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Comment by ziszis | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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.

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.

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.

> * "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.

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