

Ask HN: Disclosing your startup to current employer - tmaly

A colleague and I want to do a startup on the side outside of work.  However, our employer requires that we disclose outside business activities.  Since our employment is &quot;at will&quot;  it seems this disclosure would be more like getting approve rather than being a disclosure.  Has anyone had this experience?  How did you go about it and what was the outcome?
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jhwhite
Is the startup along the same lines as the work you're doing now? My last job
I was a Software PM in an engineering studio and they had a clause in the
handbook that any outside work done was owned by the company.

One developer tried to put an app in the Android Store, he was making a
business app and the company was a gambling company. And our employer said the
app would be their property. So he just killed the effort.

I'd check for clauses like that also.

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tmaly
I checked and our IP clause is restricted to "scope of employment" I had
previously spoken to our legal/compliance department and they said it was
limited to the type of work I do. The idea we have for the startup is not
related to the industry we work in.

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gexla
This seems strange to me. I would come up with a list of business ideas every
day and hand that into the employer. Maybe even come up with a list of places
where I could host a micro site for free, piggy back off their domain name and
put up a landing page for the idea. To monetize it, add Adsense.

