[leelin]

Oh yes, I was also there! But I remember many people came out of that event hearing very different things from PG (there were also small presentations from YC alums hiring).

I remember PG saying NYC had clearly overtaken Boston as #2 startup up in the US, partly because Boston investors were more risk averse and focused on the late stages. Then he asked whether NYC could rival the Bay Area for #1.

I don't think he made a definitive conclusion one way or another. I even remember him saying the unstoppable force of the startup revolution would hit the immovable object - that NYC is already known as many other hubs (finance in particular).

The one concept that stood out was his argument that "chance encounters" with people who can help your startup are crucial. Good luck sometimes hits when you least expect it, but NYC at the time didn't have all the ingredients in place the way the Bay Area had. A month later he wrote this down more formally in "Why Startup Hubs Work"

http://www.paulgraham.com/hubs.html

[btilly]

To me a bigger deal is that New York law by default grants copyright on work done in your spare time on your own equipment to your employer. Therefore if you try to grow a side hustle into a business, you can unexpectedly find that you don't actually have what you thought you had.

I know multiple people, directly and indirectly, who have been caught by this. Knowledge of this problem contributed to my desire to move from New York to California. Most of the stories of squashed startups will never be heard because they never got anywhere. But it limits how dynamic New York's startup ecosystem can become.

This is not to say that there won't be successful startups. Just fewer than they would have been. And people who you'd want to be able to start them, are shut out.

[jkaplowitz]

As of last time I checked a few years ago, NY law was silent on rules for the copyright ownership scenario you describe.

That leaves the federal default in place of "creator keeps the copyright when there is no explicit assignment unless it qualifies as a work for hire." Only work done within the scope of employment would be employer-owned by default, not unrelated spare time projects.

However, indeed NY's legal silence on this point allows contracts to explicitly assign the category of work you describe to the employer, if they include wording to that effect, subject only to any case law that might seem something excessive (not sure what NY courts have said on this topic).

The difference with California in this regard is that they actually prohibit and refuse to enforce contractual assignment of unrelated spare-time projects to the employer. Far stronger than a default.

The attitude to post-employment non-competes is also very different: aside from a very narrow M&A exception, California flat out bans those. NY disfavors them and courts often limit or discard them as unreasonable upon examination, but they're not categorically banned. That has a significant chilling effect.

Note I'm not a lawyer, just a law-geek former law student layman. Pay for qualified legal advice with appropriate licensure if you need that (I do that too despite my legal interests).

[sambroner]

Do you have a reference for this? And are there similar or opposite laws affecting other states?