Yes, my claim wasn't that investors approved of their employees leaving to compete with them; my claim was that, since then, the laws had changed in ways that gave them more power to prevent it, for example by vastly expanding the scope of trade-secret law. Levandowski wasn't accused of infringing any patents.

Given the expansive scope of papers donated to historical archives by various engineers from that period, it would be at least atypical if they only took the direction of research and work they wanted, rather than extensive knowhow and documentation of the processes they'd developed while working for Shockley (not "Schockley").

Nowadays the practices that made Silicon Valley possible are illegal in California but legal in China.