Alliance for Open Competition

Dr. Garmaise is an Associate Professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He has a working paper titled “Ties that Truly Bind: Non-competition Agreements, Executive Compensation & Firm Investment”.

Paul Maeder from Highland Capital summarized one of the tables from the white paper recently. It shows that the State of MA enforces non-competes significantly higher than other states.

I highly recommend reading the full paper.

Read the post on GigaOm today by Bijan Sabet, Spark Capital.

Mass High Tech recent article about non-competes and their impact on innovation. I like Nancy Edwards Cronin’s quote from the piece :

Nancy Edwards Cronin, principal of ipCapital Group Inc., a Williston, Vt.-based consulting firm.

“If these companies are focused too heavily on attrition and heavy-handed control of the intellectual capital leaving, they very well may not be properly encouraging innovation” themselves, Cronin said.

Read the full article here.

The exodus at Yahoo has been happening for some time now.

Before Microsoft formally announced their takeover bid, they were actively recruiting Yahoo employees. 

There is still a lot of great talent at Yahoo. Josh at First Round blogs today about his ad campaign targeted at Yahoo folks looking to join a startup.

Big companies often don’t work out for everyone. Sometimes the big company may end up losing itself as well. And you should be able to take your domain experience and move elsewhere without the restriction of a non-compete clause. 

Another recent example: check out this post from VentureBeat about Meebo hiring a senior person from Yahoo’s Messenger. 

I’m sure those folks at Yahoo are happy they don’t have to deal with non-compete agreements like employees here in MA/NY/WA and elsewhere have to deal with.

And VCs should be happy about that too. It’s important to the startup ecosystem and the market as a whole.

Let’s get rid of non-compete clauses everywhere. 

As some of you may have noticed we added a page to this site with an early but growing list of supporters.

If you would like to add your name and support our efforts - please send an email to OpenCompetition@gmail.com

 Thanks. 

Scott Kirsner has a great list of suggestions for a New New England in 2008.

And item #3 on his list is getting rid of non competes in this state.

Right on Scott!

We sent an open letter to Governor Patrick on Dec 6th.

I’m pleased to report that last week we received a response letter. 

We look forward to future discussions with the Governor about this important issue. 

Click here to read the full article.

The Boston Globe has an article today about non-competes (free but registration required).EMC very much supports the use of non-competes. Furthermore they believe that without them they are exposed and at risk somehow.

“The lifeblood of EMC is based on our intellectual property, and unless you have a patent or something tangible, intellectual property is in the person’s mind, and in order for us to protect our over $1 billion investment in research and development, we need to ensure people can’t take intellectual property and use it against us,” Dacier said. 

But they didn’t seem to think it hurt California based VMWare when EMC acquired that company a few years ago for $635M.Google’s Rich Miner also weighs in and shares some specific examples why he’s opposed to non-compete agreements.

“In the high-tech space, the rate of innovation is based on the spreading of ideas and the confluence of ideas. Cross-fertilization and rapid innovation is helped when people are free to move, to germinate new ideas,” said Miner, group manager for mobile platforms at Google who has been hiring new employees for Google’s Cambridge office without a noncompete clause. 

So the looming question is: Why are non-competes so important to local EMC but not to Google and other very successful California based companies.

Lots of folks think non-competes may not be significant because they don’t hear about court cases.This is incorrect. First, there are examples of court cases in this state. But the bigger issue is that it causes fear & risk. And that’s why it’s a silient killer.Read Bijan Sabet’s post, “Are non-competes enforceable?” about this very topic.