[hga]

Are you sure about that? I didn't study the issue at all, just read one or two items, but what I understood was that it closed a severability "loophole" that sounded like a very thin reed to depend on.

The very possibility of a lawsuit, even if you eventually won due to the strictness imposed on enforcement, is quite enough to quash a lot of startups. Sure, you can win, after N months and M thousand dollars spent not paying full attention to your startup (assuming you don't get TROed in the beginning). I'm also told that being the subject of a lawsuit is incredibility draining.

In California as I understand it your opponent won't even get to first base.

So, let me put it this way: in all the discussions of California's no non-compete regime, if Georgia was so good why did no ever say anything about it, as compared to e.g. Michigan? People have been pushing Atlanta as a potentially good startup area, why not advertise this advantage?

[_delirium]

Ah yeah, for startups I can buy that. Since Georgia's isn't/wasn't nearly as clear-cut as California's, it's much harder to get the lawsuit summarily thrown out, so it's a big drain for startups. The "de-facto impossible to enforce" part is more that as case law developed and somewhat expanded the "loophole", it became difficult for an employer to actually win a suit for violating a noncompete clause. But they could certainly drag it on for a while.

[hga]

Ah, yes.

And I can't believe that I forgot to mention how crippling this is when you try to raise capital, especially at the angel level. People want to invest in businesses, not lawsuit defenses, and these are high risk and hopefully high gain ventures. They don't want run an even higher risk that if you're indeed successful, your former employer will go after you with a rusty knife.

It's that risk to the high gain that's the real killer, e.g. look at all the people who've come out of the woodwork going after Facebook, some of them clearly weasels (and some not). They would have never bothered if Facebook was a "modest" success instead of a deci-billion dollar blowout, the next Google in terms of being the next big business high tech company.