The Uber Bombshell About to Drop
danielcompton.net
danielcompton.net
FWIW this assertion (which isn't really core to the central thesis of the post, but still) is wrong. That number comes from
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/12/01/2180647/the-taxi-unic...
but the author of that story misread the data. Uber only counts their cut as revenue not the full cost of the ride.
Despite this repetition (now corrected, thx!) of this incorrect data I find the overall thesis of the post compelling! As a disinterested bystander, it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
EDIT: It turns out the original 41% statement comes from http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver... not from the Financial Times. It can be hard to trace these things back sometimes.
(1) which is not the same thing, at all, as the total amount customers are paying for rides
(2) which is not the same thing, at all, as the cost of providing all uber rides
> (1) which is not the same thing,
> at all, as the total amount customers
> are paying for rides
If they suddenly had 10x as many rides or would shed coupons and R&D, they'd probably be profitable. But they'd also lose their edge they hope to have over Lyft & Co.
NB: There are of course areas where they offer rides below the driver's cut, but that's probably rare after they exited China.
I can't imagine that Uber loses money on each additional trip. If that was true, the boycotts are helping Uber!
So if you have a coupon and use it, it's quite likely that Uber makes a loss. But for most other rides, the driver will usually get a bit less than what you pay. It's just not enough to cover the company costs.
Would those be essential at this point? Seems like everyone who wants a ride-sharing app has one, so their marketing expense should be substantially down by now.
Startups typically keep the salary expenses controllable by compensating via equity (which does not have to be reported as expense unless one is doing GAAP), so it seems that it should be under control as well.
I've talked with 2-3 Uber drivers in LA area. They seem to be getting 65% to 75% of what passenger pays. I think many of the core Uber markets are fairly profitable. This would imply that majority of the burn is focused on growth in new markets.
Some potential problems with extrapolating the data:
* Small sample size.
* Uber rides cost more in California, observed 65% to 75% might not hold in other mature markets.
What's at issue here isn't that Uber drivers don't get to take home X% of what the passenger pays, but rather that the cost Uber charges passengers isn't enough to keep the business afloat without a significant amount of VC funding.
1. Run their operating business - Maintain data centers - Maintain a global web infrastructure - Maintain the app
2. Run campaigns to compete in markets with strong local competition - Europe (Hailo, Car2Go, etc) - Asia (Didi, Ola, Grab, etc)
3. Finance their ongoing operations - Equity financing expensive - Debt financing hard to get at this stage and cost money too
4. Hire and retain top talent 5. Legal fees and licensing 6. Rentals for global offices 7. Fund and maintain fleet businesses 8. Invest in R&D (self-driving technology & talent) 9. Entertain M&A
So it looks they have a lot of costs on their plate which their operating business can not cover.
Service and hardware businesses have completely different cost structures as compared to tech companies.
Think about it - standard deduction is about about 50 cents per mile for vehicle costs, and actually having a human in the seat probably costs more than 50 cents per mile ($ per hour divided by average speed), and the average drive is about 5 miles. We're talking well over $5 in wholesale operating costs for each ride. Times literally a million rides per day.
The cost of a few programmers and servers is tiny in comparison.
These are all things Uber does not do. It comes out of the cut the driver takes home, not Uber's revenue.
According to the CEO, self-driving cars are "existential" to Uber's success. They may need something that disruptive to meet the company's sky high valuation.
You go to work at 9am and while at work 9.01am to 4.59pm your car drives around making you both money. The same applies for when you return home 6.01pm to 8am the next day.
No drivers, only Auto-bots ;) and paying customers!
(makes me wonder how much Insurance companies will be making from this setup)(and if they are ready/preparing their numbers for this type of business)
I don't want to imagine what it'd be like at 8am after giving lifts to people coming home after a night out
If you find the car filthy, I'm sure a customer would too, so it's in their interest to fix it and I'm sure it's even easy to automate the cleaning process :-)
The fact that it has been widely reported is a sad statement on the innumeracy of journalism.
- 41% of Uber's corporate expenses are paid for by the customer, 59% by investors
- 100% of non-corporate costs (driver, car, fuel, maintenance, etc) are paid for by the customer and 0% by investors.
But this instead somehow got interpreted as "the customer only pays for 41% of the ride cost". Which is completely false.
I will add that I suspect that some corporate expenses are going to the driver in the form of bonuses or minimum per hour earnings (Uber has had a lot incentive programs for drivers). This, kinda, goes to the cost of a ride. I have no idea how much money this is overall. A lot maybe.
That said, they probably set machines in very high traffic areas to terrible odds to catch as many suckers as possible.
A machine that's truly random will result in everyone losing money slowly and reliably after a large number of pulls. So not fun. A machine built to have the odds wander around over a period of time will be more unpredictable with a greater earnings spread
Also, for video poker and card games, the wins and losses are distributed as if it were a real deck of cards shuffled between hands. There are strict regulations there too, and payout percentages based on the rules of the game and the payout values for each type of poker hand.
For progressive Jackpots, the chances of you hitting the Jackpot on two successive pulls are the same as you hitting the jackpot on two pulls far apart. The payouts are different, but as you said, that is not hidden information.
Slot machines are able to use psychological tricks, I believe, such as showing "almost hits" with a higher probability than them actually occurring. "Oh, if that one symbol had just changed, I'd be a millionaire right now!"
State law allows them to change the odds after a machine has been idle for four minutes, and then they must not allow anyone to play the machine for four more minutes. During that time, the screen must indicate a change is being made to the game's configuration, said Travis Foley, laboratory manager for the technology division of the Nevada State Gaming Control Board, who is overseeing the Treasure Island test.
(How many people do you suppose play lotteries week in week out never winning back a fraction of what they out in, but dreaming about and planning what they're gonna spend the $10,000,000 jackpot on?)
As to odds. If you have a 1% chance to win 99$ and play 90 times you are likely to be up 9$ and have a lower odds of being down 90$ And even lower odds of being up 108$. Over long enough time frames you still lose money, but it feels very different from losing 0.01 cents per pull.
except that revenue != income. (http://smallbusiness.chron.com/net-sales-revenue-vs-net-inco... )
> Net sales, or net revenue, is the money a company gets from doing business with its customers. Net income is profit -- what's left over after the company has accounted for all its revenue, expenses, gains, losses, taxes and other obligations.
Uber almost certainly counts the revenue. This is a standard silicon valley way of getting a higher VC valuation.
This is important because if the money is flowing through Uber's pockets then Uber has the ability to adjust the diversion of revenue into income. ( and the VCs know this )
Look at the random silicon valley startup marketplace that reports how many millions of dollars they sold. All revenue - but the income may be pitiful.
It does not, as you can plainly see if you look at the nakedcapitalism link. Revenue is a separate, and much smaller, number than total passenger payments.
Farebox ratio = fares / total cost of operations
Total cost of operations = fares - profits
Farebox ratio = fares / (fares - profits)
For 1H2015:
Farebox ratio = 3,661 / (3,661 - -987) = 3661 / 4648 = 78.8%
"Uber passengers were paying only 41% of the actual cost of their trips."
What you have calculated is that Uber passengers paid 78.8% of the cost of operating the company in 1H2015.
The cost of operating the company isn't the same thing as the cost of all their trips. The company does a lot more than provide trips.
Mmmkay
"As long as I don't have to pay, I don't care what the cost is! Wait, why is everyone looking at me all funny?"
However, if the stolen material had the results of years of training data generated from all the trial runs, that would be Google's only edge in the whole market.
yes he could, the team and him had a killer track record and he wouldn't admit to stealing anything from Waymo
"He joined Google in 2007 as part of its Maps team and helped to build the company’s Street View product. When Google gave the green light to begin working on a self-driving car in 2009, Mr. Thrun picked Mr. Levandowski for the original team.
Mr. Levandowski gained some notoriety within Google for selling start-ups, which he had done as side projects, to his employer. In his biography for a real estate firm, for which he is a board member, Mr. Levandowski said he sold three automation and robotics start-ups to Google, including 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots, for nearly $500 million. After this story was published, the real estate firm updated its website erasing Mr. Levandowski’s biography and said that it had “erroneously reported certain facts incorrectly without Mr. Levandowski’s knowledge.”"
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/technology/anthony-levand...
"And yet, one of Google’s most strategic acquisitions has mysteriously been actively blocked from public view. An investigation by IEEE Spectrum has uncovered the surprising fact that Google’s innovative self-driving car and the revolutionary Street View camera technology that preceded it were largely built by 510 Systems, a tiny start-up in Berkeley, Calif."
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/th...
Why would he need to steal if he had that kind of money already?
Greed.
It's why politicians who have enough money for several generations continue to take more and more bribes. (I live in Sri Lanka and witness this on a regular blatant basis).
Enough or more than enough isn't a reason for human nature to not want more. It actually seems to be a driver to get more by any means. (my assumption )
This is also stealing in my opinion, but it might be a little more nuanced than for pure greed.
I disagree: they don't make cars. That's a huge impediment. The prime position company is surely Tesla. Or, really, any car manufacturer.
If you are retrofitting existing cars you are wasting a ton of money and getting a half baked solution to a dedicated provider.
Actually developing self-driving tech and then deploying it is almost entirely unrelated to the business that Uber has developed thus far. It's an enormous undertaking, and they were starting from almost zero.
Dispatch via app is a solid improvement over the old phonecalls or street pickup, automatic credit card billing is an improvement over cash, and in cities with shady taxi drivers, GPS tracking is an improvement over potentially hacked taxi meters.
So there is an obviously valuable business model for "taxi dispatch app" here even without a moonshot - just perhaps smaller than Uber's dream of being the only provider of personal transportation in the world.
Uber would need to start understanding how ordering of goods works, returns, and service/quality complaints.
They could do it, but there are a whole lot of domain specific problems and approaches to resolve and it's not clear that's it's long-term viable.
It's also the easiest part to copy, most taxi companies have already. Now try asking they investors why the spent so many billions of dollars to break into the taxi business?
Being a good taxi company in the 21st century will mean good at self-driving cars.
Not to mention that transportation-as-a-service would also be a lot more convenient than car ownership. No need to refuel, repair, or otherwise maintain your vehicle; just grab whichever one happens to be nearby. You can have as many or as few cars as you need at any particular moment, and get a car of any model or paint color you want at the push of a button.
Not relevant to my assertion. I said when they become the norm, as in, when they're no more expensive as other cars.
> ... transportation-as-a-service would also be a lot more convenient than car ownership.
This means I can share a car with several friends, neighbors, or room-mates with little fuss. The problem with sharing a car today is licensing, insurance, and the inconvenience of the car being stuck somewhere when in use. If it acted, instead, as your own personal driver it can handle multiple trips concurrently. Two people go to the movies, so they're committed for X hours, and in that interim instead of sitting in a parking lot the car can deal with other things.
Uber's business model arbitrages the difficulty and expense of owning a car vs. the expense of buying a cab ride. If the car becomes more cost effective because of personal ride-sharing their margin evaporates.
Today a decent car would cost me about $600/mo. all-in. If I could buy a 1/6th share in a car for $100/mo. and be able to use it in short stints with little contention that's going to be cheaper than Uber if I use it more than a handful of times.
My point is that self-driving cars will become the norm long before they're "no more expensive as other cars" precisely because of transportation-as-a-service companies like Uber. By the time we start getting anywhere near the point where self-driving cars are "no more expensive as other cars", car ownership will already have been largely supplanted by transportation-as-a-service.
> If I could buy a 1/6th share in a car for $100/mo. and be able to use it in short stints with little contention that's going to be cheaper than Uber if I use it more than a handful of times.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here. It sounds like you're describing transportation-as-a-service, but with the additional restriction of you only being able to use one particular car that you "own" 1/6th of instead of any car that happens to be nearby at the time when you request it.
That sounds like a needless restriction, and negates many of the advantages of transportation-as-a-service (no need to refuel, repair, or otherwise maintain your vehicle, the flexibility to obtain as many cars as you want at any particular moment, the ability to use a pickup truck one day and a minivan the next, etc).
Also, why would that be cheaper than Uber? I think a service like Uber is likely to be far more efficient with the usage of their self-driving fleet than you could ever be with any one, individual car, even if that car _is_ shared between multiple people.
If you're used to taking an Uber on occasion, taking an AutoUber isn't a big deal, just like trying a new coffee at Starbucks.
Even if GM is selling L5 autonomous cars to everybody in 2025, they're going to cost as much as a car does. Why buy it when you can pay by the ride? And Uber wants to be the name you think of when summoning a ride.
What is a startup? Poised for explosive growth. Are commodity businesses poised for that growth? No.
A taxi company has well understood financials and valuation and would never be given a crack at VC Lotto.
In addition, the kind of quality control that Uber/Lyft exert over drivers almost certainly places the drivers in the position of being employees which makes things even more unprofitable.
I can see in the best possible scenario we end up with more cities like Austin, Texas that have their own nonprofit ride sharing app. I actually have huge respect for what Austin did in banning Uber and Lyft and making their own app (Ride Austin) that isn't designed to make investors and owners rich, instead just benefit drivers and riders.
For now. I generally prefer for-profit approaches because their motivations are far more transparent. They want to make money for the investors.
Non-profits exist to serve the wishes of the donors, which may be opaque. For instance, the Ride Austin investors might suddenly decide that they really want to focus on transportation to/from low income areas or art festivals. That would degrade service, and there would be no accountability to the customer in that regard.
Not only are food coops a pretty big deal in Austin, but when I lived in Austin even the electricity company that I got my power from was a coop (https://www.pec.coop/) and if the coop made too much money it redistributed the profits back out as credits to member accounts. I generally ended up with one out of twelve months effectively being free because of profit credits being redistributed back out to my account.
The whole culture of coops and nonprofit service organizations is something I really miss about Austin now that I no longer live there.
This is great and all, but wouldn't that money be more effectively utilized maintaining or upgrading the grid or investing in renewable energy? Seems like the co-op model never really invests in progress.
Non profits, you can get a lot of people arguing about how to best fulfill the intents of the non-profit. In that situation, whoever argues the most persuasively or loudly wins, and it's the customers that suffer.
This past Saturday none of the ride sharing services could handle demand and all went down. No riders could request and an no drivers could accept.
Also when the service does work glitches like seeing the login screen when you are already logged in are routine.
Source: I'm in Austin right now for sxsw and I'm a former Austin resident.
Also this whole debacle was a clear and present tax grab for the city please dont pretend it wasn't.
Now on balance Uber and Lyft ran an AWFUL campaign against the regulations when they already do background checks but still that was always about money.
(1) The total of the permit fee paid by taxicab companies times the number of persons driving for the TNC;
(2) One (1) percent of the TNCs annual local gross revenues, or a comparable percentage of a TNCs portion of driver fares; or
(3) Based on total miles driven.
(B) Except for any TNC participating in the Safety Assurance Program, each TNC shall pay an additional fee of one (1) percent of the TNCs annual local gross revenue for the Compliant Driver Education Fund to be used to assist and incent drivers to become compliant."
Also, it was about much more than just fingerprinting. Fingerprinting was emphasized because it would have affected Uber and Lyft's business model the most by reducing the supply of drivers due to higher onboarding friction.
Here's the ordinance: https://www.austintexas.gov/edims/document.cfm%3Fid=245769
Some more interesting parts:
- "A TNC shall establish a driver-training program designed to ensure that each driver safely operates his or her vehicle prior to the driver being able to offer service"
- "during periods of abnormal market disruptions, dynamic pricing shall be prohibited."
- ...and the whole reporting section where they have to hand over all their internal operating data to the city
A tax grab for me implies taking some money from some entity for a completely different reason. Like, paying for a civic ice rink with the money.
I am very interested to see if aggressive pricing and cost/route optimisation can unlock enough demand to make pooling actually viable economically, which none of the Uber/Lyft alternatives really seem willing to try.
1) Austin did not ban Uber or Lyft. The city council passed an ordinance that required a gradually increasing percentage of rideshare drivers pass an FBI-approved fingerprint background check. (These rules are in place in other locales in which Uber operates, such as NYC and Houston.) Uber and Lyft formed a PAC that got a proposition on the next local election ballot that would have overturned the ordinance, then spent $9 million on a massive advertising campaign supporting the proposition. The proposition failed overwhelmingly.
2) Uber and Lyft stopped providing services of their own volition within 48 hours. Considering they abide by the same regulations in other cities, it seems pretty obvious to me that it was done in retaliation in order to show other cities considering doing the same that they will actually pull out.
3) Several upstart ridesharing companies immediately jumped into the market and were fully operational in less than a month and are complying fully with the regulations. (Examples are Fasten, Fare, RideAustin, and GetMe.)
4) RideAustin is registered as a non-profit organization, formed by several local tech entrepreneurs affiliated with Capital Factory, an Austin accelerator/VC firm. It is not owned or operated by the city in any fashion.
They have no moat, no barrier to entry, and a whole lot of hubris just waiting to mature in the form of fierce competitors and negative PR.
Its not an unsolvable problem though. I bet if they could hire more/better engineers and invest in infra for reliability they could be a lot better. And it might actually happen if Uber suddenly raises its prices and people look around for alternatives.
I think Uber and Lyft have made a huge mistake by leaving Austin. First of all they showed drivers and passengers just how little they cared about them; a lot of people in Austin were really angry at them and continue to be. Second, their stunt did not work. There was, obviously, a lot of backlash against the Mayor and local politicians but that has died down and the city has moved on. But lastly, and most importantly, the Austin market became available exclusively to all the other ridesharing apps, giving them a leg up and a source of reliable income and feedback.
I get the feeling that next time this happens in another city, the other apps will similarly step in and take over the market. But this time they will be faster and better prepared.
Doesn't this count as first-mover advantage?
Austin's homegrown competitors may not be fearful, but one of the existing majors could single-handedly shatter Uber's image with a half-decent app, esp if it's integrated with something like Google Maps or Apple Wallet or equivalent feed.
I read a poignant comment on Twitter the other day, about how nowadays public libraries and fire services would never be funded - perhaps we'd give illiterate people tax credits for buying books, and insurance companies would have private fire engines.
The neo-liberal agenda of not allowing any public entity to provide services that could possibly compete with a private corporation has succeeded too well.
Modern conservatism is a cancer.
I pay for fire protection as part of my property taxes. In this case, it's a separate item that must be purchased separately. That's what makes it "a cancer"?
As the morons in the article said: Bell and her boyfriend said they were aware of the policy, but thought a fire would never happen to them.
No sympathy for people who lost their home and possessions over a $75 fee?
I had a friend who had no sympathy for another friend who was diagnosed with throat cancer, because he smoked cigarettes. Didn't matter that the person had cancer, what mattered is that they smoked cigarettes and knew the risks. It was forgivable on the first friend's part because he was also heavily medicated for a psychiatric illness.
Well, yes, sympathy from me as in "sucks to be them". But they were adults and made a voluntary decision to forego paying for fire protection. They made a bet and they lost.
As for cancer, when I was in high school some 40 years ago, I knew a US Army Major (i.e. Gung-ho military) who smoked. Even then, smoking was starting to be frowned upon. So he used to say "any fool can quit smoking. It takes a man to face cancer."
At a personal level, if I ran into that person now and it turned out he indeed had cancer, I would of course have sympathy for him. But perhaps he and I would both agree that adults sometimes make bad decisions, and they then should accept the consequences of those bad decisions.
As Niven and Pournelle explained it back in 1981: "think of it as evolution in action".
Personally, I don't think we should reward people for making bad decisions; you are implicitly punishing the people who made the good ones, which are often hard. However, rewarding is one thing; saving from death/destitution is quite another.
Yes of course families help each other no matter the previous bad choices.
On a societal level we try to help people with cancer even if they don't have health insurance. That's what Medicaid is. Unfortunately that only helps save them from death; destitution probably feels almost as bad and we don't have an easy solution to that.
At the point that someone is diagnosed with cancer, what is gained by saying "I told you so"?
Would you go as far as to say that to someone who got stomach cancer? That they should accept the consequences of eating cured meats while they and their family suffer?
What about prostate cancer? Did you know that the risk of prostate cancer is decreased by 20% - 30% for each of the following: 1) regular prostate massages 2) increased number of orgasms 3) drinking coffee 4) ingesting more lycopene 5) exercising (41% decrease in risk of developing prostate cancer!) 5) consuming more omega-3 fatty acids.
Would you hold the same "I told you so" attitude towards someone diagnosed with prostate cancer because they didn't have enough kinky sex, drink enough coffee, exercise and eat the right foods?
I'm having a hard time differentiating between "didn't pay $75" and "didn't exercise or rub their prostate hard / often enough".
There's a big difference between having "no sympathy" (which is what I said) and "I told you so".
"No sympathy" means indifference. The problems of people who didn't pay for fire service should be a cautionary tale, a warning to society at large. As the article said: by now, everyone should know about the city's fire policy. "After the last situation, I would hope that everybody would be well aware of the rural fire fees, this time"
"I told you so" is much different. It's "rubbing it in" at a personal level. I would never say "I told you so" to friends or to random people. I would, however, say it to my children in the appropriate situation. Pointing out consequences of bad choices helps children learn to make better choices.
I'm having a hard time differentiating
In "didn't pay $75", the people who don't pay but still expect to be covered are making a deliberate choice to freeload off the goodwill of their neighbors who are paying. How does a fire department exist if paying for it is optional? There is no 'fire department tooth fairy' that periodically delivers money to pay for salaries and equipment.
Cancer is much different. As you note, there isn't 100% certainly what causes a cancer. Lung cancer is one that can be closely linked to smoking, but even there it's not absolute. A quick search turns up a CDC web page that links 80% to 90% of the cases to smoking.[1]
In the case of cancer, interestingly enough it's once again an issue of insurance. Even when I was 20 years old and working a shitty no-benefit low paying job I still paid for my own health insurance. I was only being paid $4 per hour but I prioritized insurance highly enough to pay $100 per month for it. (Granted, that was 40 years ago, it's much harder to afford individual insurance today without some sort of subsidy or group policy).
In your hypothetical situations, did the stomach cancer or prostate cancer patient have insurance? If not, how is it once again not a freeloader problem? There's certainly no reason to say "I told you so". That appears to be a strawman you invented to avoid discussing the real issue which IMO is freeloading.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/basic_info/risk_factors.htm
This is sort of a fundamental problem with our entire conception of a digital economy. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are fundamentally the only games in town that can compete. Our regulations, laws, and economics are not well set up to deal with the fact that there is a wholly new type of meta-entity that is so overwhelmingly important for modern business.
We can barely regulate (and often fail to regulate) the energy industry appropriately and that's a way more competitive market.
This is where someone should come in and offer business software that is easily branded to handle the technical aspect of the business, and just sell it to the new entrants. This is a great market for shovels.
This is their first go at this especially crazy rodeo, though.
If large chunks of people ditch Uber, Lyft could stand to grab the lion's share of the market.
No the measure passed because Uber and Lyft failed to understand Austin culture and shot themselves in the foot by annoying Austinites with intrusive tactics that made them look bad in the eyes of a local culture that tends to be fiercely anti big business. It's the same type of mistake Airbnb made in SF with their big marketing campaign of 2015 that just offended everyone.
Good riddance.
I don't believe that for a second. Especially because the exact regulations that Austin put into place are followed by Uber in other places.
As discussed upthread, Uber's investors and owners take a 20% loss on every ride. How much more benefit to drivers and riders do you want?
I don't see what's the problem with that.
I have trouble finding exactly how a customer encountered a 500 10 minutes ago.
GRR Rapid Response https://github.com/google/grr http://grr-response.blogspot.com/
https://github.com/google/grr/blob/gh-pages/screenshots/Scre...
It looks like they could see:
* When the device made check-ins to their management server, and appeared on the Google network
* That the Windows OS was re-installed
* MoMA search queries (some kind of internal system?) for "chauffeur svn login"
* Downloading and installing TortoiseSVN
* Transferring files from SVN
* When a card reader was plugged in
* When the OS was reformatted to Linux
* File downloads from Google drive
Weird that he'd allegedly type "I've never logged into Subversion before, but suddenly I need access" into MoMA, but hey. The whole saga just reminds me that people are really bad at opsec.
The Google Drive/GAIA linkage is the most interesting technical revelation from a quick read. I'm surprised they didn't redact that little trick, because that seems to be the best way to catch the very people doing this. Most people would be forgiven for assuming that a Google consumer product might be a little more obfuscated in terms of forensics (logs access, PII, etc), and I could see that train of thought even though it's dumb. I guess they're willing to burn the technique, because the next person who attempts this will definitely avoid Google Drive.
[14863.014481] usb-storage 2-4:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
...
[15045.488440] usb 2-4: USB disconnect, device number 34
A cursory google search shows this for USB events: https://dfstream.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/the-windows-7-event...
And you are talking about logging actions of your own employees. Let's say 100kb per day per employee (these logs are pretty detailed).
100kb * 50 000 employees = 4.7Gb per day. 1740Gb per year. Probably much, much less then 1 day of youtube videos.
- Can we stop dispensing USB cables in the vending machines?
- Should we deploy the new Macbook Pro without classic USB ports as the new standard?
- Do our conference rooms really still need USB presentation remotes? Does anyone actually use them?
Especially since windows is much bigger than a default linux install these days, and this was a rarely used laptop, it seems unlikley any linux was left, even in free sectors.
It's not hard to get this data or set this data collection up on a Windows domain or machine. Anyone can set this up as long as you have the TBs to collect the data and the presentation/searching layer to find it.
Windows has the ability to log everything, including device installs/uninstalls, file opens/closes/creation/deletion, logons/logoffs, you name it. The Windows Auditing library is really, really, really extensive.
Additionally, setting this up in Active Directory is really easy, both manually and magically with Powershell. It takes about ten minutes or so.
As you would iamgine, most of these policies were enabled on the domain to which most users authenticated and the data it collected was siphoned off to essentially a giant cluster of syslog servers.
In fact, just about any domain will audit device plugs/unplugs. Had Anthony known about this (it's easy to find out even if you're not an admin), he would've not plugged in that memory stick :)
In general, it's pretty hard to do stealthy stuff on Google's network. Everything is logged eight ways to Sunday, especially with GAIA and key-based, two factor auth to EVERYTHING. And unlike most other networks, I wouldn't put it past their security engineers to find shady behavior in a moment's notice.
Sometimes we also see a medium-sized payment (not ruinous) to address the allegedly bad conduct. That usually gets paired with some lawyer-like phrases that amount to a blend of quasi-apology and face-saving evasions.
It's still an interesting suit. But after Apple/Samsung, Oracle/SAP and many others, it's hard to expect that the eventual resolution lives up to the pre-trial buildup.
The civil case was filed in 2007, reached its high-water mark with a jury verdict in 2010 of $1.3 billion in damages, and after a great deal of appeals-court maneuvering, ultimately was settled in 2014 for $356 million in damages.
A separate criminal case was settled for $20 million in 2011. If this Huffington Post article has it right, no individuals were charged. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/13/oracle-sap-settleme...
TomorrowNow was basically caught stealing Oracle manuals to provide the same service as Oracle but at a lower cost.
The person who "wins" the self-driving market on the other hand potentially may be the purveyor of a business and an industry that is set to upend an industry that absolutely dwarfs "Oracle maintenance contracts". Stakes are much higher.
It's no fun to be working in such an environment. Everyone who can afford to get out, gets out.
In this case, it really sees this is cut high and dry. We will see but this really looks bad.
Coca-cola was about to buy Gatorate for $13B. Buffett squashed the deal at the 11th hour and Pepsi paid $14B. Buffett presumably thought that Coca-cola could use the $13B to make its own sports drink. It's still not clear which company was wiser.
Sure, although that's an extremely unlikely outcome. Normally the company would be liquidated to pay the judgment (this is basically what happened in Bollea (Hogan) v Gawker - Gawker couldn't afford the damages, so had to declare bankruptcy and sell itself to pay for them).
Obviously, it runs the risk someone else will come along and buy the company instead, but any other buyer will have significant ongoing IP concerns by using google tech vs re-engineering stuff. Hence, Google will probably outbid other buyers since the company has more utility to them than to others.
No money left to pay off the judgment. Most of the talent is gone, and the folks that remain are hardly motivated to rebuild the business for their new masters. The Napster mess is instructive. The brand might live on, but no one gets rich in the process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster#Shutdown
The math still doesn't work.
If there's a $680 million prize for a successful theft, and people think the chances of being caught are low, you'll need a big penalty to act as an effective deterrent.
The problem here is the prize. It's not a paltry few hundred millions. Just in the USA the yearly car sales are above 500 billion and we are talking about disrupting that big time. Really, really big time. It is not unreasonable to think that private car ownership will become deprecated in 20-30 years. Do you think Google won't be happy to burn the $260M they invested in Uber and a hundred more for lawyers over the years to make sure Uber doesn't get an illicit advantage when the time comes of who will be the doorkeeper?
Can you imagine -- and I know Google can -- the possibilities of an ad company selling all the cars there is? Or the software therein which amounts to the same. Your self driving taxi today is free you just need to listen / watch / immerse / whatever happens by then to ads enroute. You can't even count the trillions they would make.
Thinking in conspiracy theory mode I wonder if it could be possible that Alphabet knew about the theft for longer than they admit, waiting for Uber's self driving projects to grow more valuable, kind of like a secret stake. Would that even be legal?
Though in many cases its beneficial to use this as a way to become a key supplier to a competitor. If it's not a winner take all market (and I doubt this is), then it might be more profitable to take a cut from Uber than to reduce competition by one.
A Google / Uber joint venture where Google provides the software and Uber does fleet management could be unbeatable, for example.
In fact, the people involved look to have done rather well financially out of it so far.
It really isn't hard to imagine - no one is too rich to be greedy, even billionaires want more money.
They both have to decide if that might be better than a long and expensive legal battle.
This one is about bad-faith theft. Google didn't sue Uber because they want to extract some $ from them, they sued because they feel their hard work was literally stolen by a bad-faith actor who is now competing against them with their own work.
Neither party cares about an extra billion or two in either direction, so I doubt we'll see a "token" settlement for that amount.
If Waymo can sue Uber and get $5b, that might keep them away from the prying eyes of the ruthless shareholders looking to cut unprofitable side projects.
> December 13, 2016 - A Waymo employee was accidentally copied on an email from one of its LiDAR-component vendors titled OTTO FILES. The email contained a drawing of what appeared to be an Otto circuit board that resembled Waymo’s LiDAR board and shared several unique characteristics with it. (Filing 59)
Thank god for the honest among us.
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH19137?locale=en_US
https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1299903 (Outlook macro)
i had to ask him more than a couple of times to delete my personal email from his agenda so this wouldn't happen again.
Hence, if jsmith left google, emails to jsmith@google.com would bounce, and bounce messages from google are returned as SMTP errors before the mail server accepts the contents of the message.
It's almost hard to believe Uber would be so brazen as to put something like this together, except that breaking the law has been Uber's business model since day 1.
So tired of hearing this. It's just parrots talking in the echo chamber. Show me a court verdict that Uber broke the law.
http://mobile.ilsole24ore.com/solemobile/main/art/tecnologie...
This is about UberPOP.
"Uber settles driver lawsuit over background checks, to pay $7.5 million" http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-lawsuit-idUSKCN0Z12GS
"Uber has agreed to pay $28.5 million to settle litigation brought by customers who alleged the ride hailing service misrepresented the quality of its safety practices and the fees it charged passengers" http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-tech-safety-settlemen...
Need more?
that is, just because one was not found guilty by deliberation does not mean one didn't break the law.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/uber-driv...
TL;DR: App is legal, most drivers are not.
This, particularly, seems absolutely moronic. If you're going to do something shady, don't tell anyone about it.
Highly unlikely. Why? Investors who stomach multi-billion dollar annual losses will probably just shrug off a mere lawsuit or a "bad media narrative". If the choice is to either write off $15 billion or to give another couple to help the company go through a rough patch (what a buying opportunity!) I think I know what investors are going to do.
They may demand Kalanick's head in the process (and I think they will -- not that it would really hurt him much personally though...) but seriously a whole nother level of crap would have to happen before investors start getting comfortable with the thought of letting go those $15 billion.
"Hey, what about now? When Uber is taking fire from all directions?"
So Otto was essentially just a vessel for that stolen data, created simply to transfer the IP to Uber. If true, that'd be much bigger and much more damaging than just stealing some files.
Engineers rarely use windows. He was also a manager at Google. Very techy folk don't take on manager responsibilities because it quickly saps time.
Both those things tell me he was more of a people person than a technical person.
And as a Googler, I can comfortably state that most engineering managers are very technical. I know because I've worked under many of them.
This doesn't mean that they're in a good financial position, just that the signalling is different from other VC funded companies.
How much do you want to bet?
Continental is targeting shipments in 2020. They're a large auto parts maker, and they bought the technology from Advanced Scientific Concepts, which has sold good but expensive flash LIDAR units for years. They're demoing now, and will probably end up selling millions of the things to auto companies.
Disclosure: employee of Clearpath, the company behind OTTO Motors.
Why? Because self-driving cars are basically a fleet service driven by a software. Once you remove the driver (where Uber spent so much acquiring) The only differentiator is the consumer facing experience. Neither Uber or Lyft will have as much power as Apple and Google since they ultimately own the mobile experience.
I ultimately envision this business as kind of a Kayak mobile on the phone managed by Siri or Google/Apple maps that will call the nearest taxi or the cheaper rate aggregating from multiple possible vendors. Larger fleets (Uber, Apple, Google) to smaller individually manage fleets. Car companies might decide to also enter that market in collaboration with financial underwriter.
So having a network of drivers ultimately gives Uber some leverage and removing them from the equation, I think it'll actually destroy Uber. This is why I think, this could be a blessing in disguise.
Uber just needs to think of themselves as a mobile staffing company and they'll be fine. Unfortunately, staffing is a market where "Move fast and be an asshole" isn't a great philosophy so they'll need a bit of a temperament change to survive.
This would basically turn them into a private driver service and finding qualified staff would be a pain for anyone wanting a french tutor for the drive. Ignoring that as an off the wall example though they'll still hit a pretty hard wall with trust. Even if the fear is unfounded trying to get a huge number of people to sign up for random (to them) people to pick up and drive around their kids is running into a lot of child abduction/abuse fears that run kind of deep in the US.
Why? Just filter on the "Speaks French" tag.
Are you trying to argue that there is zero use for a person with a car who speaks French in a city like San Francisco? I really don't understand what you're trying to convince me.
It's common for the acquired company to make specific "representations and warranties", particularly around IP.
"We own our IP and didn't steal it" is typical, and some percentage of the deal is held back for ~1-2 years in case there is a problem.
But if there's fraud, all bets are off.
Does Uber throw Otto under the bus? It would be "The Uber Way", based on what's been published recently.
My prediction is that Kalanick and Levandowski will soon be attempting to throw each other under the bus to save their own job, money, and reputation. With any luck they will both wind up under a bus.
Anthony Levandowski has a personal net worth in the hundreds of millions, that is not counting the other founders plus they could raise money at a whim, or get acquired whenever they wanted
"The next day, January 15, 2016, Mr. Levandowski’s venture 280 Systems - which
became OttoMotto LLC - was officially formed (though it remained in stealth mode for several
months). On January 27, 2016, Mr. Levandowski resigned from Waymo without notice. And on
February 1, 2016, Mr. Levandowski’s venture Otto Trucking was officially formed (also
remaining in stealth mode for several months)."
not sure if that timeline is accurate, any way to check when the ot.to website was registered? the site used for looking up http://whois.domaintools.com/280systems.com doesn't work for ot.to
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12315205
The consensus seems to be: "Huh, that's weird."
> December 11, 2015 - Anthony Levandowski installed TortoiseSVN and downloaded 9.7 GB of data from the SVN repository. (Brown 17)
> December 14, 2015 - A USB card reader was attached to the laptop for eight hours. Google doesn’t appear to have logged what the laptop did over that time, but the implication is that data was copied from the laptop to a memory card. (Brown 18)
If these three things are true, then that looks extremely bad for Otto. I imagine they'll be a lot of questions regarding the purpose of that USB stick.
I strongly suspect that the existence and timestamps of the Drive logs can be verified at multiple levels and exist in backups made around that time.
HTTP logs as well as MTA logs have been provided as evidence before, those too could be fabricated.
Email you have a bunch of different parties: the sender, the receiver, the servers in the middle, all of which are going to record something, and maybe they differ in weird ways, but if you got it you go it.
And of course none of this planning could be done over email or Google docs, so it all has to be coordinated in person with only handwritten notes. And you've got to make sure a co-operative representative from legal is involved, just so the evidence generated in the logs corresponds to the cover story.
Routinely-kept business records are common evidence in cases, and, while any evidence is subject to impeachment, "it supports the case of the party keeping the records" is almost never sufficient to get a trier of fact (jury in the case of a jury trial) to dismiss the evidence; you generally need either some more concrete evidence of fabrication or independent evidence contradicting the conclusion the evidence is offered to support.
Google Drive logs are fundamentally no different than email, or even paper business records, in this context.
Also, if he actually did the queries, the defense team is incredibly unlikely to claim that Google may be forging evidence.
In Edinburgh, Scotland over NYE all Uber drives were on £75/hr minimum, regardless of how many rides they took. A friend of a friend who decided to ride for them that night said he was out for about 7 hours and picked up about 10 people the whole night (was very busy after midnight but quiet otherwise).
The fares totalled about £150. So Uber probably got £30 but subsidised the driver by £525. Pretty crazy if you times this by all the 'newer' markets uber is in.
Let's say an Uber ride costs a passenger $10, and the driver is paid $15. Uber loses $5.
Note, this may be because Uber has no competition here and is already 50% cheaper than taxis. However it still illustrates that Uber can certainly operate with positive profit margins.
Eventually the payment on the ethical debt comes due. In Uber's case, they have been building it up for a long time without any down payment. A hard cleaning is needed from top to bottom.
I also found the SVN allegation to be circumstantial at best in the coverage that didn't focus on any other points. Installing a tool and downloading gigs of design data is a nuts-and-bolts operation for many disciplines (even for those that don't normally use version control but interact with a team that does).
If Levandowski didn't typically access SVN on a frequent basis, it's still very circumstantial on it's own. Seeing this all laid out in the context of the surrounding allegations, it becomes an important and fairly damning point.
The USB sd card reader could just be so he could sync his holiday photos.
The downloading of the entire SVN repository could just be so he could grep it for a file he didn't know the path to, or perhaps to try to compile something he wasn't sure the dependancies of. Reinstalling to linux could simply be because the software wouldn't build under windows. (it seems doubtful the self driving car uses a windows software stack).
- It's unlikely that whichever automotive company achieves autonomy first is going to immediately get into the ride sharing game, except perhaps Tesla but they don't have enough manufacturing capability (yet, or anytime soon) to be a global threat to Uber.
- Uber is never going to be a manufacturer but they have partnered with Volvo and Daimler (2) recently who seem very amenable to licensing / leveraging third party tech to continue to be competitive in selling automobiles.
- Why does Uber need to build autonomous tech vs license it? Are they concerned that the Google / Ford partnership is going to leave them out / decimated?
(1) http://www.techtimes.com/articles/188654/20161213/alphabet-l...
(2) http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/31/14453704/uber-daimler-part...
I think GM shows clear signs of interest of being in the ride sharing game if they have an advantage there.
Would you rather be the first self-driving ride sharing company, and use that to displace Uber in high margin areas, or would you rather try to make a little bit of money off the premium segment buying these cars and then be a fast follower?
The main argument for being a fast follower would be to let someone else deal with regulation for you, but otherwise being able to undercut everyone in rich markets seems like a no brainer that would bring a tonne of revenue and experience to the project very quickly.
Disclaimer - I work for GM, but not on any of these things.
Driver satisfaction will improve once it's composed entirely of autonomous vehicles.
As for the real drivers, who are paid less than taxi drivers, I'm wondering how that put them into the red when they pay less than taxi companies and skirt regulations. They must have interesting books.
How is this actually implemented? How do you prevent a new project starting from scratch with the same employees from ending up with the exact same tech as before?
Imagine re-creating a fairly large complex project without access to any source control, build systems, or bug reports. It'd be easier than starting from scratch, but not much - especially for hardware, all the tradeoffs and manufacturing tricks you had to investigate and implement your devices would have to be recreated.
Your end result would probably look similar, but the way you get there would be different. Just like the wings on an insect are different from the wings of a bird.
How do you prevent a new project starting from scratch
with the same employees from ending up with the exact
same tech as before?
If you have separate employees you _can_, if you avoid patents. Look up clean room implementation.
Can you define your usage here?
So it's investors would probably bail it out (and try their best to make sure it's a bit more restrained).
Each driver increases value for riders, and each rider increases value for drivers. This two sides.
A 1 sided network is facebook. A two sided market is like the video game industry (more video games are good for gamers and more gamers are good for video game devs)
For taxi apps, imagine if there was only 1 driver in SF. That wouldn't be a good experience for consumers. Thus, network effect.
Almost every user in Facebook is both a provider and consumer of content. It's like an exponentially-sided network.
In Uber, drivers provide supply to riders. Riders provide demand for drivers.
That is the definition of a 1 sided market.
Sorry, I am using economics jargon.
More drivers => decreased wait times => more customers => more drivers
Consider eBay, perhaps the most-successful two-sided network of the first dot-com boom. You could switch to another auction site, but as a seller you would lose all of your online reputation (sales history) which is worth a lot on eBay (since people don't buy expensive items from someone with no sales history whatsoever). When is the last time you cared how many drives your Uber/Lyft driver had given? eBay - very sticky. Uber/Lyft - not so much.
Compared to other services in this market, e.g. taxis or buses, Uber has a significant portion operation costs implicitly discounted and/or indirectly subsidised. Uber drivers are self-employed, which in many parts of the world has lower tax rate as opposed to employment contracts (which is pretty common for bus drivers). Uber cars are registered as non-commercial vehicles with less restrictions inherently increasing utility value (a family can have one car used for Uber and weekend driving, but having a Taxi car may very likely result in the need for another car) and non-commercial insurance rate despite increased accident risk, which results in elevated overall risk of non-commercial vehicles which all (non Uber) drivers must share.
Bad press for Uber may result in law changes that level the playing field and either increase operation costs for Uber significantly increasing their burn rate or lower operation costs for their competitors decreasing Uber's attractiveness and revenue thus increasing burn rate.
Holy hell. That's not exactly a sound business model.
http://fortune.com/2016/03/21/uber-carnegie-mellon-partnersh...
For those reasons alone, I think there is definitely something fishy going on. Perhaps not as fishy as Daniel claims, but something just does not smell right here.
You need to demonstrate some attention to detail, if you're going to claim an ability to 'read between the lines' in this dossier.
So I don't think so, something else is needed :)
Makes industrial sense for Google to be in that business too.
Were these founders previously Google executives or "9th engineer from the left" individual contributors? If you were getting exec pay, it might be semi-believable that you could come out of it and be able to self-fund salaries for 91 employees, but if the latter, I can't see how. Sure, Google pays engineers a lot but come on...
Global Annual Estimates:
Deaths: 1.25 million
Injuries: 20-50 million
Cost: $580 billion
Google will let Levandowdki off the hook for testifying against Uber.
Mission accomplished.
Uber - all the recent examples - it must be truly exceptional environment.
Stellar growth, massive burn rate... I would imagine they are profitable, cashing 25% of the total fee?
I assume they must look similar enough to a non-technical judge for them to be presented in that form, or they would be presented with an expert analysis of the similarities.
My guess is they are identical except the logos. The dimensions of the redaction boxes is very similar.
The date of the blog post is March 14th. Is his calendar a day ahead?
The only thing truly gained by stealing Waymos's LiDAR designs was a temporary period of lower cost , but high quality, LiDAR unit. Effectively, a short term discount. You can buy high quality today...It's just expensive. More affordable LiDAR is coming, for everyone, regardless of what Waymo does. They are not the only entity using innovation to drive the cost down.
I would try to have the punishment match that gain, versus something more catastrophic.
Of course, IANAL, and have been mystified by judgements in the past. Some were immensely lower, some higher than what seemed to make sense.
Also, who knows what else was stolen? The LiDAR stuff might just be the one Waymo could most easily demonstrate before filing suit...perhaps there's more.
This LIDAR costs $10k. Other LIDAR costs $100k. At the time of this lawsuit, we had 25 test cars on the road. Therefore triple damages are $90k * 25 * 3, so we'll pay you $7 million.
This is from the big Bloomberg article/interview that came out today:
'Kalanick began courting Levandowski this spring, broaching the possibility of an acquisition during a series of 10-mile night walks from the Soma neighborhood where Uber is also headquartered to the Golden Gate Bridge. The two men would leave their offices separately—to avoid being seen by employees, the press, or competitors. They’d grab takeout food, then rendezvous near the city’s Ferry Building. Levandowski says he saw a union as a way to bring the company’s trucks to market faster.'
Which implies to me that the plan was for Uber to acquire Otto all along.
"Otto was designed to be sold to Uber before it was created, there's a reason it was self-funded despite having nearly 100 employees by the time it was acquired. Anthony Levandowski met Travis Kalanick years ago and had been planning something like this for a while. It's basically an open secret."
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-13/one-reaso...
Makes sense! (cough)
I guess it's up to the legal process to decide if he did or not.
>the subtext of Alphabet’s filing is an even bigger bombshell. Reading between the lines, (in my opinion) Alphabet is implying that Mr Levandowski arranged with Uber to:
>Steal LiDAR and other self-driving component designs from Waymo
>Start Otto as a plausible corporate vehicle for developing the self-driving technology
>Acquire Otto for $680 million
Sounds like a farytale to me, unless those logs are captures and stored independently then otherwise anyone can claim having any kind of evidence against anyone involved.
Besides, there might be many reasons of him doing that, let the backup be one.
- He installed custom software to access the files.
- The files were in a data store he had no normal access to.
And here's my best guess as to why Google knows so much:
- Google requires access to their networks using either your Google assigned device, or a pre-approved list of devices of your own (basically chromebooks). I know from past interactions with a friend that works at Google that they often give beta versions of software (Android) and/or hardware (Nexus phones, chromebooks) to employees to test. It's entirely possibly that quite a lot of debugging data is reported on some build. Additionally, that same friend noted that Google has a whole department dedicated to rooting our invalid access like what is alleged here, and since they control the devices available to access their network, there's really no conceivably limit to the amount of activity data they could collect about employee usage.
In short, I see no reason why Google couldn't have as much data as they allege and possibly much more. to me, the fact that they waited until this stage to present it also seems calculated to benefit the most from those trying to defraud them (why not stop the forming of Otto initially, or the buyout?). If that's the case, I don't really have much sympathy for Uber, as they seem to possibly have been integral to the crime, and may have escaped punishment if it hadn't gotten this far.
Edit: Whoops, said Waymo where I meant Otto,
You mean Otto?
My point wasn't that Google doesn't have data; my point is that they want to use it as evidence.. but said evidence has been created by themselves!
That's like saying the police created their own evidence by performing an investigation.
I imagine logs by themselves might not sway some people, but logs combined with whatever is found in a discovery process from Uber along with the fact that a parts supplier of Waymo happened to be making the exact same part for Otto (either because the secret part was requested or because they were provided the exact same design docs), doesn't make it look very good for Otto/Uber (if that allegation is correct).
As someone who several years ago "managed" to take over a publicly traded company (via a federal judge's order once certain evidence was presented) and gather and present evidence of massive fraud, etc., and working entirely as an amateur in this effort, managed to aid in recovering assets and capturing the former CEO and sending him to prison for several years, I find stories of (allegedly) fraudulent action (and solid response) like this heartwarming.
If Uber had no self-driving car program to speak of before talking with Levandowski, and discovery shows they basically started from that conversation, then that would seem to open up all of Uber to any discovery process - they can't justifiably claim "it's the self driving car division that did all this". This seems much more than a civil process from my reading of it. It could be great theater.
If I was on Uber's BOD, I'd immediately relieve the CEO simply based on the allegations here, and if I didn't have the votes to do that, I'd immediately resign my seat.
That sounds like an interesting story!
Have you told it elsewhere?
And I would guess that the next four years will be a popular market for legal stories of corruption (from people of all political affiliation).
I'm not near to you and I'm not sure what the options are to ship crates of beer but count me in.
I'll swap you a story of attempting to help the father of a friend who was CEO of some company that ended up with me fronting the bill for a lawyer to keep him out of jail.
He who smelt it...must certainly have dealt it.
Would you feel the same if the company in question would not be Uber (whose CEO may be a liability for Uber ATM anyway) but, say, IBM? This is an honest question.
Enough accusations and then you are guilty until proven innocent?
Wtf
The man is unquestionably toxic - it's entirely possible the entire company is toxic.
Board members and shareholders aren't responsible or particularly concerned with innocence or guilt, but are very concerned with trust and respect that customers (or potential-investors/business-partners/governments) have in their company's leadership.
They're not deciding whether to put him in jail or not, but board members are legally obligated to determine whether or not he's adding or detracting from shareholder value.
Even if every single accusation against him and the culture he's built is false - the public perception needs addressing. Perhaps "remove" is the wrong wording, but if you're an insider/board member who thinks every single accusation and report is false - you'd at least have to seriously consider asking Travis to publicly "recuse" himself while the investigations are under way - without that anything coming out of the investigation is going to be about as believable as the Police Union guy announcing "We've investigated the matter and cleared ourselves of any wrongdoing!".
I'm inclined to agree that there's significant circumstantial evidence here that at the very least extremely pointed question should be currently being asked of the CEO, and in the absence of immediately and publicly verifiable evidence countering these claims - the CEO should quite reasonably be "relieved" (as in - temporarily taken out of decision making and business information collecting capacity) while the investigation continues.
But Uber has continuously demonstrated if not the sort of company who's ethical constraints would bind it to that sort of behavior. (To the extent that I'm now cynically wondering whether the current "Uber is an awful place for women to work" controversy has been intentionally orchestrated and played up in the press to help suppress this information...)
Lyft started with a different business snd pivoted to Uber's (itself all a pivot?). Did Lyft "steal the concept?"
I think in the Uber/Otto case the theft is pretty specific. The laws outline what it means to steal corporate secrets. (This is distinct from violating IP or copying an idea). Usually this sort of theft involves being privy to corporate secrets and breaking contractual agreements to not take certain information with you.
I agree 100%. When you wrote "stole the concept" I thought you meant Uber's original business approaches.
The kind of person who does this stuff, really doesn't understand even the concept of 'crossing a line', or indeed legality. Hence, it seems to them really offensive that anyone should get in their way, and up TO that point their self-confidence carries them and helps persuade others that they're the golden boy.
The real lesson is 'how did we get here in the first place'. It's easy to bust the biggest megastar and make a story of hubris and disastrous, Icarus-like fall, but isn't it the very same system that put them there at that valuation?
The rule seems to be 'Seem like the biggest monster around, but if we catch you actually BEING it, you're busted'.
Um. Nope. Uber based on its business on weakening the rule of law by wilfully ignoring the taxi regulations https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-... . To add insult to injury they worked steadily on reinstating indentured servitude by pushing subprime loans on drivers where the payments come out of their wages and their cars not starting if they are remiss. http://valleywag.gawker.com/uber-and-its-shady-partners-are-... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-31/inside-ub... https://twitter.com/shashashasha/status/688734478181732352 And to crown it all, when they started automated car testing they put cyclists in deadly danger https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/19/uber-self...
What's "wonderful and exciting" about this? Uber from day one has been running from the law. You can't do that forever. It's been some sixty years now when the "I fought the law and the law won" song was recorded. It's still true.
"From Waymo’s filings, it seems that they have Levandowski dead to rights on stealing their LiDAR designs." This is one of the dumbest quotes in the post. Of course the lawyer's job is to write up their side of the story. He hasn't even heard the other side of the story and he's already coming up with conclusions. That's pretty terrible.
I hear what you're saying, but I think you're being unfair. This isn't bloggism; I think it's a pretty solid analysis from a lot of available information. There is definitely another side, and it's definitely making an appearance in this thread, but I don't think it's unfair to say "yep, that looks like a hole in one." Certainly smells like one, and it's not partisan or agenda-based to say that.
Could you elaborate on what you feel the agenda is here?
You don't know he dumped anything onto a USB drive. As far as the testimony knows, he plugged in a USB drive to the laptop. Any lawyer worth her salt would rip that to shreds. Do you know he didn't copy a movie onto the USB drive and watched it from the laptop? Do you know he didn't use the USB drive to copy information onto the hard drive? To qualify that as "Dead to rights" is particularly stupid.
The only person being unfair is the blogger, and you, by coming to a conclusion without hearing all the evidence. It's not solid analysis, it's lazy and premature.
I actually haven't drawn any conclusion, particularly on the person involved. This is basically standing on the sidelines and saying damn, they have a good case. It'll be impressive to see the defense.
You've drawn the conclusion and assumed I have. I'm merely remarking that the case is extraordinarily strong and the evidence, as circumstantial as it is, is compelling, unless you feel that the evidence is fabricated. And a lawyer can't rip all of what I read to shreds, though I understand what you're saying.
Of course you think they have a good case. All you've heard is their side.
Maybe he has an explanation that we will find out (maybe he was performing surgery to save him!), but right now, the evidence doesn't look good. This isn't complicated whether English is my primary, secondary, tertiary, or quarternary language. I also have performed forensics investigations not unlike the deposition I've read, and at no point did I say "gosh, that's thin." That's my point. He was remarkably dumb in the alleged narrative, if it's all true. Given my experience with Google's investigative abilities, I don't doubt any of the evidence submitted.
I disagree with you, you are wrong, and I understand every inch of the words I am typing. It's perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that Google and Waymo have done their due diligence bringing a coherent and well-defended complaint here. Please do me a favor and don't assume that because I'm on the other side I'm deficient or inferior to you in some way. It's how I know there is literally zero fruit down the path of engaging you.
> "He hasn't even heard the other side of the story and he's already coming up with conclusions"
I tried pretty hard throughout the entire article to make it clear both that I was speculating, and that Uber will contest these claims in court.
In the 'dead to rights' quote you referenced, my first three words were "From Waymo's filings". I am aware that Uber hasn't had a chance to respond, if I was to expand that sentence it would be something like: "If everything in Waymo's case is accurate, then they have a very comprehensive case to make against Levandowski stealing their LiDAR designs, based on forensic evidence as well as testimony and eyewitness accounts.
I don't care at all about the rest of the drama. It's hard to even keep up with it. I suspect most people are the same.
Enjoy your cheap rides!
That's a pretty fat check for someone who just ran away with the crown jewels. How do we know Google didn't have Lavandowski do all this on purpose to lure Uber into a compromised position by buying Otto? Unless the courts are rigged, doesn't Google have to prove Uber acquired Otto with full knowledge that they were buying stolen property?
Regarding the lawsuit - I've learned that we have no clue what is going on behind the scenes, so why stress over it. For all I know this is a power play by google or some evil scheme by Uber. Let's just wait and see how it plays out.
What phone ideas stole Google?