NLRB acting general counsel rescinds non-compete labor policy

We need stronger enforcement all around

I had been doing all the selling for my tech startup, this, on top of handling all product engineering, manufacturing and, well, everything else. It was time to get a sales person to take-on that role.

I put it out there that I was looking for someone. I interviewed many. Most with a good deal of experience in the industry. One of my resellers called and asked if I would consider hiring his outgoing marketing guy. Zero experience in sales. He also lacked in-depth domain knowledge. Tabula rasa, if you will.

Well, I did. And I also paid him above average as well as commission and benefits.

What followed was approximately a year of intense training to get him up to speed on not just our products, but the science and technology of the relevant domain. We sold to very technical people, mostly engineers, so you had to be know what you were talking about.

A bit over six months after "graduating" he took a job as sales manager with one of my largest competitors. He probably got a nice boost in pay. He used me --quite literally, me, because I was the only one who could train him-- to learn and go from his resume being utterly irrelevant for the position, to being valuable enough to hire.

This wasn't about money. He was making double what our engineers were making. He told me why he did it: He did not want to work for a startup. He wanted to work for an established company.

That absolutely fried my brain. Of course, there was no non-compete. The investment in time and money to get this person up to speed easily exceeded a million dollars at the time. Him leaving also caused damage across more than one front. First, I had to replace him. That took time and money. Second, he took everything I taught him and everything he knew about us and used it against us in his new role working for a competitor. I don't know if I can quantify the damage twenty years later.

The consequence of that one event was simple: I have never again hired someone that required a significant amount of training. Nope. Not doing that shit again. They can go learn somewhere else. Because there are people out there who will gladly use you to move a few steps up the ladder and not have any sense of loyalty or gratitude at all. In a self-funded startup you sometimes do things like pay salaries using credit cards when things are rough (which I have done a couple of time). In other words, this can be very personal.

Again, I do not personally like non-competes and I would not advise anyone to sign one. In fact, I recently did exactly this with my son, who got an offer from --oddly enough-- a YC-funded company who wanted him to sign a non-compete. I told him "fuck no".

However, as I said, I fully understand why some businesses feel there's a need for it. My solution is to never again be "Professor Martin" (a term that stuck in my head when a friend warned me not to do that). My guess is that lots of companies avoid hiring inexperienced because the cost to train isn't trivial and being used as a stepping stone in this way is more costly than just the raw financial cost of training.