Ask HN: What should early startup Employee Agreements require, and not?
I'd like to understand a reasonable and fair balance between the needs of the company, and the needs of the employees. The needs of the company include satisfying whatever due diligence scrutiny is required by investors.
Some questions, based on example documents:
* Do employees have any reasonable expectation of privacy when on company facilities, using company devices/equipment, or using company-related services (Zoom, Slack DMs, VoIP, etc.)?
* Should people be required to list every prior invention and work of authorship, and agree that the company has rights to everything else? (If it matters, people in Cambridge, Mass. tend to have lots of ideas, past work, etc. And we can only pay a small fraction of what Google might pay for signing-away of rights.)
* If a document lists a dozen artifacts and assets that employees must make accessible and turn over to the company, and somehow misses SaaS passwords and 2FA, is it not tuned to the needs of a scrappy early startup, and we're looking at the wrong document?
* Can an employee solicit/hire another employee, either while working at the company or soon after? And if not, how long after severing are they locked out from that?
* How do we talk about what ideas belong to the company and what don't? On-your-own-time-and-own-equipment seems not enough, but related-to-the-business-of-the-company seems too vague.
* Should the employment agreement assert that the employee is only working in exchange for salary, and any other benefits and incentives are at the discretion of the company and can be modified at any time? (No mention of incentive stock options in a tech startup?)
A lawyer has to represent the interests of one party, so I'm asking HN about balance.