Employed with a side of startup

There is interesting story about moonlighting at Microsoft.

For many years Microsoft required employees with side projects to submit and get approved moonlighting request. The problem was that it was not easy to get approved for start-up-like projects: neither management nor legal didn't want to take responsibility and were pushing requests back and forth for months.

Finally, in the beginning of 2006, some brilliant legal head solved the issue once and for all: they removed approving process entirely and released set of guidelines you have to use _yourserf_ to determine if there is conflict of interest. So in one simple move they not only reduced amount of work legal department has to do, but also reduced possibility that employees would choose to create start up by pushing everyone in gray area and keeping door open for later litigation threat.

BTW, if you have day job you want to incorporate early so you can do proper assignment of invention related to your start up (in addition to incorporating for liability reasons).

I think nonsolicit is quite unfair. You can't force any of your co-workers to leave with you, and if they're happy where they are most of them won't. If the company sucks, a Good Friend would try to take as many with him as possible when he found something better. That's just people helping other people out of crappy situations.

I've heard some people espouse the idea that there might be some ethical misconduct in courting [soon-to-be] ex-co-workers. I don't see any basis for that belief. Again, the most you can do is make an offer; if your company's staff is all going to jump ship when someone comes to them with vague and shakey musings about founding a startup together, that should really tell you something about the company you work for. There's nothing wrong with making a proposition, imo.

I have worked with people who have signed oppressive contracts. I find it deeply sad that some people have done that. Neither of my co-workers from my last job would be available if I wanted to proposition them, as they are both engaged in multi-year contracts which state departure before Month Year is punishable by big, big financial penalties. Only for the employee, of course; the employer can terminate them at its leisure without any responsibility according to these documents.