
Due Diligence Report on Otto and Anthony Levandowski - troydavis
https://www.scribd.com/document/360525542/Due-Diligence-Report-on-Otto-and-Anthony-Levandowski
======
warent
Lior Ron:

1/12/2016 Internet search on "how to securely delete files mac"

1/13/2016 Ron leaves Google

1/19/2016 Internet search on "can a MacBook be recovered after formatting the
OS"

3/22/2016 A file labelled Chauffer win plan.docx is deleted, shortly before
Ron's interview with Stroz Friedberg

"Chauffer win plan.docx" is this guy serious? Did he name his other
incriminating file "if they find this im fucked.pdf"

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Is opsec really as hard as all these people make it seem? If I were planning
something shady there's probably a lot of stupid questions I'd need to Google
for, but I'd at least do it on public library wifi and download a Tor browser
or something. I dunno if that would protect me, but it's more than seems to
have been done here.

~~~
dx034
Once you start using Tor and public Wifi, you admit that what you're doing is
illegal. I think in these cases, many people tell themselves that they operate
in some kind of gray area.

~~~
kobeya
> Once you start using Tor and public Wifi, you admit that what you're doing
> is illegal.

Thankfully that’s not how law works. Also, I use Tor everyday, for totally
legal things I want to keep private.

~~~
austinjp
It's not how law works -- currently, in some countries. But it is how
suspicion works, and governments in the US and UK, for example, seem highly
suspicious of their populous.

~~~
kobeya
In the US at least the law cannot devolve into suspicion being adequate burden
of proof. This is a constitutional protection that has been strengthened, not
weakened by the courts over time, with only infrequent temporary setbacks.
It's unfortunate that's not how things operate on the other side of the pond,
but that's connected to why the US is the way it is.

~~~
dreamcompiler
Salina v. Texas changed that. It's a horrendous decision.
[https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/supreme...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/supreme-
court-salinas-v-texas-ruling-explained/314145/)

------
KKKKkkkk1
> Our forensic examination of Levandowski's devices and accounts corroborates
> his assertion that he stored and accessed Google files on his personal
> laptop in folders labeled Chauffeur and Google. However, contrary to his
> belief that there were no or few Google e-mails on his laptop, Stroz
> discovered approximately 50,000 Google work e-mail messages that were
> downloaded onto Levandowski's computer on September 20, 2014. Ten of those
> e-mails were last accessed between September 1, 2015 and January 28, 2016.
> It is difficult to believe that Levandowski was not, prior to his interview,
> fully aware of the extent of the data that he had retained.

50K Project Chauffeur emails stored on his personal laptop. People have gone
to jail for less.

> Levandowski also attempted to empty the Trash bin on his MacBook Pro while
> he was at Stroz Friedberg's office on March 22, 2016 at approximately 12:12
> p.m., but our examination found no files were contained in his Trash at the
> time he attempted to empty it.

What kind of company does business with a shady character like this?

~~~
asn0
> What kind of company does business with a shady character like this?

A company that was already doing shady things?

~~~
snarf21
What rules? Rules are for suckers!

------
CalChris
The Scribd post (by Gawker, Gawker lives!) calls it a _Due Diligence Report_
but that's not a phrase used anywhere in the document. Due diligence is
something you'd do before making a decision. Investigation is what you do
afterwards. Indeed _Project Unicorn Investigation_ is what the document calls
itself.

Mods: you might want to overrule the post and retitle the post as _Project
Unicorn Investigation_.

In fact, I'd love to see the due diligence report for Uber buying Otto.

~~~
jacquesm
> Due diligence is something you'd do before making a decision.

There is such a thing as 'vendor due diligence' where a party that will sell
something does their own DD in preparation to the DD by others to ensure they
haven't missed anything obvious.

Other than that you are right though, this is an investigative report, but it
would have been a lot smarter of Uber to have this stuff checked _before_
making a deal, the optics are not pretty and the fact that they tried to hide
this report makes it even less so.

I have seen a couple of these in the last few years that were 'exciting', this
one is off the scale for me on a professional interest level, there are only
three that I'd like to read more, the actual due diligence reports - if they
exist - on this deal, Ubeam and Theranos.

~~~
asn0
Report says it was requested by Uber and Otto in March 2016, and it is dated
Aug 5, 2016. Uber announced Otto acquisition on Aug 18. So this looks like an
investigation that was part of the due diligence for the acquisition, and Uber
would have had it well before the acquisition was announced.

Could be that when you're hustlin', making bold bets and being optimistic
leaders[1], you don't get too concerned about (or read) a report like this.

1\. [https://www.quora.com/What-are-Ubers-14-core-cultural-
values](https://www.quora.com/What-are-Ubers-14-core-cultural-values)

------
retSava
A thing I hadn't really thought of was that perhaps the main goal from Uber
wasn't to explicitly gain access to Waymo secrets (as in documents etc) but
simply how to recruit the whole self-driving cars team from Waymo. Uber trying
to one-by-one recruit them from Waymo would probably have been much more
difficult compared with what happened - Levandowski creating a start-up, whose
whole aim was to get acquired by Uber.

> At one point, Levandowski said that he asked Brian McClendon, who left
> Google to join Uber, how much Uber would be willing to pay for the Chauffeur
> team, claiming he wanted to have a market value for the team

Ie it's more "I'll make it so you can buy the Chaffeur team" rather than "I'll
let you buy these design docs that are Waymo confidential".

------
thisisit
Just wondering - How is Uber claiming to be non-complicit in this? The report
is damning on Levandowski's behavior. But Uber to hire him in spite of all
this is surprising at best.

At this point, it doesn't matter if they took Waymo's files or not, just the
appearance of something like this to happen reflects poorly on them.

~~~
fnwx17
It's actually pretty amazing how much of Uber's policies seems to be around
"plausible deniability"

let's get [this] done! but, it is legal? no, it's mostly borderline towards
full blown illegal. ok, make sure you empty the trash on your Mac before we
get started.

------
zaroth
Kind of impressive how _much_ historical record they were able to glean from
all those devices! Amazing how much digital residue was left behind, even
persisting against pointed efforts to destroy them -- _bits lingered_.

But also, yikes! My next phone will have 256GB of storage, how much stuff is
going to accumulate in there, and really we have to hand this over for
inspection by the company? I think the one part about the drives filled with
porn they didn't want to inspect, by then it was really creepy.

The fact this document is in the public record. Just wow.

------
lsseckman
"He [Lewandowski] also said it was common practice to share work files via
Dropbox"

Always interesting seeing company employees not using their company's
products. Shows that what some view as a monolith is a bunch of smaller bands
of people.

~~~
jon_richards
Given the bugs/missing features in the google docs lineup, I've never believed
they are dogfeeding. It's been out for 10 years and it still has formatting
issues. Change the zoom level of your browser and tab-aligned things will
suddenly unalign. Made a report with pictures/figures? Good luck printing
that, everything will move around as soon as you go to print it.

The only thing I know google uses google docs for is coding interviews. Which
is just sad.

~~~
philsnow
google docs is not for typesetting; if you care what things will look like on
a printed page it's not the right tool.

re tab-aligned things, are you using explicit tab stops or not?

~~~
eropple
A competitor to Microsoft Word isn't "if you care what things will look like
on a printed page"?

That seems fishy to me.

~~~
ggg9990
Google Docs is not marketed as a complete replacement for Microsoft Word. It's
marketed as "the 50% of Word's feature set that 99% of people need."

~~~
jon_richards
I would have guessed more than 1% of people need to print and/or turn a
document into a pdf without having it change the page a picture is on.

------
rogy
Maybe im being naive but if you had an inkling something like this was going
to happen, and given the 'worth' of the guys in questions.. would you not just
burn all the personal devices you had when you left? it seems amazingly
careless with little thought beyond 'oh sh*t maybe i just trash some of these,
that'll sort it'

~~~
CamperBob2
Most people aren't really all that devious and evil. In order to do shady
stuff, most of us have to first convince ourselves that we're not really doing
anything wrong, or that the legal fine print will give us a way out if it ever
comes down to a fight.

If Lewandowski had an inkling of the trouble he was getting himself into, he
would have done a lot of things differently. But he didn't. He was going to go
start something awesome, damn the lawyers, full speed ahead. Many of the
greatest founders in the Valley got their start by either backstabbing or
frontrunning their employers. If you're hoping to follow in their footsteps,
it's easy for survivorship bias to take hold.

------
zaroth
In other news, deleting iMessage chats is completely useless?

~~~
neom
Seriously. wut the fuq?????? I'm so curious how they recovered them.

------
ixtli
Can someone explain the context for this?

~~~
dlgeek
Waymo (Google's self-driving car venture) has a big lawsuit against Uber
alledging patent violations (since dismissed), trade secret infringement, and
assorted other claims. This is all revolving around their hiring of a senior
Google manger (Anthony Levandowski) who quit google to form a bunch of
companies that were then acquired by Uber.

Waymo/Google have claimed that Levandowski was negotiating with Uber to steal
their secret stuff well in advance of leaving Google, met Uber executives
during this time, and following his meeting with them, stole a bunch of files
(a big SVN checkout of their hardware repo). He also did a bunch of other bad
stuff that I'm not going to get into. They've also claimed to have evidence
that Uber was using their IP through some stolen boards.

The pre-trial case has been really, really bad looking for Levandowski, but
Waymo's been having trouble finding a smoking gun to implicate Uber as a
whole.

However, one of the key pieces of evidence here was a due-diligence report
prepared by Stroz Friedberg that went into exactly what info Levandowski still
had from Waymo/Google. Uber and Levandowski, ESPECIALLY Levandowski have been
fighting really hard to prevent Waymo from getting it's hands on the report -
going all the way up to the Federal Circuit Appeals court. They lost all of
these, and the report was handed over a few weeks ago.

This is that report. As to how big of a smoking gun it is... I'm still
reading. Waymo's been claiming it is in their filings up through last week,
but I haven't been able to see anything past that - something's up with either
PACER or RECAP and there aren't any updates/filings on the case in over a week
on RECAP for some reason. (If anyone's got a pacer account...)

~~~
united893
> all the way up to the Federal Circuit Appeals ...

I'd be curious to know what's the most procedurally complex trial out there.
I.e. One where the distance between the original suit, and the issue at hand
has the most steps. I.e original suit spawned a separate suit on the
admissibility of evidence which got escalated and then spawned another suit on
the procedural ... etc

~~~
AnimalMuppet
SCO v. IBM, which spawned SCO v. Novell, SCO v. Red Hat, and a couple others
that I forget. Started in March 2003, and currently in the Tenth Circuit Court
of Appeals.

------
thisisit
Can someone explain this to me - It seems Uber met most of them while they
were working with Google. Why did Levandowski form a company? Why couldn't
Uber simply hire them off Google?

~~~
kovacs_x
Buy a team for $680M? You serious? :)

From my understanding they bought a functioning truck prototype, corresponding
IP's AND the team.

~~~
brandon
The document shows in great detail that Kalanick and Levandowski were already
working together closely before work on the truck even began.

2016-01-26 - Levandowski's last day at Google

2016-02-22 - iMessage chatter directly between Levandowski and Kalanick about
poaching more Google employees

That certainly paints the "acquisition" of Ottomotto in August 2016 in a
different light, no? It's also shown in the document that Levandowski was
meeting with Kalanick and other Uber execs as early as June 2015, though it's
harder to divine what was happening at that time.

------
kevan
The abridged timeline has an amusing series of trips to the hard drive
shredder and deleting texts daily.

~~~
CamperBob2
Reminds me of Carmack's involvement in the Oculus fiasco. When people with
four-digit IQs start Googling things like "how to destroy a hard drive," you
can bet that numerous lawyers are going to enjoy elevated job security in the
near future.

~~~
smnrchrds
How did that fiasco end? I lost track of the events after the initial
accusations.

~~~
CamperBob2
I never heard, actually. I believe Palmer Luckey ended up in somewhat more
legal and/or financial trouble than John Carmack, but the magnitudes involved
are probably under appeal.

------
phillywiggins
For a genius, Levandowski "did not recall" a lot of important details :)

~~~
tryingagainbro
And that's genius. No one really knows if you _really_ recall it or not, but
they know whether it happened or not, based on other people's testimony. "I do
not recall" is brilliant.

~~~
catskul2
It's not genius. It's the standard instruction from a lawyer defending such a
person.

------
chatmasta
Tangential, but looks like this report was prepared using forensics software
from Relativity [0]. It looks like an interesting product in a growing market
segment. Seems like there are some startup opportunities in
forensics/eDiscovery, might be worth exploring if you're into this sort of
thing.

[0] [https://www.relativity.com/](https://www.relativity.com/)

------
trhway
> While employed at Google, Levandowski had a number of one-on-one meetings
> and four group meetings with several Google/Chauffeur employees about
> joining his start-up company.

sounds like various code of conduct, policies, etc. is for small, rank-and-
file, guys only :)

------
raesene6
interesting read. One thing I'm surprised about is that they didn't assess the
Slack chat that's mentioned throughout the document, to assess what
information might have been uploaded/shared there.

From what I've seen of slack it retains a lot of history (even if you're on
the free plan where you can only see a limited amount, the archives are still
there), so you'd think would be an interesting source of data for this kind of
investigation.

------
Fricken
There's little doubt that Levandowski and Lior Ron are in deep shit if this
goes to criminal court, but I'm still waiting for Waymo's slam dunk against
Uber. If they have one, it hasn't been presented yet.

