On 20 December 2018, Vircon Legal co-founder Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu spoke at GET 2018: the Entrepreneurship, Career and Youth Summit.
Starting a company while you are still somewhere else
Most first ventures begin inside another institution — a university or an employer — and that context quietly determines who owns the result. Work produced using an employer’s resources or within the scope of employment can belong to the employer rather than the person who wrote it, and university regulations often claim a share of research outputs developed with institutional facilities. Neither is a reason not to start; both are a reason to check before the work has value.
The practical steps are small. Read the employment contract’s IP and side-project clauses, keep personal work on personal equipment and time, and where an idea genuinely originates inside an institution, treat it as a spin-off to be negotiated rather than something to be quietly taken out. Student teams should agree ownership among themselves at the early stage, before one member leaves. See Intellectual Property and Employment Law.
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