14 ms·

Uber and Waymo Reach Settlement

557 points by chollida1 9y ago

thecybernerd 9y ago
I wonder if Uber will license Waymos driverless technology?
- arebop 9y ago
  sounds like no: "we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work"
- bertil 9y ago
  If they do, Waymo will most likely have a clause that allows them to pull if away or a price point that prevents Uber from operating profitably once Waymo is in full force. A small sign of that: I generally order Ubers from Google Maps. Until recently, I was sent to Uber app; lately, it’s an entire experience through GMaps. I suspect they are planning to switch that default to Waymo wherever they are.
  - alextheparrot 9y ago
    Can you select which one you’d prefer to use? This seems like another anti-trust case in the making.
    - puzzle 9y ago
      You can book either Uber or even Lyft from Google Maps (assuming they are available in your location). Once the ride starts, you can follow progress from either Google Maps or the Uber app. You can still book and track the whole thing from the Uber app, of course. I prefer GM because it has all my bookmarks, it doesn't download the same map tiles again, etc. Until recently, it was quite annoying, because you were trapped in "Uber mode" during a ride. As of a few months ago, you can go back to the base map, start new searches, look up transit directions, etc. and later return to your ride's status.
    - bertil 9y ago
      Full disclosure: I prefer to walk and public transport, so I generally use those when I’m late. This means that I rarely use any and I tend to pick whichever seems to work seamlessly, namely the one not asking me for my credit card number, asking to confirm my phone number with a SMS handshake that takes five minutes, etc. I remember navigating between several options including Addison Lee (a local equivalent in London), local taxis if they have an app (in Stockholm: great service, inexplicably expensive). That does mean that Google Maps will win and its default option too. I suspect that the way they display services, notably prices and availability will have a dramatic impact too: at the moment, it’s a band. It’s all too easy to show a cheap low price for instance and I suspect that Google Maps might want to argue that they should review estimates and compare them to actual charges to enforce consistent labelling. Same for availability: you can say a car will be there in three minutes, but have that change to five once you clic, etc. Overall, it does look like an anti-trust issue. I guess, in that case, a China-Wall between Google Maps and Waymo, transparent ranking process, etc. would be necessary. I can’t imagine not having access to either a mapping service, or the convenience of comparing public transport with ride-hailing. I’ve been an advocate for auditing a lot of algorithms by publicly-appointed experts for a while now. You need a good understanding of machine learning to audit the political impacts of Facebook News Feed and the Call to Vote button, for instance. Not all countries can appoint their expert though, so we might need to have smaller countries agree to trust the expert from larger nation groups.
    - inlined 9y ago
      Are you asking whether you have to use Uber? It gives you a list of providers. If you're asking whether you can ask maps to switch into the Uber app, I'm not sure there is a lot of value (you can pop open the app and your ride appears there too). Uber exposed developer APIs presumedly for this reason. Embedding the UX lowers friction and tightens up the user funnel.
    - jlebrech 9y ago
      I suppose if they did that, that they would make an Uber Maps app.
  - jayd16 9y ago
    Where can you do this in Google maps? I don't see it.
    - noer 9y ago
      In the mobile app, request directions of a location and there's a rideshare icon (a person holding a suitcase with their other hand hailing a cab). For me it's between the walking & bicycling options. You're presented with several options from both Uber & Lyft, each with a price range.
bertil 9y ago
I appreciate the overall conciliatory tone (with the usual “we did nothing illegal” caution) but I’m not seeing mention of any financial settlement. I can’t imagine that didn’t happen.
- yathern 9y ago
  "Waymo is getting .34% of Uber's equity in the settlement, which at a $72 billion valuation, is valued at about $245 million." https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/961993637348327424 https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/961993637348327424
  - vuln 9y ago
    Still less than Uber paid for ottomotto. Crazy.
- otterley 9y ago
  The language of the announcement was almost certainly dictated in the terms of the settlement as well.
ProAm 9y ago
Kind of a disappointing end to such a lengthy and publicized build up.
- jonknee 9y ago
  It was always going to end with money, this just fast forwards it a bit.
  - nissimk 9y ago
    When Intel stole Digital's alpha technology the lawsuit ended with intel acquiring the Digital chip business. I guess that's also sort of money, but not exactly.
- mcguire 9y ago
  What am I supposed to do with all this popcorn? :-)
mataya 9y ago
I would like to see more actions that show they mean what they say.
- bertil 9y ago
  They did get rid of a handful of employees that were considered rowdy, handsy or sexist. Internally, I’m told the changes are quite dramatic. The public tone around the legality of their offering, notably in London, is a bit like this note: far more consensual but not clearly stepping down. They want to serve London and Londoners need the service (minicabs aren’t able to produce software at the quality Uber does) so to me, that sound much better. More recently, they did publish detailed data to help a conversation on gender-balance of their driver compensation (not where I expected them to have their main problem, but good for them to inform the conversation on pay gap). I don’t think Dara is an angel, far from it — I got internal rumours that he’s more than willing to punish good people if that makes him look tough and, honestly, he needs to. Rather than let him cull randomly until he feels like he’s done enough, we could help him pick the bad: Were would you expect them to lead? Serious question: I know many employees read HN, and I’m happy to point some of the more respectful and change-prone ones to your suggestions.
sneak 9y ago
This is disgusting. I recognize that the moat that the government provides via the nonsense system that is IP is an incentive for investment, but the very notion of intellectual property should fly in the face of the moral code of every single person who works at a business built on Linux or HTTP. The future the Earth needs is only delayed by these moats of who-can-use-which-research. You don’t own your discoveries or ideas, any more than you can own a song that you sing to another person. The moment something leaves your head, that information is no longer yours—it enriches the whole world, and that is how it should be. I am the staunchest defender of property rights—but information can never be property.
- tantalor 9y ago
  Well stated but I think you're wrong, although I can't articulate why, so I'll upvote in the hope that somebody else will adequately refute.
- flavor8 9y ago
  Really? As an extreme example, if it costs $1B for a company to develop some IP (1000 people working for 5-6 years) that IP should just be freely shareable?
  - jannotti 9y ago
    Spend can't really be the reason a company gets a public good, right? If I want to own a city park, and I spend a bunch of money trying to own it, that doesn't mean I do, in fact, own it or should own it. Society should give (or "lend", in the case of a patent) a public good to a private entity if and only if the societal benefit outweighs the societal loss of giving out the good. Maybe your argument was shorthand for something along those lines, but I think it's important to distinguish.
    - apendleton 9y ago
      That seems like a poor analogy, if you mean the park already exists and the company is just trying to take possession of it. In this situation, there is no park at the outset, and the company would have no incentive to build one if it didn't have some way to benefit from it once built. Companies will only create this kind of IP if they can profit from it; they're not charities. If we as a society want this IP to exist, our only options are to protect the profit motive that leads to its private creation, or (like the park!) fund it publicly.
empressplay 9y ago
Uber and Waymo announced on Friday that they had settled a high-stakes court battle with Alphabet subsidiary Waymo over trade secrets related to self-driving cars. As part of the settlement, Uber will pay Waymo 0.34% of Uber equity, valued at Series G-1 round at an approximate $US72B valuation. Uber’s CEO also “expressed regret for the actions” that led to the lawsuit.
- bertil 9y ago
  It is interesting that Alphabet will accept stock because that means they believe they can carry it to market (or at least, won’t lower its value until it does) which might still take more than a year. This could mean Waymo will probably not be able to announce anything significant until then: Uber would suffer from having such a big rival step up. Internal politics at Alphabet must be fun.
  - shimon 9y ago
    Or, it's the best they thought they could given what's provable about the case, their experience in court so far, etc. Presumably it's possible there are settlement terms having to do with the use/disuse of certain trade secrets, but we may never know.
  - fnbr 9y ago
    Alphabet's probably accepting stock because they're one of the most risk-loving investors possible. They've already got a business that's spinning off tons of cash, so they have no need for money, and instead, are pursuing any possible avenue that has the potential of making $$$ (e.g. all of the other bets).
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > It is interesting that Alphabet will accept stock because that means they believe they can carry it to market (or at least, won’t lower its value until it does) which might still take more than a year. It doesn't mean Alphabet thinks the stock won't lose value, it means that they think that it won't lose enough value to be worth less than what they could have gotten in cash, either in a settlement or (discounted for risk and time, and netted against the expense of continuing) from taking the lawsuit to it's conclusion. > This could mean Waymo will probably not be able to announce anything significant until then: Uber would suffer from having such a big rival step up. Is $245 million really worth any significant risk to Alphabet’s position in self-driving cars? I suspect they’d accept the risk to the value of the Uber stock to maximize their own future prospects in that market.
cavanasm 9y ago
I recall earlier news stories that Waymo's first settlement proposal last year included demands for a public apology from Uber. Is this that? I wonder if Uber is also paying $1b like Waymo initially demanded, or if that part changed as well. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-uber-lawsuit/exclusive-alphabets-waymo-demanded-1-billion-in-settlement-talks-with-uber-sources-idUSKBN1CH0QC https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-uber-lawsuit/exc...
a13n 9y ago
"Waymo is getting .34% of Uber's equity in the settlement, which at a $72 billion valuation, is valued at about $245 million." https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/961993637348327424 https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/961993637348327424
- jmkni 9y ago
  Those numbers are insane.
  - minimaxir 9y ago
    Insanely low, given that Waymo could have crippled Uber if successful.
    - mstade 9y ago
      So does this mean perhaps their case wasn't as strong as they thought?
    - mseebach 9y ago
      Could they, though? Uber's valuation is based on its taxi technology business. The self-driving stuff might be their long play, but certainly not the source of their value. I have no idea what kinds of damages Waymo might have been able to extract from Uber, but it seems very unlikely that it would have been in the multi-billion-dollar range. $245 million is a huge sum, add to that the saved cost of ongoing litigation.
      - CodeWriter23 9y ago
        The value of the taxi technology is predicated on surviving high losses for a few years to secure riders for the autonomous fleet that will emerge. The driver component in the current equation is 100% subsidized by investors.
      - jacksmith21006 9y ago
        Uber value is based on adopting SDC. Otherwise the business does not work long term.
sneak 9y ago
> To be clear, while we do not believe that any trade secrets made their way from Waymo to Uber, nor do we believe that Uber has used any of Waymo’s proprietary information in its self-driving technology, we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work. At what point do statements like this start to harm a company rather than benefit it? It is plain to see that they are lying; if the first is true the second part would not be happening.
username223 9y ago
That was quick. What would Uber and/or Google have been embarrassed to see become public? And will Lewandowski get to quietly sneak away, or will both companies now pillory him?
- bertil 9y ago
  Once evidence is revealed, there isn’t much new for lawyers to discover: good, experience negotiators know what angle the other side is going to take and after opening arguments, even that is pretty settled.
montrose 9y ago
Uber was right to cave. Google is not a litigious company, and would not have sued unless Uber had behaved really badly.
- pavlov 9y ago
  It doesn’t make sense to apply anthropomorphized motivations to giant corporations. Google’s IPR management is not that different from the others. They will litigate if it’s to their advantage. Maybe the reason Google hasn’t been suing much until now is that they’ve largely been on the borrowing end of the deal (cf. Android’s debt to Sun and Apple).
  - jacksmith21006 9y ago
    Just not Google's approach to sue others. Think in this case just too much too let it go. You can see it elsewhere with all the research papers and open sourcing so much software. I mean OS K8s was a little nuts, imo.
robterrell 9y ago
"To be clear, while we do not believe that any trade secrets made their way from Waymo to Uber, nor do we believe that Uber has used any of Waymo’s proprietary information in its self-driving technology, we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work." I feel like there's a contradiction inside this sentence. Is this an admission that some of Uber's technology came from Waymo, but merely things that are not trade secrets / proprietary information?
- philfrasty 9y ago
  While there may in fact be some truths to the allegations this seems more like a standard settlement phrase to me. Got sued a lot of times myself for various (business related) reasons. Sometimes just faster to pay than see how it plays out.
- woodandsteel 9y ago
  It is not a straight-forward admission of guilt, but it is much more of an admission than you usually see in these sorts of cases. It seems pretty clear that the new CEO thinks they had some real ethics problems at Uber, and is sincerely working to straighten things out.
roymurdock 9y ago
Good behind the scenes analysis of why Waymo's case was flimsy here from Sarah Jeong, a lawyer and journalist who has been live tweeting the trial: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16993208/waymo-v-uber-trial-trade-secrets-lidar https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16993208/waymo-v-uber-tria... Summary - Waymo was claiming Uber violated 8 trade secrets (down from 100s), and had only directly discussed these trade secrets for 45 minutes over the past week. "Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes?" "And then there’s the part where Anthony Levandowski is not on trial, Uber is. Even if Levandowski took 14,000 confidential documents, that doesn’t mean that Uber did something wrong — there isn’t a clear link to how those documents got onto Uber computers or were used in Uber self-driving cars."
- manux 9y ago
  She makes a number of fair points, but: > Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes? Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I think I can do that in 45 seconds. - hey what's your learning rate scheduling for module X? - we use an EMA with coefficient 1e-4 - oh great, and for Y, do you do constant strides? - no we use backtracking to figure out some sampling heuristic etc.
  - phil21 9y ago
    None of which would be useful for a judge or jury. Heck, I'm generally pretty decent technically compared to the rest of the population and what you wrote here is barely relevant to me.
    - manux 9y ago
      Sure what I just wrote is technobabble, I don't have much self-driving car expertise, but it was just to make a point. From my experience with large scale engineering projects, especially ones with ML involved, the tiniest details can make the stupidest difference.
      - pvg 9y ago
hawktheslayer 9y ago
> "may have potentially" This kind of language must be intentional given the team that reviewed and edited the memo, which makes it worse to my ears. Either "may have" or "potentially" would have sufficed.
- bradfitz 9y ago
  The lawyers get paid per weasel word!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
tyingq 9y ago
I wonder if this means Levandowski is also personally off the hook now as well. Also, I'm not clear how much he actually netted from Otto, since lots was probably based on vesting that didn't happen.
- csours 9y ago
  Is there any motivation for Waymo and Uber to work together to burn Levandowski? If not, he's {probably} off the hook.
aresant 9y ago
The statement from Uber's new CEO on this settlement is concise: https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-waymo-settlement/ https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-waymo-settlement/
- rdiddly 9y ago
  Yes I believe I saw that recently...
  - Zhyl 9y ago
    If not, you can find it here: https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-waymo-settlement/ https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-waymo-settlement/
    - wand3r 9y ago
      link to the HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16341094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16341094
- thrillgore 9y ago
  Dara's day job, it appears, is to apologize for the poor conduct of former management.
edshiro 9y ago
Really surprised this ended so quickly. Did Waymo and Uber reach a settlement that early because: - the former felt this was the "best" it could get in such a situation as their case was not as strong as they initially thought - the latter was not keen on having its image dragged into the mud any further and may also be aware that more incriminating material could surface if Google or others dug further? IANAL, but I find the resolution of this case quite puzzling... Also what does it mean for Uber's self-driving car development efforts?
- alex_young 9y ago
  After a few days of testimony it's surely related to how that's going. The stakes get really high when your fate is in 10 random people's hands...
- pcwalton 9y ago
  The trial was turning into a circus. (Just look at Sarah Jeong's tweet storms about it.) I'm not surprised this happened in that light: it was terrible for the image of both companies and self-driving cars in general.
  - fullshark 9y ago
    Why both companies?
    - Fricken 9y ago
      For Uber I think it's obvious. For Waymo, well, to use the Words of former program manager Chris Urmson in a late 2015 letter to Sergey Brin (Which Uber's lawyers trotted out as part of their defense) "Over the past 6 months we have stopped playing to win and are now playing to minimize downside." Waymo joins Tesla and Baidu as self driving car companies who have levied lawsuits over top engineers leaving their projects to become competition.
    - pcwalton 9y ago
      The judge was admonishing Waymo for showing what were essentially marketing materials to the jury in closed-door sessions. Their lawyers were showing clips from Wall Street in court. They were asking Travis Kalanick to explain video game terminology in ludicrous detail. And so on. No company that aims to be taken seriously wants to be involved in a circus like that.
decacorn1 9y ago
Google should have pummeled Uber. That company deserves massive correction, even if it means crippling it to ground zero. Truly deplorable company.
samfisher83 9y ago
google used to own 7% of uber. I don't know what it is now, but lets say its 5% that stake would be 3.5bil at 72bil valuation . If they are getting .34% essentially they are losing money from GV losing money as a share holder while waymo is gaining some, but they are both google companies. I don't see how this lawsuit benefits google shareholders as a whole. They just wasted money on lawyers.
- neuland 9y ago
  Won't they make money in absolute terms? Maybe it was a waste of time. But, 0.37% of Uber is $245 million. I can't imagine Waymo spent that on lawyers, investigators, etc.
- bagacrap 9y ago
  What you said would make sense if GV owned a much higher percentage of Uber.
- 111_1_111 9y ago
  Google Ventures is losing far less than Waymo is receiving. Did you get dropped on the head as a kid?
- bvod 9y ago
  Google has an in-house litigation team that would have already been on payroll. Sure they had to pay for expert witnesses and court fees, but the total would be far less than what they settled for
  - jankeymeulen 9y ago
    Charles Verhoeven, afaik the lead attorney for Waymo is definitely not on Alphabet payroll.
sleepychu 9y ago
Estimate of total legal cost to Uber and Waymo combined?
sparren 9y ago
I strongly believe that the case wasn't ever really that strong. Call me crazy, but I think the strong negative press was created to drive down the value of Uber, which in turn help build the case that those with Uber options should sell, allowing Softbank to scoop up even more equity during the large transaction that occurred recently.
rdiddly 9y ago
"But the prospect that a couple of Waymo employees may have inappropriately solicited others to join Otto, and that they may have potentially left with Google files in their possession, in retrospect, raised some hard questions." "Hard questions" -- That's a good one! Not only because of its velvety-smooth use of euphemism, but because it's basically true: We enlist the help of the judicial system to answer questions that are hard. And an accusation that the accused denies, fits in that category. Filing a lawsuit is essentially asking a "hard question" along the lines of "Should the other party be obligated to compensate us for damages?" One side says yes, the other says no. Hard question! I'll have to use that one sometime. I really need to learn the art of executive-speak if I'm to advance in this life. But I suspect I'll just stubbornly stay my same tactless self.
habosa 9y ago
So what is Lewandowski's final status here? I know he doesn't work at Uber anymore, but did he keep all the money? Seems like he got a pretty good deal if so, he's retired with hundreds of millions.
- ggg9990 9y ago
  He’ll be sued but regardless of what happens he’ll be fantastically wealthy afterwards.
- curun1r 9y ago
  He's probably going to be sued by Waymo, likely with Uber's full cooperation. The part of Google's case that always seemed the strongest was their forensic evidence of his misconduct just before he left. He could also be sued by Uber if he lied or omitted anything during the Otto acquisition.
  - theptip 9y ago
    Waymo already pursued arbitration against Levandowsi, I'm unclear on whether that they can go after him again: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/29/waymo-pursued-arbitration-with-anthony-levandowski-before-it-sued-uber/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/29/waymo-pursued-arbitration-...
    - dpark 9y ago
      I don't see how it's unclear. You can't go through arbitration and then sue because you want more than arbitration awarded you. The entire point of arbitration is that it's binding and final, specifically to avoid the messy lawsuit process.
      - beambot 9y ago
        Probably true. But if he made fraudulent or false statements during arbitration that are later proven as such, I assume that could reopen him to lawsuits
      - 9y ago
crsv 9y ago
The statement might as well have just been the title. It was completely void of substance.
jfig 9y ago
«...we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work.» Waymo will have access to Ubers Lidar and software. And an admission of guilt.
mabbo 9y ago
This isn't about something new happening in the fight itself- it's about the economy lately (imho). This was a fight they could have drawn out. They could have claimed it wasn't their fault, they could have paid enough legal fees to win the day. But it was always going to be a waste of time, in a literal sense. Years could have gone by before any decision, holding back Uber the entire time. Uber is still a black hole for money but VCs see it's potential and keep throwing money at it. So long as that money kept coming, Uber could do anything they want really. But then the market started crashing. The last week has been a wake up call that things are a-changin'. In another six months, there may not be VC money being thrown around anymore. And then you'd have Uber actually in a crunch. What then? By settling today, Uber may have the time it needs to get their self-driving fleet in the road before the money runs out for good. That's all that matters to keep the company alive, and Khosrowshahi knows it. But if he'd been smart, he'd have settled six months ago instead.
- encoderer 9y ago
  Lawyers don’t work fast enough for this to have anything to do with stock market pullback.
  - mabbo 9y ago
    They can if you pay them enough. Or if this contingency plan was written 3 months ago just in case the economy finally faltered.
    - eclipxe 9y ago
      Yeah, no. That's not how this works.
      - mabbo 9y ago
        Seriously though- beyond a dismissive snarky reply, what is your view on it? Why now? Why not six months ago and why not fight to the end? It's fine to disagree, but don't just tell me I'm wrong, convince me I'm wrong!
lorenzhs 9y ago
The page redirects to a non-existent page in some countries, here's an archive link for anyone else who can't access it: http://archive.is/0YuQe http://archive.is/0YuQe
thecolorblue 9y ago
Is there any precedent for settling with stock? I would imagine this could create a dangerous standard.
- jsjohnst 9y ago
  Tons of precedent. In fact, Google paid Yahoo stock worth about the same amount to settle the Overture suit.
laveur 9y ago
I have to say that this is kind of surprising but thinking about it all logically it seems like there is a lot more to this story. First off as others have pointed out Waymo's case wasn't a slam dunk. So they settled for way less than they originally wanted. But there are several other interesting things to note. Because of this case there is now a criminal investigation into Uber's acquisition of Otto. I feel like part of why Uber settled was because they knew this was being investigated and dragging out this case in court may have made public some really incriminating evidence in the criminal investigation. What further leads me to believe this is the case is the fact that the current CEO has basically admitted that the acquisition of Otto should have been handled differently. It seems like they knew that Otto may have stolen trade secrets from Waymo. It also appears that Uber may have had helped set up Otto from the start to acquire such information. For this we will have to wait and see how the criminal investigation shakes out. At which point we could see federal charges appear against Uber and Levandowski. We may also see the SEC step into this as well if they did appear to set up Otto as a Shell company to acquire stolen technologies. Time will tell.
woodandsteel 9y ago
I think what happened is Levandowski and Uber acted in a very suspicious way that lead Waymo to conclude that Uber must have stolen its IP. But then when it came to discovery they couldn't find solid evidence (either because the property was not used, or Uber managed to destroy the evidence), and so Waymo realized it was probably going to lose the trial. In the meantime, the lawsuit helped kick Kalanick out, and he was replaced by someone much more reasonable who wanted to end the lawsuit. As a consequence the two parties were able to come to an agreement.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  I doubt they destroyed evidence - if they acted nefariously, they probably just operated in a manner that did not generate evidence. I'm just a middling employee in a big company and it is drilled into my head how to, basically, not leave a paper trail for important topics.
- jamiequint 9y ago
  This theory is so wildly off from what my lawyer friends have told me about the case (including one who has 5+ years of IP law experience) They are mostly in agreement that Google had enough to win the case but that they likely had the worry that juries are always unpredictable and you really never know what will happen. They seem to believe that the thing that Google cared about the most was restricting Uber's usage of the stolen technology. They believe that Uber felt they had a decent chance of losing so they mutually agreed to setting, giving Google what they wanted (restriction of the technology usage). Once that was offered Google immediately moved to settle since that was what they wanted from the outset and any additional cash or destruction of Uber's image would have been beyond their needs.
  - inverse_pi 9y ago
    If you look at the settlement number, 0.34% of Uber at 72B (yes, 72B, not 45B as the recent down round which would equate to 150M), then you'll see that Google did not expect to win this case.
    - 9y ago
loverofthings 9y ago
It's amazing how judicial system works fast in the USA. In my country both companies would go bankrupt and would still be suing each other due to sunk cost fallacy.
cft 9y ago
Very good lesson:risk pays off. Lewandowski risked and it paid off.
- objclxt 9y ago
  > Lewandowski risked and it paid off. Levandowski was fired from Uber, is still in arbitration with Waymo, and possibly has a federal investigation pending against him (which is why he has, and was planning to, take the fifth amendment). I'm not sure how it "paid off" here.
  - joering2 9y ago
    I think his firing was only PR. Seems like he is still at Uber: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-levandowski-8164291/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-levandowski-8164291/
bradtemp 9y ago
Big victory for Uber http://ideas.4brad.com/uber-and-waymo-settle-lawsuit-giant-victory-uber http://ideas.4brad.com/uber-and-waymo-settle-lawsuit-giant-v...
zpatel 9y ago
google is looking like microsoft of yesterday, although i had high hopes from google.
fnord77 9y ago
At the end of the day, Alphabet is just another lawyer-driven company. Gross.
burner890 9y ago
Anyone who thinks this is a loss for Uber doesn't know what was at stake in this case. At one point an injunction against Uber's self-driving division was on the table. If that were still any sort of possibility Uber would have ended up paying far more than a couple hundred million in equity to settle the case. I think it's safe to say this wasn't really about theft of trade secrets by Uber. We can infer this because Google's lawyers would have known exactly how weak their case against Uber was when nothing of substance turned up as part of discovery. Google decided to go to trial anyway. They knew that Uber's ailing brand would make them _seem_ guilty in the public eye even though they clearly weren't. I can't prove this, but I think this was a chillingly opportunistic move by Google that was designed mainly to stop the loss of top engineering talent to Uber ATG. After all, who would want to go to join a company which appeared to be in serious legal jeopardy? I'd speculate that Uber's current leadership saw an opportunity to immediately stop the damage to their brand and took it. Part of me wishes TK were still running the show because he probably would not have settled.
bprasanna 9y ago
That is called a positive attitude towards accepting mistakes and moving forward. Uber finally got a good CEO.
utopcell 9y ago
Uber has bad connotations in my head. To be honest, I'd rather Google didn't hold a stake at it.

557 points by chollida1 9y ago

thecybernerd 9y ago

I wonder if Uber will license Waymos driverless technology?

arebop 9y ago
sounds like no: "we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work"
bertil 9y ago
If they do, Waymo will most likely have a clause that allows them to pull if away or a price point that prevents Uber from operating profitably once Waymo is in full force. A small sign of that: I generally order Ubers from Google Maps. Until recently, I was sent to Uber app; lately, it’s an entire experience through GMaps. I suspect they are planning to switch that default to Waymo wherever they are.
- alextheparrot 9y ago
  Can you select which one you’d prefer to use? This seems like another anti-trust case in the making.
  - puzzle 9y ago
    You can book either Uber or even Lyft from Google Maps (assuming they are available in your location). Once the ride starts, you can follow progress from either Google Maps or the Uber app. You can still book and track the whole thing from the Uber app, of course. I prefer GM because it has all my bookmarks, it doesn't download the same map tiles again, etc. Until recently, it was quite annoying, because you were trapped in "Uber mode" during a ride. As of a few months ago, you can go back to the base map, start new searches, look up transit directions, etc. and later return to your ride's status.
  - bertil 9y ago
    Full disclosure: I prefer to walk and public transport, so I generally use those when I’m late. This means that I rarely use any and I tend to pick whichever seems to work seamlessly, namely the one not asking me for my credit card number, asking to confirm my phone number with a SMS handshake that takes five minutes, etc. I remember navigating between several options including Addison Lee (a local equivalent in London), local taxis if they have an app (in Stockholm: great service, inexplicably expensive). That does mean that Google Maps will win and its default option too. I suspect that the way they display services, notably prices and availability will have a dramatic impact too: at the moment, it’s a band. It’s all too easy to show a cheap low price for instance and I suspect that Google Maps might want to argue that they should review estimates and compare them to actual charges to enforce consistent labelling. Same for availability: you can say a car will be there in three minutes, but have that change to five once you clic, etc. Overall, it does look like an anti-trust issue. I guess, in that case, a China-Wall between Google Maps and Waymo, transparent ranking process, etc. would be necessary. I can’t imagine not having access to either a mapping service, or the convenience of comparing public transport with ride-hailing. I’ve been an advocate for auditing a lot of algorithms by publicly-appointed experts for a while now. You need a good understanding of machine learning to audit the political impacts of Facebook News Feed and the Call to Vote button, for instance. Not all countries can appoint their expert though, so we might need to have smaller countries agree to trust the expert from larger nation groups.
  - inlined 9y ago
    Are you asking whether you have to use Uber? It gives you a list of providers. If you're asking whether you can ask maps to switch into the Uber app, I'm not sure there is a lot of value (you can pop open the app and your ride appears there too). Uber exposed developer APIs presumedly for this reason. Embedding the UX lowers friction and tightens up the user funnel.
  - jlebrech 9y ago
    I suppose if they did that, that they would make an Uber Maps app.
- jayd16 9y ago
  Where can you do this in Google maps? I don't see it.
  - noer 9y ago
    In the mobile app, request directions of a location and there's a rideshare icon (a person holding a suitcase with their other hand hailing a cab). For me it's between the walking & bicycling options. You're presented with several options from both Uber & Lyft, each with a price range.

bertil 9y ago

I appreciate the overall conciliatory tone (with the usual “we did nothing illegal” caution) but I’m not seeing mention of any financial settlement. I can’t imagine that didn’t happen.

yathern 9y ago
"Waymo is getting .34% of Uber's equity in the settlement, which at a $72 billion valuation, is valued at about $245 million." https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/961993637348327424 https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/961993637348327424
- vuln 9y ago
  Still less than Uber paid for ottomotto. Crazy.
otterley 9y ago
The language of the announcement was almost certainly dictated in the terms of the settlement as well.

ProAm 9y ago

Kind of a disappointing end to such a lengthy and publicized build up.

jonknee 9y ago
It was always going to end with money, this just fast forwards it a bit.
- nissimk 9y ago
  When Intel stole Digital's alpha technology the lawsuit ended with intel acquiring the Digital chip business. I guess that's also sort of money, but not exactly.
mcguire 9y ago
What am I supposed to do with all this popcorn? :-)

mataya 9y ago

I would like to see more actions that show they mean what they say.

bertil 9y ago
They did get rid of a handful of employees that were considered rowdy, handsy or sexist. Internally, I’m told the changes are quite dramatic. The public tone around the legality of their offering, notably in London, is a bit like this note: far more consensual but not clearly stepping down. They want to serve London and Londoners need the service (minicabs aren’t able to produce software at the quality Uber does) so to me, that sound much better. More recently, they did publish detailed data to help a conversation on gender-balance of their driver compensation (not where I expected them to have their main problem, but good for them to inform the conversation on pay gap). I don’t think Dara is an angel, far from it — I got internal rumours that he’s more than willing to punish good people if that makes him look tough and, honestly, he needs to. Rather than let him cull randomly until he feels like he’s done enough, we could help him pick the bad: Were would you expect them to lead? Serious question: I know many employees read HN, and I’m happy to point some of the more respectful and change-prone ones to your suggestions.

sneak 9y ago

This is disgusting. I recognize that the moat that the government provides via the nonsense system that is IP is an incentive for investment, but the very notion of intellectual property should fly in the face of the moral code of every single person who works at a business built on Linux or HTTP. The future the Earth needs is only delayed by these moats of who-can-use-which-research. You don’t own your discoveries or ideas, any more than you can own a song that you sing to another person. The moment something leaves your head, that information is no longer yours—it enriches the whole world, and that is how it should be. I am the staunchest defender of property rights—but information can never be property.

tantalor 9y ago
Well stated but I think you're wrong, although I can't articulate why, so I'll upvote in the hope that somebody else will adequately refute.
flavor8 9y ago
Really? As an extreme example, if it costs $1B for a company to develop some IP (1000 people working for 5-6 years) that IP should just be freely shareable?
- jannotti 9y ago
  Spend can't really be the reason a company gets a public good, right? If I want to own a city park, and I spend a bunch of money trying to own it, that doesn't mean I do, in fact, own it or should own it. Society should give (or "lend", in the case of a patent) a public good to a private entity if and only if the societal benefit outweighs the societal loss of giving out the good. Maybe your argument was shorthand for something along those lines, but I think it's important to distinguish.
  - apendleton 9y ago
    That seems like a poor analogy, if you mean the park already exists and the company is just trying to take possession of it. In this situation, there is no park at the outset, and the company would have no incentive to build one if it didn't have some way to benefit from it once built. Companies will only create this kind of IP if they can profit from it; they're not charities. If we as a society want this IP to exist, our only options are to protect the profit motive that leads to its private creation, or (like the park!) fund it publicly.

empressplay 9y ago

Uber and Waymo announced on Friday that they had settled a high-stakes court battle with Alphabet subsidiary Waymo over trade secrets related to self-driving cars. As part of the settlement, Uber will pay Waymo 0.34% of Uber equity, valued at Series G-1 round at an approximate $US72B valuation. Uber’s CEO also “expressed regret for the actions” that led to the lawsuit.

bertil 9y ago
It is interesting that Alphabet will accept stock because that means they believe they can carry it to market (or at least, won’t lower its value until it does) which might still take more than a year. This could mean Waymo will probably not be able to announce anything significant until then: Uber would suffer from having such a big rival step up. Internal politics at Alphabet must be fun.
- shimon 9y ago
  Or, it's the best they thought they could given what's provable about the case, their experience in court so far, etc. Presumably it's possible there are settlement terms having to do with the use/disuse of certain trade secrets, but we may never know.
- fnbr 9y ago
  Alphabet's probably accepting stock because they're one of the most risk-loving investors possible. They've already got a business that's spinning off tons of cash, so they have no need for money, and instead, are pursuing any possible avenue that has the potential of making $$$ (e.g. all of the other bets).
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > It is interesting that Alphabet will accept stock because that means they believe they can carry it to market (or at least, won’t lower its value until it does) which might still take more than a year. It doesn't mean Alphabet thinks the stock won't lose value, it means that they think that it won't lose enough value to be worth less than what they could have gotten in cash, either in a settlement or (discounted for risk and time, and netted against the expense of continuing) from taking the lawsuit to it's conclusion. > This could mean Waymo will probably not be able to announce anything significant until then: Uber would suffer from having such a big rival step up. Is $245 million really worth any significant risk to Alphabet’s position in self-driving cars? I suspect they’d accept the risk to the value of the Uber stock to maximize their own future prospects in that market.

cavanasm 9y ago

I recall earlier news stories that Waymo's first settlement proposal last year included demands for a public apology from Uber. Is this that? I wonder if Uber is also paying $1b like Waymo initially demanded, or if that part changed as well. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-uber-lawsuit/exclusive-alphabets-waymo-demanded-1-billion-in-settlement-talks-with-uber-sources-idUSKBN1CH0QC https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-uber-lawsuit/exc...

a13n 9y ago

"Waymo is getting .34% of Uber's equity in the settlement, which at a $72 billion valuation, is valued at about $245 million." https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/961993637348327424 https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/961993637348327424

jmkni 9y ago
Those numbers are insane.
- minimaxir 9y ago
  Insanely low, given that Waymo could have crippled Uber if successful.
  - mstade 9y ago
    So does this mean perhaps their case wasn't as strong as they thought?
  - mseebach 9y ago
    Could they, though? Uber's valuation is based on its taxi technology business. The self-driving stuff might be their long play, but certainly not the source of their value. I have no idea what kinds of damages Waymo might have been able to extract from Uber, but it seems very unlikely that it would have been in the multi-billion-dollar range. $245 million is a huge sum, add to that the saved cost of ongoing litigation.
    - CodeWriter23 9y ago
      The value of the taxi technology is predicated on surviving high losses for a few years to secure riders for the autonomous fleet that will emerge. The driver component in the current equation is 100% subsidized by investors.
    - jacksmith21006 9y ago
      Uber value is based on adopting SDC. Otherwise the business does not work long term.

sneak 9y ago

> To be clear, while we do not believe that any trade secrets made their way from Waymo to Uber, nor do we believe that Uber has used any of Waymo’s proprietary information in its self-driving technology, we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work. At what point do statements like this start to harm a company rather than benefit it? It is plain to see that they are lying; if the first is true the second part would not be happening.

username223 9y ago

That was quick. What would Uber and/or Google have been embarrassed to see become public? And will Lewandowski get to quietly sneak away, or will both companies now pillory him?

bertil 9y ago
Once evidence is revealed, there isn’t much new for lawyers to discover: good, experience negotiators know what angle the other side is going to take and after opening arguments, even that is pretty settled.

montrose 9y ago

Uber was right to cave. Google is not a litigious company, and would not have sued unless Uber had behaved really badly.

pavlov 9y ago
It doesn’t make sense to apply anthropomorphized motivations to giant corporations. Google’s IPR management is not that different from the others. They will litigate if it’s to their advantage. Maybe the reason Google hasn’t been suing much until now is that they’ve largely been on the borrowing end of the deal (cf. Android’s debt to Sun and Apple).
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Just not Google's approach to sue others. Think in this case just too much too let it go. You can see it elsewhere with all the research papers and open sourcing so much software. I mean OS K8s was a little nuts, imo.

robterrell 9y ago

"To be clear, while we do not believe that any trade secrets made their way from Waymo to Uber, nor do we believe that Uber has used any of Waymo’s proprietary information in its self-driving technology, we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work." I feel like there's a contradiction inside this sentence. Is this an admission that some of Uber's technology came from Waymo, but merely things that are not trade secrets / proprietary information?

philfrasty 9y ago
While there may in fact be some truths to the allegations this seems more like a standard settlement phrase to me. Got sued a lot of times myself for various (business related) reasons. Sometimes just faster to pay than see how it plays out.
woodandsteel 9y ago
It is not a straight-forward admission of guilt, but it is much more of an admission than you usually see in these sorts of cases. It seems pretty clear that the new CEO thinks they had some real ethics problems at Uber, and is sincerely working to straighten things out.

roymurdock 9y ago

Good behind the scenes analysis of why Waymo's case was flimsy here from Sarah Jeong, a lawyer and journalist who has been live tweeting the trial: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16993208/waymo-v-uber-trial-trade-secrets-lidar https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16993208/waymo-v-uber-tria... Summary - Waymo was claiming Uber violated 8 trade secrets (down from 100s), and had only directly discussed these trade secrets for 45 minutes over the past week. "Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes?" "And then there’s the part where Anthony Levandowski is not on trial, Uber is. Even if Levandowski took 14,000 confidential documents, that doesn’t mean that Uber did something wrong — there isn’t a clear link to how those documents got onto Uber computers or were used in Uber self-driving cars."

manux 9y ago
She makes a number of fair points, but: > Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes? Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I think I can do that in 45 seconds. - hey what's your learning rate scheduling for module X? - we use an EMA with coefficient 1e-4 - oh great, and for Y, do you do constant strides? - no we use backtracking to figure out some sampling heuristic etc.
- phil21 9y ago
  None of which would be useful for a judge or jury. Heck, I'm generally pretty decent technically compared to the rest of the population and what you wrote here is barely relevant to me.
  - manux 9y ago
    Sure what I just wrote is technobabble, I don't have much self-driving car expertise, but it was just to make a point. From my experience with large scale engineering projects, especially ones with ML involved, the tiniest details can make the stupidest difference.
    - pvg 9y ago

hawktheslayer 9y ago

> "may have potentially" This kind of language must be intentional given the team that reviewed and edited the memo, which makes it worse to my ears. Either "may have" or "potentially" would have sufficed.

bradfitz 9y ago
The lawyers get paid per weasel word!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

tyingq 9y ago

I wonder if this means Levandowski is also personally off the hook now as well. Also, I'm not clear how much he actually netted from Otto, since lots was probably based on vesting that didn't happen.

csours 9y ago
Is there any motivation for Waymo and Uber to work together to burn Levandowski? If not, he's {probably} off the hook.

aresant 9y ago

The statement from Uber's new CEO on this settlement is concise: https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-waymo-settlement/ https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-waymo-settlement/

rdiddly 9y ago
Yes I believe I saw that recently...
- Zhyl 9y ago
  If not, you can find it here: https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-waymo-settlement/ https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-waymo-settlement/
  - wand3r 9y ago
    link to the HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16341094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16341094
thrillgore 9y ago
Dara's day job, it appears, is to apologize for the poor conduct of former management.

edshiro 9y ago

Really surprised this ended so quickly. Did Waymo and Uber reach a settlement that early because: - the former felt this was the "best" it could get in such a situation as their case was not as strong as they initially thought - the latter was not keen on having its image dragged into the mud any further and may also be aware that more incriminating material could surface if Google or others dug further? IANAL, but I find the resolution of this case quite puzzling... Also what does it mean for Uber's self-driving car development efforts?

alex_young 9y ago
After a few days of testimony it's surely related to how that's going. The stakes get really high when your fate is in 10 random people's hands...
pcwalton 9y ago
The trial was turning into a circus. (Just look at Sarah Jeong's tweet storms about it.) I'm not surprised this happened in that light: it was terrible for the image of both companies and self-driving cars in general.
- fullshark 9y ago
  Why both companies?
  - Fricken 9y ago
    For Uber I think it's obvious. For Waymo, well, to use the Words of former program manager Chris Urmson in a late 2015 letter to Sergey Brin (Which Uber's lawyers trotted out as part of their defense) "Over the past 6 months we have stopped playing to win and are now playing to minimize downside." Waymo joins Tesla and Baidu as self driving car companies who have levied lawsuits over top engineers leaving their projects to become competition.
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    The judge was admonishing Waymo for showing what were essentially marketing materials to the jury in closed-door sessions. Their lawyers were showing clips from Wall Street in court. They were asking Travis Kalanick to explain video game terminology in ludicrous detail. And so on. No company that aims to be taken seriously wants to be involved in a circus like that.

decacorn1 9y ago

Google should have pummeled Uber. That company deserves massive correction, even if it means crippling it to ground zero. Truly deplorable company.

samfisher83 9y ago

google used to own 7% of uber. I don't know what it is now, but lets say its 5% that stake would be 3.5bil at 72bil valuation . If they are getting .34% essentially they are losing money from GV losing money as a share holder while waymo is gaining some, but they are both google companies. I don't see how this lawsuit benefits google shareholders as a whole. They just wasted money on lawyers.

neuland 9y ago
Won't they make money in absolute terms? Maybe it was a waste of time. But, 0.37% of Uber is $245 million. I can't imagine Waymo spent that on lawyers, investigators, etc.
bagacrap 9y ago
What you said would make sense if GV owned a much higher percentage of Uber.
111_1_111 9y ago
Google Ventures is losing far less than Waymo is receiving. Did you get dropped on the head as a kid?
bvod 9y ago
Google has an in-house litigation team that would have already been on payroll. Sure they had to pay for expert witnesses and court fees, but the total would be far less than what they settled for
- jankeymeulen 9y ago
  Charles Verhoeven, afaik the lead attorney for Waymo is definitely not on Alphabet payroll.

sleepychu 9y ago

Estimate of total legal cost to Uber and Waymo combined?

sparren 9y ago

I strongly believe that the case wasn't ever really that strong. Call me crazy, but I think the strong negative press was created to drive down the value of Uber, which in turn help build the case that those with Uber options should sell, allowing Softbank to scoop up even more equity during the large transaction that occurred recently.

rdiddly 9y ago

"But the prospect that a couple of Waymo employees may have inappropriately solicited others to join Otto, and that they may have potentially left with Google files in their possession, in retrospect, raised some hard questions." "Hard questions" -- That's a good one! Not only because of its velvety-smooth use of euphemism, but because it's basically true: We enlist the help of the judicial system to answer questions that are hard. And an accusation that the accused denies, fits in that category. Filing a lawsuit is essentially asking a "hard question" along the lines of "Should the other party be obligated to compensate us for damages?" One side says yes, the other says no. Hard question! I'll have to use that one sometime. I really need to learn the art of executive-speak if I'm to advance in this life. But I suspect I'll just stubbornly stay my same tactless self.

habosa 9y ago

So what is Lewandowski's final status here? I know he doesn't work at Uber anymore, but did he keep all the money? Seems like he got a pretty good deal if so, he's retired with hundreds of millions.

ggg9990 9y ago
He’ll be sued but regardless of what happens he’ll be fantastically wealthy afterwards.
curun1r 9y ago
He's probably going to be sued by Waymo, likely with Uber's full cooperation. The part of Google's case that always seemed the strongest was their forensic evidence of his misconduct just before he left. He could also be sued by Uber if he lied or omitted anything during the Otto acquisition.
- theptip 9y ago
  Waymo already pursued arbitration against Levandowsi, I'm unclear on whether that they can go after him again: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/29/waymo-pursued-arbitration-with-anthony-levandowski-before-it-sued-uber/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/29/waymo-pursued-arbitration-...
  - dpark 9y ago
    I don't see how it's unclear. You can't go through arbitration and then sue because you want more than arbitration awarded you. The entire point of arbitration is that it's binding and final, specifically to avoid the messy lawsuit process.
    - beambot 9y ago
      Probably true. But if he made fraudulent or false statements during arbitration that are later proven as such, I assume that could reopen him to lawsuits
    - 9y ago

crsv 9y ago

The statement might as well have just been the title. It was completely void of substance.

jfig 9y ago

«...we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work.» Waymo will have access to Ubers Lidar and software. And an admission of guilt.

mabbo 9y ago

This isn't about something new happening in the fight itself- it's about the economy lately (imho). This was a fight they could have drawn out. They could have claimed it wasn't their fault, they could have paid enough legal fees to win the day. But it was always going to be a waste of time, in a literal sense. Years could have gone by before any decision, holding back Uber the entire time. Uber is still a black hole for money but VCs see it's potential and keep throwing money at it. So long as that money kept coming, Uber could do anything they want really. But then the market started crashing. The last week has been a wake up call that things are a-changin'. In another six months, there may not be VC money being thrown around anymore. And then you'd have Uber actually in a crunch. What then? By settling today, Uber may have the time it needs to get their self-driving fleet in the road before the money runs out for good. That's all that matters to keep the company alive, and Khosrowshahi knows it. But if he'd been smart, he'd have settled six months ago instead.

encoderer 9y ago
Lawyers don’t work fast enough for this to have anything to do with stock market pullback.
- mabbo 9y ago
  They can if you pay them enough. Or if this contingency plan was written 3 months ago just in case the economy finally faltered.
  - eclipxe 9y ago
    Yeah, no. That's not how this works.
    - mabbo 9y ago
      Seriously though- beyond a dismissive snarky reply, what is your view on it? Why now? Why not six months ago and why not fight to the end? It's fine to disagree, but don't just tell me I'm wrong, convince me I'm wrong!

lorenzhs 9y ago

The page redirects to a non-existent page in some countries, here's an archive link for anyone else who can't access it: http://archive.is/0YuQe http://archive.is/0YuQe

thecolorblue 9y ago

Is there any precedent for settling with stock? I would imagine this could create a dangerous standard.

jsjohnst 9y ago
Tons of precedent. In fact, Google paid Yahoo stock worth about the same amount to settle the Overture suit.

laveur 9y ago

I have to say that this is kind of surprising but thinking about it all logically it seems like there is a lot more to this story. First off as others have pointed out Waymo's case wasn't a slam dunk. So they settled for way less than they originally wanted. But there are several other interesting things to note. Because of this case there is now a criminal investigation into Uber's acquisition of Otto. I feel like part of why Uber settled was because they knew this was being investigated and dragging out this case in court may have made public some really incriminating evidence in the criminal investigation. What further leads me to believe this is the case is the fact that the current CEO has basically admitted that the acquisition of Otto should have been handled differently. It seems like they knew that Otto may have stolen trade secrets from Waymo. It also appears that Uber may have had helped set up Otto from the start to acquire such information. For this we will have to wait and see how the criminal investigation shakes out. At which point we could see federal charges appear against Uber and Levandowski. We may also see the SEC step into this as well if they did appear to set up Otto as a Shell company to acquire stolen technologies. Time will tell.

woodandsteel 9y ago

I think what happened is Levandowski and Uber acted in a very suspicious way that lead Waymo to conclude that Uber must have stolen its IP. But then when it came to discovery they couldn't find solid evidence (either because the property was not used, or Uber managed to destroy the evidence), and so Waymo realized it was probably going to lose the trial. In the meantime, the lawsuit helped kick Kalanick out, and he was replaced by someone much more reasonable who wanted to end the lawsuit. As a consequence the two parties were able to come to an agreement.

oh_sigh 9y ago
I doubt they destroyed evidence - if they acted nefariously, they probably just operated in a manner that did not generate evidence. I'm just a middling employee in a big company and it is drilled into my head how to, basically, not leave a paper trail for important topics.
jamiequint 9y ago
This theory is so wildly off from what my lawyer friends have told me about the case (including one who has 5+ years of IP law experience) They are mostly in agreement that Google had enough to win the case but that they likely had the worry that juries are always unpredictable and you really never know what will happen. They seem to believe that the thing that Google cared about the most was restricting Uber's usage of the stolen technology. They believe that Uber felt they had a decent chance of losing so they mutually agreed to setting, giving Google what they wanted (restriction of the technology usage). Once that was offered Google immediately moved to settle since that was what they wanted from the outset and any additional cash or destruction of Uber's image would have been beyond their needs.
- inverse_pi 9y ago
  If you look at the settlement number, 0.34% of Uber at 72B (yes, 72B, not 45B as the recent down round which would equate to 150M), then you'll see that Google did not expect to win this case.
  - 9y ago

loverofthings 9y ago

It's amazing how judicial system works fast in the USA. In my country both companies would go bankrupt and would still be suing each other due to sunk cost fallacy.

cft 9y ago

Very good lesson:risk pays off. Lewandowski risked and it paid off.

objclxt 9y ago
> Lewandowski risked and it paid off. Levandowski was fired from Uber, is still in arbitration with Waymo, and possibly has a federal investigation pending against him (which is why he has, and was planning to, take the fifth amendment). I'm not sure how it "paid off" here.
- joering2 9y ago
  I think his firing was only PR. Seems like he is still at Uber: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-levandowski-8164291/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-levandowski-8164291/

bradtemp 9y ago

Big victory for Uber http://ideas.4brad.com/uber-and-waymo-settle-lawsuit-giant-victory-uber http://ideas.4brad.com/uber-and-waymo-settle-lawsuit-giant-v...

zpatel 9y ago

google is looking like microsoft of yesterday, although i had high hopes from google.

fnord77 9y ago

At the end of the day, Alphabet is just another lawyer-driven company. Gross.

burner890 9y ago

Anyone who thinks this is a loss for Uber doesn't know what was at stake in this case. At one point an injunction against Uber's self-driving division was on the table. If that were still any sort of possibility Uber would have ended up paying far more than a couple hundred million in equity to settle the case. I think it's safe to say this wasn't really about theft of trade secrets by Uber. We can infer this because Google's lawyers would have known exactly how weak their case against Uber was when nothing of substance turned up as part of discovery. Google decided to go to trial anyway. They knew that Uber's ailing brand would make them _seem_ guilty in the public eye even though they clearly weren't. I can't prove this, but I think this was a chillingly opportunistic move by Google that was designed mainly to stop the loss of top engineering talent to Uber ATG. After all, who would want to go to join a company which appeared to be in serious legal jeopardy? I'd speculate that Uber's current leadership saw an opportunity to immediately stop the damage to their brand and took it. Part of me wishes TK were still running the show because he probably would not have settled.

bprasanna 9y ago

That is called a positive attitude towards accepting mistakes and moving forward. Uber finally got a good CEO.

utopcell 9y ago

Uber has bad connotations in my head. To be honest, I'd rather Google didn't hold a stake at it.