CEO Don Burnette, and Waymo CTO Dmitri Dolgov — nice bonuses and a blowout party at the Palo Alto home of their leader, Sebastian Thrun. It marked the start of more focused efforts to figure out how to commercialize autonomous tech. And it made the young engineers realize they had created something that could be worth an incredible amount of money.
So, led by Levandowski, some of the engineers indicated to Page and other Google higher-ups that they were willing to walk. They would find independent venture capitalist funding and start their work over, no big deal for a team that had done so much so quickly. "It was like collective bargaining," Levandowski said in an interview.
"We were focused on getting a start-up-like compensation system," Page said in a 2017 deposition, as part of thecase. "And start-ups pay people a lot of money if they do something significant — if the start-up does something significant." Aurora Innovation