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There's no way to really know how true this is but it certainly feels true if you're on the startup side - however most startups just aren't being realistic wit

There's no way to really know how true this is but it certainly feels true if you're on the startup side - however most startups just aren't being realistic with themselves, and thinking they are special. 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-placement-ar-feature-too https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/1/16590160/amazon-furniture...

guessbest 6y ago
Why even pitch the idea to big companies then? Seems like a no brainer to just avoid discussing technology with anyone on the M&A team of any large company with an development team, unless you went to the same college as their executive staff.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  To try and sell it to them.
- twic 6y ago
  Because that's where the money is.
VRay 6y ago
I dunno if they can necessarily do a better or cheaper job. A lot of the engineers at these megacorps are super burned out 9-to-5ers who don't particularly care about what they're doing, since it won't have that big an impact on their lives one way or the other if it succeeds. ("Woo, 20% bonus this year" vs "Team's being reorged, gotta hit up leetcode and find another corporate job")
mkagenius 6y ago
> 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. 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.

guessbest 6y ago

Why even pitch the idea to big companies then? Seems like a no brainer to just avoid discussing technology with anyone on the M&A team of any large company with an development team, unless you went to the same college as their executive staff.

IshKebab 6y ago
To try and sell it to them.
twic 6y ago
Because that's where the money is.

VRay 6y ago

I dunno if they can necessarily do a better or cheaper job. A lot of the engineers at these megacorps are super burned out 9-to-5ers who don't particularly care about what they're doing, since it won't have that big an impact on their lives one way or the other if it succeeds. ("Woo, 20% bonus this year" vs "Team's being reorged, gotta hit up leetcode and find another corporate job")

mkagenius 6y ago

> 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. 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.