How I Beat The Noncompete

In the summer of 2012, I joined Systems In Motion, an Ann Arbor-based contracting company which had a couple of hundred of software engineers on staff who worked on projects for SIM clients. In 2013, Kaybus, an early-stage startup based in Mountain View, contacted SIM looking for engineers who were either experienced in Ruby on Rails or in the javascript framework called Ember. Since I checked both those boxes I was assigned to the Kaybus account.

Fueled by VC money, Kaybus expanded rapidly, growing engineering centers in both Mountain View and Bangalore. Kaybus also contracted for more engineers from SIM, and I wound up managing a team of four in Ann Arbor.

In 2014, Kaybus wanted to hire me directly since I knew the code base well and they figured that I would be less likely to move on to other projects if I worked for them. I wanted to work for Kaybus because I was increasingly unhappy at SIM. However, even though Kaybus offered to pay SIM a fairly good amount to induce them to release me from my contract, and promised to continue to contract with SIM for more engineers, SIM refused, saying that allowing their employees to leave to work for SIM clients didn’t fit their business model. Because of a noncompete clause in my employment contract with SIM, I couldn’t just quit SIM and work for Kaybus.

The noncompete clause said that I couldn’t work for any company that was a client of SIM’s at the time I left SIM for one year. So Kaybus terminated its contract with SIM, and a few weeks later I left SIM and joined Kaybus. Since Kaybus was no longer a SIM client when I left, there was nothing SIM could do about it. SIM’s obstinacy in refusing to let me go resulted in them losing not only me but the entire Kaybus contract.

Epilogue

SIM has gone through a couple of ownership changes and is now a part of NTT Data. They also closed that particular loophole in their noncompete.

Kaybus continued to grow, and I wound up managing teams in both the US and India. However, rancorous disputes about the direction of the company and the intended market for the product resulted in a lot of C-level churn. My boss, the VP of Engineering, decided he had had enough and left in early 2016. His replacement and I agreed on almost nothing. He didn’t like ORMs and wanted to completely rewrite our large and stable Rails API server in Java. He also wanted to rewrite the frontend Ember app using Angular. He thought we could do all this in six months, which is insane. This was clearly a train on its way to a wreck, and I noped out in mid-2016. The VCs finally pulled the plug on Kaybus and merged it with another of their portfolio companies in 2017.