"building new companies with ideas developed at their prior places of employment" is VERY different from copying files and stealing IP. The former is the reason Silicon Valley is what it is today.

The Traitorous Eight (the highest profile case of what the OP was describing) is one of my favorite Silicon Valley stories. If you haven't read about it, you really should! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

I'm not asserting he did either, there is a lot of grey there for sure. I'm saying that's the message a lot of people will hear from this result, for better or worse (my opinion is worse, but it's nothing more than my opinion). I think we agree here.

How could he possibly think he could get away with stealing files? Stealing "IP" seems a little less concrete.

This is harmful to innovation in the Bay Area. Big Tech eats up all the talent and now sends the signal that they can’t leave. The trial hasn’t even begun for this case - I think they’re still debating what constitutes a trade secret. This seems personal. Google got angry that one of their “own” went to a competitor.

I bet this will make companies think twice about acquiring startups founded by Google employees.

> This seems personal. Google got angry that one of their “own” went to a competitor.

He literally copied gigabytes of work onto hard drives and stole them.

You can leave any time you like, just don’t literally take files with you.

Totally agree. That exactly what I'm saying too.

Just don't copy privileged/proprietary data/code and you'll be fine.

Anthony brought self driving tech to Google, and that's why we have Waymo. Him leaving was an actual competitive threat to them. Look at Don Burnette and others who have since left. Google doesn't give a shit about them and they have AV companies that have raised millions of dollars.

You really think a person so invested in IP threft would be spending enough time to do engineering work?...