Comment by tomhow

> "I can make millions out of selling stolen code if I don't get caught"

This is the opposite of what happens and YC drums this into founders from the start; at least they did in my day, because pg's main startup (Viaweb) was nearly brought undone by an IP dispute, and it scarred him deeply.

What YC tells you is that the more successful you are, the more likely it is that you'll be caught if you mis-use IP, and auditing this is one of the biggest parts of the due diligence that investors, acquirers and commercial partners will undertake.

In fact, pg explicitly addresses this very thing in his 2005 essay How To Start a Startup [1], which was the original inspiration for YC:

One of the worst things that can happen to a startup is to run into intellectual property problems. We did, and it came closer to killing us than any competitor ever did.

As we were in the middle of getting bought, we discovered that one of our people had, early on, been bound by an agreement that said all his ideas belonged to the giant company that was paying for him to go to grad school. In theory, that could have meant someone else owned big chunks of our software. So the acquisition came to a screeching halt while we tried to sort this out. The problem was, since we'd been about to be acquired, we'd allowed ourselves to run low on cash. Now we needed to raise more to keep going. But it's hard to raise money with an IP cloud over your head, because investors can't judge how serious it is.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/start.html