THE PROBLEM WITH THE PLATFORMS
Giant tech companies love founders. Until they start getting too successful.
Jeremy Edberg has some advice: Don’t build a business on Amazon’s digital turf. Edberg, a veteran infrastructure architect for Netflix, Reddit, and PayPal, has seen the movie many times: A software startup launches, catering to the millions of companies that use Amazon Web Services, and quickly attracts customers—and then Amazon, with its God’s-eye view of its platform, spots it and trots out a cheaper product boasting full AWS integration. Within six months, the startup folds. But, contrary to his own advice, Edberg chose to build his new cloud-management startup, MinOps,
