[kirse]

Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools... they often don’t realize that the internal tools they had at prior jobs are a great place to get inspiration from.

Interesting that YC is willing to toe the IP theft line on this one. I think plenty of us do in fact realize that homegrown corporate ideas / apps could likely be turned into external new businesses, but then the blurred ethics and legality of doing so occurs a few thoughts later.

An F100 I worked for had an entire corporate group for the purposes of spinning off their IP so that it could be done ethically/legally and give the employees' new startup the boost it needed. Several of these startups have gone on to $MMM/$B valuations. If you're at Boring BigCo and thinking of ripping one of their developed ideas for a small YC check, I'd advise against it.

[eastbound]

Not to underestimate the power of evil, but ideas are cheap and execution matters. One never reproduces an idea as-is, if only because your service should be multitenant. On the other hand, going to BigCo’s legal department to beg for a spin off of an activity you’ve seen, is as risky as the next 10 stages of your startup.

Especially since the first stage of your startup is to test the waters with an MVP, which leads to a quasi-immediate pivot from the initial idea. Example:

> web application which would combine a project manager, contact manager, and to-do list

became Blogger and was sold to Google in 2003 (by Jack Dorsey).