Things learned from Anthony Levandowski's deposition in Waymo vs. Uber | Hacker News Reader

Things learned from Anthony Levandowski's deposition in Waymo vs. Uber

spectrum.ieee.org

185 pointsziszis65 comments

Waymo's allegations now go much deeper and further back than just Otto:

* "Levandowski was deceiving Google almost from the moment it hired him to work on the Street View maps project back in 2007."

* "Levandowski controlled a company called Dogwood Leasing that hired ex-Google contractor and 510 Systems engineer Asheem Linaval to use Google’s secrets to develop self-driving car technology."

* "Levandowski founded yet another startup, Odin Wave, feeding it confidential lidar technology ... renaming the company Tyto, to hide his involvement."

How did he have time to do his day job with all this scamming on the side?

I met him when he was doing a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 2004. He was an undergrad at UC Berkeley then, was doing the self-driving motorcycle, and had a successful startup selling a large folding tablet computer for viewing engineering drawings at construction sites. He does seem to get a lot done.

Some people are just driven that way. They don't watch much TV or play video games. They just eat, sleep and breath their designs.

> They just eat, sleep and breath their designs.

I think a different verb may apply in this particular case.

Clearly he is a brilliant man. Too bad that he got so greedy. This is doubly sad when he was already a legitimate multimillionaire from his job at Google.

I want time management coaching from him.

I believe the commenters who say he's very smart and very driven.

But I'd also suggest that setting up small companies isn't THAT much work. Funneling other people's designs to those companies isn't THAT much work either.

Surely, the scheming took time and effort and I'm not saying he wasn't working hard. But the scheming described doesn't exactly sound like a superhuman feat for the ages.

How would renaming a company hide your involvement?

Involvement is dealt with in the shareholder registry, not in the company name. Neither 'Odin Wave' nor 'Tyto' have any direct visual resemblance to "Levandowski', the fact that 'Odin Wave' is a partial anagram of "Levandowski" isn't reason enough to suspect involvement by any other person. (Such as Dwain Evo...).

If I were looking at this sort of thing I'd start with the cap table and look for direct or indirect participation.

"I'd start with the cap table and look for direct or indirect participation"

I can imagine it's hard to get this kind of info, it's not that cap tables are public and sometimes they don't even exist at all, especially if there's no investors involved.

Another data point would be the registered officer(s)/manager(s) with the secretary of state, but removing himself from it would achieve the same without having to change the company name, unless he then started a company with the same name?

But yeah, I also can't see how changing a name is hiding involvement...

A judge will have to sign off on it but then you'd be able to compel the other party to provide such details. That's not an outrageous request, especially not when 'who benefits' is an important question to answer in cases like these.

> * "Levandowski was deceiving Google almost from the moment it hired him to work on the Street View maps project back in 2007."

I read this, and immediately wondered why Google didn't immediately fire him? Seriously. When you find out someone is taking your IP and using it for his own profit, you don't put the guy on a sensitive project. I don't care how talented he is, he couldn't be trusted.

That statement doesn't say anything about when Google became aware of what he was doing. It may well be that Google wasn't aware of the earlier scheming until many years later when they started investigating the bigger issues in this case.

I guess you don't need trust when you can use a person as a vehicle (pun shamelessly intended) to sue potential competition.

If he was deceiving Google from the very beginning, why didn't Google find it out earlier and fired him? Google bought more than one companies he co-founded or was heavily involved with. How did not Google find that he was involved with these companies and there was obvious conflicts of interests there.

The use of OMW Corp, which is just a contract CNC machine shop, indicates the LIDAR in dispute has moving parts. It's probably just another rotating scanner. That approach is just for prototypes. Everybody serious is going with flash LIDAR or MEMS.

If he'd been talking to somebody about custom GaInAs photosensor ICs, that would indicate a more advanced technology.

Does MEMS count as solid state or is it also seen as a moving part?

Probably depends if the service life is in practical terms limited. Offhand I'd guess it's probably very long. MEMS accelerometers in airbag sensors have to stay within tolerances for the life of a car.

For sensors I can see how you could do that (piezo with a small weight attached) and it will likely live a very long time. But for an MEMS actuator that would be driven to oscillate it would be a lot harder to make that long-lived.

To the extent I can find serivce life specs for MEMS tuning fork gyroscopes, which are driven to oscillate, they say "more than 100,000 hours" - about 10 years of powered-on time, which, for an automotive application like roll-over sensing, is essentially forever, since cars have a low duty cycle.

MEMS would be solid state pretty sure.

Could be a waveguide... not all machined parts move.

GaInAs would imply 1500nm or some non-standard wavelength, at this point I would suspect that normal silicon would do, but you just have to get down to a low enough price point.

That's what Advanced Scientific Concepts uses in their high-end LIDAR units. That gets them the sensitivity needed for flash LIDAR with hundreds of meter range. There are people talking about doing the same job with CMOS technology, and that may well happen, but I don't think the CMOS people have comparable sensitivity yet. Fraunhofer is working on it.[1]

[1] http://www.ait.ac.at/fileadmin/mc/digital_safety_security/do...

I'm kind of stunned at the amount of side-hustling that Levandowski seems to have been doing while at Google. How could the Google not have been aware of it, and how could it let it continue for so long?

If I were more conspiracy-minded, I'd think they let Otto happen in order to feed a poison pill to Uber... In reality, I think they were just complacent, but still :\

I'm not sure if that's plausible or if I've just watched too much Silicon Valley

> I'm kind of stunned at the amount of side-hustling that Levandowski seems to have been doing while at Google.

Well, Uber is running TV ads urging people to "get your side hustle on" [1], so at least he ended up at the right place.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKqnkoCfQGU

> If I were more conspiracy-minded, I'd think they let Otto happen in order to feed a poison pill to Uber...

That would be a very bad strategy if true so I highly doubt it. IANAL, but I believe under estoppel Google's knowledge of Levandowski's activity and implicit permission to continue would forfeit Google's right to sue later. Likely as soon as they came to know about it they took immediate action to prevent him from taking this defense.

Levandowski has absolutely tarnished his own reputation. Sooner or later he will be abandoned by Uber - how could they possibly trust him if his thieving goes back a decade? - and finding employment or trust in the industry is going to be extremely difficult.

If he really made $120m from Google alone, he probably thought he was safe by that point, I mean, he must have thought through this and bought himself a private island somewhere to go to when the shit was going to hit the fan..?

Or maybe he'll take his talents to China?

When "fsck you money" goes wrong.

That decade of deception netted him >$100M. I don't think he's going to fill out some online job application form.

Of course there is a pending civil suit from Waymo but what are the damages? Can't just make up a number based on the potential of self-driving cars and right now they are a mere money sink.

Didn't he make that $100M before he got to Google, i.e. from the company he helped start that was sold to Google? All he had to do was keep his nose clean at Google and let his stock vest.

So, why does he need to find employment in the industry? If I was a double-digit or triple-digit millionaire, I would not give a hoot about is how hard it will be to find employment.

Practically speaking, has enough money to sustain himself indefinitely. Why would he care?

Perhaps he enjoys working at high profile companies on advanced high profile projects.

Having a ton of money means you don't have to worry about food, transport, or housing. In no way does it scratch the itch to build and sell cool new stuff.

What's Google's policy on side businesses? They're cool if you work on self-driving cars and start LIDAR and "self-driving truck" side projects?

Did Levandowski have some sort of special pass due to the unicorn nature of his experience and expertise?

https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/

Can someone (with hopefully a legal background) comment on what the judge will be looking at when deciding if there should be an injunction against Uber and stopping ALL their self-driving car work? What criteria are they specifically looking at/how much burden of proof do they need?

seems Levandowski is out as head of the self-driving project at Uber, will remain in some role but recuse himself from Lidar

"Uber's self-driving car boss, Anthony Levandowski, is stepping aside amid legal fight with Waymo"

http://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-no-longer...

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14214772

Anyone have the link to the original document? Could not find it (I understand the original version was pulled due to the index, but other versions).

Yeah I'm also interested in the original deposition

Some good stuff in here worth reading if you're following this case. The author was able to figure out the names of redacted component suppliers.

Great analysis and generally a good read.

However, to simplify, I think the biggest lesson learned is:

When you create a product at a company and use the company's resources, the IP belongs to the company. If you're going branch out and work on a related product, you better understand the legal issues first.

Also, stealing is bad.

"When you create a product at a company and use the company's resources, the IP belongs to the company. If you're going branch out and work on a related product, you better understand the legal issues first. "

I mean, this should be pretty obvious to anyone who has so much as had a passing glance on their employment contract. I doubt very much that Levandowski didn't know this could put him in trouble.

Link to deposition source doc?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14214772 is more newsy so we'll treat this one as a semidupe (there probably being no need for 2 Levandowskis in the top 4).

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