The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

"That Otto hadn’t received funding from any VC’s is unusual. With 91 employees, getting paid $150k/year (this might even be too low given they are working on self-driving cars, one of the hottest spaces in tech right now), they would have had a $13.6 million/year burn rate just on salaries. Otto always aimed to get to market quickly, but getting to profitability without funding seems like it would have been very hard, especially on the accelerated timescale they were working towards and the need to likely hire many more people to get to production. All of Otto’s public self-driving car and truck competitors have taken venture funding. However, as someone working on a bootstrapped SaaS application, I’m sympathetic to wanting to self-fund."

Anthony Levandowski has a personal net worth in the hundreds of millions, that is not counting the other founders plus they could raise money at a whim, or get acquired whenever they wanted

"The next day, January 15, 2016, Mr. Levandowski’s venture 280 Systems - which

became OttoMotto LLC - was officially formed (though it remained in stealth mode for several

months). On January 27, 2016, Mr. Levandowski resigned from Waymo without notice. And on

February 1, 2016, Mr. Levandowski’s venture Otto Trucking was officially formed (also

remaining in stealth mode for several months)."

not sure if that timeline is accurate, any way to check when the ot.to website was registered? the site used for looking up http://whois.domaintools.com/280systems.com doesn't work for ot.to

SVN is popular for hardware groups. Why? Better sparse checkout than git when you are dealing with large binary design files. It's not what git is optimized for.

"Besides, Lewandowski couldn't realistically raise money through proper channels if his pitch amounted to, "I stole stuff from Waymo."

yes he could, the team and him had a killer track record and he wouldn't admit to stealing anything from Waymo

"He joined Google in 2007 as part of its Maps team and helped to build the company’s Street View product. When Google gave the green light to begin working on a self-driving car in 2009, Mr. Thrun picked Mr. Levandowski for the original team.

Mr. Levandowski gained some notoriety within Google for selling start-ups, which he had done as side projects, to his employer. In his biography for a real estate firm, for which he is a board member, Mr. Levandowski said he sold three automation and robotics start-ups to Google, including 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots, for nearly $500 million. After this story was published, the real estate firm updated its website erasing Mr. Levandowski’s biography and said that it had “erroneously reported certain facts incorrectly without Mr. Levandowski’s knowledge.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/technology/anthony-levand...

"And yet, one of Google’s most strategic acquisitions has mysteriously been actively blocked from public view. An investigation by IEEE Spectrum has uncovered the surprising fact that Google’s innovative self-driving car and the revolutionary Street View camera technology that preceded it were largely built by 510 Systems, a tiny start-up in Berkeley, Calif."

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/th...

I was a Windows engineer for Google's Corp Eng PaaS SRE team and have familiarity with this topic.

It's not hard to get this data or set this data collection up on a Windows domain or machine. Anyone can set this up as long as you have the TBs to collect the data and the presentation/searching layer to find it.

Windows has the ability to log everything, including device installs/uninstalls, file opens/closes/creation/deletion, logons/logoffs, you name it. The Windows Auditing library is really, really, really extensive.

Additionally, setting this up in Active Directory is really easy, both manually and magically with Powershell. It takes about ten minutes or so.

As you would iamgine, most of these policies were enabled on the domain to which most users authenticated and the data it collected was siphoned off to essentially a giant cluster of syslog servers.

In fact, just about any domain will audit device plugs/unplugs. Had Anthony known about this (it's easy to find out even if you're not an admin), he would've not plugged in that memory stick :)

In general, it's pretty hard to do stealthy stuff on Google's network. Everything is logged eight ways to Sunday, especially with GAIA and key-based, two factor auth to EVERYTHING. And unlike most other networks, I wouldn't put it past their security engineers to find shady behavior in a moment's notice.

Man, I really didn't make it clear enough that I didn't think forgery would ever happen. Mostly interested in how bug-free it could be demonstrated.