Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Young talent, brilliant resume, heavy boss, career success, bright future. These words are perfect for Anthony Lewandowsky, which just left Google in early 2016 and turned around to create Otto.

If Google hadn't filed a lawsuit against Uber and Otto for the theft of trade secrets in February 2017, the genius Levan would probably still be highly praised in the US tech world and might even be seen as the next Elon Musk.

Anthony Lewandowski, the key figure in this lawsuit, has something to do with it. According to the result of the lawsuit, Levan stole Google's trade secret documents, real hammer; continue to engage in Google work-related duties or consulting, real hammer; encourage and guide employees of Google's self-driving department to change jobs, real hammer; and all these violate the employment agreement with Google, for which he must pay a high price.

As the lawsuit progressed, Levan was first dismissed by the Uber in May 2017, followed by more than two years of criminal proceedings and review. Recently, a court in San Francisco ordered Levan to compensate Google as much as $179 million. It is reported that the amount of compensation directly led him to file for bankruptcy protection, which means that Levan has been punished to the point of going bankrupt.

The roller coaster resume of genius Levan

Before Google's lawsuit of the century, Levan's resume was perfect among many entrepreneurial elites in Silicon Valley.

Born in Brussels, Belgium in 1981, he moved back to California with his father as a teenager.

In 1997, he founded the first company in high school and made the first bucket of money by setting up a website.

In 1998, he was admitted to California Berkeley. Three years later, he won the first prize in a Java programming competition and got a master's walk. Since then, he has become the only super high achiever in the college who has completed all his master's courses and passed the comprehensive examination within one year.

In 2004, Levan led the Berkeley team to participate in the US DARPA driverless car Challenge, becoming the only team of 15 teams to use a driverless motorcycle, known as the "Ghostrider" (Ghost Rider), which is still in a private museum.

In 2005, Levan competed again, although he was still out in the second half. But it opened the acceleration key for it to step into the field of autopilot.

Since then, in 2006, the 510 Systems Company was founded. In 2007, he joined Google and began to participate in Google Street View and Project Chauffeur self-driving project. In 2011, 510 Systems, founded by Levan, was acquired by Google for $20 million, while another company, Anthony's Robots, was acquired by Google for a four-year stake worth $120 million.

There has been a feud with Urmson because Levan failed to get the role of head of Google's self-driving program in 2012. In 2015, Levan, who was unwilling to work, also set up an AI religious organization called the Road to the Future.

At the end of 2015, Google fulfilled the promise it made to Levan after the success of the Chauffeur project. Levan received $50 million, almost twice as much as the then head of Google self-driving, Ermson. It's time to leave.

In May 2016, it became Levan's highlight moment. After a wave of "beautiful" flickering operations, Levan's new self-driving truck company, Otto, was acquired by Uber for $680 million, serving as head of Uber's self-driving car program and vice president of technology at Uber.

The story since then is already well known to the public. In 2017, Google launched a "Century lawsuit" with Uber, which ended with Uber seeking a settlement, with Uber compensating Waymo and its parent company Alphabet for $245 million worth of shares and removing Waymo's technology from its own solution.

Of course, the author, Levan, got the punitive verdict we mentioned at the beginning. It can be said that it took more than a decade for genius Lai to step into the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial myth, and falling off the altar is just a few more "smart" steps. From his roller coaster experience over the past decade or so, we can take a closer look at the entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley and the flashy and lost talent.

There is no "success formula" for Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, but the law of "failure" is clear.

Silicon Valley, located in a large narrow bay area south of San Francisco, is the birthplace of the entrepreneurial myth familiar to almost all domestic entrepreneurs. The eight Rebellion, which represents the birth of Fairchild Semiconductor in Silicon Valley, has become a legend; the garage entrepreneurship stories of Google and Apple have also become spiritual totems of entrepreneurs. The success path of Bill Gates and Zuckerberg dropping out of Harvard to start a business also seems to be an oracle that some entrepreneurs can convince themselves when they are "unorthodox".

Technological advances and new business models around the Internet have really created Silicon Valley. The emergence and progress of semiconductor technology promoted the first wave of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, resulting in Intel, AMD and other manufacturers; the invention and prosperity of the Internet promoted the second wave of entrepreneurship, giving birth to IT giants such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and so on. Based on the maturity of Internet software and hardware technology, more kinds of start-ups, such as Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Tesla and so on, have been born. In the latest decade, with the re-emergence of artificial intelligence technology, AI entrepreneurship has become a new tuyere.

Around the entrepreneurial atmosphere of colleges and universities in Silicon Valley and the scattered branches of the sponsors of early start-ups, Silicon Valley has formed a strong entrepreneurial alliance, such as the famous PayPal gang, Elon Musk, who founded Tesla and SpaceX, Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn, and Peter Thiel, the godfather of Silicon Valley investment. Around, Apple, Google, Oracle and other IT giants have also produced their own entrepreneurial factions, and even the well-known Master Qiao started a second business after being driven out of Apple, until he returned to the endangered Apple and became a god again.

It can be said that generations of old, middle-aged and young people in Silicon Valley constitute a complete pattern that affects the global IT industry, and the fierce life-threatening competition promotes the rapid change of the industrial pattern between the old and the new. The hardware giant holds the core technology patent and enjoys the technology dividend under Moore's Law; the Internet giant holds the treasure of traffic and data, enjoys the world's demographic dividend and huge revenue, and firmly locks the position of the industry monopoly through technology patents and commercial mergers and acquisitions; at the same time, through the investment in the new technology track, always beware of the barbarians breaking into the new track and grow into a new giant again.

Monopolies and acquisitions are passes for giants, while financing or body selling is a lifesaver for innovators. Today, the entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley has changed. Almost every track is crowded with competitors, but almost every track can see the layout and capital tentacles of the industry giants. Many entrepreneurs of the new generation seem to have tacitly accepted the arrangement of fate and become unicorns in the sense of valuation as soon as possible, in order to be favored by the industry giants and sell for a good price that can be financially free.

This may be a partial generalization, but it really represents a transformation at the beginning of the entrepreneurial culture in Silicon Valley.

"Fake it till you make it" (pretend it until you succeed) is a hidden rule in the minds of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

I have an idea that can change the world, which is almost the standard for applying this law at the beginning. A business and technical concept that seems to have a broad market but is unproven (requires investment), one or two carefully packaged success cases, a carefully chosen and logical entrepreneurial planning book, an extraordinary-looking and confident founder and his "perfect" growth story, it is easy to get the first angel fund from all kinds of venture capital funds.

It can be said that entrepreneurs used to be a group of people who "suffocated their dreams". No matter whether the start-up is successful or not, it is mostly a normal business relationship between investors and entrepreneurs. For example, the Softbank Corp. Vision Fund, which has hundreds of billions of dollars, invested tens of billions of dollars in betting on shared office space Wework, which became Softbank Corp. 's largest investment loss in history.

But there is also a kind of naked commercial fraud by entrepreneurs, which has absolutely no bottom line for investors and the public. For example, Theranos, a Silicon Valley medical high-tech blood diagnostic company once valued as high as $9 billion, is suspected of core technology fraud and is valued at zero after investigation by a number of institutions.

For genius Levan, it is somewhere in between. He stepped on almost every drumbeat in Silicon Valley's startup system, took the first step of autopilot for Google with his startup, sold his technology company to Google at a high price, and finally got tens of millions of dollars of options promised by Google one step at a time. The talented teenager who could have been written into the glorious history of Google's autopilot was eventually defeated by his own ambition and disregard for business principles. When he decided to use a hard drive to handcuff the technical data from Google's computer that did not belong to him, the end was doomed.

Although it is difficult to sum up the general "formula" of successful startups, failed entrepreneurs have some common characteristics:

1. Pay too much attention to packaging yourself, exaggerating goals and market value, while ignoring the real business landing and revenue problems

2. Rely excessively on financing and believe in the mindset of "regardless of profits and occupying the market with subsidies".

3, lack of awe of business rules, more than smart, the bottom line is not strong, in order to ambition and even the previous boast of Haikou, do not hesitate to break through business rules and even the legal bottom line.

Under the Silicon Valley talent system, why do "Levans" still have a place to survive?

The entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley is a new business culture system with technology and talents as the core, capital as the fuel and business innovation as the driving force. Top universities and scientific research institutions provide cutting-edge technology and export first-class talents. Technological capital not only bears the risk of failure of entrepreneurs, but also has the opportunity to enjoy a high return on investment. Innovative business models have greatly reduced the costs of communication, transactions and various services around the world, and improved the overall well-being of mankind.

For the entrepreneurs and technical personnel of these start-ups pouring into Silicon Valley, we can also see a rich and well-organized entrepreneurial talent system.

First of all, the most obvious are the star entrepreneurial leaders who are always in the limelight. They are either the inventors of certain new technologies, the founding fathers of certain business models, or business wizards who try to turn the tide and save enterprises from hanging. Of course, all this praise is based on the great commercial success of these people. They are like the "freaks" around us who were gifted and never at peace to realize their lofty ideals when they were at school.

The second is the technical professionals who support the mainstay of these entrepreneurial success. For example, there are scientific research bulls and their technical teams from Stanford, Berkeley, California, MIT and other universities; there are also capital elites who are familiar with business operations, such as Wall Street and Goldman Sachs; and professional managers who have grown up with the IT giants step by step. They are like the three good students in our class, and their performance is always so stable.

In addition, it is the vast number of IT farmers and professional white-collar workers who have skills but lack entrepreneurial passion and courage, who contribute the most ingenuity and time and energy to the whole business world, while also enjoying the income and living standards of the middle class. They are more like the most mediocre students in every class, and they may have had a dream, but they still choose to help them realize their dreams in order to make a living.

In the tortuous entrepreneurial story of genius Laiwan, we can see a typical talent system of "production-learning-research-business". Lewan's leader, Sebastian Trent, director of Stanford University's AI Laboratory, is a typical representative of "engineer culture." In 2008, Trent applied for academic leave and took his students to join Google, which led to Google's self-driving program Project Chauffeur, which is recognized by the industry as the "father of self-driving." in the end, Trent chose to leave Google and create Udacity to focus on the popularization of technology education and the open source sharing of self-driving technology.

John Krafchik, the current CEO of Google Waymo, is a more typical professional manager, with professional MBA training and the experience of a number of first-class companies. Krafchik joined Google in charge of self-driving projects in 2015 and has since served as CEO of Waymo, officially turning Waymo from a money-burning experimental project into a technology business asset with a market capitalization of hundreds of billions.

Compared with his two predecessors, Levan, who was born in 1981, does not have the patience to build his own business or grow into a mature manager to lead Waymo to commercialization. Perhaps no one will deny his great vision for technology choice, and few people have such shrewd entrepreneurial skills to be as comfortable as a fish in water under the Google system, but he chose to take a shortcut between realizing his career ambitions and starting from scratch. But it ended up ruining his great career in self-driving.

Levan's "cleverness" is another lively scene derived from the entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley, which is also high-end cutting-edge technology and unlimited business prospects in the market. In the pursuit of hot spots and profit-maximizing business capital, hot money is surging, which always attracts speculators and entrepreneurs who are eager to take risks but are not afraid of failure, and they are even willing to "collude" to blow a bigger business bubble. Waiting for the arrival of the next catcher.

From the many cases in Silicon Valley, we can find many "Levantes". They are smart and calm, interest first, keen on resource integration, but also good at creating marketing topics; they are familiar with investors' investment logic and capital games, but often lack sufficient patience and the ability to operate for a long time. He is even too eager for quick success and quick profit, crossing the bottom line of commercial principles and laws, and enjoying the bitter fruit of conceit he has planted.

Under the stimulation of interests, entrepreneurs are more willing to take risks and boast. This may be no difference between right and wrong, but only the best choice for the game of commercial interests. But judging from more and more successful cases and accumulated experience, the market and consumer choices will always eliminate those entrepreneurs who only create concepts and reward those entrepreneurs and investors who really promote technological innovation and business efficiency.

Perhaps tolerance and acceptance of failure are the original genes that drive innovation in Silicon Valley, a mechanism that allows more young people to start a career with ingenuity when they have nothing. But this cultural gene is not an amulet that encourages "Levans" to speculate at will. Good entrepreneurs should respect business rules, market rules and social common sense, so that they can turn a short-term entrepreneurial success into a sustainable life-long career.

In 2015, Trent, who ran away from Google, started the flying car company Kitty Hawk with the support of Larry Page. Levan, who is mired in litigation and founded self-driving startup Pronto.AI at the end of 2018, said he wanted to re-examine his past and start new plans for the future.

Silicon Valley will always give entrepreneurs another chance. And now facing a sky-high fine, whether Levan can start again, we can actually continue to look forward to it.

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