Uber must turn over information about its acquisition of Otto to Waymo
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Operating a fleet of self-driving cars may turn out to be a lousy business. Uber's business model is built around others buying the cars, maintaining them, replacing them, and doing all the hard work. All Uber does is run an app.
Running a fleet of self-driving cars is running a car rental company. The company will have to buy the cars, maintain the cars, fuel or charge the cars, and obtain parking lots for storing the cars. They also have to figure out what to do with the used cars after a few years. Car rental companies turn over their fleets in a year or two, and are big sellers of used cars.
It's more likely that car rental companies will get into self driving than that Uber will get into car rental by the trip.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber/funding-rounds
Given a choice, Uber would love to be the first to have self driving cars. Once they do that their business model scales predictably with capital.
Whoever gets self driving technology right, will own all transportation and logistics - which is huge!
However, I doubt they can do it. The quality of engineering talent is subpar compared to Google. Given that they couldn't compete with R&D they probably resorted to other means.
>Eventually there will be self-driving cars, and there's no special reason to think that Uber will be the best at building them, or that its dominant position in the ride-hailing-app space will protect it from better self-driving-car businesses.
On the other hand, I feel that we will not have self driving cars for a really long time. Instead I believe we will have flying cars before that, who will solve the last mile problem. They will take you from the house to the hub and hub to the final destination. Buses can transport people between hubs.
With self driving cars you need to deal with existing regulations, traffic rules, other drives on road, people jaywalking, animals running into you.
However with flying cars - you literally have exponentially more roads in air (which don't even have to be built). No existing regulations (unless at risk of being in flight path). Technology is already there (make drones bigger). These drones will communicate using MESH networks leading to lesser risk of collisions.
I also feel that Elon Musk is doing something really smart with The Boring Company. If he can dramatically reduce the cost of building tunnels (like he did with space travel) - he could build a lot of underground roads at a lower cost and faster pace than roads on surface. No need to deal with buying out land and getting approvals.
Imagine if these tunnels are exclusive to Tesla cars, who can auto-drive these tunnels for long distances. No need to worry about other cars, animals, rain, snow, traffic regulations. All the problems that auto driving cars are facing now, will go away. Multiple Tesla cars will communicate with each other using MESH network. Teslas could be driving in these tunnels at 150+ mph and discharged cars could be swapped with charged cars on the way. Drivers might need to take over minimally just for the last mile.
If a tunnel like this could be built between SF to LA. It could be faster door to door vs flight.
To get started, a tunnel from SF to really South Bay could have an huge impact on the commute.
I do not have much experience of these industries. So these are my hypotheses. Would love to know what others think!
We already have flying cars. They are called helicopters, and they are only available to various government agencies, large corps and the rich.
Obviously you haven't had your flight lessons yet. Not only there are scores of airspace regulations, but flying is a much harder task to do as well. The freedom you're thinking off is akin to freely driving in a 4x4 on an open ranch, which has more to do with joy, and less with transportation needs.
I have a copy of the 1960 U.S. Corps of Engineers plan for the Bay Area. It totally predates environmentalism, and they were thinking big. They proposed five freeways on the SF peninsula - US 101, I-280, CA-1, CA-35, and one out in the bay on stilts. There's a second Bay Bridge at Candlestick. The area south of the Dumbarton bridge was to be filled in and developed.
Marin was planned as a heavy industry center, with steel mills at Tiburon. There was considerable WWII heavy industry in the north bay, including big shipyards, and the Corps thought that would grow, not shrink.
The SF peninsula would be a center for "business machines". They got that right.
Even under an optimistic scenario, might have a two-year SDC monopoly, after which others can offer the same product. That's still not nearly long enough to justify the valuation.
With this in mind, how does anyone else compete without burning through far more money trying to gain market share. Uber burned through the money trying to be efficient when the market was much smaller. Once the market is much much larger, any competitor will have to burn through a orders of maginitude more cash to buy market share.
There's a lot more to succeeding in this market than self driving cars.
There's also the burden of convenience. A taxi is an instant, summonable affair that ends completely with the trip. A hire car has to be hired and returned to a specific location, you have to stow it during your hire period and you have to fuel it. Beyond the tangible costs of fuel, parking, etc. there's also the opportunity cost. For exmaple, people will pay for convenience of a car to pick them up and take them home when drinking, and they may only need the hire car for a couple of 10 minute bursts but you can't hire a car for less than a 24 hour period. Both of those help buoy the cost of a taxi.
I'm not suggesting you're wrong, but it's not as simple as [hire car] + [driver] = [taxi] from a cost perspective.
However from Uber's point of view - cost of 24 hours to rental company vs cost of 24 hours of taxi+driver would probably be a good approximation to get an idea of the order of saving which might make owing self driving cars feasible for Uber vs their current business model.
There's https://www.car2go.com which ran for a year or so in my city but has since shut down. You could leave the car within the bounds of the city.
There are also various bike schemes with a similar idea?
I suspect that with all the VC money subsidizing Uber et al, for most people the gap between regular rentals for a day+ and just calling an Uber isn't large.
* cars are littered throughout the city rather than in designated parking spots
* cars are rented by the minute rather than by the hour
* cars don't have to be returned to where you got them from
The last point is the game changer. Now, it's feasible to do things like drive to the bar, but get a taxi back, or go on a long walk and grab a car back home when you're tired out.
Why? Presumably others will develop self-driving technology too, and then ground transportation becomes an interchangeable commodity that competes on price. It's not like there's only one container-ship firm in the world.
The last best sucker is the stock market.
Why? I cannot believe Uber's status-quo supports its valuation at all.
I am very surprised this comment got the top votes. OP - in which world do you live in? Uber already lease out vehicles so people who don't have a car but want to drive for Uber.... can lease it out from them.
Uber does not have to maintain their cars. They can sign an AMC with some company.
The guy then says on the phone, "I'll get this guy to drive me too it." He takes forever to get all his crap out of the car and says "We can drive-"
"Dude, it's two blocks that way. I'm paying by the minute. I'm not driving you.."
..and I thought to myself, there is no way this guy is really a Lyft/Uber driver and is using ReachNow or Zipcars? Even if that wasn't against policy (which I have a feeling it is), that also has to be incredibly expensive. How does he turn a profit?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...
Do you have any links for Uber-backed leases? This is the first I've heard of them and I'd like to know more. Last O heard, Uber was encouraging/facilitating leases from 3rd parties for its drivers without being involved in the resulting lease itself.
One of the uber drivers told me this. I forgot the exact amount. I guess he said he pay around $250 per week to Uber
Here you go - https://www.uber.com/drive/vehicle-solutions/leasing/
Uber might have collaborated with some third party to handle the paper work
Edit - Uber partnered with Xchange Leasing, LLC for this leasing program
"It's their xchangleasing leasing program. It's basically a sub prime car loan like from the housing bubble days. You use Uber as your income verification and they'll let anyone lease a car provided they do X amount rides each week regardless of credit. They require a three year lease, you a have month to back out but after that you're on the hook for the car 100%. So if Uber cuts it's rates they still have same payment but less fare money each month. They did this to a lot of people and it's well known within the company that a lot of Uber black drivers were screwed when this happened. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-31/inside-ub.... <q>He leased a 2016 Toyota Corolla from Xchange in November, paying $155 a week. Two months later, Uber slashed fares nationally. Soon Hofstede had trouble keeping up with his payments. He went from making $200 in a weekend to $140 in a weekend, he said. "It got to the point that I would drive just to meet my payment," he said. "If you were short on your payment for a week it would roll onto the payment for next week. It starts adding up." </q> In this guys case they did a similar program for uber black years ago. Then they changed which cars were considered black cars. If I remember right a year after they started the program they changed which cars were considered "black" cars and this guys Lexus?? Was no longer a black car. They said it couldn't exclusively be used for black and had to pick up Uber X riders as well. Uber x pays a lot less. The people this happened to were basically bait and switched when Travis changed the terms on them. He can refuse uber x rides and only pick up uber black riders but if he refuses more than 45 rides in a month he's fired and forever banned from Uber but still on the hook for the car lease. The old Uber black leases started around 4k or 5k a month(I forget which cars but this was for a base "black car") but they made 6k to 8k, 10k a month back then depending on market. They cut rates and required you to pick up cheaper fairs and you're underwater. That's the 97k he's talking about. A lot of Uber black leases were repo'd because after this change their leases were more than their entire monthly wage. That's the personal responsibility Travis wants him to have. It's "Sorry the market change, too bad". Also the market changed or I mean people did. They just stopped using Uber black. I mean if you're taking at 10 or 20 minute ride across town are you really so vain to need a uber black. Turns out actually rich people are cheap and flocked to Uber x. That's why Travis mentioned their reducing the amount of drivers beacuse the number or riders also drop double screwing guys like this. Now let me say YES Travis is correct the guy is responsible for his desisions and things don't always work out like you'd expect. That said I see the guys side he made a 3 year commitment to Uber he couldn't walk away from and everything he was promised changed."
https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/07/new-reports-confirm-1-15b-...
If not, it would be the worst IP miss since Ebay acquired Skype for $2 Billion, only to find out that they didn't own Skype's IP or have access to the source code [0].
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/18/new-lawsuit-brings-clarity....
However, Uber's behavior is so open and notorious in terms of disregarding policy/rules/regulations/laws that it really wouldn't surprise me that if there is bad behavior here, then evidence exist showing Uber knew or should have known; therefore, if that is the case then even with indemnification, warranties and guarantees in any and all Agreements concerning IP, Uber could be liable.
Still unless that smoking gun evidence is found or some evidence of spoilation to shift the burden, it is a high legal standard to use past bad behaviors as evidence of bad behavior here, unless there is a clear pattern. As easy as it is to demonstrate past bad behavior can it be demonstrated that have knowingly/intentionally/negligently violated IP of its competitors?
"In September 2005, eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion.[13]
In September 2009,[14] Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board announced the acquisition of 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from eBay, which attributed to the enterprise a market value of $2.92 billion. Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion."
Looks like Ebay paid 2.6B for Skype, then got 1.9B for 65% of it and presumably another 2.8B for the remaining 35% once Microsoft acquired it. Doesn't sound like such a bad acquisition.
The miss is that eBay completely failed to secure the IP rights to Skype. Zennström (CEO of Skype) was essentially able to sell his company twice and eBay made less than they would have without the mistake.
Uber's big problem is not the $680 million. It's that if Waymo's claims are true, then Uber's self-driving car program will likely be shut down, and they will have to start all over from scratch.
And that in turn means other companies are going to beat them, likely by years, to fielding self-driving taxis, and that would be the end of Uber.
They would then have to hire a new team of people who never worked at Google, or with the former Googlers, and do a "clean room" reimplementation of a self driving vehicle, based on publically available materials and tools.
Can the knowledge they already obtained really be undone?
Seeing maybe the LIDAR efforts suffer a temporary setback, but any outcome that blocks all the work of all the engineers that all exercised their at-will rights to work for a different company is not something any engineer should be celebrating.
There's a lot more to SDCs than a LIDAR device and the engineers at Uber were working on all these different areas well before Otto even existed.
If Google sought to actually shut everything down, then they will have strayed very very far from the "Don't be evil" mantra and would be the company that truly deserves negative criticism IMHO.
I think one of the crazy things about all this is that having files from a previous employer is not a smoking gun. I wouldn't be surprised that with the blurring or work and life boundaries that a significant portion of people on HN have files from a previous employer on their personal computers. I still to this day occasionally find emails and files from prior employers for whom I haven't worked for in almost a decade now, including employers in an industry I've long since left behind. When I encounter them, I just delete them andget on with my day. Still having these files is nothing malicious on my part. It was often work that followed me home or files emailed around to print while on a business trip or any number of completely non-malicious reasons. This also extends to private code repos on github (many engineers use the same github account for both personal work and professional work). Check your personal computer and email for files from a previous employer. Do you have zero files from your previous employers lying around accidentally?
Thus far discovery has found a single file on a personal computer of one former Waymo engineer and no files on Uber computers using the terms requested by Waymo in discovery. To me that suggests that Google does a pretty good job of keeping work on Google's infrastructure (probably because most code only is useful on their specialized infrastructure) and that the overwhelming majority of former Waymo engineers are honest people doing honest work. There is literally one and only one engineer whose conduct has been called into question and that is Levandowski. Yes, he's the head of it all, but if discovery using the terms Waymo turned up nothing on Uber's machines then the files likely never made it to Uber. At best the knowledge from those files was laundered through Levandowski's mind, but even then without his personal computer showing that he still has those files and he's opened them since leaving Google, it's reasonable to assume that any knowledge he's past along was knowledge he himself created, i.e. it's tacit knowledge earn through his many years of professional experience.
Google is bleeding engineers to Uber. Why I don't know. It could be bureaucracy at Google and the lack of bureaucracy at Uber or Uber just made a better offer. One thing for sure is that if I were a Google engineer I would fear the ability to change employers to Uber right now because Google is going after many former Waymo engineers and not just the one engineer they have evidence for. This means that these engineers have fewer prospects to shop around their skills. That's evil in my book and as bad as the wage fixing collusion between companies like Google, Apple, Palm, Pixar, etc. Self driving car engineers are worth a lot of money in the market right now and Google filing this lawsuit against not a single engineer accused of wrongdoing but many engineers none of which they have evidence against that are likely honest hardworking people trying to get their market value is evil IMHO. Google should be dealing with Levandowski arbitrage, not dragging other engineers into it that have nothing to do with what Levandowski did when he was at Google.
Maybe you do, I don't. Leaving an employer while retaining a copy of their confidential data is IMO a massively unethical thing to do.
I won't speak for others but when I leave an employer I do not take any data with me, not even notebooks. I may take additional notes about things I do outside of work, but I do this on my own time, and ensure that no source code, emails, or other company data is mixed up in those.
I have previously worked with people who kept their entire notebooks from previous employers. While it might help you solve a problem faster, I personally find that practice hugely unethical. You developed these skills on your former employer's time, and either you know the information well enough to do it again from memory, or you should learn it again on your new employers time. Otherwise the new company is unjustly benefiting from the previous company's investment in you.
The "Uber agrees to defend Levandowski" document and the Uber-Otto due diligence documentation.
Levandowski asked for the former to be redacted, was denied. The article says it was signed just a few days after quitting his job at Google.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/uber-wa...
>"Waymo has claimed that Levandowski signed an agreement with Uber’s lawyers just a few days after quitting his job at Google, requiring Uber to defend him if the company’s acquisition of Otto resulted in a lawsuit."
>"Mr. Levandowski argues that he is entitled to relief under the Fifth Amendment because production of the unredacted privilege log could potentially incriminate him. We are not persuaded that the district court erred in its ruling requiring defendants to produce an unredacted privilege log,” the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled."
>"The order also opens the door for Waymo to request a copy of the due diligence report that Uber commissioned while it was in the process of acquiring Otto. Waymo has claimed that the due diligence report could contain evidence that Uber knew Otto was using stolen technology"
Why would a company sign an agreement with the founder of a startup about the acquisition of said startup before it even exists?
This lends credence to Google/Waymo's argument that Uber and Levandowski where scheming from the get-go. Bad optics, indeed.
In addition there is the fact the he secretly started a self-driving car company at least a year before. The whole thing looks like he and Uber planned the whole scheme beforehand.
The clause was added by my lawyer because he said it was standard practice to have it if you're the officer of a company or in a position where to possibility of liability exists. I would expect anyone signing a non-standard run-of-the-mill at-will employment contract would have their own lawyer and that any good lawyer would ask for such a provision.
That said, when I last tried to find transcript, I couldn't find a comprehensive archive. They are available from PACER and from the court, but they charge transcription fees in the 3-digit range. But individual transcripts are published by media organisations, presumably after they pay for them.
"Ramsey pointed to a joint defense agreement between Levandowski and various law firms that meant that nothing should be revealed."
I assume it was dated.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/judge-accuses-ub...
Perhaps a move he regrets?
Edit: That arstechnica article has much more info on how this played out than the main linked article for this thread.
How can he argue that other people (or an entire company in this case) are not allowed to incriminate him?
Has anyone successfully claimed 5th amendment and forced other people/entities not to incriminate him/her?
http://corporate.findlaw.com/law-library/taking-the-fifth-am...
0: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=uber&sort=byDate&dateRange=pas...
And it's objectively defensible. The outcome of this lawsuit will shape what an incredibly important future technology looks like and who controls it.
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2003101616...
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175
"[...] So. There we are. The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can't do Groklaw without your input. I was never exaggerating about that when we won awards. It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate.
I'm really sorry that it's so. I loved doing Groklaw, and I believe we really made a significant contribution. But even that turns out to be less than we thought, or less than I hoped for, anyway. My hope was always to show you that there is beauty and safety in the rule of law, that civilization actually depends on it. How quaint.
[...]
My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it's possible. I'm just an ordinary person. But I really know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through, that I can't stay online personally without losing my humanness, now that I know that ensuring privacy online is impossible. I find myself unable to write. I've always been a private person. That's why I never wanted to be a celebrity and why I fought hard to maintain both my privacy and yours."
And I can't imagine that Snowden or the other NSA leaks have made her feel safer about being a public figure.
It seems quaint now, reading her expectations and worries, but it's honestly infuriating that in less than a decade we've gone from an expectation of net privacy to haggard indifference at government's best efforts to engineer electronic panopticon.
Lots of cheerleaders for that right here. It's a sad state of affairs, to put it mildly.
I am no where near as passionate about uber vs google probably because google vs uber is not as great as microsoft vs linux and the survival of opensource.
Are you also vexed every time a story has "Apple" in the title?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
That being said, "where there's smoke there's fire"... but pleading the 5th isn't always the drama we see in Law and Order and Making a Murderer - often individuals just don't want to be misconstrued and prosecuted for saying something and their words being taken out of context.