Yeah, I get that reading most of the stories feels like rehashed gossip rags. But it's the meta that's cool to me; this is a real life battle of technology behemoths with hefty repercussions, and the media is part of the game. It's cool to watch it play out.
I remember showing up to their local meeting with some other Linux guys in the area and politely calling bullshit on their lawsuit. It was kind of fun, although I'm not normally one to court controversy.
Man, I miss Groklaw. I would love to have a Groklaw-equivalent following this trial. I wonder if folks could, like, crowdsource a salary for PJ to cover a new trial?
"[...] 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.
> 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 wasted so many working hours over SCO. Tons of arguments at work and reading slashdot. Oh man those were the days. :)
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.
Perhaps this is standard practice, in the valley, to make the company that acquired your company defend you in the event that the acquisition resulted in a lawsuit, but this revelation just adds another red flag to the already long list of red flags that Uber ignored when acquiring Otto. IMO, Uber clearly knew what he did, either through disclosure or due diligence, and disregarded it. Considering their company culture of playing fast and loose with the rules until you get caught this is not surprising.
>"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"
Not just in the Valley, and not just in the case of M&A events; generally companies sign agreements with their executives to defend them in the case of lawsuits for actions they take in their professional roles. Often, to avoid conflicts of interests between corporate counsel and individual counsel, this works out as the company paying either directly for lawyers for the company officer, or paying for individual liability insurance.
The article seems to indicate the document was signed days after his departure from Google, presumably before Otto was a paper entity. That seems a little unusual.
You are missing the key point: that agreement was not signed when Otto was acquired by Uber, it was signed days after Levandowski left Google, before there should have been any discussions with Uber regarding the acquisition of a startup that didn't exist yet. That is really bad optics.
Waymo claims it has evidence that Levandowski and Urber were talking for months before he left Waymo.
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.
I don't know about Silicon Valley, but I've had such a provision in one previous employment contract because the position was high enough up that I'd be legally liable.
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.
Honest question, I have little VC expertise. Are these valuations relatively legit? Do the people with money at stake have undue influence on the number?
The 60 billion valuation means that there was an investor who was willing to put their money where their mouth is and trade X billion dollars for Y number of shares under certain terms.
But the specifics of that term sheet matter a lot.
For example, if that investor has "ratchets" or preferred shares in their term sheet, it means that they get their money before anyone else does.
Kind of like if a bank gave you a loan, but put a 100% interest rate on it.
Okay, so early investors have some influence on valuation, based on how much risk they appear to be taking? So a high valuation helps attract new investors to dilute the risk of the early crowd?
Sounds like that might result in some inflation. I guess I could look at eventual IPO events, but that's judging the herd by the leaders.
Edit: Thanks for the clarification below. I'm dragging this page off topic now, so noting it here.
High valuation is equivalent to saying high price. The higher the valuation, the more you pay, for less of the company.
BUT, in order to get investors to pay this high price, sometimes you have to give them really good terms.
Terms like "if the company sells for less than you paid, then you get all of your money back, thus you aren't risking anything".
Early investors pay a lower price, but generally risk more. If the company ever has a down round, at any point in the history of the company, the early investors get screwed/might walk away with literally 0$, even though they "owned" x% of the company. While the later investors walk away with all their money intact.
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].
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Where's the district attorney? If someone is claiming the 5th because he might be incriminated that seems like pretty strong probable cause for a criminal investigation.
There's nothing wrong or shady about claiming the 5th. It's an important legal protection. Why would you seek to diminish or undermine something that might one day protect you?
There's a pretty big difference between your fifth amendment rights in civil cases vs. criminal cases. California extends more protections than many states in civil cases, but in many places it can absolutely be used against you in adverse inferences..
That's not how the 5th amendment works. It's not a flag you raise to say "nah nah, I'm not gonna tell you!" for the purpose of attracting a criminal lawsuit.
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.
This is a civil suit, the district attorney is for felony trials. Levandowski definitely seems to have committed a felony. What usually happens in these sorts of cases, from what I have read, is that the civil suit takes place first and establishes the facts, and then the felony trial takes place based on them.
For all the relative good that Facebook and Google have done for the image of how contemporary business gets done in Silicon Valley, Uber is doing its best to make sure we realize that y'all are just as big a shitheads as the rest of corporate America.
Uber's self-driving system doesn't actually have to work beyond the demo level. It's mostly to pump up the company's valuation. Uber is losing money, and unless they find another sucker within a year, they're toast. They've already had to borrow on unfavorable terms.[1]
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.
I think the biggest cost in this business is the human component. For that all you need to do is check the price difference between renting for a day or getting taxi for a day.
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.
Agreed. Unless they have a monopoly on self driving technology (which I seriously doubt).
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!
>>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.
We already have flying cars. They are called helicopters, and they are only available to various government agencies, large corps and the rich.
> No existing regulations (unless at risk of being in flight path).
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.
But note that Uber doesn't become superprofitable from SDCs unless they're the only ones with them; otherwise, they have to cut prices in line with the other SDC-ride-hailing apps.
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.
No company is going to have a monopoly of self driving cars. Uber just needs to get them at the same time as everyone else to with either through build or buy. The main reason for doing as much building now is to have a sizable patent portfolio for defensive reasons. Google bought Motorola's patents to protect them while they competed with Apple.
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.
For that all you need to do is check the price difference between renting for a day or getting taxi for a day
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.
I agree it's not the same from the user point of view.
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.
Car schemes exist like Zipcar. I know people who live in cities and don't own a car who use them all the time. But it's turned out to be a pretty niche business. Zipcar is the highest profile of these businesses, at least in the US, AFAIK and even they ended up bought by Avis.
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.
car2go and reach now are much more usable than zipcar.
* 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.
> Whoever gets self driving technology right, will own all transportation and logistics - which is huge!
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.
In addition they need the law to allow them to have driverless vehicles, right now these vehicles need a human driver 'just in case' with that expense autonomous vehicles will struggle against their traditional rivals. Where uber have an issue so that whilst Google can wait for the laws to allow for it Uber can't burn money for that long.
As someone that worked on Wall Street, most HNers aren't any better than Main Street investors. In many ways I'd say they are worse. Specifically, the level of emotion some people have on HN when it comes to liking or disliking companies based on their pet issues leads them to make some financially asinine statements. If you want to make money in the capital markets, you have to be dispassionate, making your decisions based on financials and fundamentals.
> Running a fleet of self-driving cars is running a car rental company.
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.
I was not aware drivers could lease vehicles from Uber. I assumed they couldn't because I once reserved a ReachNow car, only to find an Uber driver setting up in it. He had ended his ride by accident, and was on the phone with their customer service. He was talking about needing to start work. The customer service rep said there was another car nearby (it was 2 blocks away when I looked at the app).
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?
That seems unlikely. You need to register each car you intend to drive with Uber and each one requires them to perform an inspection. So the chances of just grabbing a ZipCar and using it for Uber for the day being allowed are pretty much zero.
Ehh, except I have seen people use different cars. I imagine you could just have a random zipcar inspected, and grab a similar looking one each time. People who drive for uber already have a terrible idea of finances, so not suprising.
As a rider I would report that. If the license plate doesn't match what I see in the app I also wouldn't get in the car. Maybe not enough riders care enough and some drivers can get away with it.
I don't know what reach now is but ubers leasing program is called exchange lease. Its scummy as hell. Anyone can get approved if they agree to drive for uber. A Toyota corolla is 150 a week and your fairs pay the lease. If they cur rates or itw a slow week you're underwater. Lots of people got screwed when the cut rates and had to drive for uber just to break even
> 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
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.
Xchange Leasing is an Uber affiliate which takes capital from wall st banks and loans it to uber drivers. uber takes out the loan payment before paying the driver.
Copied this reddit post ive linked to before that sums it up:
"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."
Wow! So, Uber is not a taxi company, it's a sub-prime auto-loan company with draconian terms that masquerades as a taxi company. So much more makes sense about Uber in this light.
One solution to parking, once the human drivers are out of the picture and fuel costs are largely removed, is in self-driving cars purposefully getting themselves stuck in traffic.
I think that might be missing the point of something like uber a bit, they could very well just rent you the self driving cars of individuals when they are not using them. Once self driving features hit most cars, companies like uber will be very well placed to capitalise on that. As software providers for the networks of self driving cars and trucks, owned by others.
And all of that is only going to be profitable if they are somehow allowed to operate fully autonomous cars without the need for a driver. If a driver wage has to be paid then the additional cost of an autonomous car is going to fuck up the already slim margin for potential profit. And whilst they have been able to disrupt the existing system by bypassing or ignoring laws they don't like and then fighting them in the courts there is no country on earth, at least not in somewhere they want to to operate, that will allow them to run an autonomous car and seek approval later.
How does the link show that they were borrowing on unfavorable terms? Crunchbase doesn't show the terms of the funding round, and when I followed the link for the July 2016 round, it shows that they got a loan at 5%, which is ridiculously good in tech:
Question: how public are these hearings? Is there a place we could get transcripts of them? (I remember previous days had snippets of transcripts (at the very least))
They are public by default. There was a really entertaining transcript where the judge argued vehemently against attempts by the lawyers to restrict public access (which is possible to protect privacy or trade secrets, for example).
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.
'The statement at issue need not directly implicate the witness as long as it "furnish[es] a link in the chain of evidence needed to prosecute the claimant for a...crime." Hoffman v. United States , 341 U.S. 479, 486-87 (1951).'
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadThe "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...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO/Linux_controversies
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?
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/topics/money-stuff
>"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.
It is 2megacorps fighting each other.
The 60 billion valuation means that there was an investor who was willing to put their money where their mouth is and trade X billion dollars for Y number of shares under certain terms.
But the specifics of that term sheet matter a lot.
For example, if that investor has "ratchets" or preferred shares in their term sheet, it means that they get their money before anyone else does.
Kind of like if a bank gave you a loan, but put a 100% interest rate on it.
Sounds like that might result in some inflation. I guess I could look at eventual IPO events, but that's judging the herd by the leaders.
Edit: Thanks for the clarification below. I'm dragging this page off topic now, so noting it here.
High valuation is equivalent to saying high price. The higher the valuation, the more you pay, for less of the company.
BUT, in order to get investors to pay this high price, sometimes you have to give them really good terms.
Terms like "if the company sells for less than you paid, then you get all of your money back, thus you aren't risking anything".
Early investors pay a lower price, but generally risk more. If the company ever has a down round, at any point in the history of the company, the early investors get screwed/might walk away with literally 0$, even though they "owned" x% of the company. While the later investors walk away with all their money intact.
"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.
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference
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.
Edit - or maybe the OJ trial.
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-...
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.
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...