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Things learned from Anthony Levandowski's deposition in Waymo vs. Uber
- ziszis 9y agoWaymo's allegations now go much deeper and further back than just Otto: * "Levandowski was deceiving Google almost from the moment it hired him to work on the Street View maps project back in 2007." * "Levandowski controlled a company called Dogwood Leasing that hired ex-Google contractor and 510 Systems engineer Asheem Linaval to use Google’s secrets to develop self-driving car technology." * "Levandowski founded yet another startup, Odin Wave, feeding it confidential lidar technology ... renaming the company Tyto, to hide his involvement."
- empath75 9y agoHow did he have time to do his day job with all this scamming on the side?
- Animats 9y agoI met him when he was doing a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 2004. He was an undergrad at UC Berkeley then, was doing the self-driving motorcycle, and had a successful startup selling a large folding tablet computer for viewing engineering drawings at construction sites. He does seem to get a lot done.
- djsumdog 9y agoSome people are just driven that way. They don't watch much TV or play video games. They just eat, sleep and breath their designs.
- __jal 9y ago> They just eat, sleep and breath their designs. I think a different verb may apply in this particular case.
- maverick_iceman 9y agoClearly he is a brilliant man. Too bad that he got so greedy. This is doubly sad when he was already a legitimate multimillionaire from his job at Google.
- valuearb 9y agoI want time management coaching from him.
- elefanten 9y agoI believe the commenters who say he's very smart and very driven. But I'd also suggest that setting up small companies isn't THAT much work. Funneling other people's designs to those companies isn't THAT much work either. Surely, the scheming took time and effort and I'm not saying he wasn't working hard. But the scheming described doesn't exactly sound like a superhuman feat for the ages.
- jacquesm 9y agoHow would renaming a company hide your involvement? Involvement is dealt with in the shareholder registry, not in the company name. Neither 'Odin Wave' nor 'Tyto' have any direct visual resemblance to "Levandowski', the fact that 'Odin Wave' is a partial anagram of "Levandowski" isn't reason enough to suspect involvement by any other person. (Such as Dwain Evo...). If I were looking at this sort of thing I'd start with the cap table and look for direct or indirect participation.
- tinbad 9y ago"I'd start with the cap table and look for direct or indirect participation" I can imagine it's hard to get this kind of info, it's not that cap tables are public and sometimes they don't even exist at all, especially if there's no investors involved. Another data point would be the registered officer(s)/manager(s) with the secretary of state, but removing himself from it would achieve the same without having to change the company name, unless he then started a company with the same name? But yeah, I also can't see how changing a name is hiding involvement...
- jacquesm 9y agoA judge will have to sign off on it but then you'd be able to compel the other party to provide such details. That's not an outrageous request, especially not when 'who benefits' is an important question to answer in cases like these.
- jonathankoren 9y ago> * "Levandowski was deceiving Google almost from the moment it hired him to work on the Street View maps project back in 2007." I read this, and immediately wondered why Google didn't immediately fire him? Seriously. When you find out someone is taking your IP and using it for his own profit, you don't put the guy on a sensitive project. I don't care how talented he is, he couldn't be trusted.
- pmorici 9y agoThat statement doesn't say anything about when Google became aware of what he was doing. It may well be that Google wasn't aware of the earlier scheming until many years later when they started investigating the bigger issues in this case.
- seangrogg 9y agoI guess you don't need trust when you can use a person as a vehicle (pun shamelessly intended) to sue potential competition.
- nullnilvoid 9y agoIf he was deceiving Google from the very beginning, why didn't Google find it out earlier and fired him? Google bought more than one companies he co-founded or was heavily involved with. How did not Google find that he was involved with these companies and there was obvious conflicts of interests there.
- exhilaration 9y agoSome good stuff in here worth reading if you're following this case. The author was able to figure out the names of redacted component suppliers.
- mks40 9y agoAnyone have the link to the original document? Could not find it (I understand the original version was pulled due to the index, but other versions).
- MusaTheRedGuard 9y agoYeah I'm also interested in the original deposition
- Animats 9y agoThe use of OMW Corp, which is just a contract CNC machine shop, indicates the LIDAR in dispute has moving parts. It's probably just another rotating scanner. That approach is just for prototypes. Everybody serious is going with flash LIDAR or MEMS. If he'd been talking to somebody about custom GaInAs photosensor ICs, that would indicate a more advanced technology.
- jacquesm 9y agoDoes MEMS count as solid state or is it also seen as a moving part?
- Zigurd 9y agoProbably depends if the service life is in practical terms limited. Offhand I'd guess it's probably very long. MEMS accelerometers in airbag sensors have to stay within tolerances for the life of a car.
- jacquesm 9y agoFor sensors I can see how you could do that (piezo with a small weight attached) and it will likely live a very long time. But for an MEMS actuator that would be driven to oscillate it would be a lot harder to make that long-lived.
- Zigurd 9y agoTo the extent I can find serivce life specs for MEMS tuning fork gyroscopes, which are driven to oscillate, they say "more than 100,000 hours" - about 10 years of powered-on time, which, for an automotive application like roll-over sensing, is essentially forever, since cars have a low duty cycle.
- deepnotderp 9y agoMEMS would be solid state pretty sure.
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- arkitaip 9y agoLevandowski has absolutely tarnished his own reputation. Sooner or later he will be abandoned by Uber - how could they possibly trust him if his thieving goes back a decade? - and finding employment or trust in the industry is going to be extremely difficult.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tinbad 9y agoIf he really made $120m from Google alone, he probably thought he was safe by that point, I mean, he must have thought through this and bought himself a private island somewhere to go to when the shit was going to hit the fan..?
- revelation 9y agoThat decade of deception netted him >$100M. I don't think he's going to fill out some online job application form. Of course there is a pending civil suit from Waymo but what are the damages? Can't just make up a number based on the potential of self-driving cars and right now they are a mere money sink.
- valuearb 9y agoDidn't he make that $100M before he got to Google, i.e. from the company he helped start that was sold to Google? All he had to do was keep his nose clean at Google and let his stock vest.
- ryandrake 9y ago
- RockyMcNuts 9y agoseems Levandowski is out as head of the self-driving project at Uber, will remain in some role but recuse himself from Lidar "Uber's self-driving car boss, Anthony Levandowski, is stepping aside amid legal fight with Waymo" http://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-no-longer-leads-uber-self-driving-cars-2017-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-no-longer...
- j_s 9y agoDiscussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14214772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14214772
- AceJohnny2 9y agoI'm kind of stunned at the amount of side-hustling that Levandowski seems to have been doing while at Google. How could the Google not have been aware of it, and how could it let it continue for so long? If I were more conspiracy-minded, I'd think they let Otto happen in order to feed a poison pill to Uber... In reality, I think they were just complacent, but still :\
- tdb7893 9y agoI'm not sure if that's plausible or if I've just watched too much Silicon Valley
- joering2 9y agoWait - aren't they supposedly promoting the idea of 20% of work time to be spent of your outside of work projects?? Or that's just bullshit PR propaganda, like "don't be evil" slogan, meanwhile taking money and being basically setup up by CIA's In-Q-Tel?
- tdb7893 9y agoI don't think that your outside of work project is supposed to take proprietary knowledge to create a competitor, that seems like a pretty reasonable limit.
- nostrademons 9y agoThey promote the use of 20% time to do projects that will be owned by Google. It's essentially giving you freedom to work on what you want, with the understanding that Google will reap the economic rewards (if any) from what you do. Google's not very tolerant of moonlighting. If you want to work on stuff and own it, quit.
- jacquesm 9y ago> Google's not very tolerant of moonlighting. If you want to work on stuff and own it, quit. That goes for quite a few employers, especially if what you are doing is (1) competing with their products and (2) potentially successful or (3) both.
- Nelson69 9y agoWhat's Google's policy on side businesses? They're cool if you work on self-driving cars and start LIDAR and "self-driving truck" side projects? Did Levandowski have some sort of special pass due to the unicorn nature of his experience and expertise?
- wetherbeei 9y agohttps://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/ https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/
- probe 9y agoCan someone (with hopefully a legal background) comment on what the judge will be looking at when deciding if there should be an injunction against Uber and stopping ALL their self-driving car work? What criteria are they specifically looking at/how much burden of proof do they need?
- huangc10 9y agoGreat analysis and generally a good read. However, to simplify, I think the biggest lesson learned is: When you create a product at a company and use the company's resources, the IP belongs to the company. If you're going branch out and work on a related product, you better understand the legal issues first. Also, stealing is bad.
- make3 9y ago"When you create a product at a company and use the company's resources, the IP belongs to the company. If you're going branch out and work on a related product, you better understand the legal issues first. " I mean, this should be pretty obvious to anyone who has so much as had a passing glance on their employment contract. I doubt very much that Levandowski didn't know this could put him in trouble.
- dang 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14214772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14214772 is more newsy so we'll treat this one as a semidupe (there probably being no need for 2 Levandowskis in the top 4).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- noahmbarr 9y agoLink to deposition source doc?