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Leaving for a competitor? Onboarding new employees? Avoid accusations of trade secret theft
Nick Saenz
Contributor
Contributor
Nick Saenz is a partner at Lewis & Llewellyn LLP, a boutique litigation firm in San Francisco specializing in complex corporate litigation.
When a company hires talent away from a competitor, onboarding the new employee can pose significant legal risks for both the company and the new employee. A fundamental aspect of Silicon Valley is that employees are generally free to move between competitors.
This unrestricted movement of talent facilitates the robust competition that helps drive the Silicon Valley economy. While this is no doubt positive, unfettered employment mobility also creates unique challenges when it comes to protecting a company’s trade secrets, which are the lifeblood of many Silicon Valley companies.
Because of California’s policies regarding free employment mobility, unlike in most other states, California companies cannot protect their trade secrets with non-compete contracts. So, they instead rely heavily on trade secret laws for protection.
And, of course, when trade secret theft occurs, it is often when an employee transitions from one company to another. Thus, when a key employee gives notice that he or she is leaving for a competitor, it sets off alarm bells for the soon-to-be former company.
Unfortunately, because of the hypersensitivity to protecting trade secrets, many departing employees who have no interest in actually taking their former company’s trade secrets get accused of theft. This allegation can trigger a long, stressful, expensive legal process for both the employee and the new company, and sometimes cost the employee his or her reputation and new job.
This article explains how this situation arises and provides some practical considerations for how the employee transitioning jobs, and the onboarding company, can avoid an unnecessary legal fight.
1. California companies’ aggressive protection of trade secrets.
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Verified Expert Growth Marketing Agency: NoGood
NoGood CEO Mostafa Elbermawy describes how they evaluate a client’s growth challenges by quoting Zen teacher Hunryu Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are only a few.” Rather than deferring to in-house playbooks, NoGood adopts an open mind combined with a methodical, data-driven approach to find untapped growth opportunities for its clients. Learn more about how NoGood came to be and why they’re willing to say no to potential clients.
On NoGood’s approach to growth:
“Our work is methodical. It’s intentional. We have to talk about it. We are very transparent about what we do and it’s completely process oriented. Hacking is a misnomer. Growth is not about clever shortcuts. It has to be sustainable and repeatable, and if it’s not, we won’t do it.”
On NoGood’s proudest accomplishment:
“They helped us launch our business. They are our CMO and our CTO. Would recommend to anyone.” Erica Tsypin, Washington D.C., Co-Founder & COO, Steer
“Our success in jumpstarting Steer’s business is one of our proudest accomplishments this year. Steer is an electric car subscription startup that asked us to increase their activations. Basically, our job was to generate new active members, which not only meant encouraging more users to download the app, upload a license, and get approved, but it also meant delivering a car to a member’s door, having them drive that car and leaving a review. We were able to demonstrate signup traction for Steer and help them launch in under three months.”
Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.
Interview with NoGood CEO and Growth Lead Mostafa Elbermawy
Yvonne Leow: To kick things off, how did you get into growth?
Mostafa Elbermawy: Well, I went to school for archaeology, but hieroglyphics weren’t paying the bills, so I taught myself how to code and started a web design studio after college. I started building websites for clients, and they started asking me how to drive more users to their sites to help grow their business.
I started tinkering with growth out of curiosity, and eventually joined the digital experience team at American Express. That job helped me gain some marketing and growth experience, and I ended up falling in love with that part of the job.
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How to make remote work work
Every time I see a “the future of work is remote” article, I think to myself: “How backwards! How retro! How quaint!” That future is now, for many of us. I’ve been a fully remote developer-turned-CTO for a full decade. So I’m always baffled by people still wrestling with whether remote work is viable for their company. That jury rendered its verdict a long time ago.
One reason companies still struggle with it is that remote work amplifies the negative effects of bad practices. If everyone’s in one place, you can dither, handwave, vacillate, micromanage, and turn your workplace into an endless wasteland of unclear uncertainty, punctuated by ad-hoc last-second crisis meetings — and your employees will probably still conspire against your counterproduction to get something done, albeit much less than what they’re capable of.
If they’re remote, though, progress via conspiracy and adhocracy is no longer an option. If they’re remote, you need decisive confidence, clear direction, iterative targets, independent responsibilities, asynchronous communications, and cheerful chatter. Let me go over each of those:
Decisive confidence. Suppose Vivek in Delhi, Diego in Rio, and Miles in Berlin are all on a project. (An example I’m drawing from my real life.) It’s late your time. You have to make a decision about the direction of their work. If you sleep on it, you’re writing off multiple developer-days of productivity.
Sometimes they have enough responsibilities to have other things to work on. (More on that below.) Sometimes you don’t have to make the decision because they have enough responsibility to do so themselves. (More on that below.) But sometimes you have to make the business-level decision based on scant information. In cases like this, remember the military maxim: “Any decision is better than no decision.”
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Verified Expert Growth Marketing Agency: Growth Pilots
Growth Pilots is one of the more exclusive performance marketing agencies in San Francisco, but they know how to help high-growth startups excel at paid marketing. CEO and founder Soso Sazesh credits his personal experiences as an entrepreneur along with his team’s deep understanding of high-growth company needs and challenges as to what sets Growth Pilots apart. Whether you’re a founder of a seed or Series D stage startup, learn more about Growth Pilots’ approach to growth and partnerships.
Advice to early-stage founders
“I think a lot of times, especially at the early stage, founders don’t have a lot of time so they’re willing to find the path of least resistance to get their paid acquisition channels up and running. If things are not properly set up and managed, this can lead to a false negative in terms of writing off a channel’s effectiveness or scalability. It’s worth talking to an expert, even if it’s just for advice, to ensure you don’t fall into this trap.”
On Growth Pilots’ operations
“They have good business acumen, move fast and work as an extension to your internal team.” Guillaume McIntyre, SF, Head of Acquisition Marketing, Instacart
“Something we pride ourselves on is working with relatively few clients at a time so we can really focus all of our team’s efforts and energy on doing the highest quality work. Each of our team members works on a maximum of two to three accounts, and therefore they’re able to get very invested in each client’s business and integrated into their team. We really try to simulate the internal team dynamics as much as possible and pairing that with our external capabilities and expertise.”
Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.
Interview with Growth Pilots Founder and CEO Soso Sazesh
Yvonne Leow: Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into growth.
Soso Sazesh: I grew up in northern Minnesota where there is no tech industry whatsoever and then after high school, I came out to Silicon Valley and got exposed to the epicenter of the technology industry. I became very interested in startups and hustled to find startup internships so I could get experience and learn how they operated.
After a couple of startup internships, I got accepted to UC Berkeley and that gave me even more exposure to the startup ecosystem with all of the startup events and resources that UC Berkeley had to offer. I worked on a couple of startup projects while I was at UC Berkeley, and I taught myself scrappy product management and how to get software built using contract developers.
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How we scaled our startup by being remote first
Michael Risse
Contributor
Contributor
Michael Risse is VP & chief marketing officer at Seeq, a company building advanced applications for engineers to accelerate insights into process manufacturing data. He was formerly a consultant with big data platform and application companies, and prior to that worked with Microsoft for 20 years.
Startups are often associated with the benefits and toys provided in their offices. Foosball tables! Free food! Dog friendly! But what if the future of startups was less about physical office space and more about remote-first work environments? What if, in fact, the most compelling aspect of a startup work environment is that the employees don’t have to go to one?
A remote-first company model has been Seeq’s strategy since our founding in 2013. We have raised $35 million and grown to more than 100 employees around the globe. Remote-first is clearly working for us and may be the best model for other software companies as well.
So, who is Seeq and what’s been the key to making the remote-first model work for us? And why did we do it in the first place?
Seeq is a remote-first startup – i.e. it was founded with the intention of not having a physical headquarters or offices, and still operates that way – that is developing an advanced analytics application that enables process engineers and subject matter experts in oil & gas, pharmaceuticals, utilities, and other process manufacturing industries to investigate and publish insights from the massive amounts of sensor data they generate and store.
To succeed, we needed to build a team quickly with two skill sets: 1) software development expertise, including machine learning, AI, data visualization, open source, agile development processes, cloud, etc. and 2) deep domain expertise in the industries we target.
Which means there is no one location where we can hire all the employees we need: Silicon Valley for software, Houston for oil & gas, New Jersey for fine chemicals, Seattle for cloud expertise, water utilities across the country, and so forth. But being remote-first has made recruiting and hiring these high-demand roles easier much easier than if we were collocated.
Image via Seeq Corporation
Job postings on remote-specific web sites like FlexJobs, Remote.co and Remote OK typically draw hundreds of applicants in a matter of days. This enables Seeq to hire great employees who might not call Seattle, Houston or Silicon Valley home – and is particularly attractive to employees with location-dependent spouses or employees who simply want to work where they want to live.
But a remote-first strategy and hiring quality employees for the skills you need is not enough: succeeding as a remote-first company requires a plan and execution around the “3 C’s of remote-first”.
The three requirements to remote-first success are the three C’s: communication, commitment and culture.
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Who helped your startup grow? Nominate a growth marketing agency.
Growth marketing is critical to a startup’s survival, but it’s not always clear how to successfully pull it off. How do you jump the chasm from one to 10 million customers? Should you recruit an in-house growth team or hire an agency? How do you actually get content marketing to work? How much money should you spend before writing off or doubling down on a marketing channel? What does it take to build an extraordinary team at every stage of your startup?
There isn’t a silver bullet when it comes to growth, but we are tapping some of the most brilliant minds in growth marketing to share their experiences and advice to entrepreneurs.
Last month, we launched an initiative to find the industry’s best growth marketing agencies, and since then entrepreneurs from all around the world have submitted their nominations.
If you haven’t already, take two minutes to nominate a growth marketing agency that has helped your company scale and reach its target customers.
We’re zeroing in on a short list of top firms, and we’ll begin publishing their profiles in the next few weeks, but founder recommendations, like yours, help determine who we feature.
Similar to our work with startup lawyers and brand designers, our goal is to make it easier and faster for entrepreneurs to find the right service provider, but without real and relevant founder recommendations, we can’t accomplish our mission. Growth is the latest iteration of Verified Experts (with more to come).
Help us support early-stage startups by nominating a growth marketing agency you’ve worked with.
Have any questions? Email ec_editors@techcrunch.com
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Verified Expert Brand Designer: Milkinside
Gleb Kuznetsov refuses to settle for less. After spending years leading product design for startups and corporate clients, Gleb started a boutique branding agency, Milkinside, that helps clients translate new technologies into useful products.
Gleb and his team of experienced creators are committed to serving the end user, which is why they love taking products from zero to launch. Their services are expensive, partly due to their expertise in product development, motion graphic design and animation, but we spoke to Gleb about why Milkinside is more than just a branding agency and how they strive to be the best.
Why Gleb created Milkinside:
“I wanted to create a team that wasn’t just an agency that companies could contract, but a partner that would support the client’s product development from beginning to end. Everything from the product narrative, product branding, product design, UI user experience, motion design, design languages, motion design languages, etc. I looked around the industry and didn’t see what I was envisioning so I created my dream company, Milkinside, in 2018.”
“Gleb has one of those rare skills that can make ordinary, plain parts of a design come to life and doing so in a beautiful and useful way. Always pushing the boundaries.” Jacob Hvid, Stockholm, Sweden, CEO and Co-founder at Abundo
On common founder mistakes:
“There are a lot of founders who believe they created useful technology and are absolutely certain people will use it. But everything is moot if users aren’t able to understand your product narrative and how it fits into their lives. Establishing a product narrative at an early stage is essential. A lot of founders will try to create a minimum viable product as soon as possible, but they aren’t thinking about the narrative, branding, the product design, and how everything comes together.”
Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup brand designers and agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.
Interview with Milkinside Founder and Director of Product Design Gleb Kuznetsov
Yvonne Leow: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got into the world of branding and design?
Gleb Kuznetsov: I was 10 years old when I started programming and learning different coding languages. At the age of 15, I shifted to design and became pretty passionate about what could be possible in the digital world. I worked as a product designer for 15 years before I started Milkinside. I worked for big consumer product companies across various verticals and platforms. When I was a chief design officer at a startup, I was responsible for everything from the product design, UI design, branding, advertising to producing product explainer videos.
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HeyJobs, a ‘talent acquisition’ platform out of Berlin, raises $12M Series A
HeyJobs, a three-year-old Berlin startup that helps large employers scale recruitment, has raised $12 million in Series A funding.
The round is led by Notion Capital, with participation from existing investors Creathor Ventures, Rocket Internet’s GFC and newly re-branded Heartcore Capital.
Founded in 2016 and launched the following year, HeyJobs aims to tackle the recruitment problem European employers are facing due to steep declines in available workforce as the so-called the “boomer” generation nears retirement (this is seeing Germany alone losing 500,000 workers annually, apparently).
The HeyJobs platform leverages machine learning in an attempt to make high-skilled recruitment more scalable. It promises to match talent with job profiles and draw in the best candidates via targeted marketing and a “personalized application and assessment flow.”
“We use a fully automated technological approach to help candidates find jobs and companies find employees,” says HeyJobs co-founder and CEO Marius Luther.
“For example, we deploy multiple machine learning algorithms to find the right potential candidates for a specific role (asking ‘who are the most likely candidates for an intensive care nurse role in East London?’). Our technology then makes sure candidates see the job proposal on channels such as Facebook, Instagram, job platforms and across the web.”
In addition, Luther says that HeyJobs’ personalized assessment ensures that the company only delivers to employers high-quality, hireable candidates, something he dubs as “predictable hiring” at scale.
“Our clients are typically the talent acquisition teams of employers with high-volume recruitment needs,” he explains. “In Germany, 8/10 largest employers (by headcount) are our clients. Typical industries would be logistics (i.e. DPD, UPS), retail (i.e. Vodafone) and hospitality (i.e. h-hotels, Five Guys). However our real customer is the non-academic job seeker who is looking for a job that will help him/her live a more fulfilling life — be it by being paid more, switching to better employment conditions or finding a job closer to home.”
To that end, HeyJobs says it is now serving more than 500 enterprise clients, including United Parcel Service, PayPal, Five Guys, Vodafone and Securitas. The company generates revenue via a range of business models, from subscription to per-hire success fees.
“The cost per hire is typically a fraction of what clients would pay job boards on a per-post basis or what they would pay to staffing firms on a per-hire basis,” adds the HeyJobs CEO.
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Verified Expert Brand Designer: Kristine Arth
After spending a decade working at international design and branding agencies, Kristine Arth launched her own independent branding agency called Lobster Phone last April. Since then, she’s launched 22 brands under her unofficial tagline “I don’t sleep.” Lobster Phone, however, is all about creating iconic brands with bold personality, which Kristine passionately delivers to her clients. We spoke to Kristine about her branding philosophy, the story behind the name Lobster Phone, and why she loves working with founders.
On working with founders:
“My specialty is people, honestly. I don’t find that I focus in any category, field, or particular segment of an industry is my focus. My specialty is working with people and understanding their background because entrepreneurs have a very different outlook on life. They will climb that mountain at all costs, and I feel very similarly. My sign is Capricorn, I’m a goat. So I will always climb to the top of that mountain. I feel very in line with entrepreneurs in that way because I want to help them do their best work.”
“Kristine is what every person dreams of in a design partner to give your brand a soul and heart.” Julián Ríos Cantú, México City, Mexico, Co-founder and CEO, Eva Tech
On common startup mistakes:
“Entrepreneurs will come to me and say, “I want a logo, I want a campaign, I want this.” And I will say, you need a brand, you need strategy, you need a foundational promise to sell to your clients. And with that foundational brand strategy and a flexible brand, we’ll get what you want. The common mistake is to come with a solution versus coming in with the problem.”
Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup brand designers and agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.
The Interview
Yvonne Leow: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got into branding?
Kristine Arth: I originally thought I was going to be a ceramist. I went to school at Columbia in Chicago, and studied ceramics for about half a semester before I discovered the computer lab, and was like “Oh my God, everything is happening so fast there, this is amazing. It’s for me.” So I quickly moved into graphic design and never looked back. I started in advertising and marketing, and worked in Chicago for about 10 years at Leo Burnett, Wunderman, and then moved out to San Francisco to start fresh. Fuseproject, a top industrial design and branding agency, reached out to me, had me come in for an interview and the rest is history.
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How to source hard-to-fill programming positions
Zack Burt
Contributor
Contributor
Zack Burt is an American computer programmer. He founded Code For Cash, the tech recruiting firm.
The competition is intense for great tech talent, and it’s even harder to find the most qualified people who are also the right fit for your company
This article shares some practical processes that you can add to your human resources function in order to accelerate the programmer pipeline, based on the years I have spent as a hiring focused software engineer at growing startups and now running my own recruiting firm.
Our recruiting strategy is surprisingly simple, and boils down to optimizing various segments of the sourcing funnel: awareness, pageviews, and application submits.
What ties these tactics together, though, is you, your company, what you’re offering, and how you approach the people you want to hire. If you want to build a strong, diverse team, you need to develop a thoughtful, empathetic and proactive approach before you can optimize.
Within the article we cover:
- The mixed value of tech meetups
- Cold outreach
- Deciding who you’re targeting
- Prospecting through developer sites like Github
- Channels
- LinkedIn (yes) and LinkedIn ads (probably not)
- Reddit ads (yes)
- Craigslist (really, yes)
- Alumni networking
- Techniques for improving conversion rates
In the article’s appendix, I also provide our company’s 2019 checklist process — eighteen steps that we delegate to manage our sourcing process.
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