I don't think that's all that bad - you're looking for stuff that's public information anyway, and it just so happens that your employer made use of that public information as well. It's like Apple and Microsoft both ripping off Xerox's GUI - Microsoft didn't take anything from Apple, it's just that they both originally took from the same source.
I'd draw the line at using the result of previous problem-solving that you've done for your employer. For example, in the course of my employment, I wrote a slider widget for my employer's product. I need a slider widget for my startup. Rather than using the code I wrote for my employer, I'm grabbing another open-source slider widget and modifying it as necessary. Same with utility classes - my employer wrote an OrderedDict class in Python, I need an ordered dictionary, rather than using my employer's I grabbed a third-party class off the net.
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I don't think that's all that bad - you're looking for stuff that's public information anyway, and it just so happens that your employer made use of that public information as well. It's like Apple and Microsoft both ripping off Xerox's GUI - Microsoft didn't take anything from Apple, it's just that they both originally took from the same source.
I'd draw the line at using the result of previous problem-solving that you've done for your employer. For example, in the course of my employment, I wrote a slider widget for my employer's product. I need a slider widget for my startup. Rather than using the code I wrote for my employer, I'm grabbing another open-source slider widget and modifying it as necessary. Same with utility classes - my employer wrote an OrderedDict class in Python, I need an ordered dictionary, rather than using my employer's I grabbed a third-party class off the net.