Former Uber CEO queried in trade secrets theft trial

SAN FRANCISCO -- Former Uber Technologies Inc. CEO Travis Kalanick seemed to defy his reputation as an irreverent tech brat when he took the stand Tuesday in the Uber-Waymo trade secrets trial, projecting a calm, easygoing demeanor despite being faced with some difficult questions.

But he also gave the impression that he was attempting to soften some of the answers that he had given during his deposition, causing Waymo attorneys to repeatedly play clips from that earlier interview, demonstrating to the jury that Kalanick seemed to have a more vivid memory of events the first time he answered the same questions.

The case involves Alphabet Inc.'s driverless car company, Waymo LLC, suing ridesharing tech company Uber on the allegation that the competitor hired away a key engineer, Anthony Levandowski, and encouraged him to bring stolen trade secrets with him. Waymo LLC v. Uber Technologies Inc. et al., 17-CV00939 (N.D. Cal., filed Feb. 23, 2017).

It's clear that both legal teams feel that the jury's perception of Kalanick's character will be a key element in the case. They spent much of their time before the jury entered the room arguing about whether Waymo's attorneys could play a clip from the movie, "Wall Street," in which actor Michael Douglas gives his famous "greed is good" speech.

Waymo attorneys say Levandowski sent the clip to Kalanick in a text message, encouraging him to emulate the speech in an upcoming meeting.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup said he would wait until the end of Kalanick's testimony to decide whether the film clip is relevant enough for the jury to see. Kalanick was the last witness to testify Tuesday and his interrogation is likely to take up much of Wednesday.

The first two Waymo witnesses also gave mixed impressions on the stand. Waymo CEO John Krafcik and head engineer Dmitri Dolgov found themselves repeatedly quibbling over the wording of questions, often on subject matters that seemed trivial.

A few of these instances could be harmless but the frequency with which they occurred could have made the witnesses seem overly combative in the eyes of some jurors.

Waymo's internal cybersecurity specialist, Gary Brown, seemed to be an effective witness for the plaintiff company. His previous role working at the Federal Reserve to help banks fight hackers and his detailed analysis of forensic evidence in the case gave him gravitas on the stand.

Brown described in great detail the laborious process of his investigation into Levandowski's alleged use of a company laptop. Brown went through it step by step, explaining how he determined that Levandowski downloaded 14,000 documents onto his laptop from a Waymo server and later attached a memory card to the computer.

Brown said his investigation led him to believe that Levandowski attached an external memory card to the laptop several days after the files were downloaded. He added that forensic data indicated the memory card was attached to the Waymo laptop for eight hours before being removed.

Brown said Levandowski's operating system was replaced soon afterward, switching out a Windows system for Linux and therefore erasing the data on the hard drive.

Attorneys for both sides spent much of their cross examination time trying to convince the jury that their opponent's CEO was panicking because of difficulties in the driverless car technology market.

On Monday, Krafcik was asked repeatedly about internal emails he exchanged with Waymo executives, detailing his concerns about increased competition from Uber.

Uber's attorneys put up an email on the screen, purportedly sent from Dolgov to Krafcik, expressing alarm at the idea of their former engineer, Levandowski, recruiting their talent to move to Uber with him.

"We should be seriously concerned," the email read. "The competition for talent with Uber will get much more serious."

Presented with a list of six employees who left the company in a matter of months, Krafcik pushed back on the significance of the emails and departures.

"There were hundreds and hundreds of us, so it makes sense at the time there would be some attrition," he said.

Uber attorneys argued that Waymo filed its lawsuit out of desperation as the competition closed in.

On Tuesday, Waymo attorney Charles K. Verhoeven tried to convince the jury that it was actually Uber that was getting desperate, causing the company to resort to drastic tactics, stealing Waymo's trade secrets by hiring the head of its program.

Verhoeven, a partner with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, showed Kalanick an email he sent to Uber's former head of communications, Rachel Whetstone, emphasizing that "autonomous transportation is very possibly a winner-take-all and thus existential for Uber."

Kalanick testified that Uber was behind Waymo in the race to create autonomous vehicles at the time of that email and was still behind in 2018.

He said his email was meant to indicate that if Uber didn't catch up, Waymo could end up in an insurmountable competitive position, similar to how Google has dominated the search engine market, making it impossible for competitors to turn a profit in the industry.

Verhoeven also referred Kalanick to notes taken by a previous witness, John Bares, who founded Uber's advanced technology center. Bares wrote a list of what he perceived to be Kalanick's goals in acquiring Levandowski's company in January 2016. One of those goals was "IP," shorthand for intellectual property.

"Did you tell this group that what you wanted was intellectual property?" Verhoeven asked.

"I don't remember saying that," Kalanick responded.

"Do you deny you said it?" Verhoeven followed up.

"No."