.engadget.com/2013-04-17-amazon-may-have-quietly-acquired-evi-for-voice-guided-search.html https://www.engadget.com/2013-04-17-amazon-may-have-quietly-...
- throw24234 6y ago> Also kind of interesting that they are an opportunistic buyer (almost vulturous) that most of the times only pulls the trigger when the acquisition target is in their lows. Unsurprising since Bezos himself worked in a Hedge fund. The Autonomous Driving hype train is slowing down, so this is the perfect opportunity for this move. Interestingly, with this move, Bezos can soon rival Musk for the next 'billionaire super genius rock star' position.
- zxcmx 6y agoThey both want a planet. Musk wants to take over Mars. Bezos wants to take over Earth.
- redredrobot 6y agoActually if you pay a little attention to Bezos, it's clear that his focus has been outer space at least since he was a college student. IMO Amazon was an opportunity that Bezos saw while Blue Origin is the fulfillment of his lifelong dream.
- throwaway1777 6y agoSo if it’s his dream when does he start actually focusing on it?
- redredrobot 6y agoWhat do you mean? Prior to COVID I thought Bezos had his full attention on Blue Origin
- simonh 6y agoAbout 9 years ago when they started development of the BE-4. Up until then Blue Origin was mainly a think tank and research project. I've been quite dismissive of Blue Origin in the past, their pace of development seemed so sluggish compared to SpaceX, but I think that was somewhat unfair. It seems Bezos only really started pouring money into the project a few years ago though. BE-34 does seem to be behind schedule, or at least the launch vehicles are by a year or two, but that's par for the course for big rockets.
- redredrobot 6y ago> Amazon doesn’t invest in greenfield projects that are not customer facing I don't think this is very true, they are just very good at turning around and selling the internal tech. The underlying technology for AWS was developed internally and it was not customer facing at first. Similarly if you look at their internal data platforms, they have invested heavily even though it's not customer facing (yet, because eventually they will start selling services inspired by the internal systems via AWS). I remember watching a presentation on how they invested large amounts of money into prototyping FC robotics technologies. If you look at AWS Kinesis or EventBridge, the technologies were developed for internal usage before they were sold. There is also considerable investment into distributed consensus technologies that hasn't been turned directly into products (yet). You're kind of right in that Amazon doesn't spend much time working on greenfield projects that don't have any forseeable business value (in contrast to say Google), but that is in many way a product of their organizational structure where two-pizza teams are supposed to do 'research' as part of their product work rather than having a pure R&D division.
- 7952 6y agoWasn't there an edict that amazon internal services have to be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. So even internal technology is designed with being customer facing in mind.
- TheCoelacanth 6y agoDoes than mandate predate the creation of AWS?
- xxpor 6y agoAccording to the Yegge rant, it was some time around 2001/2002/2003, so yes. https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
- strgcmc 6y agoThere is no mandate that I'm aware of (not that I know everything about everything), but it's definitely the case that projects with "externalization potential" (making up a phrase out of thin air) will generally be more likely to get funded and prioritized (of course, why wouldn't they be preferred?). So, even without a mandate, the market forces at play in terms of proposing roadmap projects and choosing what to invest in, will naturally tend to favor those solutions with can pull double-duty (solve an immediate problem/pain-point that Amazon already has, and with a clear path/potential to be converted into or evolve into an external sell-able service too).
- Lavery 6y ago>Amazon is an formidable acquirer and probably the only big-tech that knows how to squeeze from their M&A activity. Not really sure how you're using "squeeze" here, but Instagram and Whatsapp were both, with the benefit of hindsight, phenomenally successful acquisitions.
- whoisjuan 6y agoI agree with you. Instagram was an excellent acquisition. WhatsApp was an OK acquisition, not because is not a great product or good ecosystem play, but mostly because it came at a premium price and it hasn't been monetized yet.
- jkingsbery 6y agoAs someone who works for Amazon, I can tell you there is plenty of impressive technology built within Amazon that is only used internally to Amazon.