> Levandowski was able to collect more than $120 million in incentive pay from Google, the complaint says, “all while he was breaching his obligations to Google and building a company that would compete with Google.”<p>Uh.... that's a ridiculous amount of money to try and incentivize someone.
The most eye-catching part of the article was the fact that "Levandowski was able to collect more than $120 million in incentive pay from Google." Wow! I knew that competition was fierce but not hundreds of millions of dollars fierce.<p>That and his chunk of the $680MM acquisition price for Otto means his venture was well worth it as long as he can avoid jail time.
$120M. Google basically paid this guy's lawyer fees and then some. They literally enabled and financed their own court case through this guy's salary. Since this is white collar crime this guy will not spend any time in jail, the lawyers will get rich, and either it will be settled or like Oracle case will be dragged out for a decade until Uber is out of business but since all the higher-ups are friends I'm guessing it will be settled.
Every day we're finding out about new details of crazy things this guy did. Everyone's focusing on the $120M, but can we talk about the fact that he was connected to two other startups while working at Google, never disclosed it, and later basically acquired both of those?
While this is an extreme case, it seems to me that this highlights why aqui-hires may not be a good idea:<p>The founders of aqui-hired companies may get compensation which is completely out of line with what engineers originally at the hiring company earn. Furthermore, it gives them both the means and the motivation to only stay in their new job until they've earned out their incentive pay, and then repeat the quit /found startup/get aqui-hired cycle.<p>This basically teaches both the aqui-hired and the tenured engineers that the way to get ahead is to embark on a series of short term engagements. I'm sure that many consider this style of career the true magic of silicon valley, but to me it looks like companies are incentivizing disloyalty.
Wow, this story just keeps getting better and better. It would be really interesting to see if Levandowski was able to get Google's employee agreement litigated in a California court.
Levandowski seems like one of those "Hustle" tv show characters who was able to collect money from everyone by using a sophisticated scheme and almost got away with it. Hope he will write a memoir one day called "if I did it" or something