A Weird Glimpse Into Autonomous Vehicle Top Management

You’ve probably heard about the legal morass involving Google (ahem, I mean Alphabet’s spin off Waymo) and Uber. It’s been surprisingly big news and has a lot of interesting implications for high tech business practices.

I take a very personal and keen interest in the specific business of autonomous vehicles so when a deposition was filed yesterday in which Larry Page, one of the Google founders, is asked a lot of questions about the autonomous vehicle business, I read the entire thing! It can be found here. I read every word of it and found it fascinating! But if you don’t want to slog through hours of questioning, I’ll share some of it that I found especially interesting.

Not only was there a lot of interesting insight into how the top level of management in the autonomous vehicle industry works, but there were many other well-known people involved too. For example, there’s Chris Urmson who has started the company Aurora Innovation which seems to have its own bit of controversy. It also stars Sebastian Thrun, who led the first DARPA Challenge winning team and now teaches me all kinds of interesting robotics topics as the founder, CEO, and star professor of Udacity. Finally the main antagonist of the plot is Anthony Levondowski. You may have heard of him in connection to this lawsuit business recently but I’ve been a fan for years since I first saw "Ghostrider", his entry in the DARPA Challenge. What’s extraordinary about this entry is that it is an autonomous motorcycle. The chutzpah of this outrageous objective was so striking to me that I have been deeply inspired by it. Check out this 3 minute video of Levondowski explaining with complete conviction why an autonomous motorcycle is much less stupid than you might imagine. As you watch this keep in mind that this guy parlayed that autonomous motorcycle into a career that picked up a $100 million bonus from his time managing Google’s autonomous car project. And that is what a lot of the fuss is about.

Let’s turn to the deposition and Larry Page’s own words.

That’s interesting to be reminded of the fact that Google, who is suing Uber (or Otto or something) is a huge investor in the defendant. That’s kind of odd, right?

Here the question itself is extremely interesting even if the answer is not.

Again the next question is also interesting in sorting out the topic.

Ok, so Levandowski is accused of taking data?

Or maybe he’s accused of trying to steal all Google’s personnel? And the final quote I’ll cite to set the stage.

Although it’s not especially good, that’s about as good of a summary of this mess that I’m aware of.

There was definitely a lot of legal posturing and punting.

While I find this fascinating because I’m interested in the business of autonomous vehicles, I also find it sad that this kind of suit is seeing such notoriety. Autonomous vehicles are going to be hard enough without this kind of conspecific fighting.

This deposition is full of innuendo about the office politics of the autonomous vehicle world. There’s lots of stuff involving Sebastian Thrun. There is also a lots of redacted stuff that seems quite juicy. It is made quite clear that Anthony Levondowski does not like Chris Urmson. From an email from Levondowski that Page reviews: "There’s just too much BS with Chris." And Page believes there is tension between Levondowski and Bryan Salesky. And John Krafcik. In an email to Page from Thrun referring to Levondowski: "If he is the single leader, a good number of team members will leave." I could imagine this caricature of the leadership dissuading some new talent who haven’t made up their mind about what sector to work in.

The following paints a picture of either Levondowski being quite terrible to work with or quite maligned. Larry cleverly averages to hedge.

Pressed further on this issue…

And.

I found this bit quite interesting as I have wondered this exact question. It seems obvious, but I have some hypothetical reasons why it may not be.

After that answer, I still have questions. Apparently Page is kind of unsure too.

Finally this deposition was filled with unintentional humor.

I’m pretty sure you’ve got $700k dollars for every employee Google’s has. Feel free to give me the balance, Larry!

Oh come now, after 8 years, I was finally able to delete my call history from Google Voice just a couple of months ago. Seriously, they just added this function!

Here’s a funny example of "Ask a dumb question…"

This next bit is mind blowing. Check out the lawyer from Otto getting Larry Page’s name wrong!

And immediately follows with this bit of punchy inquiry.

What’s really interesting to contemplate is that he did the name mistake intentionally, maybe to mess with Page. He’s certainly no fool elsewhere in the deposition. Check it out.

Later he even smoothly brings in this.

I was a little disappointed to hear Larry confess he didn’t really know what Subversion was. I found this specific exchange amusing.

My conclusion about this topic is that I find it very interesting to get a peek into this world (so that’s what people with $50e9 are like). I am also very interested in how autonomous vehicles feature into the story. But my conclusion is that I don’t really know much more than before. I think I do have some new things to worry about with respect to this technology. It’s definitely interesting what a high profile mess this is making. It’s interesting to consider that autonomous vehicle talent and expertise are the scarce resources which are being fought over in this case. I will optimistically view that as a good sign that my recent educational investment was a good one. I just hope it’s not too detrimental for the technology itself.