Former Apple chip executive Gerard Williams III who is being sued by the company after he allegedly poached its employees for his new Nuvia server chips startup is accusing Apple of poaching his employees.
Gerard Williams III, who last year left his job as lead chip architect at Apple and co-founded Nuvia Inc., fired back with counter-claims against his former employer over its breach-of-contract lawsuit. He claims Apple tried to stop his firm from hiring its engineers while simultaneously recruiting staff from Nuvia…
Nuvia is developing a chip to power cloud servers. Williams, who spent nearly a decade at Apple, says he raised the possibility of developing such technology years ago, but the idea was rejected by then-chief executive officer Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, and by Johny Srouji, who’s now Apple’s head of hardware technology, because they thought it would detract from the company’s work on consumer facing technology.
After Nuvia launched, Apple’s vice president of silicon engineering Sribalan Santhanam warned of “consequences” if the startup continued hiring Apple engineers, according to Williams.
MacDailyNews Take: This is certainly not the most amicable of separations. We can’t wait for discovery (if we ever get to that point)!
Seems that if you poach Apple staff they are within their rights to poach back
It might seem that way, but that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. And in fact, this reporting doesn’t really make sense.
On the one hand, we have alleged breach of employment contract, where Gerard Williams III supposedly solicited Apple employees before the one-year Non-Solicit proscription expired. (This, afterApple already accused Williams of cooking up the concepts for Nuvia while using Apple resources, and Williams failed to get that shot down in court.)
On the other hand, we have Apple hiring Nuvia employees. But Apple didn’t sign a Non-Solicit with Nuvia. So it’s not clear what he’s accuse Apple of doing. Does he really mean that former Nuvia employees, who did have a contract with Nuvia, went to work for Apple and then hired other Nuvia employees, thereby breaching their contract? If so, wouldn’t that be an issue between Nuvia and those employees?
But the really weird thing about this article is that the headline (“Apple Accused by Ex-Exec It’s Suing of Poaching His Staff”) is not at all supported by the article. The article doesn’t mention any such accusation.
How about enforcing NDAs, but making the impediment of people working wherever the heck they want illegal.
Read my lips employers, people aren’t slaves and you have to compete for them.