Abstract:
On September 3, Bloomberg reported that
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company is developing its own satellite network, and some of the employees assisting in this work were poached from Amazon, another Bezos business
. Blue Origin has poached at least 47 senior employees from Amazon's Leo satellite project over the past year, according to their LinkedIn profiles. According to an analysis of these employees' online posts, many of them are currently working on Blue Origin's newly formed satellite communications project, TeraWave.
Blue Origin
Amazon’s Project Leo plans to start selling broadband internet services to customers by the end of this year and eventually expand them to homes, businesses and governments around the world. Blue Origin's TeraWave project, announced in January, is seeking regulatory approval to build an equally ambitious network of thousands of satellites to serve businesses and governments that need to transmit large amounts of data. In the past, these customers often needed to lay out dedicated fiber optic connections to meet such large data demands.
It's unclear to what extent the two projects will compete for these big customers. But Blue Origin’s recent hiring spree shows that the two companies are at least going head-to-head in the battle for talent in the Seattle area where they’re headquartered.
Among the employees who switched jobs from Amazon Leo to Blue Origin this year, they include engineers with professional experience in fields such as satellite testing, networking, avionics, radio communications, optical systems and software. Since March, TeraWave has had a director of recruiting, as well as at least two vice presidents, also join from Amazon Leo, according to their social media profiles.
This type of talent is very scarce in Washington State
, because only a few large companies in the state are involved in the space business. Recruiters who have worked with both companies said Blue Origin is emphasizing to potential candidates that they will have the opportunity to build an entirely new program from the ground up. The Amazon Leo project was launched in 2018, when Amazon took advantage of the situation and recruited executives who had left Elon Musk's Starlink project. It is now a more mature business.Seattle-area employees have long moved between companies founded by Bezos. Among them is Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp, who once led the division at Amazon that oversaw Amazon Leo (the original project name was Project Kuiper). TeraWave is led by Lindo St. Angel, a veteran of Amazon's devices division who left the company late last year.
Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO five years ago, but still serves as Amazon's chairman and is also the largest individual shareholder of the retail and cloud computing giant. He is actively involved in board affairs and meets regularly with executives and teams responsible for AI projects.
As of press time, spokespersons for Blue Origin and Amazon declined to comment.
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