It turns out that the purchase of Amazon by Eero was not the success story of the startup, we thought

When Amazon bought the Eero meshed Wi-Fi router company, our first reactions were depleted, dismayed, and worried: why could not a tiny company offering an excellent privacy product be able to- she be left to her own giant Big Data devices from Seattle?

Now, we know why. Mashable reports that Amazon paid only $ 97 million for Eero, well below the $ 148 million it would have collected at start-up. It's something you do not do if your business does not have problems, and that means that Amazon may have saved Eero from a different destiny.

The edge can confirm this figure of $ 97 million, by the way, as well as many other Mashable history – we have seen similar documents, and we think this is the real deal. Eero declined to comment.

Amazon has many side effects on buying Eero at a discount sale, rather than making a profit, and MashableThe report describes in detail some of them, such as how Eero execs masquerade as bandits with multi-million dollar parachutes, while core employees find themselves now with stock options worthless – or worse, stock bought for $ 3 is now worth $ 0.03 each. It's not unusual, but it's a warning about the operation of stock options.

But I'm curious if that also means that we should expect less from Amazon's Eero, under Amazon, than if it were more successful for the startup. If Amazon were able to pay so little for Eero, he might have smaller ambitions for society, and it would be much easier to justify the slaughter as a failed experiment if something went wrong.

After all, Amazon would have spent more than $ 1 billion on Ring, the smart doorbell maker, in early 2018, and has barely begun to integrate its products with Amazon's voice badistant Alexa in a simple, easy way. a year later.

It could also mean that Eero's managers had much less weight in the negotiations to maintain control of the Eero brand and its operation. The good news is that Senior Vice President of Devices and Services Amazon, Dave Limp, badured us last month that the company was not planning to change anything and would respect its privacy policy. "We're going to reinforce our commitment to privacy and security," said Nick Weaver, CEO of Eero at the time.

And as Nest's Tony Fadell and Oculus's Palmer Luckey will say, a big selling price does not necessarily mean that the founder continues to run a business indefinitely once it's sold.

Amazon's Dave Limp hinted in March that Eero's first attempts to "make the smart home even easier" over the next 6 to 12 months would be expected.