Techdirt

Over the weekend, venture capitalist Bijan Sabet kicked off an interesting discussion by saying that he doesn't believe in noncompete agreements and suggesting, anecdotally, why he thinks that they do more harm than good. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson responded by disagreeing and suggesting that noncompetes do more good than harm. This is a topic that I've become deeply familiar with recently, for some research I've been working on. My interest in the specifics of noncompetes was kicked off by a small part of David Levine and Michele Boldrin's book Against Intellectual Monopoly, where they discuss how the lack of noncompetes helped Silicon Valley grow. This lead me to a lot of research on the topic, some of which I thought it would be worth bringing up, as the discussion has become so heated -- with almost all of it focused on anecdotal points, rather than actual research. Some of this research was for a separate project I am working on, but with so much interest in the topic, I thought it would be worth a detailed post.