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Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?

#161

Post by ChuckMcM »

icedchai wrote: post #151
agentofoblivion wrote: post #145

I don’t think many of these comments are realistic. I’m truth, these clauses are likely defensive, particularly for tech companies. There is an almost 100% chance that if you started a company and left your job, your company will not register your coming or going in the slightest. If you’re some famous person that ends up starting some billion dollar company, and it was in an area highly relevant to your job, you mig…

Yes. This, 100%. I would like to just add this one thing which may be obvious: don't draw attention to yourself, don't tell any coworkers about whatever you're doing on the side.

And I will add to this excellent pair of comments, 90% of "starting a company and running it" has exactly zero to do with what ever the "idea" is that your building. It is all about how to hire people efficiently, how to get the best work out of them, how to make your company visible, how to communicate your product's value, how to find potential customers and get them to look at what you have, and then how to get them to hand over real money for what you're offering.

I would strongly recommend against remote work if you're plan is to learn about starting and running a company because so much of what is involved must be observed and isn't communicated. How does the CEO talk in group settings? How do they talk to investors? How do employees talk to each other, what do they think of their manager and how is that expressed in their behavior. This is a game of observation which you cannot do on the other end of a web camera.

Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?

#162

Post by treespace8 »

agentofoblivion wrote: post #145

I don’t think many of these comments are realistic. I’m truth, these clauses are likely defensive, particularly for tech companies. There is an almost 100% chance that if you started a company and left your job, your company will not register your coming or going in the slightest. If you’re some famous person that ends up starting some billion dollar company, and it was in an area highly relevant to your job, you mig…

I just wanted to add one more scenario.

You make the next minecraft and are making millions after a few months. You now have money to fight back with your own legal team.

Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?

#163

Post by [deleted] »

treespace8 wrote: post #162
agentofoblivion wrote: post #145

I don’t think many of these comments are realistic. I’m truth, these clauses are likely defensive, particularly for tech companies. There is an almost 100% chance that if you started a company and left your job, your company will not register your coming or going in the slightest. If you’re some famous person that ends up starting some billion dollar company, and it was in an area highly relevant to your job, you mig…

I just wanted to add one more scenario. You make the next minecraft and are making millions after a few months. You now have money to fight back with your own legal team.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?

#164

Post by motohagiography »

If you want to build a company, use the time to build relationships with your future customers and credentials for your reputation for being good at whatever you mean to do. Your employer can't own these.

Once you have those relationships, learning their problems and proposing a solution to them, and having them pay for it is also likely outside the scope of your job with your employer.

If the problem is valuable enough to them, you can agree to solve it for them for enough money that it will float you for the first 6 months while you develop it. Quit your job, live on your savings, maybe pick up some contracts if you can't raise seed capital, and deliver the product to your customers.

Companies aren't made of code, products are, and there are no products without customers, as otherwise it's just art or a science project. Companies are made primarily of relationships with customers, underwritten by products, some of which are made of code. That direction is not reversible.

I've developed my own software projects, and for a long time tried to figure out how practising something I could pay someone offshore to do for $30k/year could somehow be worth so much more if I could just do some secret thing right. The advice was always scattershot, be more this, do more that. What it came down to was, it's not the code, it's not the features, it's not the design or architecture - it's the relationships.

Who do you have relationships with and what are their problems? If you can't solve them with what you are good at, maybe you need to find new people with new problems. If you can't do that, find someone who knows people who have problems and money, and then partner with them to sell a solution.

It sounds so simple, and it is, but if it were easy, everyone would do it.

Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?

#165

Post by not_a_moth »

agentofoblivion wrote: post #145

I don’t think many of these comments are realistic. I’m truth, these clauses are likely defensive, particularly for tech companies. There is an almost 100% chance that if you started a company and left your job, your company will not register your coming or going in the slightest. If you’re some famous person that ends up starting some billion dollar company, and it was in an area highly relevant to your job, you mig…

Exception: You work at a decently funded startup, you play a key role, and you leave to start something in the same domain.

They know who you are, and they're probably insecure about their own success.

Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?

#166

Post by ratherbefuddled »

There's a lot of awful legal advice in the comments here much of which ignores key issues like what exactly your contract says, which legal jurisdiction you are in and what you are planning to do. Ignore all of it.

If you want to know about the legal consequences of something you would like to do, take your contract to a lawyer before you do it and pay for written advice.

As for what you can do to be successful when you start a company here's some advice:

1) Network. People make crucial decisions about large amounts of money on reputation, instinct and lots of other intangibles all the time. Build a list of genuine contacts. Build a reputation for competence and integrity so that those contacts think and speak well of you. This pays off more than anything else you could do for getting off the ground.

2) Learn. I don't mean learn certain technologies or do lots of qualifications. Learn about an industry (not IT) and it's business problems. Learn this directly from people doing the work, not from go-betweens or books. Of course learn tech too but tech is pretty easy to get to grips with if you're really a geek. When you match cool tech up to real business problems suddenly you look like some kind of wizard.

Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?

#167

Post by TAForObvReasons »

agentofoblivion wrote: post #145

I don’t think many of these comments are realistic. I’m truth, these clauses are likely defensive, particularly for tech companies. There is an almost 100% chance that if you started a company and left your job, your company will not register your coming or going in the slightest. If you’re some famous person that ends up starting some billion dollar company, and it was in an area highly relevant to your job, you mig…

It is disappointing but not surprising that this is the top comment. If you want to start a company on the side, choose a field unrelated to your current company. If there's even a small sense that you are exfiltrating IP, any company worth their salt will come after you hard as a punitive measure. And yes, even Oracle and Google would care about small-scale IP theft, even if it isn't making much money.

Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?

#168

Post by sonnyblarney »

Kaotique wrote: post #91
sonnyblarney wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What country are you from where it is normal that a company is logging and spying on its employers? " This is everywhere. "I have a company laptop but there is no logging whatsoever." I suggest they very well could be logging your web requests. This is very common. It's not like your manager is necessarily even going to have access to this. They're not interested in what you are doing, generally. But if there is a s…

I don't know if you mean logging of traffic on the company network or all network traffic on the laptop itself. The latter is definitely not happening here.

They'll log at a network level, not from software on your laptop.

If you work remotely obviously they can't.

But if you work in an office, there's a very good chance they are.

Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?

#169

Post by xivzgrev »

I’m not sure we are getting full situation. Companies never have a full on claim to all IP you do, rather only in certain circumstances

-using their IP -using their equipment -on their time

So get your own laptop, work on a side project outside of work hours, and don’t start a company that competes.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?

#170

Post by kanyethegreat »

ratherbefuddled wrote: post #166

There's a lot of awful legal advice in the comments here much of which ignores key issues like what exactly your contract says, which legal jurisdiction you are in and what you are planning to do. Ignore all of it. If you want to know about the legal consequences of something you would like to do, take your contract to a lawyer before you do it and pay for written advice. As for what you can do to be successful when…

Great advice. Number 2 is really hard to execute though. What are actionable steps you can take to really learn about an industry/domain. I wish I was a fly on the wall and could observe people's workflows. Thought about making a platform for this like lunchclub. Kinda like how kids shadow professions they may be interested in.
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