Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How to validate a startup idea whilst employed?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 153 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to validate a startup idea whilst employed?

#21

Post by jt2190 »

sarcasmatwork wrote: post #2

>employed under employment contract to assign both moral rights and intellectual property to their employer. This is usually when you're on company time with company assets. If you're at home/coffee shop and off the clock and on your assets/pc its your IP. Do you have a contract with current employer that has this specific language? I would understand a term for a non-compete agreement, but what you're saying does no…

> This is usually when you're on company time with company assets. If you're at home/coffee shop and off the clock and on your assets/pc its your IP… what you're saying does not sound right/legal from my perspective.

Employers need to know what their assets are, what they own. It greatly simplifies things for them if you have a contract that assigns them ownership of any invention you come up with while you’re their employee. This is especially true in early stage companies, where the business model might be evolving, and employees are working all hours from all over the place. Contracts like this are very common.

The best approach in this situation is to use your own computer and network to develop the core ideas for your business, but delay any formal business activities until you’ve left your job.

Re: Ask HN: How to validate a startup idea whilst employed?

#22

Post by gnicholas »

rockemsockem wrote: post #16

A lot of times you can validate whether a market exists without writing any code. You can engage in communities that would use your potential product and see if there are problems there that exist for a decent number of people. Once you're convinced and ready to start building I think you just have to quit like you're saying. I did exactly that about 6 months ago because I had the exact same type of contract (despite…

> you can validate whether a market exists without writing any code

This is true, but it's possible that even this act could indicate that the founder has developed valuable IP that his employer could claim. It would seem ridiculous to think that even just having an idea could make it assignable to your employer, despite not having actually written any of the code.

However, there are some circumstances where it could seem reasonable. For example, if you work in Industry X and come up with an idea related to Industry X and your employer's specific niche in that industry, it seems less unreasonable that your employer would care if you struck out on your own and started a startup in that niche. They would argue that your knowledge of that niche derived from your work as an employee, and they would try to tie your creation to proprietary information that you were privy to as an employee.

This isn't to say they would win — but they could cause you quite a headache if you built a successful company.

FWIW, IIAL and have seen folks argue over less!

Re: Ask HN: How to validate a startup idea whilst employed?

#23

Post by gnicholas »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #14

IANAL. Make sure you put in a carveout for every repo you have in GitHub. It helps to have a lot of public ones, then roll in your private ones into the list. Even if you have to pivot one of your private accounts, you get legal cover for working on it. Odds are the legal team won't bother checking on the contents of every single enumerated repo, and it would be insane to not hire you when you have those repos. I rec…

I wonder how this would work if you have a bunch of shell repos where you can add whatever you want later. That is, your employer surely wouldn't be fine with you creating a competing product based on trade secrets that you were exposed to as an employee, just because it resides in a repo that existed prior to your employment.

> it would be insane to not hire you when you have those repos.

My hiring at a large software company was delayed for weeks because of two enumerated carveouts related to software that had nothing to do with the company's business. And this was when I was being hired as a lawyer! I can imagine for devs or PMs they would be even more sensitive.

Re: Ask HN: How to validate a startup idea whilst employed?

#24

Post by ISL »

gnicholas wrote: post #19

Depends where you live. In California, there are limits to what your employer can force you to assign to them. Roughly speaking, if you do it on your own time and with your own equipment, and it doesn't relate to your employer's current/predicted business, it's yours. [1] Whether or not you're in CA, you should consider speaking to an employment lawyer in your jurisdiction to find out the relevant details. 1: https:/…

Washington State carves out exceptions too.

In addition to regulatory exceptions, some companies have policies where you can check in with the company to see if they would like to assert their IP rights over your work.

If you work at a computer chip manufacturer and you decide you'd like to moonlight developing robots that make nacho-cheese chips, there's a pretty good chance that HR will be willing to give you a written document waiving their IP assignment in a narrowly-tailored way.

I have successfully taken that approach in order to preserve my IP rights to continue my academic work and collaborations as I entered industry in an unrelated field.

Re: Ask HN: How to validate a startup idea whilst employed?

#25

Post by FreakLegion »

jackfruit2 wrote: post #3
sarcasmatwork wrote: post #2

>employed under employment contract to assign both moral rights and intellectual property to their employer. This is usually when you're on company time with company assets. If you're at home/coffee shop and off the clock and on your assets/pc its your IP. Do you have a contract with current employer that has this specific language? I would understand a term for a non-compete agreement, but what you're saying does no…

Yeah my contract is very wide in my opinion, given there is always some level of overlap when developing software. Unfortunaly I signed it unchallenged when needing employment during the pandemic :( Below is an excerpt from my contract: We understand that lots of our employees have tech related ideas that they work on outside of working hours. In a case where your idea overlaps or conflicts with the work of said comp…

There's no need to guess here. Outline the work you want to do and ask them to sign off on it. They should already have a formal process for handling these requests, which are pretty common for people who consult on the side. I've done this half a dozen times and even had it approved once when the technology was directly competitive, by a US defense contractor of all places, because I was targeting a market they didn't care about. You never know until you ask.

> Do folks go dark, build in secret, pretending they had executed their plan outside of the course/term of their employment?

JIT does seem to be more common than AOT. People do the early work in secret and delay the hard decisions until they absolutely have to be made. Most of the time the whole thing unravels before that point anyway, and all the agonizing about quitting was pointless.

Re: Ask HN: How to validate a startup idea whilst employed?

#26

Post by djbusby »

smitec wrote: post #10

A model I've uses is one of risk. Whatever your idea is there are going to be a number of potential reasons it might not work out. For some ideas the biggest risk is the market, does anyone want this? For others it might be the technology, is this even possible? In a lot of cases you can do things to reduce those risks and give yourself more confidence to jump ship and go all in. That might be talking to people, it m…

Most cases are the first: does anyone want this. With Customer Development before Product Development one can get the answer before building anything that may be covered by employment contract.

Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alavrez is a book that has details.

Edit: some jurisdiction these restrictions don't apply. That is: your off clock works cannot be claimed.

Not a Lawyer.

Re: Ask HN: How to validate a startup idea whilst employed?

#27

Post by summerlight »

I don't have useful advice applicable to your case, but we're going to live in very uncertain and adversarial macroeconomic environments for the coming years. If you're going to leave your job, then make sure that you're in a very solid financial position. One rule of thumb: can you live without any income for a year? Will it make your financial position significantly unstable?

Re: Ask HN: How to validate a startup idea whilst employed?

#28

Post by epicureanideal »

jt2190 wrote: post #21
sarcasmatwork wrote: post #2

>employed under employment contract to assign both moral rights and intellectual property to their employer. This is usually when you're on company time with company assets. If you're at home/coffee shop and off the clock and on your assets/pc its your IP. Do you have a contract with current employer that has this specific language? I would understand a term for a non-compete agreement, but what you're saying does no…

> This is usually when you're on company time with company assets. If you're at home/coffee shop and off the clock and on your assets/pc its your IP… what you're saying does not sound right/legal from my perspective. Employers need to know what their assets are, what they own. It greatly simplifies things for them if you have a contract that assigns them ownership of any invention you come up with while you’re their…

What would you consider formal business activities?

Re: Ask HN: How to validate a startup idea whilst employed?

#30

Post by jensneuse »

I've built WunderGraph (https://wundergraph.com) as a side project until it was ready for real "startup mode". I've asked my employer to give me an IP exclusion for the project in writing. Then I dedicated 1-2 hours in the morning and maybe at night as well on the weekend, depending on my energy level.

I've developed the product until it had a certain maturity. I've then onboarded two co-founders who also helped part-time. One helped with marketing, one with develoent. I've found them through YC cofounder match and the dev from GitHub OSS projects. Together, we've landed our first paying customer. With a few more leads in the pipeline, we were able to start the fundraising process.

We then slowly transitioned from side project to full time. The complete team is now full time for 2 months and we're very happy how things are going.

I can say that it was a damn struggle to get all this up and running with 2 young kids and without ruining the family. I'm thankful that my wife is very supportive. It's weird when your partner accepts that you work 3 hours per day on the weekend while the kids sleep. But there was no other way. It needed to be done. Of you really believe in what you do, it's possible, even with a family. If you have questions, please ask.

Post reply on HN