What's odd to me is those 25 apparently were only found because they had been cited by the police. So the 99.9% that weren't cited by the police could have tens of thousands more at least how I understand it
Most of the call spam blocking solutions suffer from needing to trust Caller ID. Spoofing caller ID is now trivial and used by spammers [1] There are some work arounds to this like "audio fingerprinting".
The termination letter indicates that the termination is for cause and may have implications on stock awards and other compensation:
"Under the Stock Award and other agreements, you are entitled to 20 days to cure the events that give rise to this termination for Cause. This letter constitutes the “prior written
notice” triggering the commencement of that 20day period."
This is probably costing Levandowski many many millions of dollars. Uber bought Otto for 1% of Uber stock valued at around $700 million. A good chunk of that was owed to Levandowski at some unknown vesting/performance schedule. Otto employees are also owed a fifth of any future Uber trucking profits.
If the risk of testifying/cooperating with the investigation outweighs the massive financial incentive Levandowski had to cooperate then that risk must be pretty enormous...
From what I have read elsewhere, he already has quite a lot of wealth. So "not going to the pokey" probably has a lot higher value than whatever millions he is leaving behind.
IANAL but doesn't the letter's language ("that termination shall become effective 20 days from today") imply that he has 20 days to fix things, and that the termination is not a already done deal?
"Cause" has meaning here. His days working for Uber are likely done but if he choose to rectify the issues stated in the letter then he might be able to get the terminated for "Cause" removed in which case he likely has some parachute clauses and payouts which can come into effect.
I don't know. If the court thinks there was a deal between Uber and Levandowski where they "fired" him for the duration of the trial, only to hire him back as soon as possible, that could lead to contempt of court charges, I feel. But IANAL either.
I'm assuming that since he's a high-profile hire from an acquisition with a lot of vesting cycles attached to it, there are more required legal procedures including time window to amend things.
Groupon is a great counter to consider in terms of the product-market fit theory. Few companies have ever had the product-market that Groupon had "Groupon is so effective that Mason claims Groupon now has 35,000 companies clamoring to be on its roster. Only one in eight applicants makes the cut." [0]
Instead a better model is to think about having a great product in a great market has phase 1. But if the company can't create a moat it still dies. "One problem with the Groupon model: Anyone can replicate it. More than 200 copycat sites have sprung up in the U.S., with another 500 overseas, including 100 in China."[0]
I generally believe in transparency. But I would resist transparency with someone that exhibits this attitude:
Andrew Anglin, the owner of The Daily Stormer, has been candid about how he feels about people reporting his site for its content. “We need to make it clear to all of these people that there are consequences for messing with us,” Anglin wrote in one online post. “We are not a bunch of babies to be kicked around. We will take revenge. And we will do it now.”
It is not a coincidence that Uber's competitors are all raising money at this point in time. It was hard a year ago. Uber's struggles have not only boosted the metrics for competitors [1], but there is increasingly a plausible story about how Uber could fail.
Didi is not Uber's competitor any more. Didi acquired Uber China, is an investor in Uber, and owns Uber shares. So does Uber in Didi. They don't compete directly in any major market at this moment.
Could you confirm/cite a source that didi owns shares in uber?
My understanding was that uber got ~20% of didi shares in exchange for ceding the Chinese market.
The increasingly plausible story of Uber failing is Google or other big players beating them by a large margin to self-driving cars (including for the kind of taxi-service Uber provides). None of these smaller players (aside from Didi which appears to be quite large and backed by internal Chinese interests) give the semblance of having even a minutia of a chance vs. Google.
In China, it's Google who doesn't have a chance. Their search, email, and app store are all blocked. There's no reason to think they'd have any more success as a car company.
This meme that transportation network companies are waiting for self-driving cars to eliminate drivers has been promulgated for years, but does anyone really know what will happen when self-driving cars are widely deployed? It's pure speculation.
It's pure speculation as to how quickly it will even happen. I can imagine a forum similar to this one back in the 60's, 70's or 80's talking about how cold fusion will revolutionize the world. Uber's problems are in the immediate term, the idea that they will even exist when true self-driving cars actually make it to market is far-fetched already.
As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.
Self-driving is not going to be solved by throwing money at it. If it was, Google would have "solved" it already and Apple wouldn't have abandoned their effort.
The obvious shortage is engineering talent. This is more debatable (many people, like Elon Musk, don't believe this to be the case), but the field also needs one or more research breakthroughs, especially in the realm of planning and reasoning. Most of the machine learning in self-driving cars goes towards perception / detection / mapping. The actual decision-making is still heuristics and hard-coded rules.
Network and data infrastructure is also a challenge for self driving cars and has a ways to go. The data produced by a single self driving car can be pretty staggering (I've heard estimates as high as 5 TB/minute). Now think about transferring that much data around a fleet of cars over current LTE wireless data connections.
Even if someone gets it working in a small area, it will take years of investment in network infra to make it truly ubiquitious.
Barring some major technical breakthroughs, I just don't see the current tech that these companies are testing being scalable at the same level as GPS, cellular data, etc.
> The actual decision-making is still heuristics and hard-coded rules.
The planning system always be hard coded rules. Perception, fine, throw the latest CNN at it. Planning and control, better stick to the DMV/NHTSA traffic book.
Self-driving cars are going to produce >$100B/year in value (probably at least $1T/year worldwide). They are going to cost a lot more than $5B to develop. Google has >$80B of cash on hand and Apple has >$230B. Those companies would spend $5B to develop self-driving cars in a heartbeat if they could, but they can't.
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 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.
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.
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 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 assume that Otto execs indemnified Uber with respect to the intellectual property, given that it was a primary value in the acquisition. If so, Uber can claw back the $680M they spent.
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].
>I assume that Otto execs indemnified Uber with respect to the intellectual property, given that it was a primary value in the acquisition. If so, Uber can claw back the $680M they spent.
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.
For some values of scratch, anyway. If you show me a complete design for a system, allow me to play around with prototypes for a year and peruse the documentation, forcing me to delete all the files afterwards will not take away all the things I've learned.
The court orders them to stop using any code or designs that were touched by former Google employees, AKA all of their code and designs.
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.
Schadenfreude aside, I hope others realize how evil this outcome would be. California is a great place because it doesn't enforce anti-employee provisions like non-compete agreements.
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 don't see how trade secrets are analogous to a non-compete clause. California doesn't like non-competes, but most certainly does respect trade secrets. And Waymo isn't claiming that Levandowski is wrongly using skills or experience he picked up there; it's claiming he literally downloaded a bunch of internal documents on his way out the door, and handed them over to a competitor.
And if he downloaded them but never handed them over or never did anything else with them after leaving Google?
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.
> 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.
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.
I didn't say I intentionally keep things from previous employers. I return or delete everything that I know about, but that doesn't mean that I don't occasionally come across stuff that I wasn't aware I was still in possession of from time to time. Oftentimes, it's an archived email, but sometimes it's a file. Blurred work/life boundaries contributes to this happening from time to time.
It's basically a boilerplate provision in asset purchases, Merger/aquisition, assignments, licensing agreements, etc...
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?
I tried to look up the Skype acquisition since this seemed crazy and this is what Wikipedia says:
"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 isn't that eBay made money on the transaction in the end.
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.
Presumably they did, but oftentimes indemnification for IP claims in the M&A context is limited to just a percentage of the total consideration for the merger. So, it's very possible that indemnification would be capped at, say, $68M or $136M. Certainly not nothing, but also not $680M.
The numbers in the headline measures the # of H-1B petitions that were received before the USCIS decided to stop accepting more because they can meet the "mandated 65,000 visa H-1B cap" and "the 20,000 visa U.S. advanced degree exemption, also known as the master’s cap"[1]
Given that the agency "will reject and return filing fees for all unselected cap-subject petitions that are not duplicate filings", it would be desirable to limit the number of excess applications.
I am not sure that the data points in the article extrapolate to "A lot of people are looking at America, and (wondering) if it is still a place to make business."
And then UAL gained back almost the full value by Wednesday morning and has performed similar to Delta and other airlines. Like most PR disasters unless you keep digging when you are in a hole, the long-term impact is small and consumers forget.
Uber is in the hole right now and digging. Microsoft used to be. Amazon used to be.
Don't see it in the source article.