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Due Diligence Report on Otto and Anthony Levandowski
- ixtli 9y agoCan someone explain the context for this?
- ixtli 9y agoThis article is among my first google results: https://gizmodo.com/the-due-diligence-report-on-otto-and-anthony-levandowsk-1819089212 https://gizmodo.com/the-due-diligence-report-on-otto-and-ant... "Levandowski mysteriously quit his job at Waymo in January 2016 (back when it was still part of Google) and went off to start Otto. Then, a few months later, Uber bought Otto, a fledgling startup that had just launched. Fast forward to this February, and Waymo accused Uber of orchestrating the entire thing to get its hands on thousands of confidential documents Levandowski downloaded before his departure."
- dlgeek 9y agoWaymo (Google's self-driving car venture) has a big lawsuit against Uber alledging patent violations (since dismissed), trade secret infringement, and assorted other claims. This is all revolving around their hiring of a senior Google manger (Anthony Levandowski) who quit google to form a bunch of companies that were then acquired by Uber. Waymo/Google have claimed that Levandowski was negotiating with Uber to steal their secret stuff well in advance of leaving Google, met Uber executives during this time, and following his meeting with them, stole a bunch of files (a big SVN checkout of their hardware repo). He also did a bunch of other bad stuff that I'm not going to get into. They've also claimed to have evidence that Uber was using their IP through some stolen boards. The pre-trial case has been really, really bad looking for Levandowski, but Waymo's been having trouble finding a smoking gun to implicate Uber as a whole. However, one of the key pieces of evidence here was a due-diligence report prepared by Stroz Friedberg that went into exactly what info Levandowski still had from Waymo/Google. Uber and Levandowski, ESPECIALLY Levandowski have been fighting really hard to prevent Waymo from getting it's hands on the report - going all the way up to the Federal Circuit Appeals court. They lost all of these, and the report was handed over a few weeks ago. This is that report. As to how big of a smoking gun it is... I'm still reading. Waymo's been claiming it is in their filings up through last week, but I haven't been able to see anything past that - something's up with either PACER or RECAP and there aren't any updates/filings on the case in over a week on RECAP for some reason. (If anyone's got a pacer account...)
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- ixtli 9y agoThank you :)
- Harimwakairi 9y agoThanks for writing all that out. Much easier to understand the whole story now.
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- united893 9y ago> all the way up to the Federal Circuit Appeals ... I'd be curious to know what's the most procedurally complex trial out there. I.e. One where the distance between the original suit, and the issue at hand has the most steps. I.e original suit spawned a separate suit on the admissibility of evidence which got escalated and then spawned another suit on the procedural ... etc
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoSCO v. IBM, which spawned SCO v. Novell, SCO v. Red Hat, and a couple others that I forget. Started in March 2003, and currently in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.
- gwern 9y agoI logged into PACER to take a look and wow, this is the longest docket I've ever seen in PACER - just the last 3 days take up my entire screen. So it's not that the case has been quiet... Might be a RECAP problem, since I don't see any RECAP links for recent filings. (I took a look at a few recent filings, but too detailed and too many redactions to make much sense of.)
- kevan 9y agoThe abridged timeline has an amusing series of trips to the hard drive shredder and deleting texts daily.
- CamperBob2 9y agoReminds me of Carmack's involvement in the Oculus fiasco. When people with four-digit IQs start Googling things like "how to destroy a hard drive," you can bet that numerous lawyers are going to enjoy elevated job security in the near future.
- smnrchrds 9y agoHow did that fiasco end? I lost track of the events after the initial accusations.
- CamperBob2 9y agoI never heard, actually. I believe Palmer Luckey ended up in somewhat more legal and/or financial trouble than John Carmack, but the magnitudes involved are probably under appeal.
- sangnoir 9y agoCorrection: at least one is an alleged trip to the hard drive shredder with little supporting evidence. The report mentions that the folk working at the shredder couldn't ID Levandowsky from a picture, and a receipt for the day in question could not be found. He also says he had paid in cash so there are no credit card transactions to corroborate the transaction.
- theduncan 9y agoThis screams of shifty dealings.
- thisisit 9y agoJust wondering - How is Uber claiming to be non-complicit in this? The report is damning on Levandowski's behavior. But Uber to hire him in spite of all this is surprising at best. At this point, it doesn't matter if they took Waymo's files or not, just the appearance of something like this to happen reflects poorly on them.
- fnwx17 9y agoIt's actually pretty amazing how much of Uber's policies seems to be around "plausible deniability" let's get [this] done! but, it is legal? no, it's mostly borderline towards full blown illegal. ok, make sure you empty the trash on your Mac before we get started.
- CalChris 9y agoThe Scribd post (by Gawker, Gawker lives!) calls it a Due Diligence Report but that's not a phrase used anywhere in the document. Due diligence is something you'd do before making a decision. Investigation is what you do afterwards. Indeed Project Unicorn Investigation is what the document calls itself. Mods: you might want to overrule the post and retitle the post as Project Unicorn Investigation. In fact, I'd love to see the due diligence report for Uber buying Otto.
- jacquesm 9y ago> Due diligence is something you'd do before making a decision. There is such a thing as 'vendor due diligence' where a party that will sell something does their own DD in preparation to the DD by others to ensure they haven't missed anything obvious. Other than that you are right though, this is an investigative report, but it would have been a lot smarter of Uber to have this stuff checked before making a deal, the optics are not pretty and the fact that they tried to hide this report makes it even less so. I have seen a couple of these in the last few years that were 'exciting', this one is off the scale for me on a professional interest level, there are only three that I'd like to read more, the actual due diligence reports - if they exist - on this deal, Ubeam and Theranos.
- asn0 9y agoReport says it was requested by Uber and Otto in March 2016, and it is dated Aug 5, 2016. Uber announced Otto acquisition on Aug 18. So this looks like an investigation that was part of the due diligence for the acquisition, and Uber would have had it well before the acquisition was announced. Could be that when you're hustlin', making bold bets and being optimistic leaders[1], you don't get too concerned about (or read) a report like this. 1. https://www.quora.com/What-are-Ubers-14-core-cultural-values https://www.quora.com/What-are-Ubers-14-core-cultural-values
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- dlgeek 9y agoIt's a phrase that's been used incredibly heavily in all of the litigation, filings, rulings, etc. in the suit up until now, so it doesn't surprise me that's what the post calls it - it's what the judges and lawyers often do.
- lsseckman 9y ago"He [Lewandowski] also said it was common practice to share work files via Dropbox" Always interesting seeing company employees not using their company's products. Shows that what some view as a monolith is a bunch of smaller bands of people.
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- dward 9y agoThis is not common practice. Google has had a strict no iCloud, no Dropbox policy for a while. We can't even have code from the core codebase stored locally on our company issued laptops.
- rtpg 9y agoIs everything done on networked drives then?
- dirtyaura 9y agoBuilds are run on servers, using Blaze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257000
- dantiberian 9y agoWhat about editing? Do you mount a network drive to edit files on your computer?
- KerrickStaley 9y agoRoughly that, although it uses a Google-developed internal tool. Source code files can be transferred to one's workstation (which lives in a Google building), but not to one's laptop—all work on a laptop must be done through a remote session, either SSH, VNC, or via a (again Google-internal/proprietary) cloud-based editor.
- KKKKkkkk1 9y ago> Our forensic examination of Levandowski's devices and accounts corroborates his assertion that he stored and accessed Google files on his personal laptop in folders labeled Chauffeur and Google. However, contrary to his belief that there were no or few Google e-mails on his laptop, Stroz discovered approximately 50,000 Google work e-mail messages that were downloaded onto Levandowski's computer on September 20, 2014. Ten of those e-mails were last accessed between September 1, 2015 and January 28, 2016. It is difficult to believe that Levandowski was not, prior to his interview, fully aware of the extent of the data that he had retained. 50K Project Chauffeur emails stored on his personal laptop. People have gone to jail for less. > Levandowski also attempted to empty the Trash bin on his MacBook Pro while he was at Stroz Friedberg's office on March 22, 2016 at approximately 12:12 p.m., but our examination found no files were contained in his Trash at the time he attempted to empty it. What kind of company does business with a shady character like this?
- asn0 9y ago> What kind of company does business with a shady character like this? A company that was already doing shady things?
- snarf21 9y agoWhat rules? Rules are for suckers!
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- tryingagainbro 9y ago>>What kind of company does business with a shady character like this? Like in a mafia trial, the "snitch" is no angel, but that's the one that offered to d the deed. So, IMO, Uber wanted the stolen tech and the only person that gave them to them was ...drum roll. They would have bought them even from KGB. So, if you want stolen tech, you'll have to deal with a thief and then some.
- kayoone 9y ago
- warent 9y agoLior Ron: 1/12/2016 Internet search on "how to securely delete files mac" 1/13/2016 Ron leaves Google 1/19/2016 Internet search on "can a MacBook be recovered after formatting the OS" 3/22/2016 A file labelled Chauffer win plan.docx is deleted, shortly before Ron's interview with Stroz Friedberg "Chauffer win plan.docx" is this guy serious? Did he name his other incriminating file "if they find this im fucked.pdf"
- curiousDog 9y agoHaha. Even funnier is Levandowski attempting to delete his trash bin contents while in Stroz's offices for the interview.
- abalone 9y agoDoes the report mention how they determined this? Was there monitoring software installed on the laptop, or is this part of standard macOS logs?
- thisisit 9y agoThey mention a tool called Relativity being used. A google search turns up this website: https://www.relativity.com/ https://www.relativity.com/ Though I am not sure if it is just collates data from MacOs logs or does some kind of deep analysis to pull data.
- j_s 9y agoGoogle has a hardcore TPM-verified boot with monitoring software installed on all company computers. I believe a good chunk of the userspace log collector is open source: https://github.com/google/grr https://github.com/google/grr Not sure any of this tech was used by or on behalf of the company creating this document though. Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718586 (Feb 2017) > tajen How does Google build such forsenics? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718970 > bitL: Alphabet just [...] revealed what they track internally to all their employees | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719728
- thisisit 9y agoCan someone explain this to me - It seems Uber met most of them while they were working with Google. Why did Levandowski form a company? Why couldn't Uber simply hire them off Google?
- richardwhiuk 9y agoPresumably to make it less obvious that they were trying to poach a bunch of people (and possibly tech) from Google.
- kovacs_x 9y agoBuy a team for $680M? You serious? :) From my understanding they bought a functioning truck prototype, corresponding IP's AND the team.
- brandon 9y agoThe document shows in great detail that Kalanick and Levandowski were already working together closely before work on the truck even began. 2016-01-26 - Levandowski's last day at Google 2016-02-22 - iMessage chatter directly between Levandowski and Kalanick about poaching more Google employees That certainly paints the "acquisition" of Ottomotto in August 2016 in a different light, no? It's also shown in the document that Levandowski was meeting with Kalanick and other Uber execs as early as June 2015, though it's harder to divine what was happening at that time.
- zaroth 9y agoIn other news, deleting iMessage chats is completely useless?
- neom 9y agoSeriously. wut the fuq?????? I'm so curious how they recovered them.
- trhway 9y ago> While employed at Google, Levandowski had a number of one-on-one meetings and four group meetings with several Google/Chauffeur employees about joining his start-up company. sounds like various code of conduct, policies, etc. is for small, rank-and-file, guys only :)
- retSava 9y agoA thing I hadn't really thought of was that perhaps the main goal from Uber wasn't to explicitly gain access to Waymo secrets (as in documents etc) but simply how to recruit the whole self-driving cars team from Waymo. Uber trying to one-by-one recruit them from Waymo would probably have been much more difficult compared with what happened - Levandowski creating a start-up, whose whole aim was to get acquired by Uber. > At one point, Levandowski said that he asked Brian McClendon, who left Google to join Uber, how much Uber would be willing to pay for the Chauffeur team, claiming he wanted to have a market value for the team Ie it's more "I'll make it so you can buy the Chaffeur team" rather than "I'll let you buy these design docs that are Waymo confidential".
- phillywiggins 9y agoFor a genius, Levandowski "did not recall" a lot of important details :)
- tryingagainbro 9y agoAnd that's genius. No one really knows if you really recall it or not, but they know whether it happened or not, based on other people's testimony. "I do not recall" is brilliant.
- 88 9y agoThat is, until you do not recall something which you later rely on in court.
- catskul2 9y agoIt's not genius. It's the standard instruction from a lawyer defending such a person.
- phillywiggins 9y agoHaha, I appreciate the earnest response to my silly joke.
- zaroth 9y agoKind of impressive how much historical record they were able to glean from all those devices! Amazing how much digital residue was left behind, even persisting against pointed efforts to destroy them -- bits lingered. But also, yikes! My next phone will have 256GB of storage, how much stuff is going to accumulate in there, and really we have to hand this over for inspection by the company? I think the one part about the drives filled with porn they didn't want to inspect, by then it was really creepy. The fact this document is in the public record. Just wow.
- rogy 9y agoMaybe im being naive but if you had an inkling something like this was going to happen, and given the 'worth' of the guys in questions.. would you not just burn all the personal devices you had when you left? it seems amazingly careless with little thought beyond 'oh sh*t maybe i just trash some of these, that'll sort it'
- CamperBob2 9y agoMost people aren't really all that devious and evil. In order to do shady stuff, most of us have to first convince ourselves that we're not really doing anything wrong, or that the legal fine print will give us a way out if it ever comes down to a fight. If Lewandowski had an inkling of the trouble he was getting himself into, he would have done a lot of things differently. But he didn't. He was going to go start something awesome, damn the lawyers, full speed ahead. Many of the greatest founders in the Valley got their start by either backstabbing or frontrunning their employers. If you're hoping to follow in their footsteps, it's easy for survivorship bias to take hold.
- chatmasta 9y agoTangential, but looks like this report was prepared using forensics software from Relativity [0]. It looks like an interesting product in a growing market segment. Seems like there are some startup opportunities in forensics/eDiscovery, might be worth exploring if you're into this sort of thing. [0] https://www.relativity.com/ https://www.relativity.com/
- raesene6 9y agointeresting read. One thing I'm surprised about is that they didn't assess the Slack chat that's mentioned throughout the document, to assess what information might have been uploaded/shared there. From what I've seen of slack it retains a lot of history (even if you're on the free plan where you can only see a limited amount, the archives are still there), so you'd think would be an interesting source of data for this kind of investigation.
- Fricken 9y agoThere's little doubt that Levandowski and Lior Ron are in deep shit if this goes to criminal court, but I'm still waiting for Waymo's slam dunk against Uber. If they have one, it hasn't been presented yet.