throwaway_aws

A clarification: I'm talking about tactics from 2010-2014. I left in 2015.

I wish I could reveal team and product name... but that would be a career suicide. I'm not asking you to believe what I'm saying... but I truly am sharing my experience. I'd encourage you to talk to folks you know from AWS who were there for last 8-10 years.

I joined after the team had gotten traction already. Both the GM and senior most product person on the team told me about their tactics independently.

To be honest, I didn't think of it as anything sinister at that time. AWS had such high octane culture to move fast and innovate that I actually felt what they had done was quite smart. It was a super competitive culture and people did whatever was needed to build new things. On a day to day basis the only pressure was to build... I don't remember instances where ethical guidelines were brought up. So, in a way, the outcomes were a result of what people were rewarded on.

Only after I left AWS I started thinking it was ethically iffy. I still believe Amazon is an amazing company and my time at AWS was one of the best learning experiences.

"An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products"

Maybe...but in the past, AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped & targeted customer list of those hosted products. In fact, I was on a team in AWS that did exactly that. Why wouldn't their investing arm do the same?

They poached because it was a lucrative business. AWS’ sales pitch was that their service was so much better integrated with the underlying infra. Also, they priced out the competition and offered generous discount for bundling with additional AWS services.

As for talking to journalists, I didn't leave with any ill will and don't want to complicate my life. I personally know a friend who got involved with journalists... his past employer came to know about it, sued him... and he became almost unemployable in the valley.

Edit: fixed a typo

Throwaway account for obvious reasons.

In the past, AWS has used the data from third party hosted services on AWS to build a similar service and in fact start poaching their customers.

Source: I used to be at AWS and know the PM & his manager who built a service this way. I was hired on that team.