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Comment by fliellerjulian | Hacker News Reader

Two weeks ago I posted "LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one" here on HN — it unexpectedly hit #1, and the feedback was incredible.

Since then: - we hit #1 on Product Hunt the next day - got featured in their daily + weekly newsletter - 1,500+ sign ups - 1,000+ waitlist sign ups from non US countries - 32,000+ website visitors - 35 recruiter signed up

The response gave us so much conviction that we decided to go all-in: we left our Big Tech jobs to work on Openspot full time.

It still feels surreal.

What we are building: In a world where AI can write the perfect resume for anyone, what actually makes you stand out is you — your personality, your voice, your story. That’s what OpenSpot helps you showcase — through video, audio, projects, and more.

If you're curious what we've learned so far — from launch tactics to handling the wave of attention to quitting Big Tech jobs to build this full-time — happy to share everything.

View on HN

I don't buy this as sold because Big Tech has very strict policies about IP ownership on code you write while you're working for them, even if it is totally separate from work.

Wish you the best of luck, but I also wish for a tradeoff towards honesty from salesmanship in this world.

EDIT: A cursory review of your Twitter reveals several significant departures from this narrative. I'm very confused but given your goals with this, would highly recommend you at least tighten things up enough so it doesn't take 1 missed piece of ingroup knowledge on your part, and ~1 minute of due diligence on X, to find out we're reading copy-pasta.

It's also really uncool to create two bits of "someone else did it" knowledge in the world that are absolutely false and irresponsible (built quickly parttime, quit after launch).

Also, if the other founders contracted you while they were still at big tech, that can be a major problem for them.

This isn't really true.

In California specifically, Labor Code Section 2870 limits an employer's claim over inventions or products created a) outside of work hours, b) without using company resources like your work laptop, and c) not related to/competitive with the company's business.

Even outside of California, it's extremely rare for companies to try to claim ownership of side projects that check all of the boxes above. Legal action is expensive and bad PR unless the employee is clearly infringing or building something competitive.

> c) not related to/competitive with the company's business.

Is a loophole big enough for a train to go through. BigTech can, and will, with a straight face, claim almost anything as "related to" something they are working on--because they work on everything. I have worked at two BigTechs and had to basically stop working on side projects because they both emphatically threatened (during onboarding) that they will aggressively claim IP ownership of moonlighting projects.

Anyone considering doing potentially commercializable side projects should do their due diligence. Even if you're right and they can't claim it, do you have the $$$ to fight their army of lawyers?

EDIT: The loophole's actual wording is:

     "Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer"

Which I think we can all agree is pretty broad. Be careful out there!

IP that doesn't relate to the role you're employed for, especially that wasn't made with company time, information or resources, is yours in California if you want to fight it out in court. Most bigtech companies also have a process to get explicit written recognition about such code before going to court because this is such a common thing. It usually amounts to filling out a form and sending it to legal for approval. There are a few companies with a reputation for somewhat more difficult processes (Apple, Amazon), but the above post is entirely plausible.

Sure: I cant think any of the above would say "yeah cool make a LinkedIn competitor part time"

(I worked at Google 2016-2023. Open source and video games were approved, anything else wasn't even worth the trouble of asking. i.e. it was well known to be "no" and a great signal to your manager you were unhappy)

We also have the benefit of _knowing they lied_: they were hired as a contractor to build it, and weren't at big tech.

By way of analogy: you're right, of course a German could hold up 3 fingers to order 3 beers. In practice, it is a tell.

In California statutes make it pretty clear that IP done off work hours without work equipment belongs to you not your employer, and it has repeatedly held up in court.

It also must not "relate to" the company's existing or demonstrably anticipated research, which is pretty broad in the case of "Big Tech".

I agree. Replacing LinkedIn is a great story. The story being spun seems disingenuous.

> In a world where AI can write the perfect resume for anyone, what actually makes you stand out is you — your personality, your voice, your story. That’s what OpenSpot helps you showcase — through video, audio, projects, and more.

The video and audio part are clear, but how do you showcase projects?

we have a "projects" section where you can upload, pdfs, images, links, and videos and also ofc write something about each project :)

How will this scale for Product folks? Unlike Engg. and Design, there is very little product guys can do to showcase their work/projects (except for a go-live feature blog). How about Sales guys and other similar functions?

Have you considered scrapping HN, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc posts? I used to play with semantic algorithms and it’s pretty cool how quickly you can show someone’s voice and content vectors and how they relate to others.

Any concern that something like this could make it easier to discriminate against certain groups of people? Or how this might tip towards appearance-based bias or age bias when making decisions on who to interview?

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