Ask HN: Disclosing your startup to current employer

1 point·tmaly··3 comments

A colleague and I want to do a startup on the side outside of work. However, our employer requires that we disclose outside business activities. Since our employment is "at will" it seems this disclosure would be more like getting approve rather than being a disclosure. Has anyone had this experience? How did you go about it and what was the outcome?

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Is the startup along the same lines as the work you're doing now? My last job I was a Software PM in an engineering studio and they had a clause in the handbook that any outside work done was owned by the company.

One developer tried to put an app in the Android Store, he was making a business app and the company was a gambling company. And our employer said the app would be their property. So he just killed the effort.

I'd check for clauses like that also.

I checked and our IP clause is restricted to "scope of employment" I had previously spoken to our legal/compliance department and they said it was limited to the type of work I do. The idea we have for the startup is not related to the industry we work in.

This seems strange to me. I would come up with a list of business ideas every day and hand that into the employer. Maybe even come up with a list of places where I could host a micro site for free, piggy back off their domain name and put up a landing page for the idea. To monetize it, add Adsense.

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