Home Tech Insider Read the text messages from Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski that Uber fought to keep sealed in its legal battle with Waymo (GOOG, GOOGL)

Read the text messages from Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski that Uber fought to keep sealed in its legal battle with Waymo (GOOG, GOOGL)

mimisabreena Tuesday, October 03, 2017 Tech Insider

Travis Kalanick Anthony Levandowski

Waymo published an important document late Monday in its legal battle with Uber over whether a former engineer, Anthony Levandowski, took self-driving car secrets when he left Waymo to form his own startup.

The document, called the "Stroz Report," is a due diligence report that Uber commissioned before it purchased Levandowski's startup, Otto, in 2016.

It was written by cybersecurity firm Stroz Friedberg and it includes details about Levandowski's personal computers and the data on them, deleted text messages, and a rough timeline of how Levandowski and his partners formed a new startup and sold it for a reported sum of $680 million in under a year.

Uber had fought to keep the report sealed in its long-running battle with Waymo. Alphabet's lawyers say it shows that Uber knew that Levandowski had taken secrets from Google's self-driving car spinoff, Waymo, when he joined Uber.

Waymo wants to delay the Uber-Waymo trial, scheduled to start this month, as it looks through this report and other recent files Uber recently produced.

Here are some key details:

Levandowski once pitched Google employees on Otto's business during a ski trip to Lake Tahoe.
Google self-driving car materials, including whiteboard sketches and pictures of equipment, were found on Levandowski's iPhone.
The cybersecurity firm even physically went to a data destroyal company — "Shred Works" — to verify whether Levandowski had five disks shredded as he had said. Nobody at the company recognized Levandowski but they found a potentially relevant receipt.