PJ Vogt

But competition would soon arrive in the form of Uber.

This was the oh shit moment for me.

Uber announced their self-driving program.

And I remember like it was yesterday, waking up, reading the news, going to my desk in the morning and thinking, oh crap, these guys are going to eat our lunch.

In 2013, then CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, had gotten a ride in one of Google's prototype driverless cars.

Sitting in a taxi without a human driver, he'd understood that this could mean the end of his company.

And so Uber had plunged headlong into the driverless car race.

The company hired nearly half of Carnegie Mellon's top robotics lab.

And not long after, we also know through court records and emails that Uber also began communicating with Anthony Lewandowski, who in 2016 would leave Google, quitting just before he could be fired for recruiting team members away, including Don Burnett.

Anthony would then start his own autonomous vehicle company.

Uber would soon buy that company for almost $700 million, even though the company had no product and was only months old, which raised a mystery.

Why would Uber pay so much for a company whose only asset seemed to be its people?

This is where Google goes into its computer security logs and realizes that not long before he left, Anthony Lewandowski downloaded something like 14,000 technical files onto his computer and moved them onto an external disk.

Obviously you can't do that.

I mean, I'm assuming obviously you can't do that.

No, you definitely cannot do that.

And this is the kind of thing that maybe if he had stayed there, this is the kind of thing Anthony would have done, and he would have been like, oh, it's just so I could have access to it somewhere else, and he probably would have gotten away with it.

But when you then go and work for Uber and start running their direct competitor self-driving car program, that's when you get in trouble.

And that's when what's technically called Waymo at this point, Google's program, sues Uber.

Specifically, it involves a former lead engineer of Google's self-driving car unit, Anthony Lewandowski.