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Comment by johnwheeler | Hacker News Reader

Situation sounds like to me is:

CEO keeps in touch with beast mode 10x'er intern who both impressed him and needed to be kept at arms length.

Beast mode intern flirts with the idea of launching a competing startup under the guise of innocent open source project and transparency with a passing mention of project in email.

CEO realizes he needs to shut intern down otherwise any communication that looks supportive might be used against him later on.

Intern realizes the jig is up. Writes apology to CEO out of fear and discomfort.

CEO responds that he doesn't want anything further to do with him.

Beast mode intern exercises final option to write a blog post attempting to gain community support.

Something or other like that...

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Except nothing in the OP's work or correspondence suggests any competitive aspirations, so unless other information comes to light, this summary is a fantasy.

Regardless of whether it's true, one has to admit it sounds like a sideplot from Halt and Catch Fire, lol.

Of course it doesn't.

The lack of evidence is a clear indication!

Yep, that's the first thing I do when I'm running off with my former company's IP to launch a competitor: send an email to my erstwhile CEO with a link and ask him "so what do you think?"

I shouldn't have had to scroll so far to read this

> Beast mode intern flirts with the idea of launching a competing startup under the guise of innocent open source project

From the article:

> I’m not a business person. I’m just an open-source dev who likes to build weird things for fun. (If you doubt my track record of building things that don’t make money, just check out the list on my website, and note the conspicuous absence of anything that’s ever made a cent of revenue.)

This doesn't make your interpretation impossible, but it's certainly very unlikely.

> Beast mode intern flirts with the idea of launching a competing startup under the guise of innocent open source project and transparency with mention in email.

Amjad... is that you?

Agreed.

It's one thing to do this to learn more about software development, it's another to give it a name and a website.

They're really leaning into the "I'm just an intern without commercial intents" narrative, but regardless of their intent, it's still incredibly unethical to create something similar your previous employer's IP and market it independently.

Then why would OP tell them about that? Sounds to me like the latest thing you'd do

Likely OP didn't think it was unethical, which is why they shared, but that doesn't change the fact that it was.

>incredibly unethical to create something similar your previous employer's IP and market it independently.

Can you explain why you think it is unethical? Provided no noncompete clauses or other previous agreements were violated.

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