Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, February 24

• Alphabet’s Waymo is suing Otto and Uber for allegedly stealing the design of a key self-driving system: Waymo, formerly Google’s self-driving car unit, is suing Otto — the self-driving trucking company co-founded by former Waymo employee Anthony Levandowski and quickly acquired by Uber — for allegedly stealing the company’s proprietary design for its laser-based radar system. According to Waymo, before Levandowski left what was then a part of Google’s moonshot labs, he downloaded 14,000 “highly confidential” files to an external hard drive, including the design for the company’s lidar circuit board. The company decided to perform a forensic investigation of Levandowski’s former company computer after a Waymo employee was inadvertently copied on an email from a lidar supplier with the subject line “Otto Files.” The email was being sent to a list of people that Waymo believes were Uber employees. Attached to the email were drawings of Otto’s lidar circuit board. It looked just like Waymo’s design, the company alleged in the suit filed today, “the design of which had been downloaded by Mr. Levandowski before his resignation.” “The Replicated Board reflects Waymo’s highly confidential proprietary LiDAR technology and Waymo trade secrets,” the complaint reads. “Moreover, the Replicated Board is specifically designed to be used in conjunction with many other Waymo trade secrets and in the context of overall LiDAR systems covered by Waymo patents.” To then verify its suspicions, Waymo filed a public records request to the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development and Department of Motor Vehicles in February for Otto’s communications with the departments. In that correspondence, Otto indicated that the company was using custom lidar that it built in-house. Waymo cites this as evidence that Uber and Otto are using a circuit board that “bears a striking resemblance” to Waymo’s. Lidars are seen by most as a crucial piece of self-driving technology. The radar shoots lasers at objects in order to detect them and works closely with the cameras and normal radars to create a thorough image of the car’s surroundings.

• Thistle launches meal kits to make nutritious baby food at home: Food delivery startup Thistle was never in the business of making meal kits, those boxes of pre-measured ingredients and recipes to help customers cook at home. The startup’s married cofounders, Ashwin Cheriyan and Shiri Avnery, thought that prepared meals, ready-to-heat or raw and ready-to-eat, were a better fit for their busy customers. Meal kits, they said, felt like time consuming and frustrating cooking lessons when they tried them personally. The Thistle Baby meal kit consists of vacuum-sealed bags of apportioned, organic ingredients, flash-frozen to preserve flavor. A parent would open up the pouch, and steam and puree it however they like, then add spices also provided in the meal kit at levels they or their kids like best. The company says its prices work out to $2 per toddler or infant meal. Before now, the startup was trialing its Thistle Baby service with an invitation-only group of subscribers. As of next week, Thistle Baby will become available to any customers who sign up for it.

• Baidu's Sales Tops Estimates as It Pushes New Businesses: Baidu Inc. posted quarterly results that topped analysts’ estimates, as China’s biggest search engine pushes into new businesses such as news aggregation to overcome government restrictions on web advertising. Revenue for the fourth quarter came to 18.21 billion yuan ($2.62 billion), compared with estimates for 18.17 billion yuan, Baidu said in a statement. Net income, adjusted for certain items, was 4.61 billion yuan, compared with the 2.52 billion yuan average of analyst estimates. Shares in the company rose more than 1 percent in after-hours trading.

• Snapchat Founders’ Grip Tightened After a Spat With an Early Investor: One of the biggest questions that Snap has faced from potential investors is why its two founders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, have retained such a hold on voting power in the company — power that public shareholders will not gain. Exploring that question helps explain how years-ago dealings with venture capitalists helped lead to this point. At the heart of that is a Lightspeed venture capitalist, Jeremy Liew, and the terms he embedded in his 2012 investment in what was then known as Snapchat. The terms gave Mr. Liew outsize power over the company’s future financing round. That ended up irking Snapchat’s chief executive, Mr. Spiegel, who took steps to reassert control over the company.The end result was a largely severed connection. Today, Lightspeed is listed in Snap’s I.P.O. prospectus as the company’s second biggest venture investor, with 86.6 million shares, or a stake of more than 8 percent, and Mr. Liew has appeared on television shows, podcasts and in technology publications to discuss Snap. Yet he and Snap no longer have close ties, and Mr. Spiegel has not had meetings or hung out with Mr. Liew since the early investment rounds.Mr. Liew and Mr. Spiegel met in March 2012, when Mr. Liew used Facebook to contact Mr. Spiegel, a Stanford University student who had recently started Snapchat with Mr. Murphy, a fraternity brother. At the meeting that followed, Mr. Spiegel said his father was tired of paying Snapchat’s bills. Mr. Liew offered to help. Mr. Liew offered to invest $485,000 in Snapchat, which Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy accepted. The investment was completed in less than two weeks. What Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy paid less attention to were the exact terms that Mr. Liew embedded in the deal. Those terms gave Lightspeed the right of first refusal to invest in a future round of funding and the ability to increase its share of the company that round. Lightspeed could also take 50 percent of the future round. Such terms effectively let Lightspeed have veto power over the next investment at Snap. It also made Snap an unattractive investment for other investors — who would not be able to take as large a stake as they would like in the company.Mr. Spiegel was unhappy with the outcome. Over the years, he has alluded to his early dissatisfaction with venture investors. In a 2015 interview at a start-up awards show, he said, “when we were first getting started and took financing, our lawyers would take us through the documents and they’d say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. It’s all standard.’” “I’ve since learned that standard means either the person who’s walking you through documents doesn’t understand them or you could be getting taken advantage of,” Mr. Spiegel continued. “When someone says something is standard, just ask why, and why and why and why, until you really understand intricately, I think, how the deal is structured.”