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Oh, Gerard! I am one of your former underlings, commenting anonymously. I'm rooting for you, but I gotta tell you you've been sloppy. You can't leave digital fingerprints. Lemme tell you how to start a company to compete with Apple without getting in hot water: 1. Get a burner Android phone. 2. Get a cofounder who has no connection to Apple. You give a non-electronic list of Apple employees you want to poach to that guy. 3. The non-Apple cofounder sends all the e-mails to the poaching target. Those e-mails don't mention your name. The cofounder sets up a meeting with the prospective employee at a coffee shop, and you just happen to show up unannounced. 4. Tell new employees to keep it off their linkedin profile. Fer gawd's sake, make sure they don't tell their Apple coworkers they're joining a startup that has you in it. Everyone at Apple knew that John, Pradeep and Conrado were at your company. That's a problem.

Normally this sort of suit is meritless. California law give employees a right to moonlight, invent stuff, and start companies regardless of whatever terms their employer puts in their employment contract. That's how Silicon Valley came to exist. But Gerard was unusually sloppy. You can't use company time or resources to do this. If you do, you make sure there's absolutely no electronic evidence of it. Especially at Apple, which is really damn good at digging it up. If you want to recruit coworkers to your new startup within a year, you need to be very discreet and indirect about it. Make sure there's deniability. Keep it off LinkedIn. Gerard was openly going around handing out job offers to his former subordinates (disclosure: I was one of them, don't work for Nuvia though). This is the first time Gerard's started a company, and I'm guessing he just didn't know better. My advice to any Apple employees planning to escape the Borg and start their own company: Get a burner Android phone.

I worked as a CPU architect on Nvidia's Denver project and on Apple's CPU cores. This article hits really close to home. DED nails all the details, even stuff that's known to nobody outside my little circle of Nvidia and Apple CPU designers.