SAN FRANCISCO — Basketball players have pickup games. Rappers have freestyle cyphers. Tech entrepreneurs, according to the former chief executive of Uber, riff on big ideas in something they call a “jam sesh.”
Travis Kalanick, the former chief executive of Uber, who is known for pushing boundaries in business, kept his answers short and his demeanor neutral as he testified on Tuesday in a high-profile court fight between Waymo and his former employer over intellectual property.
Waymo, the self-driving-car unit of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, called Mr. Kalanick to the stand during the first full day of testimony in the federal trial. It hoped to reveal how Uber’s win-at-all-costs attitude had pushed the company to acquire Otto, an autonomous-vehicle start-up created by a former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski.
Waymo contends — and Uber denies — that the deal was part of Uber’s plan to steal intellectual property from Google’s self-driving-car project, which would later be renamed Waymo, in order to close the gap in an area of technology essential to its business.
As he waded through questions from Waymo’s lawyers, Mr. Kalanick, who resigned in June as Uber’s chief executive, offered unusual insight into how deals get done in Silicon Valley and the freewheeling — some might say self-parodying — business culture at the biggest technology start-ups.
Mr. Kalanick said he and other Uber executives had a “jam sesh,” or jam session, with Mr. Levandowski on a Sunday while Mr. Levandowski was still employed by Google. In fact, Mr. Kalanick was such a fan of these sessions that a 2015 profile of him revealed that his home was called a “Jam Pad.”
A jam sesh, as Mr. Kalanick explained it, is a business meeting akin to a session in which a jazz ensemble spontaneously works out music. Creative people come in with their own ideas and create “beautiful music.” Or business plans. The group discussed laser sensor technology that was critical to the operation of self-driving cars. A handwritten note on a whiteboard read, “Laser is the sauce.”
Mr. Kalanick, wearing a dark-gray suit, a blue shirt and a silver tie in court Tuesday, didn’t deny that Uber had wooed Mr. Levandowski and met with him at Uber’s offices before he left Google. He said he was “a big fan” of the engineer, one of the first employees at Google’s self-driving-car project, and wanted to hire him.
But there was a hangup: Mr. Levandowski wanted to venture out on his own.
“I wanted to hire Anthony and he wanted to start a company, so I tried to come up with a situation where he could feel like he started a company and I could feel like I hired him,” Mr. Kalanick said, choosing his words carefully between long sips of water. He polished off four bottles of water in less than an hour on the witness stand.
Uber acquired Otto for a reported $590 million in 2016, just six months after it was started. It is unclear how much Mr. Levandowski, already a wealthy man thanks to a $120 million bonus from his time at Google, personally made in the deal. An Uber spokesman, Matt Kallman, said the company had fired Mr. Levandowski in May before Otto could meet any of its performance targets. As a result, he lost out on an estimated $250 million worth of equity in Uber.
Waymo contends that the clever solution — let Mr. Levandowski create his own company and then buy it — was simply obfuscation for a plot to steal important technology from Waymo.
While the deal was unusual, it’s not rare for an executive to want to ensure his independence inside a larger company. Technology giants often have to sell founders of start-ups on the idea that they will maintain some independence, as well as a big payday, in an acquisition. Facebook, for example, acquired Instagram and kept the photo-sharing app a separate unit within the company.
Otto is still an independent unit within Uber and is technically a separate defendant in this case.
Waymo is trying to portray Mr. Kalanick and Mr. Levandowski as a pair of aggressive, money-hungry conspirators who worked together to steal Google’s intellectual property.
Before Mr. Kalanick testified, Uber’s lawyers objected to Waymo’s presenting a text message that Mr. Levandowski sent to Mr. Kalanick with a clip from the movie “Wall Street” in which Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, passionately argues that “greed, for the lack of a better word, is good.” No ruling was made.
On Wednesday, Mr. Kalanick is expected to be asked how much he revealed to Uber’s board about Mr. Levandowski and what the engineer had taken with him from Google.
In deposition testimony before the trial, Bill Gurley, an investor and a former board member at Uber, said the company’s board had not been shown a due diligence report before the acquisition of Otto.
Mr. Gurley, who stepped down from Uber’s board in June, said he wouldn’t have voted in favor of the acquisition had he known the report indicated that Mr. Levandowski possessed files from Google.
Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for Mr. Levandowski, said after the session in the federal courthouse in San Francisco that “although a great many things have been said about Anthony over the last two days, we are confident that he will eventually be vindicated.”