Tesla sues ex-manager 'for stealing 100GBs of Autopilot secrets' Tesla has sued a former employee who left to set up a rival business, claiming he tried a not-so cunning plan to steal company secrets and lure away key staff. Sterling Anderson joined Tesla in 2014 as a senior product manager working on the Model X SUV. In 2015, he became director of the Autopilot team. At the end of 2016, he …
The patents might be open-source, but the implementation by Tesla won't be. They'll invest plenty in their version of things based on the open patents, just as other manufacturers would, each trying to build what they would say is the best implementation at whatever point on the tech/cost/legislation/etc. scales they choose to operate.
Didn't Elon make all the Tesla stuff open source?
I don't believe he did. They probably do have some open source code, but certainly not all of it. But in any case this sounds like data, not source code, and they certainly aren't making their data available to anyone.
Does that mean Tesla employees are so underpaid, and so badly treated, that they will leave at the drop of a hat? And when someone does leave, Tesla looks to sue their new employer? Remind me never to apply for a job with them.
Does that mean Tesla employees are so underpaid, and so badly treated, that they will leave at the drop of a hat?
Or that they don't have faith in the long term future of the company. I am surprised (in a pleasant way) to note that the Chevy Volt is getting quite good reviews, which could massively queer the pitch for the upcoming affordable Tesla. At that point, a pure autopilot company might have more options in finding corporate customers.
(I confidently expect to get downvoted by Tesla fanboys, but the simple fact is that GM has far more experience in making and supporting mid-size, mid-price cars, and so now they have the first mover advantage.)
Or it could simply be that the two directors named and the techs they were trying to poach seeing that autonomous driving software companies were being bought out for a billion thought it was a good opportunity to make extra money. Since machine learning is a lot about the churning through data, nabbing the data would be very valuable.
You mean the Bolt. Seems like a good car. Only issues reported so far seem to be issues with seat comfort and charging being a slow. But, the Bolt doesn't have an all-wheel drive option, doesn't have a performance option, doesn't have an option for a larger battery, the DC charging doesn't seem to be very fast and the manufacturer's leaving infrastructure to other companies and isn't looking for large volume at this point. (They're not even planning to match Tesla's current S and X volumes). So, I wouldn't say that Chevrolet's really got much of a first-mover advantage. It's really going for a different market.
The Bolt may be a good California car. I'm still waiting to see how far it can go when it's -35, and you're driving, through snow, into a 60 kph headwind, running full lights, heater, defroster, and wipers. You really don't want to find yourself walking away from a depleted car in that.
"Does that mean Tesla employees are so underpaid, and so badly treated, that they will leave at the drop of a hat? And when someone does leave, Tesla looks to sue their new employer? Remind me never to apply for a job with them."
Quite the opposite, it suggests that they are paid well enough that they are able to save enough of a buffer for them to leave their job at the drop of a hat to work at a startup.
Also, Tesla are suing the new employer mainly for theft of commercially sensitive information, the staff poaching will be secondary to this, staff can be replaced but a few hundred GB of your designs, plans and probably code for your product in the hands of a competitor is something that your not going to be able to recover from easily.
Non-Competes are not uncommon. I and my new employer were sued for a cool million by my ex employer. Of course, the Ex withheld bonuses and chunks of pay rightfully owed to me, which is why I quit in the first place. Once all of this came out in deposition, they sent me a check for the missing compensation, THEN proceeded to sue me. Go figure.
The guy with the porn star name and his sidekick didn't think it through, they saw the all potential riches and none of the pitfalls.
Neither of them has the required trait to succeed as entrepreneur/business leader, they should have stuck to being employees.
What is the "required trait"? Perseverance at a guess.
I don't know whether these people did anything wrong or not - that is for the courts - but "thinking things through" definitely isn't a requirement for a successful entrepreneur or business leader. Just ask Robert Maxwell or the people who ran ENRON - and they were just the unlucky ones who only nearly got away with it. And they didn't even have names you can sneer at.
If the allegations are true then I would suggest that these two individuals are just your averagely greedy narcissists.
1. They recognised the value was in the data but didn't steal it in a manner that would not arouse any suspicion.
2. They breached No Poaching clauses without making much of an attempt to conceal their actions.
3. They disclosed their actions to the people they were trying to poach.
It was probably point 3 that alerted their former employers.
People start up businesses all the time with stolen information and poached employees but they do so in a manner that is difficult to prove sufficiently for court action.
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