It is clearly morally wrong, but is it illegal? Does someone here have a legal sense of this?
In this case his idea was "role-based" communication. He came up with this (2016) as Slack and other role-based solutions were storming across the market.
[1] - a common problem coupled with advancements in the field/technology often yield many people "inventing" the same thing simultaneously, because it's an obvious next step. It's why we're so negative of the countless useless "on a computer" patents, "on a network", etc.
> It's not about whether more than one person could come up withe idea, it's that he pitched it to his own employer, met multiple times with execs to discuss acquisition, only for them to suddenly cut him off and directly copy what he proposed with no remuneration.
> That is not the same as two disparate people who have never communicated coming up with the same idea for something.
It's entirely possible, if not probable, that there was independent efforts to build out "role-based" communications. Some employee comes along and says "Look, I've already developed an app do you want to buy it?". They talk with him and decide that what he has built isn't worthwhile and move on. Suddenly he thinks he has intellectual ownership over the entire premise (hence the hilarious $1B claim).
It doesn't work like that. Indeed, stories like this are why many firms simply don't want to listen to any pitches, because people often have a pretty outsized notion about their "inventions".
Again, maybe they really did rip off his idea. Maybe in 2016 they really had no idea of broadening their communications approaches (or I guess narrowing in this case). His lawyers can demand the pertinent records and that's what a court case is for. But just seeing this reminds me why I'm very clear in a lot of situations that I don't want people's ideas/inventions, because in almost every case they've been considered but now the person thinks they invented it and have ownership over it.
Not so sure about that. I recently interviewed where I asked something along the lines of, "So what would my daily responsibilities look like?" They refused to tell me what I would be doing day-to-day. No specifics on technologies, platforms, would I be helping internal/external groups, etc. Could not even get them to elaborate on specifics in the job posting itself.
That company? Google. He would've been employee # < 100, and comfortably retired in 10 years.
I’ve seen enough to know, that your secret sauce probably isn’t as secret as you think. Even in the ridiculously tight-lipped world of quant trading, it turns out that everyone’s mostly doing the same few basic ideas with not much more to distinguish than a few peripheral variations here and there.
In general execution ability, not having the best idea, tends to be the main driver of which teams win. If a third party does think your idea is brilliant, then stealing it from you is a pretty moronic way to capitalize on it. You’re creating a motivated competitor from day one who by definition has a lot more domain expertise.
It’s much simpler to just cut the guy a check for equity in the company.
He could have had some implementation of some kind of basic messaging functionality, which for any number of reasons they may have decided to implement themselves, which is pretty rational for a whole host of reasons.
If an employee is trying to sell a 'side project' to a Corp. they are acting effectively as a 3rd party and should expect to be treated as such.
If there was some material, core IP that was infringed upon, maybe there's an issue, but otherwise some kind of independent implementation is probably within bounds.
I can't speak to what extent there was 'carbon copy' of features, or even if that is lawful or what not.
Think of it like this: company ABC pitches their app to Airline. Airline decides to roll their own, and the feature base seems quite similar. That's pretty normal.
I recall as story about a manufacturer, building a new plant. He took "reasonable security precautions" to protect its design, fences, guards while being built. A competitor hired a plane, flew over, took detailed photos. It was later ruled that the trade secrets were intact, thus could not be used.