TECH TITANS THWART STARTUP DREAMS

Companies resorting to legal fights to stop ‘theft’ of proprietary data

THE biggest players in Silicon Valley’s burgeoning autonomous car industry have a warning for their top engineers: if you quit to set up your own company, tread carefully.

Anthony Levandowski, a pioneering self-driving car engineer, became the highest-profile casualty of this increasingly litigious approach after Uber Technologies Inc fired him in the midst of a contentious legal fight.

Alphabet Inc’s autonomous car project, now called Waymo, sued Uber alleging Levandowski stole some of its core technology and took it to the ride-hailing company when it acquired his startup. Levandowski has refused to testify in the case.

“You could consider this as a shot across the bow, of companies saying they’re not going to stand for this stuff,” said Michael Dovorany, a Los Angeles-based consultant at the CarLab. “In the past there really hasn’t been a lot of respect or upholding of noncompete agreements. Now you’re seeing the pendulum swing the other way.”

Once General Motors Co paid US$581 million (RM2.48 billion) for Cruise Automation Inc last year, a bevy of engineers recognised they could get a bigger payday if they set up their own companies rather than remain employees of a bigger beast.

Tesla Inc and Waymo started to haemorrhage top staff, and the number of autonomous car testing licences granted in California ballooned from about a dozen companies to 30 inside a year.

Several of those engineers have faced legal pressure from their former employers who are trying to gain an advantage in an industry McKinsey & Co estimates will be worth US$6.7 trillion by 2030.

Waymo claims Levandowski stole key intellectual property when he left to create Otto, the startup that was subsequently acquired by Uber for about US$700 million.

Meanwhile, Tesla settled out of court in April with Sterling Anderson, a former director of its Autopilot programme.

Anderson formed a company called Aurora Innovation LLC earlier this year with Chris Urmson, the ex-head of Google’s selfdriving car programme.

Tesla had claimed that Anderson breached his contract by starting Aurora and recruiting engineers from the Elon Muskled company.

The smartphone, computer and tablet markets are “very mature, whereas autonomous cars is brand new”, said Bob O’Donnell, president and chief analyst at Technalysis Research. “It’s a real opportunity for these tech companies so that’s why they’re taking it very seriously.” Bloomberg