Amazon-Zoox Deal Details Leak And Hint At Expensive Acquihire

The price can be that astronomical because it’s a lot of work and time to build a talented team of this size in Silicon Valley or anywhere else in the world.

Now, since Amazon has no business in self-driving, with only a few minor projects publicly revealed such as their Scout delivery robot and an investment in Aurora, they clearly want to have a robotic transportation arm, so they are buying the product as well as the team. This is in no way a pure-acquihire, and probably not even mostly one. The terms reveal, however, that it is at least partly one. This leaves in the open the question of just what Amazon wants to do with the technology and team.

In the current economy, teams are a bit harder to build due to the economic slowdown and layoffs. Zoox had already lost some key people who worried about whether it would continue as a going concern. Self-driving teams are still of high value, so the Zoox team would have found itself hired quickly enough at various companies. Amazon could probably have hired a large fraction of them on the open market, but many would have also gone to Cruise, Waymo or anybody else hiring.

As noted, all about around $100M of the purchase price went to the investors, not the founders and employees. So it’s a lot of money to pay other people to get those employees.... [+]For founder Tim Kentley-Klay, who was ousted from the board by surprise two years ago, his $35M payout is obviously better than a kick in the head, but far from what he dreamed about. Kentley-Klay ran a design firm in Australia, but dreamed of designing something big.

One of the great risks of the Zoox “do it all at once” plan — doing self-driving, novel vehicle design and a ride-hailing company — was that it was expensive and complex. They needed to build Waymo, Something beyond Tesla

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