One of your biggest risks when you start your own company is handling the business side of the business. The tech might be the easy part. Your present employer may be willing to teach you the business side if you're willing. Allow yourself to be noticed as a person who can be groomed for management.
I worked at a small company for a few years before my spouse and I decided to relocate. Today I have a small side business, and everything I know about running that business, I learned from the job that I worked for a few years, a couple decades ago.
They own IP but there are lots of valuable things you can do for a startup that don't involve important IP.
For b2b you can start talking to potential clients in the space. They don't own your network.
For b2c you can start finding communities and building an email list. They don't own your audience.
This is great because as a dev it forces you to do the hard stuff first that has the biggest impact on your success or failure. Not coding which is the fun easy part(for coders).
Because I installed it myself and nobody else touched it. If you suspect your employer to secretly keep logs of your internet traffic to one-day claim your IP rights you seriously need to search for a new employer.
I'm really sorry, but this is naive. It may be true that in your case you have complete control over your laptop and there is no possibility of logging, but this is not broadly the case, and it is not a good litmus test of an employer. If you start working for a company with lots of employees and valuable proprietary data, they will have access to take a look at what you've done with your company computer. And not because they're evil, but because "insider risk" is a real problem that scales with a company's size and success. An employee could be looking up private information of an ex-partner, or sending a zip file of customer credit card data to their private email account, the company could be sued and need to provide information on those acts during discovery, etc. I think good employers should assume good faith by their employees and should not employ the sort of active monitoring and productivity tracking stuff that exists, but I think having the ability to reactively look at backups and system logs is important.
The clauses I have seen attempt to claim all intellectual work regardless of when it was done or whether it was related to the job. To me, this is an indication that we truly have not progressed beyond wage slavery. I believe such clauses should be illegal. I think one thing we might be able to do is to create a list of companies that have blanket clauses like this and then some people (not most) will have the luxury…
I'm kind of mind-blown reading this thread. Right now I'm working on a product of my own, and I'm currently employed. The product has absolutely-zero-nada-nothing to do with what my company does, I do it on my own time, with my own money, with my own machine. Are you saying that I still may not be legally in the clear? If so, that is incredibly insane, and I can't believe clauses like that actually exist. Not sure ho…
Even if you are legally in the clear, your company’s lawyers could still try to fight for it anyways.
Make sure you Never use company resources, and next time, consider getting a copyright assignment exemption before beginning work.
The reality is that it probably isn’t really likely all companies are out to steal your personal work through dubious copyright assignment agreements, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be super aggressive.
The clauses I have seen attempt to claim all intellectual work regardless of when it was done or whether it was related to the job. To me, this is an indication that we truly have not progressed beyond wage slavery. I believe such clauses should be illegal. I think one thing we might be able to do is to create a list of companies that have blanket clauses like this and then some people (not most) will have the luxury…
I'm kind of mind-blown reading this thread. Right now I'm working on a product of my own, and I'm currently employed. The product has absolutely-zero-nada-nothing to do with what my company does, I do it on my own time, with my own money, with my own machine. Are you saying that I still may not be legally in the clear? If so, that is incredibly insane, and I can't believe clauses like that actually exist. Not sure ho…
Read your employment contract, see if it contains this Sex Tape Clause
Does anyone have any anecdotes about companies enforcing this rule and coming after a founder that started a side project while working for the company?
Does it need to be a tech company? My workaround for when companies have a super restrictive IP contract is to work on companies that don't require coding: eCommerce, local small business, blogging, etc.