Ask HN: Why shouldn't I leave Google?
From someone who&#x27;s been there done that: former Googler, now running engineering at a startup. It doesn&#x27;t get any easier to come up with a startup idea once you leave mothership. I know it seems counterintuitive, since once you leave you have nothing else to do but come up with ideas, but you could find that after 6-9 months you still don&#x27;t have anything you really believe in. That&#x27;s what happened to me circa 2008. In the end I just joined Google back then. So your mentor seems to be right, even though what he&#x27;s suggesting is not 100% ethical: if you read your contract you&#x27;ll see that all of your software related ideas are property of Google. But they can&#x27;t read your mind (yet) so there&#x27;s no way for them to enforce this, unless you tell them about it or do something stupid, like using company laptop (or Borg, or Google3 code) to work on it.