Slashdot Mirror
Uber Settles Dispute With Alphabet's Self-driving Car Unit (cnbc.com)
In a shocking development, Uber said on Friday it has settled the high-stakes trade-secret theft lawsuit brought by Alphabet's Waymo, resolving a conflict that already cost the ride-hailing giant its top driverless car engineer and threatened to further embarrass the company. From a report: Uber will pay Waymo a 0.34 percent equity stake amounting to about $245 million at Uber's recent $72 billion valuation, the companies said on Friday, after days of courtroom theatrics. Uber has also agreed not to incorporate Waymo's confidential information into its hardware and software, though Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi writes that he doesn't believe his company used any of Waymo's trade secrets in the first place. Khosrowshahi says that he feels "regret" over the dispute and wished his predecessors had handled it differently.
Why is Google taking an equity stake in a company that promotes such a toxic workplace? Shameful. It is almost like they are in it for the money or something.
Good behind the scenes analysis of why Waymo's case was flimsy here from Sarah Jeong, a lawyer and journalist who has been live tweeting the trial:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16993208/waymo-v-uber-tria...
Summary - Waymo was claiming Uber violated 8 trade secrets (down from 100s), and had only directly discussed these trade secrets for 45 minutes over the past week. "Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes?"
"And then there’s the part where Anthony Levandowski is not on trial, Uber is. Even if Levandowski took 14,000 confidential documents, that doesn’t mean that Uber did something wrong — there isn’t a clear link to how those documents got onto Uber computers or were used in Uber self-driving cars."
Good behind the scenes analysis of why Waymo's case was flimsy here from Sarah Jeong, a lawyer and journalist who has been live tweeting the trial:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16993208/waymo-v-uber-tria...
That link wasn't clickable for me. Here it is as a clickable link: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16993208/waymo-v-uber-trial-trade-secrets-lidar
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
promotes such a toxic workplace...
I would hasten to add that toxic workplace is as most subjective as can be, and that this is *your* opinion.
There are a lot of external references to Uber's toxic workplace. Try google searching Uber+toxic+workplace. A few hits I could dismiss as "a few haters", but I get 443 thousand hits.
Here are some of the top few. It looks pretty toxic to me:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/technology/uber-fired.html
https://www.recode.net/2017/6/21/15844852/uber-toxic-bro-company-culture-susan-fowler-blog-post
https://thinkprogress.org/travis-kalanick-uber-resigns-a8537d468f11/
https://www.recode.net/2017/6/21/15844852/uber-toxic-bro-company-culture-susan-fowler-blog-post
http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-holder-report-results-investigation-harassment-bro-culture-2017-6
http://theconversation.com/fixing-a-toxic-culture-like-ubers-requires-more-than-just-a-new-ceo-79102
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/uber-workplace-culture.html
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/06/uber-fires-employees-sexual-harassment-investigation
https://qz.com/1010986/a-timeline-of-events-that-led-to-travis-kalanick-stepping-down-as-ceo-of-uber/
Uber will pay Waymo a 0.34 percent equity stake amounting to about $245 million at Uber's recent $72 billion valuation, the companies said on Friday, after days of courtroom theatrics.
Uber worth $72 billion? For a privately held company that had a loss of $3.8 billion on revenue of $6.5 billion? For a business with limited economies of scale? (providing twice as many rides does not result in major cost savings) Anyone who actually believes Uber is worth that much is a weapons grade idiot. It's like the dotcom boom all over again.
Basically they arrive at a "$72 billion valuation" by someone buying a portion of the company and then extrapolating what that person thinks it is worth. So if I buy 1% of a company for $1 million I'm effectively valuing the company at $100 million. Doesn't mean it is actually worth that because you have to consider the winners curse. Just because someone is willing to overpay doesn't mean others will.
I would hasten to add that toxic workplace is as most subjective as can be, and that this is *your* opinion.
Hardly. 20 seconds on google and you'll find literally thousands of articles documenting in great detail how rotten the company culture is. Not even remotely the "opinion" of one person.
Heck, I am sure that what you call a toxic workplace has a lot of people waiting in line to join.
There are lots of people who are attracted to others that share terrible values and behave badly. Doesn't make it something to be celebrated or forgiven.
Curious is he indicted on theft? I tried to google him but there was so much noise in the results from this trial I did not see anything.
Google*
The judge gave the US prosecutor all the evidence Waymo had on the guy. Give it some time for them to get their own investigation completed.
To be honest I can't say I'm too surprised hearing about all the evidence against Uber. While no one can be entirely sure, there's a very high possibility that they were in the wrong so by settling it stopped an embarrassing and potentially damaging legal case against them. You only need to look at their history to see that virtually everything they've done is borderline sketchy and or illegal or in grey areas. Even the reason why they want to automate cars is to line their bottom line by getting rid of uber drivers.
My significant other was until recently an associate at the firm representing Waymo.
Whilst not directly on the team working the case, the opinion was that it was clearly apparent from discovery that it was going to be a slam dunk for Waymo and a settlement was the likely outcome.
An unaffiliated 3rd party took the wind out of google's sails. The settlement might have been different otherwise.
https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit-patent/