I was a senior manager on the very first product the article talks about. I was closely involved in designing the service and presenting it to Amazon senior leadership. WSJ quotes the CEO of a startup called DefinedCrowd as accusing us of stealing their ideas from a meeting 4 years earlier.

What a bunch of conceit. I don't remember our team discussing DefinedCrowd even once. We focused on the many other more interesting players that are doing the same thing, and researching them by trying out their service etc. like anyone normally would.

I'm sure someone talked with DefinedCrowd 4 years before that. Amazon, like all other tech companies, routinely has NDA conversations with startups that never go anywhere.

I can't speak to the rest of the article, but the very first example is totally false. WSJ is looking for an angle, and this startup is probably looking for a way to blame Amazon for their own execution problems.

DefinedCrowd is pretty successful actually, just so you know this isn't sour grapes. And it isn't about a meeting 4 years ago, the very first line of the article says that Amazon was an investor (at seed stage, probably a few hundred K).

So the problem isn't that someone heard about DefinedCrowd and decided years later to make something like it. Amazon made a significant investment in an early player in this space, and then started building a direct competitor while still presumably having both access and influence over that company. Doesn't seem responsible or ethical to me.

you mean NDAs that basically state that whatever you tell amazon belongs to amazon?