>I'm really interested in knowing to what degree someone should be paranoid. Are you potentially risking your entire business because you once checked your work

>I'm really interested in knowing to what degree someone should be paranoid. Are you potentially risking your entire business because you once checked your work webmail from a personal computer or checked a personal email account from a work phone? You should be paranoid, but just checking your email isn't a big deal unless you start co-mingling secret information. But under CA trade secret law, you can commit trade secret misappropriation without ever taking a document or file. Mind trade secrets are still trade secrets. If your employer creates a new algorithm that nobody outside the company knows about. You can't recreate it from memory in your own company. As you can imagine, this gets into grays areas real quick. It's impossible to neatly distinguish between skills you learned at work and trade secrets you learned. I'll leave the business advice to the businessmen, but I've seen several investment/buyouts killed because during an IP review it was discovered that the startup was in the same space as a previous employer.