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."
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.
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.
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.
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]
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..?
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.
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.
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 don't think that your outside of work project is supposed to take proprietary knowledge to create a competitor, that seems like a pretty reasonable limit.
They promote the use of 20% time to do projects that will be owned by Google. It's essentially giving you freedom to work on what you want, with the understanding that Google will reap the economic rewards (if any) from what you do.
Google's not very tolerant of moonlighting. If you want to work on stuff and own it, quit.
It's written into most peoples' contracts (in a way that isn't always obvious) but if you spend time at home working on stuff that's unrelated and then leave and found a company, if your employer tries to convince a judge they own your "on your own time, unrelated work," good luck with them not looking like shitheads.
Name something remotely related to the use of computers that is not related to things Google does. Note that it doesn't have to be anything you personally worked on at Google (or whatever tech BigCo™) - just something related to their business.
Google's employment onboarding makes this bit unambiguous. You are told from the outset that if you have any current side projects you need to declare them when hired. Google will then tell you whether you can continue them and still work there. You are also told that if you wish to start any side projects while at Google the online form to tell Google of your intentions is at such and such a link. After you submit said form Google will either tell you that you risk legal consequences if you go ahead with said side project while still employed. Or that you are given explicit permission to go forward.
Google doesn't make this at all ambiguous or even difficult to get clear legal guidance on side projects. Levandowski has no excuses here.
It was actually significantly more ambiguous when I worked there (2009-2014), and presumably was even moreso in 2007. IARC didn't even exist until I think 2013, and it wasn't an online form at the time I left - you emailed some contact person, they discussed it in a relatively opaque committee, and then got back to you after an inordinate length of time. They had the standard California IP contract at the time, i.e. company claims ownership over all IP except that done on your own time, using your own resources, on subjects unrelated to the company's lines of business.
That last clause was the source of all sorts of ambiguities, eg. Googlers who had written iPhone games were told (after the fact) that their work was owned by Google because Google+ might be getting into the games business. This was somewhat legally questionable on Google's part, and it was cases like this, probably combined with a few outright corporate theft cases like Lewandowski's, that led to the IARC process.
When I was at Google, I kept hearing that California laws in particular are not employee-friendly and that you should ask for an opinion from a personal lawyer.
As to why this hard stance, I always suspected that sweeping that kind of stuff under the rug would have opened the company to a bunch of annoying lawsuits from shareholders and/or ambulance chasers for something along the lines of "not enforcing the company's rights". All it would have taken was just one successful side project.
Also note that, even if the stance was "Google owns it by default", lots of projects were assigned back (https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/). The IARC process leaves an electronic trail showing that a project was subject to at least some kind of due diligence (even if it later pockets the employee a lot of money that at some point Google or shareholders could have very hypothetically fought in court for). Or, conversely, the lack of an application might shift the legal burden onto the employee that didn't declare everything as required.
Again, the above was just all speculation on my part.
That's only ambiguous if you didn't contact IARC. I can't speak to before IARC was a thing. But after IARC you had a way to get an unambiguous answer as to how Google would view your side project. Whether by form or email that is still pretty easy.
Doesn't California state law invalidate a lot of this? I signed non-competes that come with a little clause at the end: "pretty much none of this is enforceable in California. We have to say this because California is making us."
Of course if you use company resources or IP you're out of luck.
Non-competes are a different issue. They are generally unenforceable in California, though exceptions may possibly be made for executives (I'm not sure, and IANAL anyway).
As far as the side-project policy goes, as you say, you have to avoid using company time or equipment. But that's the easy part. The tough one, as nostrademons mentions, is the requirement that the project not be related to the company's R&D ("actual or demonstrably anticipated" I think is the phrase). In the case of Google, almost nothing involving computers will get by that clause.
> Wait - aren't they supposedly promoting the idea of 20% of work time to be spent of your outside of work projects??
No, 20% time is, in principle, self-directed inside-of-work projects. Mostly, I see it as a community center for building in slack (which is desirable for a lot of reasons) in formal projects while getting a bunch of in-house speculative development which can be mined for commercializable work.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
69 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] thread* "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."
I think a different verb may apply in this particular case.
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.
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 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...
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.
If he'd been talking to somebody about custom GaInAs photosensor ICs, that would indicate a more advanced technology.
[1] http://www.ait.ac.at/fileadmin/mc/digital_safety_security/do...
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.
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.
"Uber's self-driving car boss, Anthony Levandowski, is stepping aside amid legal fight with Waymo"
http://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-no-longer...
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 :\",
Or that's just bullshit PR propaganda, like "don't be evil" slogan, meanwhile taking money and being basically setup up by CIA's In-Q-Tel?
Google's not very tolerant of moonlighting. If you want to work on stuff and own it, quit.
That goes for quite a few employers, especially if what you are doing is (1) competing with their products and (2) potentially successful or (3) both.
Name something remotely related to the use of computers that is not related to things Google does. Note that it doesn't have to be anything you personally worked on at Google (or whatever tech BigCo™) - just something related to their business.
Google doesn't make this at all ambiguous or even difficult to get clear legal guidance on side projects. Levandowski has no excuses here.
That last clause was the source of all sorts of ambiguities, eg. Googlers who had written iPhone games were told (after the fact) that their work was owned by Google because Google+ might be getting into the games business. This was somewhat legally questionable on Google's part, and it was cases like this, probably combined with a few outright corporate theft cases like Lewandowski's, that led to the IARC process.
If it was as you describe it is at least despicable, whether it is legal or not is another matter but that's very very nasty.
As to why this hard stance, I always suspected that sweeping that kind of stuff under the rug would have opened the company to a bunch of annoying lawsuits from shareholders and/or ambulance chasers for something along the lines of "not enforcing the company's rights". All it would have taken was just one successful side project.
Also note that, even if the stance was "Google owns it by default", lots of projects were assigned back (https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/). The IARC process leaves an electronic trail showing that a project was subject to at least some kind of due diligence (even if it later pockets the employee a lot of money that at some point Google or shareholders could have very hypothetically fought in court for). Or, conversely, the lack of an application might shift the legal burden onto the employee that didn't declare everything as required. Again, the above was just all speculation on my part.
Of course if you use company resources or IP you're out of luck.
As far as the side-project policy goes, as you say, you have to avoid using company time or equipment. But that's the easy part. The tough one, as nostrademons mentions, is the requirement that the project not be related to the company's R&D ("actual or demonstrably anticipated" I think is the phrase). In the case of Google, almost nothing involving computers will get by that clause.
of course 20% time is owned by Google. Otherwise it would simply be a 32h work week.
Gmail isn't owned by the people who made it in their 20% time. Obviously.
No, 20% time is, in principle, self-directed inside-of-work projects. Mostly, I see it as a community center for building in slack (which is desirable for a lot of reasons) in formal projects while getting a bunch of in-house speculative development which can be mined for commercializable work.
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
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.
Did Levandowski have some sort of special pass due to the unicorn nature of his experience and expertise?
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.
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.