Waymo v. Uber and the Anthony Levandowski case
United States, 2016 to 2021
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
Anthony Levandowski was one of the engineers who built Google's self-driving car project, later called Waymo. Before leaving the company in 2016, he copied about 14,000 internal files. He founded a self-driving truck startup that Uber bought months later, and went on to lead the rival's autonomous vehicle program.
Waymo sued Uber in 2017 for theft of trade secrets; the 2018 settlement gave Waymo a stake in Uber valued at about 245 million dollars. Levandowski pleaded guilty to a criminal charge in 2020 and was sentenced to 18 months in prison, a sentence pardoned by the President of the United States in 2021.
Sources
In the game
Blue Screen
Pulsar, Vila Olímpia, São Paulo, 8:00 am. On the eve of the startup's app launch, the team arrived and found the servers on a blue screen: the code and every backup had been wiped.
The game borrows the figure of the trusted technician who takes the company's code to a rival in exchange for a partnership. Characters, setting, crime and outcome are fiction.
