I understand, but still find it humorous that Google & Uber now say Levandowski didn't make positive contributions. It's like saying my ex-girlfriend that I lived with for 4 years and moved across the country for, was fat, lazy and a boring conversationalist. Obviously she was also amazing or the 4 years never happens.

Obviously people have both good and bad attributes. It seems pretty clear that Levandowski is a brilliant engineer, with his minor (lol) flaws being arrogance and a psychopathic lack of respect for authority and others.

It's not a unique story. Smart people who solve hugely valuable problems typically do it through obsessive work, this gives them less experience developing acceptable social behaviors, and when they get hugely successful and get to operate without normal social constraints they haven't developed a strong personal judgment to help constrain their behavior.

I once worked at a startup with a brilliant founding developer building a revolutionary new visual programming language. The entire company depended on their efforts, so they didn't get much pushback on their personal behavior. Over years this can be corrosive, and he often was quite the jerk.

Eventually there was a blow up, and the developer left and was forced to work for other companies where he was just an employee, no longer the most important person. I still kept in touch and marveled at how much more self aware he had become, and how much more the inner nice guy I had always known was there had come to the foreground.

> was fat, lazy and a boring conversationalist. Obviously she was also amazing or the 4 years never happens

Well (for the defense!) I could argue that you were tied to her for other reasons and/or were co-dependent. After all people stay in abusive and bad relationships frequently and not just for money reasons for all sorts of emotional reasons.

Can you explain the codependency?

I read it as Page saying it was a net negative. Levandowski's positives are outweighed by his flaws/actions.

Bad analogy: people stay in dysfunctional relationships with awful people all the time. Companies do too.

I think the key is some underlying and rare technology. In this case it is LIDAR. Google itself was Page Rank. Oracle was SQL. Microsoft was Basic.

Wow. Thanks for sharing this. I think this is overlooked by society today. People have no idea what it takes to truly make software. I would argue most of the people on the software side in tech have non human like abilities which enable such great technology stacks to be developed. It's such a shame that we are so quick to judge, especially when the people have no idea what went into devolpment of a technology. We Champion the outcome but not the process. I think until there is a shift in thinking and celebrating the process and the product you will constantly see nonsense comments, like Page stated, appear in a vicious loop. It would be great to see them release the emails of praise. It just sucks that negative information travels or carries more weight than positive information.

Sexist drivel has no place here. The logout button is at the right hand side of the navbar.

Ha, ha, yes; I originally thought it was similar to a bitter ex-boyfriend thing, especially since Levandowski and Thrun basically invented the Google self-driving car program.

I can understand Page feeling that way, since he had to get dragged into the dispute between Levandowski and Thrun's replacement.

The man was giving a deposition to enemy lawyers in a multi-billion dollar lawsuit. I wouldn't try to derive his raw, uncensored opinion of the man from that data point alone.

Yes, of course not. I agree that everything in this affair should be considered in that light.

No, what Page is saying, which is corroborated by this article, that after Sebastian Thrun's departure, Levandowski actively inhibited the project. Because he didn't get along with Thrun's replacement, Anthony's squabbling caused project delays to the point where Page had to personally mediate between the two. Later, Levandowski solicited Chauffer employees to quit Google to join his startup.

When the CEO of a company has to step in to mediate disputes between two of his directors, there is something seriously wrong.

The article nor Page claim that alleged theft of trade secrets has somehow slowed down Waymo's progress.

>> When the CEO of a company has to step in to mediate disputes between two of his directors, there is something seriously wrong.

I agree and for every large corporation I worked at, hearing something like this is quite odd to say the least. I would think Page would dispatch some underling to sort them out instead. Or was the project that important that Page felt he had to get involved to save it from disaster?

They may have reported directly to Page. Not unusual for a high profile projects with founder attention until they get bored and move on to something else.

Probably should have fired both quickly