This is Cisco's model: two employees (or groups of employees) leave to develop some new tech, raising money and building staff in the process. In the end Cisco buys the one that gets traction and if the other fails the people can go back to Cisco.

It is a way of providing engineering bonuses without messing up the internal politics.

I have a neighbor who did this twice. Apparently that's not that common: I mentioned that in a random conversation once and the person I was talking to said "Oh, you live near XXX?"

Is this Sipura/Linksys story? Or there are more cases?

There are plenty -- it's called a "spin in". Unique to Cisco, though.

> Provided they didn't take insider knowledge and intellectual property with them, of course.

And that is exactly what Apple's legal filing claims...

Nope: every decent technical employee acquires insider knowledge, and companies don't have the right to enslave people because of that knowledge. The laws governing this differ from state to state, and California in particular gives employees more protection from restrictive contracts than other states.

Apparently they're not making a trade secrets theft claim, which seems a little unusual for a case like this.

If you put it this way, it sounds sensible. But as soon as VC money is involved it gets a bit fishy.

Say you assembled a great team of specialists. It cost you a lot of effort, time and money to hire all these really great people. Then someone comes along with a wad of cash and convinces a bunch of those people to all quit and work on a secret project. After they come out of stealth mode, it becomes clear they worked on the same thing as they did at Apple, only now Apple has to pay $250 million dollar to get the results of the work of the team that they had put a lot of effort into recruiting in the first place...

It turns out that you don’t actually own a team in the property rights sense: you didn’t assemble it very well if they all decided to leave.

This is the market pricing the work. If someone else came along with a wad of cash and hired them, you weren’t paying them enough.

See the thing is you didn't do the work, they did. If you can't get anyone to make the tech yourself then that's just how it is. If they decide to make the tech and it is worth 250 million then pay up, or live without it, or try to make an equivalent in house. You don't own your team, you will do whatever is in your best interest and so will they.