Longtime Alphabet chief legal officer David Drummond has retreated from Uber after spending three years on the company’s board. As the top lawyer for Google’s parent company, Mr Drummond attributed his decision to step down from Uber to mounting conflicts of interest. ‘I recently stepped down from Uber’s board given the overlap between the two companies,’ he said in a statement, adding that he still considers Uber to be a ‘phenomenal’ company. According to some reports, Mr Drummond’s resignation from the board came after Uber barred him from attending board meetings.
From partners to rivals
Mr Drummond’s exit is a sign of changing times. Both he and Google have been a constant presence in Uber’s short history. Google’s mapping service is used in the Uber platform, and Mr Drummond himself was instrumental in helping Uber secure a $258 million investment in 2013 from what was then Google’s venture capital arm, GV. GV is now the venture capital arm of parent company Alphabet, following the introduction of a holding company structure at Google last year. Despite Google and Uber’s increasingly overlapped businesses and Mr Drummond’s decision to step away from Uber’s strategic leadership, the legal chief has insisted that GV’s status as an Uber investor is not currently under threat.
Driverless car race
At the heart of the growing rivalry appears to be Uber’s foray into developing driverless car technologies, an emerging market that Google and Alphabet have long been working to dominate. Uber recently sealed a $300m venture with Volvo Cars to develop self-driving cars for sale by 2021, and just last week announced its near $700 million acquisition of San Francisco-based start-up Otto. Staffed predominantly with former Google and Carnegie Mellon University engineers, Otto is developing self-driving technologies for commercial vehicles like trucks. Otto chief executive Anthony Levandowski, who will now head Uber’s driverless car efforts, is himself a former key player in Google’s driverless car development team.
Sources: New York Times; Yahoo Tech; Fortune
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