Tech Titans Thwart Former Workers’ Autonomous Startup Dreams | Hacker News Reader

Tech Titans Thwart Former Workers’ Autonomous Startup Dreams

bloomberg.com

37 pointsFricken16 comments

Aside from them trying to call Levandowski a casualty of two large companies competing....

Has any field done a good job of balancing the tension of letting employee's be able to freely move and the employer's ability to protect IP from moving to a competitor?

I only really know the finance and software fields well and there its very acceptable for an employee to leave for a competitor, however the line starts to get very murky when the employee starts recruiting other employee's to their new employer.

Typically there is a garden leave involved where the employee gets paid but can't compete with his/her former employer and can't recruit from them for the same period. Other than that, quant's often walk out the door with their models, while programmers can't leave with their source code, open source aside.

How does, say the drug industry, handle top scientist switching companies, or does this not happen as often due to the large time required to produce drugs?

>I only really know the finance and software fields well and there its very acceptable for an employee to leave for a competitor

Maybe in California. Non-competes are a reality pretty much everywhere else.

People leave for competitors all the time in many states. It's the norm rather than the exception. The exceptions usually involve high-level people taking a similar position with a direct competitor. (There are also some specific professional services-type organizations that take a hard line. The thinking there is mostly that they'll take clients with them even if they don't actively solicit.)

Everywhere?

/me raises one eyebrow

Gardening leave is the fair way to do this - say 12 months.

> quant's often walk out the door with their models

Do you mean they leave with the knowledge of the models they worked on (impossible to leave behind), or they take something more concrete?

There may be a valid point to be made about big companies discouraging star employees from leaving to become founders, but they couldn't have picked a worse example.

No kidding.

This entire article could have been summarized by - "Don't steal stuff from work."

Startup dreams involves stealing trade secrets?

"if you quit to set up your own company" that directly competes with and/or rips off your work for your previous employer, "tread carefully"

Such a weird article.

This man at this stage is pretty suspicious that he didn't approach his dream LEGALLY. That is the problem.

So much money wasted on lawsuits and acquiring companies from former employees. The same tech should not have to cost this much to develop and be made available to people. The consumers will pay for all this. The inefficiencies of capitalism.

Ton of startups by Google employees. Yet they focus on one with stolen property. Great journalism.

If two parties negotiate a deal, and one of both parties gets to write the contract, then, the other party will pretty much be screwed. That is why the contract must be written by a third party, such as a marketplace.

A marketplace is not a party.

>waiting for available socket...

hmm interesting

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