Employment contracts with employees based in California are executed under California law. Companies have indeed tried to force employees into contracts that specify Delaware as the applicable law but thankfully Delaware courts have thrown these clauses out as invalid.

That's essentially how Zoom was built. Eric Yuan took everything he learned from supporting WebEx and built a new company and product that does the same thing as WebEx.

https://slidebean.com/blog/startups-zoom-company-story-eric-...

If any of the following are true, you can:

- The company's version is not sufficiently original. IANAL but there are many sites that do something similar to replit, as shown in the blog post.

- Your version is sufficiently limited that it falls under fair use, or sufficiently minimal that it falls under the "de minimus" exception*. The guy made his project by himself in 4 days, and explicitly mentions that it does not have, and he has no intention of adding, the features it would need to compete in the marketplace with replit.

* https://www.jgschwartzlawblog.com/the-de-minimis-copyright-e...

You cannot copy the actual source code.

Designs may or may not be covered by copyright depending on how specific they are.

There is no protection on ideas.

You can most definitely leave a company and start a competitor doing exactly what you were doing in your previous role. California laws specifically encourage that, and that is the main reason why Silicon Valley exists.

I'm really curious what makes you so confident about this.

If nothing else, your conflation of "design" and "idea" doesn't make much sense, because the two are treated vastly differently by the legal system.

Maybe in idealistic world but almost every successful tech company is a blatant "stealing of ideas", thinking otherwise is naive snd won't bring you far.

You must be upset to learn about how Jet.com got founded or Zoom/