| I am not currently doing this, but have in the past. What follows is only my experience (full time roles in bay area startups with very standard contracts) There are two points of overlap between your employer and your side business to be mindful of. 1) time and resources. Generally speaking, your employer owns all IP you develop at work, or using work resources. In practice, I've never seen an employer be a dick about this, but you should still be exceedingly careful. It's really easy to be 100% free and clear on this one. Just don't ever do side project work (to include answering emails, etc) on work machines or on premises at work. 2) intellectually property. This one's trickier. The agreement that matters most you already signed, if your employer uses one. It's basically a list of stuff you've already invented or have as a side project, and it exists specifically as a papertrail. eg: I work on finance software interfaces as my full time job, and have also done work on this for myself on the side. This agreement says "I created product X, which does Y with method Z" as part of the employment agreement, so that they can't later claim that I only came up with Y and Z because of my employer's training or resources, thus entitling employer to the project. How careful you need to be here depends on the thematic proximity of your employer and your side project. If you work for dropbox and your side project is flappy bird, you're probably fine. If you work for adobe and your side project is an alternative to photoshop, do a lot of homework and consider talking to a lawyer. TL;DR: don't use employer time or resources, do use common sense. |