Copy-pasting from my comment on Reddit.
The first thing that caught my attention after reading the whole lawsuit! https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7dzPLynxaXuQjY3dkllZ2ZKb0k... [Item 42- 49] itself is some of the timings regarding Otto's inception and Uber's acquisition.
Timeline:
* Levandowski first registered the domain for his then(now Otto) company on Nov'15
* The suit says on 3rd of Dec'15 he searched for the LIDAR docs and on 11th of Dec'15, he downloaded 14,000 docs from Google's servers.
* Google alleges that on Jan'16, Levandowski told his colleagues that he plans to replicate the Waymo tech at one of Waymo's competitor.
* One of the damning allegation from Waymo is that he met with top execs at Uber at their HQ in SF on Jan 14th 2016.
* Just a day later on 15th he officially formed one of his company(280 Systems, now part of Otto), later on Feb 1st he also registered his other company(Otto Trucking) Feb 1st.
* Strangely after working at Google for about 7 years, he quit Google without a notice(from suit) on Jan 27th.
This is from the interview Bloomberg's did after Uber acquired Otto: 'Kalanick began courting Levandowski this spring, broaching the possibility of an acquisition during a series of 10-mile night walks from the Soma neighborhood where Uber is also headquartered to the Golden Gate Bridge. The two men would leave their offices separately—to avoid being seen by employees, the press, or competitors. They’d grab takeout food, then rendezvous near the city’s Ferry Building. Levandowski says he saw a union as a way to bring the company’s trucks to market faster.'
From the above details, it can imply any of these three things might have happened,
* Scenario 1: He or Uber didn't do anything different from the official story so far.
* Scenario 2: Levandowski went to Uber saying he has custom LIDAR tech but ended up starting his own company the next day and 8 months later Uber just bought them for $680M for the team and tech he alleged stole from Waymo.
* Scenario 3: Levandowski went to Uber in Jan'16, said he has the tech for custom LIDAR, Uber wants it, but there is non-suspicious way for taking the tech directly to Uber since Levandowski alone can't build it. Instead Uber suggests to spin off his own company, hire a team (mostly from Waymo), put together a demo in Nevada desert. This brings in all the press and validity that Otto has the self-driving tech and team. So at this point Otto and Levandowski is a Self-driving tech startup not a LIDAR startup. Now Uber can come in, acquire this hot startup and team, in a market that's worth Trillions. Now Uber is suddenly in the trucking business, gets a huge PR and valuation bump. In this process they also get the LIDAR tech that's build in just 9 months.
What it means is that if the 3rd theory is true, Uber was always buying the LIDAR tech from Levandowski even before he left Waymo. Otto and other components are just a proxy so that it gives them a great story without any suspicions.
To put things into perspective, a single Velodyne HDL-64E LIDAR that almost all self-driving companies use costs around $75,000. Waymo says their equivalent custom alternative costs less than 10% (<$7000). This is a huge cost saving for a tech that is going to go in 100,000+ cars Uber hopes to have in the market in the future. So yea, this can be a bullshit Lawsuit (based on the evidence, less likely) or a well executed corporate espionage!