Call me crazy, but there&#x27;s a huge difference between non-competes in startup-land and non-competes in corporate america.<p>In a startup, the whole endeavor rides on secrets. The company doesn&#x27;t more money, talent, or employees than big companies. This applies to a pretty broad definition of startups that includes unicorn and high-growth public companies. The only things that matter to those companies are what they&#x27;re doing and how they&#x27;re doing it, and in many startups, every employee has specific knowledge that would be valuable to a bigger company or competitor. [Ironically, the state with most of these companies (CA) doesn&#x27;t allow non-competes, so it&#x27;s obviously not death, probably because trying to replicate a startup&#x27;s success means starting after they&#x27;ve become successful, so it may not matter. The point is, non-competes make sense in a world where knowledge is core to the business.]<p>In a large company, execution dominates. You can go all the way to factory worker, but anything that looks like &quot;use your trade skills to make this thing&quot; obviously shouldn&#x27;t be protected by non-compete. Trade skills should cut across companies.<p>There&#x27;s ways to argue that, say, developers for CA startups could go either way. React &#x2F; Ember &#x2F; Angular &#x2F; etc. is certainly a trade skill. I&#x27;m going to hire somebody eventually to help with munging our data set, plugging into more APIs, and figuring out how to make sense of the data that comes back. If that person went to work for another marketing analytics company, I wouldn&#x27;t be too happy, because to some extent, our specific mix of APIs to integrate with and what we got from them is proprietary. If an engineer I&#x27;d worked with and developed that knowledge with went to somebody trying to solve the same problem as me, I&#x27;d be kind of pissed. Analytics the way we do it isn&#x27;t a trade skill, and I expect an informal agreement that you&#x27;re not going to go work for one of the ~5 companies in the world doing something really similar.