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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, 2
by kamikaz1k 3y ago
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 https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1699818506752287055?s=20
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fallingknife 3y agoAfaik flexport does mostly freight forwarding which doesn't really compete with Amazon logistics.
- psunavy03 3y agoLogistics 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.
- StressedDev 3y agoPlease 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.
- jiveturkey 3y ago> 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-ocado-group-6b504d0d67acd2ad1af6348cd1ec6425 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
- dboreham 3y agoIs bureaucracyOS a real thing or a metaphor?
- mikekoscinski 3y agoIt's a metaphor. For things like office politics, OKRs, etc.
- hef19898 3y agoAnd that starts as soon more than a dozen people work together. No ex Amazon excec needed.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y agoOKRs 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ht_1VAF6ik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ht_1VAF6ik, the whole system explained in 2 minutes by the OG himself
- khazhoux 3y ago> 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.
- makestuff 3y agoThis sounds like the plot to an HBO show.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dpflan 3y agoCurious if Clark had to give up any Amazon shares before taking the position at Flexport...
- __derek__ 3y agoHanlon's Razor seems appropriate here.
- boringg 3y agoInsane conspiracy level stretch of a theory.
- yashap 3y agoSeems 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.
- CamelCaseName 3y agoWhat? FBA is a key reason why Amazon.com is so dominant. It's the biggest part of their moat.
- boringg 3y agoCouldn'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.
- carapace 3y agoWe live in a world where Crypto AG was a CIA front. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal Or: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Industry_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Industry_r... We live in a world where weird things happen.
- hedora 3y ago
- x86x87 3y agoLol. This is small potatoes compater to the way Nokia was eloped
- ecshafer 3y agoI 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.
- kepano 3y agoI 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.
- tqi 3y agoYour tweet heavily implies intentionality.
- kepano 3y agoTo 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.
- malermeister 3y agoSounds similar to how Microsoft killed Nokia.
- StressedDev 3y agoPlease 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.
- rhaway84773 3y agoThe 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.
- hedora 3y agoNokia 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.
- alephnerd 3y agoThe 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.