If an ex employee of a company making a competing product walked into my office with a large treasure trove of files I would not automatically assume that he had re-created those files in his spare time.
Uber being 100% innocent would be highly surprising.
Should be fun when the due diligence docs come out, and we get Uber's view of how Otto went from a value of zero to $680M in 7 months, with only legitimate IP, 5 Trucks, and 90 employees.
1.) At the time of acquisition, Levandowski was one of the world's leading experts on self driving technology.
2.) As one of the world's leading experts, Levandowski was able to recruit an incredible team.
3.) Self driving technology could be worth trillions and, in Uber's particular case, it would remove one of their biggest cost centres, thus making their business instantly profitable.
It's complete BS but that's the reason for the valuation, he can do it, Google already paid him that much and he 'wanted to do his own thing,' it's going to cost you to hire that guy.
Can you even spin up and staff a company in that time frame and integrate a lot of the technical parts in to something very meaningful in 9 months? With custom hardware and stuff that seems insanely tight (but there is a lot of money at play, you push hard) Even if there are off the shelf components that do most of the work and they're pre-integrated that seems insanely aggressive. I can only assume Otto didn't have any IP of real value other than a staff.
But even then I'd agree that they're probably guilty of "intentionally not thinking too hard about it", at the very least.
https://www.axios.com/analysis-uber-gets-bruised-though-not-...
It is beyond suspicious, but then again, maybe pigs really can fly.
- if the IP ends up being stolen then you may not have recourse against the person that sold it to you
- if the IP ends up being stolen you might end up being liable yourself because you did not do the minimum verification required to ascertain that the seller indeed had the rights to sell
That changes the game from 'we've been had' to 'we were willing participants' and that's a very dumb position to be in.
Or maybe Uber's just complicit. But you're introducing facts not in evidence based on your assumptions about how this went down.