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A couple ideas/suggestions/questions to the Work at a Startup team: - One of the reasons people join startups is when they want to start one someday. While Cal

A couple ideas/suggestions/questions to the Work at a Startup team: - One of the reasons people join startups is when they want to start one someday. While California has great protections for people to retain IP as long as it's not directly in conflict with their employer's line of work, the rest of the world is not so lucky. How about requiring all your portfolio companies to be explicitly side project friendly by adopting something like Github's IP agreement. Keep it simple : allow employees to work on their side projects on their own time using their own resources and as long as it's not directly competing, it's all good. This seems to be the implicit understanding already, but make it formal and set a good example for the industry to follow. More Context : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13921433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13921433 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13142327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13142327 - Any chance of expanding this to international remote workers? There are obvious legal challenges to hiring someone from a different jurisdiction, but maybe you can start out with simpler solutions like a having a standard legal template by hiring international remote workers as contractors which greatly simplifies the paperwork?

ryankicks 7y ago
Those are both great ideas. We can certainly suggest to YC companies that they adopt side-project-friendly legal in their terms of agreement. Whether they choose to do so is entirely up to them, but it's worth bringing to their attention. On international remote: for our Work at a Startup onboarding, we do ask your location and whether you're looking for remote roles. But I think you're right that we can go further by trying to help founders lower the bar to working with overseas engineers -- standard legal is a good starting point. Thanks for these ideas, and I'll post with updates as I have them/if I get blocked, as maybe others here have experience in doing so successfully & smoothly.

ryankicks 7y ago

Those are both great ideas. We can certainly suggest to YC companies that they adopt side-project-friendly legal in their terms of agreement. Whether they choose to do so is entirely up to them, but it's worth bringing to their attention. On international remote: for our Work at a Startup onboarding, we do ask your location and whether you're looking for remote roles. But I think you're right that we can go further by trying to help founders lower the bar to working with overseas engineers -- standard legal is a good starting point. Thanks for these ideas, and I'll post with updates as I have them/if I get blocked, as maybe others here have experience in doing so successfully & smoothly.