The way you solicit clients from a prior company is downloading the client list, exporting to a personal drive, quitting, then using the list to poach.
I’m fine if that’s your intention, but let your employer know upfront that you won’t protect confidential company data.
If I'm a waiter in a restaurant there should be nothing to stop me telling the customers that I'm going to a better restaurant and they should come and try it. Will the boss be annoyed? Yes. Should he be allowed to stop me? No.
In the real world there is no salesman who thinks of the clients as belonging to the company. They all know that sales relationships are personal. The contracts may say one thing, but the reality is different. The law ought to be to allow free association. Customers lose out when they are not offered better deals.
On HN we’re talking about tech employees who make 5-10x the median US salary.
We can have stricter rules and stricter contracts for the 5% top paid employees. Obviously a waitress shouldn’t be sued for talking about another restaurant with a customer.
If a waitress shouldn't be sued, why should a dev or a PM? We should all be equal under the law, there shouldn't be a "oh well you make enough money" clause. If anything, freeing high-productivity workers is the bigger win for society, far outweighing the benefit from better restaurants.
In an ideal world, employees would also share in the losses when companies aren’t profitable (forgo a paycheck).
…everyone wants the first scenario, but absolutely not the 2nd! When will people realize that one of the value props of working for a company (as opposed to starting your own) is you’re guaranteed a stable income regardless of whether profits are going up or down.
(You can say it’s not guaranteed because you can be fired. Fair. But the point still stands, it’s nice to have a stable paycheck that doesn’t wildly fluctuate up and down)
I am not.
> The way you solicit clients from a prior company is downloading the client list, exporting to a personal drive, quitting, then using the list to poach.
Which part of this is "IP"?
The whole concept of "stealing IP" is something that was lobbied in to prevent market competition and establish monopolies. Calling a list of clients that might choose to vote with their wallets for better service "IP" is one of the most ridiculous claims I've seen here lately and pretty much proof of how this term has become a problem for modern free market society.
While IP protection itself is critical for some innovation, the way you all wield it to defend monopolization and entrenchment is a main reason to rethink what IP and protection actually gives to american economy.
I should have said conditional customer data. (Client lists, phone numbers, email addresses - basically whatever you can export out of Salesforce)
In order to poach your old company’s customers, you’ll need confidential data from your prior employer, assuming that your employer doesn’t publish their client roster publicly.
The debate is being dragged from poaching customers to how IP protections enable monopolies. That’s too big of a leap to be relevant in this thread (sorry for saying IP rather than confidential data)
If your company can only exist by blocking other companies from competition with your customer, then your company should not exist in first place.
Also, it’s a 100% fact that companies consider client rosters confidential. It’s fun to say no one can claim my name or phone number as confidential data… but that’s not how things work.
It is how things work legally. What you are confusing is the distinction between individual bits of information and a database: if a salesperson leaves and calls their old client, nobody reasonably expects them to forget about that relationship or be unable to look up a phone number.
If there’s an entire lead database, that might be a different story if it includes non-public data and the company can show that it’s treated as a valuable asset (limited access, confidentiality agreements, etc. ). If it’s something you could recreate with a few Google searches, you’ll have a hard time convincing a judge that there’s substantial value in its secrecy.
This is categorically untrue – if some past employer told you that, you might want to ask what their motives for lying to you were. Your knowledge of who you worked for is not corporate IP.
The actual legal standards vary from state to state but in some states it come down to three things: does that list have economic value on its own, would it be hard to recreate, and does the company make an effort to keep it secret? That probably won’t apply to your personal memory of who you worked for since that's highly unlikely to be an independently valuable resource - typically that would be a big list of non-public information like people who signed up to preorder a product, people with a certain need or interest, etc. – and it definitely wouldn’t include anything listed on their website, press releases, or someone’s C.V. If you dump the CRM on the way out, yes, you might be in trouble but there’s no legal standard expecting you to be mind-wiped on the way out.
If you steal the rolodex, it's questionable for sure.
If you leverage your network and reputation, that's something that free market should never limit.
And no, taking a client list with you is not how this works in consulting. You take the client you currently work for and have a relationship with and offer them a better deal to work with you independently. After that you’re on your own to solicit and win new clients.