Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Former Uber CEO grilled on texts

He portrays friend’s betrayal at trial over theft of technology

- MICHAEL LIEDTKE

SAN FRANCISCO — Former Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick was confronted Wednesday in court with old texts that suggested he was willing to go to any length to surpass a Google self-driving car project.

Kalanick was on the witness stand for a second day to answer allegation­s that he teamed up with former Google engineer Anthony Levandowsk­i to steal self-driving car technology now owned by Waymo, a Google spinoff.

In one February 2016 text, Kalanick agreed with a comment by Levandowsk­i that “second place is first looser.” Another text included a link to a video clip from the 1987 movie Wall Street that is popularly known as the “Greed is good” speech.

In a later text, Levandowsk­i told Kalanick, “we do need to think through the strategy to take all the shortcuts we can find.”

Waymo alleges that Levandowsk­i heisted eight trade secrets from Google before leaving the company in January 2016. He founded his own startup, Otto, which Uber bought a few months later for $680 million. Kalanick has acknowledg­ed discussing plans for Otto with Levandowsk­i before he started it, though both he and Uber deny they ever used any Google technology to build a fleet of self-driving cars.

Kalanick didn’t deny any of the exchanges, although he didn’t recall some of them. He had little to say about the texts, other than his recollecti­on that he originally heard his high school football coach say, “second place is first loser.”

After a Waymo lawyer finished grilling him, Kalanick turned to a more emotional tale under friendly questionin­g from an Uber attorney, casting himself as a “little brother” betrayed by an older and more powerful sibling. Uber and Google were once partners, although their interests later began to collide, souring the business relationsh­ip.

Kalanick recalled that Uber had only a few hundred employees in the summer of 2013 when Google was negotiatin­g to make a major investment in the ride-hailing service. He remembered thinking it was “cool” when Google sent over one of its self-driving cars to pick him up and drive over to meet with then Google CEO Larry Page (now CEO of Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet Inc.)

“It was kind of like little brother with big brother,” Kalanick described his relationsh­ip with Page, 44, who cofounded Google in a Silicon Valley garage in 1998. That was 11 years before Kalanick, 41, started Uber.

After Google invested in Uber, Kalanick testified, the plan was for Uber to eventually deploy Google’s self-driving cars in its ride-hailing service. “Google was a huge partner of ours,” he said. “It was a great relationsh­ip.”

But things began to change in 2014 when Kalanick heard rumors that Google intended to challenge Uber with its own ride-hailing service. That testimony is supported by internal Google documents already displayed in the trial showing plans to “consume” all of Uber’s profits by 2025.

Kalanick testified that he tried to contact Page about the rumors, only to be given the cold shoulder. Convinced that Google was going its own way, Kalanick decided to start a self-driving car division within Uber by hiring top engineers specializi­ng in robotics from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 2015.

That move incensed Page, Kalanick testified. “Larry was very upset that we were doing his thing,” Kalanick said. Page is expected to testify later in the trial.

Dissatisfi­ed with the progress that the engineers imported from Carnegie-Mellon, Kalanick began looking for other talent in late 2015. That spawned his discussion­s with Levandowsk­i, a respected expert in self-driving vehicles who had become disillusio­ned with the direction of Google’s project.

Waymo alleges Kalanick and Levandowsk­i cooked up a plan for Levandowsk­i to launch his startup as a storehouse for Google trade secrets that would later be transferre­d to Uber. Kalanick says he simply found a way to bring Levandowsk­i and his vast knowledge to Uber.

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