BREAKING: Rippling v Deel, Tech Feud, Corporate Espionage Drama

You're watching TVPN live. We are not live from the temple of technology today. We are broadcasting from the temple of technology because I am traveling. I'm in the Nation's capital, Washington, D.C. it is a balmy 60 degrees outside. It's not cold at all. Jordy, where are you right now? And how you doing?

I'm home in Malibu, the home of magnitude 4.0 earthquakes.

There's an earthquake.

There was an earthquake quake last night. It was like a 4. 0, just as we were sort of going to bed. And the fascinating thing is that there's been a ton of earthquakes literally right on my neighborhood. Like, if you look at the map, there wasn't. There was an LA Times article last week, I think it was Monday, about how this area of Malibu has just had a bunch of earthquakes. So we basically had two 4.0 earthquakes in the last week in the exact same spot and a bunch of others. So we're moving and shaking over here. John.

Love it.

And yeah, so the funny thing, it doesn't seem like seismologists, right. Like people that study it doesn't seem. They describe their own craft as trying to read the tea leaves, because they can't. They actually aren't. Like, they aren't able to make really accurate predictions other than we think a big one's coming.

Yeah.

But they have no sense. Like, you know, there's been this massive uptick in activity over the last, like six months. They're not able to make any type of more accurate projections other than at some point there's going to be a big one. But. But anyways, we have some news. Shaking the timeline today. There is a post I wanted to pull up from a guy named Anand. He says about the story that we're going to cover. This is an incredible tale of espionage and intrigue until you remember it's HR Sass. But it's real. It's real espionage and intrigue for our world. And do you think it's. Do you think it's an accident that they. That they did this on Saint. Saint Patty's Day?

Well, just to set the. Just to set the tone, if people haven't been following. Today, Parker Conrad, the founder of Rippling, announced that they're suing deal for embedding a spy in Rippling, which is crazy.

In the. In the Irish office.

In the Irish office. And yes, it is St. Patrick's Day. And so, you know, we got to put on the tinfoil hat and wonder what's really going on here. Is this some. Hibernian conspiracy going on. Are the, are the Irish lads up to something? But, but it feels like it's potentially Irish on Irish crime and you know, we hate to see that, especially on a day as important to me as an Irishman as St Patty's Day.

Not wearing any green, John. Yeah, you're wearing a decency to throw on a green.

Where's my green?

I even thought about leveling it up and going double green with. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave it off for now.

Well let's set the, let's set the table. There's actually a new article that just dropped in Bloomberg that I think we should actually kind of pivot over to by. Because it's by Matt Levine over at, at Bloomberg. Spies in the Sales slack. I'll send this, I'll send this over to the.

I'm pulling it up.

Yeah, because this one.

Nothing like there's nothing like breaking news.

Nothing like breaking news. Yeah. And Matt Levine is, is a fantastic writer and I think he'll break it down pretty well. So we'll read through this. We'll take you through some of the actual complaint, the PDF that's been shared. It's 50 page document. I have some ideas of where the interesting stuff is, where the interesting anecdotes are and then we'll go through a list of other corporate espionage just to give some history because it's a fascinating topic. Won't do too many deep dives there but there's some fascinating ones in this list I put together. Somebody tried to steal a Coca Cola formula at one point the Chinese were stealing Google self driving car stuff. There's been fascinating stories throughout the business.

History is the Coca Cola formula, I don't know if you know offhand, is it still actually trade secret? Secret?

I think so.

They've, they've found a way to, to maintain that secret over a century plus.

I think so I think they, I think they divide it up in, in such a way that no one can get a full look at everything and so they've never been able to because it would be off patent by now and so someone would have copied it. But yeah, highly guarded trade secrets including a new product sample and sell them to arch rival PepsiCo. Someone tried to steal it and sell it. In 2006 this happened. Anyway we'll go into that at the end of the show. We got to cover the breaking news first. So let's read about Matt Levine. He says spies in the sales Slack deal. I wonder how much corporate espionage there is like if you work in a high touch, high dollar sales, business enterprise software, investment banking, et cetera. Much of your time will be spent pitching new customers who are choosing between you and your competitors. Or pitching customers who currently work with your competitors or trying to retain customers who are thinking about switching to your competitors. If you knew what your competitors were up to, that would help. If you knew a competitor was coming to your customer's office next week to try and steal them away from you. If you saw your competitor's pitch deck, you could take some actions. You could get to the customer first and offer a discount. You could see the arguments in the pitch deck and try to counter them. You could see what your competitor says about the features of its own product and try to build those features into your product. It's not a magic cheat code. You still need a competitive product and pricing and good salespeople and all that. But it surely helps. So you know, find a salesperson at a competitor and recruiter not to quit your competitor and come work for you, but to stay at your competitor and spy for you. You give her quarterly bags of cash. She looks at your competitor's pipeline and keeps you up to date on who it is pitching and what it is saying. Obviously this is not legal advice. It seems problematic in all sorts of ways, but surely people try it from time to time. The downside is that apparently if you get caught doing this, you will get a hilarious lawsuit. And there's. And there's a big quote here from kind of summarizing what's going on. Workplace Workplace software company People Center Inc. I didn't know this is the real name of Rippling. That's their. I guess Rippling is just their dba. People center is suing its chief competitor over alleged corporate espionage. Both companies were valued in excess of 10 billion. Rippling in its complaint says Deal cultivated a spy to systematically steal its competitors most sensitive business information and trade secrets. In a deliberate attack that lasted for more than four months. The alleged spy at Rippling, its Ireland based global global pay payroll compliance manager was identified after he was observed accessing Slack channels and documents with no legitimate reason to do so. The compl set.

Crazy.

I know.

I just want to go. I just want to go out and say that this 100% is happening at other companies. Yep. And those people right now are shaking.

Oh yeah.

And. And they deserve to be. This is deeply wrong. And you know you get into this situation because Deal and Rippling were able to go grow extremely quickly.

Yep.

Initially doing very different things. Right.

Oh yeah.

Rippling was distinctly focused on the US market. They, they allowed you to pay people internationally, but it wasn't a core focus deal focused on helping US corporates move internationally. And then both these businesses are sort of have been converging over the last call it two years. And given the scale that they're at now, yes, there are companies running on legacy systems and other competitors and things like that. But for the big logo clients, you can imagine that they're almost always competing. You know, nobody is saying hey, I'm going to go sign up for I want a new payroll provider. And then not getting bids from Deal and Rippling. Right. That would be like bad practice from the HR or finance team at any company. Right. You should be getting competitive bids. So yeah, not at all. It's not at all surprising that like these companies have basically been in a blood feud. And what is surprising is that they would go far enough to allegedly, you know, plant a spy. And I'm excited to get into the honey pot component because there's so much here. Rippling was really playing some, some 40 chess I love.

Yeah, I mean I, I made a whole documentary about Rippling. I, I used Parker's previous HR company in 2012, 2013. Zenefits worked great. Interesting hack there where they'd give you the product for free and then act as your, your health insurance broker. And so they would take the broker, the brokerage fee and that was when you sign a health care contract as a company, the health care broker gets a commission and those commissions can be really, really high because you're sending, you're like you're, you're committing to spending a lot over a long time and they're very low churn. And so it was a very interesting, it was a very interesting like go to market hack. They grew extremely quickly. They were the fastest company to hit a billion dollars in, in sales in Silicon Valley or ARR like ever. They're multi billion dollar company. Then of course there's all the drama with Parker and Sachs and they've been, that's been litigated and relitigated a million times. But, but when I talked to Parker I was, I was asking him like okay, so like you're basically building the same company twice, like what. How did you think about it? And it seemed like much more focus on HRIs. Early on they wanted to do this vertical, this, he called it the compound startup model. So they do multiple things. He really looks at like what Microsoft does where they have Excel and PowerPoint. They're not this pure play vertical SaaS company, they're horizontal. And on day one he wanted, you know, payroll benefits and it. And so Rippling's go to market was, hey, you have all these employees mo, some of them are working from home. You buy them laptops. What happens when they quit or they get laid off? Well, they gotta send their laptops back. It's a hassle. You're probably not like refurbishing them properly and putting them back in the cycle. We will just handle all that for you. Is a unique go to market grew a ton. And then I asked him like, hey, like, what's going on with International? This seems like it hasn't been that much of a focus for you. And you know, the subtext of the discussion was kind of like, what's going on with Deal? And he wasn't really mincing words. You know, he's obviously sees them as like a very serious competitor. But also just, I think there was a little bit of acknowledgment that Covid caught him off guard. And Covid really, really accelerated what Deal was doing. Because Deal was built for international super.

Crazy remote work fundamental. And anybody that's an entrepreneur or investor should go back and read the deal or sorry, not Deal. Rippling series a memo. Like on the compound startup.

Yep.

Parker basically lays out the master plan. He even published the memo himself. Yep. Deal didn't have to, you know, steal that one, but, but, but he puts out this master plan of like if you basically own the employee graph, you can launch every meaningful piece of workplace software.

Yep.

On top of that and something to be, you know, I think we covered this last week. It's something like 70 plus percent of all like public companies are based in the U.S. yep. And what that means is that Rippling should own the globe, should dominate, you know, if they're going to come in the US and sort of dominate the American market here and then, you know, eventually expand into global payroll, then of course they're going to eventually get to upselling. And, and so for Deal to move into traditional payroll and HRIs, that's also something that's sort of critical for their long term viability. Like they're not going to basically dominate the global payroll market without also having a significant sort of foothold in the traditional HR tech market here in the.

U.S. yeah, yeah, it's, yeah. I mean the compound startup thing is fascinating. It's funny because we're actually working on setting up payroll right now. So we, we, we, you know, our decision is Being informed by the war on the timeline. Whoever just.

Yeah, we should just condense this down and set up a zoom link between a deal rep, a rippling rep, Augusta.

Gusto, wrap a warp rep. Yeah.

And just get them all on the same call and say, hey guys, like let's build in public here, let's keep it out.

Yeah, yeah, come on the show and pitch us. And then, yeah, whoever pitches us the best, it'll be good content and we'll, and we'll get a good, we'll get a good payroll provider. It is fascinating that. Yeah, obvious, obviously there's this almost holy trinity of unicorn Silicon Valley companies and they're all funded by Founders Fund, Andreessen and Sequoia and stuff. And all the serious VCs have piled into these unicorn decacorn payroll companies. Gusto, Rippling and deal. But if you look in the public markets, there's another three companies that are all in the tens of billions and they all have basically the exact same name. It's paycom, Paylocity, and there's another one with pay, and then above that, higher end ones that are worth even more. So it's just a massive market. When you're taking a cut of just payroll, it's just so easy to justify. Oh yeah, 50k a year or 50k a month.

Yeah, you can, you can look at, you can look at. Historically, I think the payroll market has always been, you know, the narrative has been this is not a winner take all markets. Yep. Deal and rippling and Gusto can all be worth tens of billions of dollars just by eating adp. Right, adp, totally.

Yeah. ADP is the big one.

ADP is at 120 billion today. There's no new companies signing up for ADP that I know of.

Totally, totally.

It's just not happening. I, I never interacted with a startup in coming up 10 years in startups that was on ADP. I'm sure they reach out to companies, but they're just not winning any companies. So it's almost like a cable style business where it's just.

Yeah. Or like the Oracle. It's like, you know, it's like a huge business but like for older school companies and bigger companies. And ADP I'm sure is great if you're Disney. I think, I think when I was at Disney they were on ADP and it was like, yeah, they have like the most insane enterprise compliance needs and ADP fills that probably pretty well, but it's probably so cumbersome if you're a startup and you're like, actually, I have no need for 25 of these features.

Yeah.

Anyway, let's continue with the Matt Levine article. So a Deal spokesperson said Rippling was attempting to deflect negative attention from itself weeks after Rippling is accused of violating sanctions law in Russia, which we'll get into in the Information article. It's seeding falsehoods about Deal. Rippling is trying to shift the narrative with these sensationalized claims. The spokesperson said we deny all legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaims. Sorry, but yes, that absolutely works. If you are ever accused of violating sanction laws, please do bring a sensational spying lawsuit against your competitor. That will certainly distract me.

Anyway, so to be clear here, this is a. This is a good line from. From Deal's PR team. The thing that's sort of hurting them on this is that the alleged spy hid in the bathroom and then led the scene.

You read the complaint and you're like, this looks pretty bad.

So this is the right line from. From Deal. But it's. I don't know. I think Matt's seeing through it a little bit.

Yeah. So he says this is not legal or public relations advice. It's just an expression of my own interests. Anyway, here's Rippling's complaint, which refers to the alleged spy as DS for Deal Spy. The guy allegedly lurked in a bunch of Slack channels devoted to Rippling's sales process so he could channel information back to Deal with. Guided by Deal as his primary search term, DS surreptitiously accessed Rippling Slack channels replete with its sales and marketing trade secrets and proprietary and confidential information. The channels accessed by DS contain highly sensitive and confidential information about customers, prospective customers, including details such as customer name, contact information, revenue at issue, and current issues and problems the customer is facing, and details of sales and relationships, conversations between Rippling and its customers or prospective customers. All of these are details that a competitor such as Deal could exploit to convince such customers to purchase their products rather than Rippling products. It is not clear how much this actually helped Deal, but there is at least one suggestive case here. DS navigated to a mention of Deal in a channel focused on a particular. On a particular prospective customer who is considering both, both Rippling and Deal. This is known as Prospect B. DS previewed the channel, which included details for a call scheduled with Prospect B the next day, and communications in which Prospect B relayed to Rippling specific concerns, concerns with the products and services offered by Deal. The channel also contained Rippling Sales team's internal pitch strategy discussion, including confidential details about how Rippling planned to highlight certain advantages of its products to address the prospects pain points with deals offering on February 20, 2025. This is like just weeks ago.

Recent. Yeah.

The. The day of the scheduled call between Rippling and probably D previewed the B related channel 66 times later that D. Later that day, Prospect B abruptly canceled the scheduled call with Rippling in which Rippling was going to deliver its proposal and explained that they were doing so because they had decided to select deal for the product they were interested in, even though Rippling believes that customer would have been better served by Rippling. And it's fascinating here that my takeaway is we are in a very new age of, especially with the Gong iOS and the sales recordings and stuff. Like, if you're in an organization and you have access to the slack, like, there's more information than ever because you don't have to walk by filing cabinet and grab their notes off their desk. Like, it's possible that like every single interaction with a customer is recorded verbatim and then also summarized. And then you see all the slack channels that they're in and some of them are like, it's literally just a ticker of like, this company is about to sign for this much money. This company is worth this much. This company wants us to build this feature. And it's just like, yeah, well, valuable data.

To me, this is just surfacing the reality of business, which is that it's, it's. Everybody in Silicon Valley has had this narrative generalized. You know, competitive CEOs will talk to each other, they're friends. It's sort of like, hey, positive sum. We're eating, you know, we're eating these sort of legacy businesses. Like, there's enough market cap for us to go around.

Yep.

And so this type of story is basically surfacing what has been, I'm sure, happening in the background in a bunch of different ways. Right. I was joking earlier that, you know, imagine a world where somebody bugged all the Waymos and SF because there's no driver in them. You could just hire a Jason Bourne type to just like, you know, bug.

Them and calling Waymos dropping like an airtag.

Well, yeah.

Microphone.

Yeah. And you would just get this constant stream of. Of private conversations. Right.

And this is why the ski lifts are so important. I mean, people are talking about bugging the ski lifts because that's where the capital allocators really exchange the proper alpha.

Yeah, yeah, that too. But anyways, you know, I Think this is going to be a big wakeup call for the industry that again, it's not all positive. Some.

Yep.

We are competing for the same customers and you know, we certainly, we have our own counter counterintelligence operations lead against other podcasts. Right. Yes, yes, we know that, that competing, you know, podcasts have tried to get moles into the system, but.

Yep.

But yeah, we're just embracing that head on. Right. And I think every SAS needs to have a counter counterintelligence operations lead.

Yes.

You know, yesterday.

Definitely. Definitely.

Anyways. Yeah, but, but like, let's be clear here. If, if Rippling is coming for damages and they have this, you know, this example here where it's very clear that Deal had insight into the sales process. You know, this is all, you know, it's up to Deal to like, you know, prove whether this is real. Real or not. But in this situation that Rippling is highlighting, Deal had direct insight into the sales process down to the dates, down to the individual selling points. And they were able, they were able to leverage that information to get the prospect to drop out of the process completely with Rippling. And if this was happening at scale, there's totally a world where there was tens of millions of ARR. That was on the line. Especially if you look at collectively and Rippling's able to say, look, our average customer stays with us for seven years. You guys, you know, you know, were had a sort of, you know, leverage these sort of trade secrets and sort of corporate espionage. This could be the settlement here. Could be well into the tens of millions of dollars or, or, you know, even, who knows. It's not. This is going to be, you know, Deal is going to be fine. Rippling is going to be fine. But this is, you know, not going to be an expensive blunder.

Yeah, yeah, it, it gets to like the nature of this particular business which, you know, you talked to like the nuclear founders, the, you know, they were just literally all in that Jason Carmen documentary together and they have a very positive sum mindset because for anyone in this like far out R and D heavy energy business, like they'll even let their, their lead VC invest in another nuclear company often because they're just like, look like a, if we both succeed, it's really good for the industry and we're all just selling energy onto the grid. Like we're competitive with oil and gas more. Sure we are competitive with each other, but it's much less zero sum at this point. Whereas with these, with these HR and B2B SaaS products, they're much more directly comparable. And then the other thing is that I mean this is a very high margin business where the, the pricing is super opaque and what the price that you're throwing at a customer is basically just like an idea of how much value they're going to get from this maybe. And if you have the ability to come in and quote just a little bit under, you're going to win those deals again and again like because it's just it like you just have to throw out a number and you kind of get an idea from. You can take the temperature of people, well, what are you paying for adp? Maybe they'll tell you.

And think about how many people at Rippling. It seems like there's enough proof to that like out there already that if the alleged spy is hiding and all this stuff and you know, it seems like there's enough proof to know that like some information would be past the deal somehow.

Yeah.

Think about how angry if you're the Rippling exec team, if you are. That, that one's obvious. Parker. Being livid is, is obvious. The, the team, the sales team. Right where they're, they're losing deals because people are, you know, basically just have, you know, this sort of information advantage. If you're the engineering team who's like in the product team that's trying to compete on features and you're spending all this time to build the best possible product but then you're losing out on revenue and you know, growth because again this sort of unfair advantage, I can see why they took it this route versus just, you know, this is sort of beyond just putting up an X thread and being sort of totally being angry. Right.

Yeah. Let's continue with this Matt Levine article. If you had your competitors whole pitch deck for a potential customer you both wanted, that wouldn't guarantee you a win, but it would help anyway. Most of the fun in the lawsuit is the trade craft. Rippling apparently discovered the alleged spy not because he was snooping on their sales information, but because an investigative reporter at the Information contacted Rippling about a forthcoming article concerning deals Russia related sanctions activity and asked Rippling about dealings with Russia. The reporter included internal Rippling Slack messages in his email and Rippling investigated who might have accessed those messages and quickly identified the alleged spy. Crazy, right?

Wait, I didn't even, I, I didn't even see anything about this yet.

Yeah, and so we can go, we can go over to that information article, but the, the possible lesson here is that tech companies are, are much more sensitive about leaks to journalists than they are about sharing sales information with competitors. So if you're doing corporate espionage, don't blow up your spot by trying to plant negative stories. Not any sort of advice. Having identified the spy, Rippling then tried to prove that he was working for Deal the smoking. This is a quote from the, from the, from the complaint. The smoking gun came earlier this month when Rippling set forth a test of, or what is known by security professionals as a honeypot. To confirm Deal's involvement, Rippling's general counsel sent a legal letter to Deal senior leadership identifying a recently established Slack channel called D Defectors, in which the letter implied Rippling employees were discussing information that Deal would find embarrassing if made public. It's such a weird, like thing to send. Just be like, hey, yeah, we're talking trash about you and our Slack.

I know, but it's just too.

And it's like, I don't know why you would share that with your competitor, but.

Well, it just apparently didn't matter.

Yeah, I guess it just didn't matter because they fell for it.

Well, and here's the thing, so we're not picking, we're not picking sides here. If anything, I've been incredibly impressed with Rippling's growth and deals growth. They're both tremendous examples of, you know, you know, what's possible in Silicon Valley. Many, many people, Many people almost couldn't believe how quickly Deal was growing. Deal hasn't been without its own sort of crises because anytime you're, these companies are moving huge amounts of money around the world all the time. Right. And anytime you're in that business, you're, it's somewhat crisis prone because let's say some sort of like account manager doesn't catch that, oh, this entity, you know, set up a Deal account and they're using our product to pay out. Oh yeah, people that are doing prop trading. Right. So there's sort of crisis around prop trading. I think it was probably a year and a half ago. I can't quite remember. And then on the other hand, you have Rippling who's, hey, you didn't notice this, but you know you've been paying out a sanctioned entity in Europe, right? You know, I'm just, I'm just making up an example. I have no knowledge of this specific instance. But, but yeah, you can imagine this is a war at the feature level, it's a war at the sales level, it's a war at the capital markets level. It's a, it's a war at the Sort of like, you know, narrative PR level.

So it is so funny to compare it to, like, war, because when I made the Rippling video, I. I wanted to make it, like, as dramatic as possible, basically. And I was like, what is the. Like, what is like, the hardest moment in your career here? Like, what. What's been the hard moment to talk about? And they gave me a pretty interesting anecdote about, like, early on, something happened with like, one. One of their customers had a weird character in the name of the company, and it completely messed up the entire payroll file. So payroll just didn't run. And they were on the phone with some of their clients who, like, a lot of the tech companies are like, oh, okay, like, the payroll is going to go out on Monday instead of Friday. Like, all of our employees will be fine with that. Like, we'll just deal with that. But one of the companies was like, running like, trucking. And he was calling the team, being like, guys are going to lose their mortgage over this. This is bad. You need to help that. And so the entire Rippling team had to go to ATMs, get cash, go to Western Union and wire individual amounts to people. And they just like. And it was like, super dramatic. But it's so funny because it's like, it is dramatic, but at the same time, we're talking payroll software here. It's not really life or death, but it is actually very important. And the stakes are high with sanctioned entities. And even, I mean, the abuse that can happen just moving money. Any system that moves money, whether it's Venmo or PayPal or Stripe, like, it can be abused, it can be hacked. And by definition, there's a lot of money at stake. And so it is serious business. Even though we like to joke like, oh, it's B2B SaaS. It's so easy. It's so, like, it's not as, like, world historically important as everything else, but, like, there is stuff here that's pretty important. Let's move on. So about this D defectors channel. In reality, the channel was not used by Rippling employees and contained no discussions at all. It had never been searched for or accessed by the spy, would not have come up in any of the spy's previous searches. And the SPY had no legitimate reason to access the channel. Crucially, crucially, this legal letter was only sent to three recipients, all associated with Deal, Deal's chairman, the chief financial officer, and the general counsel, Deal's head of.

US Legal, which is the founder's dad.

Oh, is that. Is that who that is, I know Boise. It's like it's gotta be someone related to him and Deals outside counsel. Neither the letter nor the deed Defectors Channel was known to anyone outside of Rippling's investigative team and the Deal recipients. Yet just hours after Rippling sent the letter to Deal's executives and counsel, Deal's spy searched for and accessed the D Defectors Channel, proving beyond any doubt that Deal's top leadership or someone acting on their behalf had fed the information. The D Defectors Channel to Deal Spy inside Rippling.

And then the amazing. Yeah, so pretty good. Good enough to get an Irish court order to seize the alleged spy's phone, at which point he also did Tradecraft. But here's the thing. This is in the days leading up to St. Patrick's Day. Can you imagine what, can you imagine the evidence that you need to get something like this to happen?

Oh, yeah.

Coming up on. On St. Patty's Day, I assume Ireland.

Shuts down for the entire month of March.

Yeah, it. What's the Chinese New Year? You know, in China they sort of shut down a lot of factory.

I mean, us Irishmen are known for liking the bottle and St. Patty's Day is a good as an excuse of any. So, you know, I certainly wouldn't be going to work if I was in Ireland.

This is the natural, you know, you know how in 2020, 2021, there was this sort of like you could go on Reddit and there's people that have two jobs, you know, software engineer, like meta and Google, you know, or sort of meta, like some unknown. This is the natural evolution of that. And just work for. Work for all the expense management companies. Work for all.

Just pass all the info back. I mean, that is my real question here is like, so this spy was clearly W2 at rippling. Might even had. Might even have had stock options, which is kind of hilarious to think about. But how was. How was the spy getting comped by Deal? Like, was it literally like cash in a duffel bag or.

Well, so basically stock option deal makes a really good product for paying people globally.

Oh, okay. I see where you're going.

And so, so it's. It's very possible that he was dogfooding the product.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe the long term here is like, okay, Rippling has like the normal, like business mid market, startup market, enterprise market. And Deal pivots to being like tradecraft payroll. So like when the CIA like Palantir for payroll, that would be a good like rebrand. Be like, hey, there's A massive network of spies all over the world. We're not going to use the traditional payment rails anymore, but if you need a duffel bag of cash dropped to an ex KGB member at the Kremlin, like, we can get it done for you.

Crazy. Crazy.

I think that's a good, that's potentially a good like growth story out of this drama. It completely repositions the company, volunteer for payroll.

Crazy.

We got to go through the actual like the bathroom scene. Do you already read this?

Yeah, yeah.

This is your favorite part. So Deal Spy initially told the independent solicitor that his cell phone was in a bag on another floor. The solicitor offered to have an associate retrieve the bag, but Deal Spy insisted that he retrieve it himself. The solicitor informed DS that if he was lying, he would be breaching the court order. The solicitor accompanied DS downstairs and took possession of the bag. But in fact, DS had lied. The bag only contained a notebook. It held no mobile device. On information and belief. DS's cell phone was on his person the entire time. After misdirecting the independent solicitor, DS then went to a bathroom, locking the door behind him and refusing to come out despite the independent solicitor's repeated warnings that these action were in violation of the court order. Rather than comply, DS was heard doing something on his phone by the independent listener.

You can just do things doing something.

He's just playing Candy Crush. Probably the haptics are going crazy. He's just addicted to TikTok. Maybe it's just ice cream. So good in the bathroom. Just watching a live stream suggesting that DS may have attempted to flush his phone down the toilet rather than provide it for inspection later that day. That day, Rippling had the plumbing of its Dublin offices inspected, but did not locate any mobile devices while in the bathroom. And continuing after leaving the bathroom, Diaz was again told repeatedly that he was required to provide the device and he would be in violation of a court order. After Diaz left the bathroom, he was informed that taking another step forward rather than handing over the phone immediately would be an additional breach of the order. Diaz then replied, I'm willing to take that risk. Diaz then stormed out of the office and fled the scene.

I mean, the Netflix doc is going to go crazy. Except I don't think it'll actually happen because it's, it's. At the end of the day, it's Enterprise SaaS.

Yeah, me or Jason Carmen are the only hopes for making this.

Well, no, to be honest. To be honest, the right form factor with this is a South park style cartoon. I agree that that Releases basically this week. And it's just sort of breaks it down because it's too. It's too silly to actually be made into a documentary almost.

It's so funny. But yeah, I mean, this is like, people keep saying, like, oh, like, you know, we need Silicon Valley back. We need HBO Silicon Valley back. Things are getting too crazy. You know, the VCs are in the White House now. Like, it's truly like, next level. Well, let's finish his.

What Matt has to say, the thing I don't understand is, is the spy not intelligent enough to understand that all of this stuff can be. What's the word for it? Subpoenaed from, like, Apple or Google or sort of.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I mean, Slack.

I'm sure he was using signal stuff like that.

Yes. I mean, Slack's not end to end encrypted. And then also, like, Salesforce owns Slack. They're happy to hand this over. And then also, like, when you run Slack at the enterprise level, like Rippling does, like, they own all the data. I'm sure they have, like their own copy. They don't even need to go to Salesforce and say, hand it over.

I think what's. What's totally possible is that he was communicating over an encrypted service to the deal, to the deal team. And then, you know, he. Who knows, maybe he had a handwritten note with like, basically like the login information and was just like, okay, I'm going to flush this down the toilet. And like, yeah, yeah, basically it. Right, Yeah. I don't know how much that's going to help him, but, yeah, you know, innocent until proven guilty, right?

So, yeah, so Matt closes out by saying, when they come to raid your office, locking yourself in the bathroom until they go away probably won't work. Not legal advice, but it will make you something of a legend. Also, imagine dredging the toilets for the possible spy phone. Oh, hilarious. Hilarious. Wild. Wild stuff. Should we go to the New York Times article? Just give some extra context because Rippling did comment on this and gave some extra information around this.

Yeah, I don't know how much of the. The New York Times we need to.

Really cover, but mostly it's just that, you know, you. You can see, obviously Parker posted about this, but Vanessa Wu, who I actually interviewed for that documentary, she's Rippling's general counsel. She said in a statement, we're all for healthy competition, but we won't tolerate when a competitor breaks the law weeks after Rippling is accused of violating sanctions. Law and then, yeah, Deal also fired back with that. It's a brazen act of corporate espionage. Logan Bartlett on the timeline.

Wait, real quick. Somewhere it says Rippling. Rippling told the New York Times that it also discovered correspondence between BS And Alex Deal, CEO and co founder. I didn't see that anywhere else. I didn't see that either, but maybe it just didn't make it into the initial complaint.

Maybe, I don't know. Is that. Yeah. Rippling said it had also discovered correspondence between DS and Alex Bazeez, Deal CEO and co founder. Earlier this month, they sent a letter, which we heard about, to the father of the. Of the founder. Within hours, DS started searching the channel and the company asserts.

Crazy stuff.

Rippling's bringing in the heavy hitters. They. The lead lawyer is Alex Spiro of Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart and Sullivan, Pasadena law firm. By the way, nice shout out. John Quinn, named partner, lives in my neighborhood. Great, great dude. He's known for representing Elon Musk, Jay Z, Mayor Eric Adams of New York City. Some heavy hitters on this. Also, I think he represented Evan Spiegel at Snapchat. And Mr. Beast was also a Quinn Emanuel client. Giving you a little bit, a little bit of world tour of what Quinn Emanuel's up to. Shout out to Quinn Emmanuel.

They're doing things.

Yeah. I went to high school with all the kids that were affiliated with this law firm.

I honestly wonder. So I really wonder how this sort of plays out. Right. So you have Deal Spy, who's an employee of Rippling, not an official employee of Deal, I would hope.

Yeah. He's just w tude. And then.

And then.

Yeah, yeah, Buying. And they pay me 20 bucks an hour. It's great.

And then. And then the issue is, then you have Deal. Who's represent, you know, Deals counsel. And any outside counsel that they would hire is representing Deal.

Yep.

But then they also have some interest in, like, making sure that Deal Spy has good representation. But at the same time, if they represent. If they represent, they can't, like, fund his lawsuit because then it looks like.

You know, Jordy, I think you need to read more spy novels because this is what's called being out in the cold. Like, the spy is burnt. They're out in the cold, and they gotta go. They gotta go figure it out. Gotta get a new identity. Go Jason Bourne mode.

Yeah. And it's a challenge because Deal has billions of, you know, potentially a billion dollars on their balance sheet. And the spy probably made, you know, what's that quote? It's like I'm, you know, I, you know, you should be embarrassed at how, you know, not that you sold out, but like how little it actually took. Right? Like this. Deal spy. Like I could imagine him making $200,000.

And then imagine he just got 10% of the company. Deal spy. If you got, if, if you got less than 5%, you got hosed. You got hosed. If you're, if you're going to do it for less than 5%, you're. You should be a co founder for this. Yeah, co founder. Stake. Board seat. For sure. Board seat. Apparently you can, you can tweet from prison and you can do podcasts from prison. So come on the show, but also join the board.

Board smart.

Why not call in, be the remote board member.

Yeah, great, great call.

If they're really going to pivot to Palantir for payroll, you know, and, and run spying operations across the world, he'd be an expert. Anyway, Wild, wild times in the timeline. Should we go to Logan Bartlett? He says today is like the not like us drop for people who know what T3 T2D3 is, which is triple, triple, double, double, double. Which is how you grow a really high growth B2B. SaaS business, of course, is not. Not like us is the, is the Kendrick song, right?

Yes. Yeah, I'd like to see. I would love to have had a little, little birdie, you know, flying around following Parker Conrad because I wonder if he did a face to face, you know, with, with his employee who was spying on him. You know, like, like the king. You know the king. You know, there's a spy within the castle walls and the king, like you know, the.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you got to hand it to Parker. Like, like Enterprise SaaS is normally so boring and his, his entire life has been fascinating somehow. It's just always filled with also that.

You gotta like one thing. The, the two reasons to be really bullish on, on rippling after this, you know, and again, we're the news, so we're not sides here, but, but just sort of objectively like incredible execution on both the law. Like the, the, the law here. The, the execution of the honey pot. You know, how quickly they moved on this. You know, less than a month ago, they were still sort of uncovering a lot of this. And then, you know, it's not super. You know, companies that are, that are winning and you know, crushing markets don't typically feel the need to hire spies. That being said, the best ones probably do it and don't get caught.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're an enterprise SaaS thought leader now, you need to parody Josh Steinman's how many foreign sabotage teams are operating on U.S. soil? You need to just post that every day. How many enterprise SaaS sabotage teams are operating in Silicon Valley right now? Just ask the question every day.

There you go.

Good morning. We're going to win. And how many enterprise.

How many corporate espionage teams are operating within, you know, American SaaS company, American unicorns.

Yeah. Well, you had a good post about this. It's a photo of a soldier doing a house clearing. Coyptos SaaS bellum est enterprise SaaS is war. There was some debate in our group chat about whether or not the translation, but I think the message got across and you got a couple hundred likes already because it's a lot of fun. And Pavel Aspruhav says the East India Company had a private army. Why shouldn't the corporate expense management platforms militarize back to basics. Imagine you're in Valhalla explaining to King Leonidas about the great battle of banking products.

Amazing. I also said Richard Nixon would have loved B2B SaaS for sure. If he were around today, I'm sure he would have been angel investing into, into one of these, you know, companies.

I'm in dc. I almost stayed at the Watergate. I'm a big fan of that hotel. They have fun with it. When you, when you pick up the, the phone at the Watergate, it says like, welcome to Watergate Hotel. You don't have to break in and everything is like branded around like the break in. And they've really leaned into that as they're like, shtick. It's pretty fun. I like it. Adam Rankin, I think, who's over at Warp, says the world of payroll moves fast, but join Warp ships faster. Announcing our Latest product launch SaaS. Sue your competitors as a service. Try it out now. Know he's having a lot of fun with it.

Yeah, Warp is just happy to not be in the. Be at the, the forefront of another dramatic payroll incident. Yep, I was Warp portfolio company. They've just been. They had a little hiccup last year related to some marketing stuff, but they just have stayed laser focused. And now if you look over at Luke Metro, he's posting. I will share this in the, in the, in the YouTube chat. Luke Metro has the emoji where the two people are fighting and then like the guys in the background, you know.

Like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's Warp.

Yeah, that's Warp.

Chilling in the back, not paying attention. I mean, honestly, like, it, it. I wonder what's going on at Gusto today. Like, they gotta be so happy that they're just out of it.

Yeah. The only thing is, like, I legitimately believe that Gusto isn't actually competitive with these companies. From everything that I know they don't. They really say if you have more than 20 employees, like, just go elsewhere. Like, it's really meant to be for sort of the SMB category. So that's cool. I have to imagine that they're just sort of, like, cool. We're glad that you guys are, you know, duking it out.

But yeah, I've been a Gusto customer for almost a decade, like, years. Always good experience. And yeah, I mean, it was interesting because Gusto launched as Zen Payroll and then Parker went through Wise. They were. Is a YC company. Parker goes through YC with Zenefits and gets so big so fast and like, completely sucks the oxygen out of the air. And then quickly is like, compound startup mode, take over the world mode. I'm going to do payroll. I'm going to do everything. And so Zen Payroll rebranded, because they didn't want to be confused, even though they were. They were their first mover. They were like, we're just going to, like, not deal with this chaos stuff that's going on. You can have the Zen name and then Zenefits, of course, like, sold and got shut down and like, rebranded. And so they could have stuck with payroll the whole time. But, I mean, Gusta's a good name too. I. I think it all worked out. And also it feels easier to rebrand a B2B SaaS product than it does a consumer product. Just because there's like. Like the goodwill doesn't build up the same. Like, you have your install base.

Yeah. Most of. Most of your sales motion is coming from, you know, word of mouth, you know, direct sales. Like, it is much easier. Yeah. I don't know if there's any other.

Yeah, I mean, there's interesting stuff. I mean, honestly, people should go read the entire complaint because it is written in, like, plain English. And also. So I just think it's a fascinating tour of, like, how enterprise SaaS works. It's not like they're leaking alpha here, but if you're running a B2B SaaS company, like, you should read this just to understand how rippling works, because they're explaining the whole process, from leads to most valuable prospects. They have, like this five stage funnel research, customer development, a demo, then refinement, then a contract. Stage. Each stage of the sales pipeline requires significant effort and the kind of goes through like it's kind of a playbook for building enterprise SaaS. And I thought, I thought it was interesting because like you often like these playbooks are repurposed by like, oh, you hear Sam Blonde who worked with Parker on a podcast on like the Jason Lemkin, like Saster. Right. You could learn some of the stuff there. But this is laid out in like with legal precision. And so it feels like there's actually, and I may be very implementable here.

I actually have some breaking news. So this, this story has apparently reached LinkedIn oh, a lot faster than I thought because my buddy who's a, who's a big LinkedIn user, he doesn't use X. He just sent me the story and I want to reply back. I'm not going to reply right now, but I wanted to reply back, buddy.

Six hours too late.

Six hours. No, the, the, my, the first text that I got this morning were like, check X. People are tagging, you know, people are tagging TVPN and this story, they're calling it the Watergate of sas.

Let me see.

Do we want to go, do we want to go through some of those examples of other big corporate.

Yes, we do. I, I, I, I, I do want to highlight this one image from the complaint. It's, it's like page 1617. And, and I think this is what people are going to be pointing to on like the. Was something actually nefarious going on or was this guy just acting weird? Rippling slack logs show that the Deal spy began searching and accessing and accessing Rippling Slack channels at an unprecedented rate beginning or around November 2024. Notably, DS searched the term deal approximately 23 times at a a day. And so it seems like it seems like this person was maybe at Rippling and then started spying. And it kind of goes from like a before and after. It's not like they were planted there beforehand. The below illustrative example demonstrates why a search for Deal is powerful and alarming. Namely, this example shows that Deal is mentioned in discussions concerning Rippling sales leads as well as discussion related to a potential customer for Rippling's PEO product.

Yeah, so the challenge, the challenge here and what I think Deal is going to run into because Deal's own internal Slack messages in regards to their entire like, it's, it's not like the, the sort of Deal Spy at Rippling could just pass information to one person at Rippling on signal and then that's like the end of the information. It's. The information gets passed. And where the evidence will be really damning is if there's sort of this top down, hey, focus on Shopify. We know like we're at risk of. And then there's sort of this record of this sort of information coming in from unknown source and then using that, you know that, that information being used to change the, change the outcome of this sort of sales process.

I wonder if the SPY knew that there are records of channel previews, because that's something. Because just for some clarity, when you're, when you're in, when you're in an organization, there are private channels which you can't even access or search for. There are public channels which you can join. When you join them, it sends a little message like, hey, Jordy, joined the TBPN guest planning chat or whatever. But you can also just preview that, which means you're just like looking and scrolling through.

But no one funny because no one.

In the organization knows but the IT guys know.

This is basically one of the sort of things that Rippling pitches, which is like you should have one sort of sort of database for all your employees and then it should connect to every application that you use so that there's sort of this like graph of activity. So.

Well, there's a graph, baby. And the graph is looking like this, like flat, flat, flat. And then just massive.

Oh no.

And it's like, oh, no. Yeah. What's going on there? Something changed.

It's funny, it's interesting to think about how that relationship would have popped up because it's possible that Deal was, you know, and totally speculating here, it's possible that Deal was wanting to recruit this person and then the person was like, I actually really like Deal, or I like Rippling and the culture here. And like I've got like a pretty great like stock option plan, but I'm down to moonlight.

Yeah, give me, give me the, Give me the cash bags. So the, the, the, the. The interesting thing here from the complaint is they really lay out how they actually found the spy. And the title of this is Tiny Bird. I love these, like little spy terms. On February 27, 2025, when the information published the article for which its reporter saw comment from Rippling, Rippling learned two important things. For the first time that tinybird, a startup discussed in the article, is Deal's customer. And two, that tinybird reportedly made payments to sanctioned rushing banks using the Deal platform. Specifically, quote Tinybird followed instructions currently hosted on the website of A sanctioned Russian bank that guided companies on how to skirt sanction rules by using Deal. Prior to the publication of this article, no one at Rippling, including Deal Spy, had any other work, work related reason to know about any connection between Tinybird and Deal, let alone search that name through Rippling Slack archives. Nevertheless, Rippling's Investigation revealed that DS had searched for Tinybird 20 times between February 19 and February 20. So before the article broke and before the information had been passed back over.

A week, you got to give the, you got to give DS credit for just being incredibly locked in on the task. It's hard to imagine him getting any other work done other than spamming these different search terms.

And yeah, you know, we talk about like 10x engineers and we talk about A players and it just seems like corporate athletes. Let's just call balls and strikes in terms of spying. Potentially a 10x spy, potentially an A player here. Although he did get caught and the whole spot lasted like two months rough and, and also the handling of the phone afterwards was pretty bad, but clearly on the grind for a while. What got to give credit where credit's due.

What did DS flush? That's the big, you know, it's like what did Ilya know?

What did Ilio see?

What did Elias see? What did.

You got? Imposed that on information and belief. DS most likely knew to search for Tinybird because he was instructed to search for that term by Deal, presumably after the reporter indicated to Deal's communications team, led by VP of Communications Elizabeth Diana, that Tiny Bird was a focus of his reporting or of, of the reporting. Upon learning of the Tiny Bird searches, Rippling strongly suspected that that deal was directing DS's actions. But to ensure, Rippling conceived a test, a honeypot. And this is where we go into the Dash Defectors tab, which is fascinating anyway, so we should quickly read through that Information article that actually kicked all this off. It's in the information. It was an exclusive that dropped on February 27, 2025, less than a month ago. It's called the bitter fintech feud that stretches from Silicon Valley to Moscow. Deal and Rippling have stirred up a hornet's nest in the staid world of HR and payment software. The seemingly mundane world of human resources management startups is not the place you'd expect to see cutthroat corporate bloodsport battles linked to global geopolitics and questions about whether companies took on the wrong customers to boost growth. But Deal and Rippling are hardly ordinary startups. Their feud spilled open, spilled, spilled into open view earlier this year in a Florida courtroom, a court appointed receiver to a fraudulent investment scheme accused Deal in a complaint of becoming a magnet for people moving money into Russia and making it easy for bad actors to do business with our nation's enemies in violation of national sanctions. The takeaway here, Deal and Rippling are trading jabs over payments in Russia. Rival fintechs are both under pressure from partners over sanction risks. Feud spills out into the open. Deal immediately pointed the finger at Rippling, calling, calling the accusation a coordinated effort by Rippling to damage the reputation of its main competitor. Deal applied to dismiss the case. Deal's evidence was that the receiver's attorney was an investor in Rippling and represented it in licensing and regulatory matters, including helping set up its insurance brokerage. So yeah, there's been this like, go back and forth on like Parker and the Rippling team clearly go pretty hard at Deal. He's taken shots like, I think there's been interviews where people have kind of asked like, hey, what's going on in the international market? And he'll just be like, deal is not a good product. And he like is very aggressive about that. Where most, most founders would not like cross that line because it can, it's just like, it's just high downside risk. It can be seen as gauche or, you know, improper or impolite. Everyone in Silicon Valley is usually like, like, hey, we, that might be a future acquirer or someone we acquire. We might have similar, similar investors, similar employees. Like, let's just keep it cordial and say, yeah, we love what we're doing, but fundamentally we have very different visions and you know, different cultures and pick whatever you want.

Yeah. So, so one data point that's interesting, Rippling had barred former employees who went to Deal from participating in a, in tender offers. So he's basically saying, sure, you're still a shareholder in Rippling, but you're not going to get access to liquidity.

Interesting.

The way you would if you went and worked at, you know, someone like ram.

Yeah, yeah. I mean just very aggressive stuff across the board. And then do you remember the, the snake oil fiasco, this whole thing?

No.

So, so there was something where, where I think it was, I think I, I'm gonna get this, I'm gonna get this close. But I think it was like Rippling was calling Deal Snake oil and they created a snake game that you could play, like, you know, a browser based game to kind of like take a shot at them. And a lot of people on, on X were kind of like just like, like this is like too much. Like just focus on building like play a clean game. This is rough in the passer. This is getting a little aggressive and we like the trash talking. Like, you know, maybe, maybe this is maybe text.

Yeah.

They said like the NFL not Deal just launched.

They said Deal just launched a page comparing themselves to Rippling. Good news, they know who's beating them. Bad news, they're selling snake oil. And then that was. You could, you could play the game.

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was their response to Deals competitor page which are very standard. Like almost every startup will have like the side by side of like oh. And it turns out like we check all the boxes and our competitors check none. Like, you know, it's like everyone just does that. It's seen as just kind of normal, normal stuff. Normally you don't use, use a, a phrase like snake oil which is aligned with like almost like illegality. Right. Because you, you like snake oil is a, is a fraudulent medical claim usually. Although Brian Johnson famously, you know, just sells oil that's called snake oil and he's leaning into it and kind of re repurp term. But in general, snake oil is a is. It's a little bit harder, harder phrase. It's a harder edge than just saying, look, like, you know, we think we're better than Deal in boom, boom, boom, boom, boom six different ways. And like that's why our product is better. And I'm sure rippling has that landing page as well. And Deal does too. But, but people were like, oh, okay, this is really, really heating up. But now we see like, okay, well like maybe that was all justified. Like maybe there's really a reason for there to be a blood feud here. And maybe there's a reason why they were doing that snake oil jab deal and not at Gusto or Paylocity or adp, even though they might be competitors with any one of those companies.

Yeah.

Anyway, we should move on to some of the greatest corporate espionage things in history. We should give some context on just where these companies are sitting. There's a good, there's a good data table in the information comparing global payroll platforms. Deal and rippling valuation deals at 2012.6 billion. Ripplings at 13.5 billion on revenue. Deal allegedly is at 800 million. Ripplings at 580 million. And so a lot of people, which is I think, which is crazy.

I mean if you just had to estimate their revenues, it's deals growth has been been almost unbelievable.

It's insane.

And so when articles pop up, you know, they had an article, this is also in the information back In September of 2023, it said how Deal became the payout provider for prop trading firms, including a site frozen by the cftc. So this stuff, this is potentially one way that they're able to put up, you know, I don't know. Deal, I think, came out in this article and said this represents like, you know, very minuscule amount of our revenue. But, but clearly Deal is a real threat to Rippling, right? Yep. It's not a, it's not. This isn't Rippling, like sort of beating up on some in any way. You know, they almost have doubled it. Yeah.

Yeah. And so rippling's raised 1.4 billion. Deal's raised 685 million. Deal has five employees and rippling has about 3,000 employees. Rippling's available in more countries. One hundred and eighty five countries, compared to 160 for deal. So that just gives you some, some, some context around the size of these companies. But they're pretty close and it makes sense that they're rivals and it does feel like increasingly they're going after the exact same customers, whereas maybe the ADPs and the gustos have found like different segments that are less hotly contested, at least for now. But it'll be interesting to see where it happened, what happens with it, and, and whether one of these companies breaks out or if we're just doomed to an oligopoly in payroll forever, which is certainly what's happened at the public market Decacorn territory, but we'll see. Anyway, should we move on to other corporate espionage cases involving US Companies?

Yeah. Should we start with IBM versus Hitachi?

Let's do it. Do you want to read this one.

Or do you want to explain what these companies are, John, since this was kind of more your era.

Brutal. Yeah. Back in 82, I almost interned at IBM, but decided to go over to Hitachi, you know. Yeah. But it was 21.

Didn't Hitachi try to get you to go back and work at IBM and then come back? They said, you know, go, go do a summer internship with IBM, then come back next summer. We got you on a, you know, a maxed out, six figure, four year deal.

Yeah, yeah, Yep. Yeah. Have you seen War Dogs where Jonah Hill is like, it's like IBM, no one knows what IBM stands for. And then the actors, like that one guy's like, international Business Machines.

Yeah.

And he's like, get out of here, you're fired. It's the greatest. I love it. I actually filmed an ad had with that actor. He was like, oh, yeah, it was a great, great experience. He has, like, one line in the movie. He was really stoked about it. Nice guy. Anyway. In 1982, IBM became the victim of a major industrial and espionage scheme. When agents of Japanese firms Hitachi and Mitsubishi sought to illicitly obtain IBM's confidential mainframe computer designs. The FBI set up a sting operation to catch the conspirators in the act. You love it. An FBI undercover operation uncovered that 12 Hitachi and five Mitsubishi employees were conspiring to purchase or steal IBM's proprietary technical manuals and software tapes for.

Wait, so were they. Is this one of those things? It's like a. Correct. What's it called? A Koretsu, where you have.

Yeah. I mean, yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if the Japanese government owns part of Hitachi and Mitsubishi or they own pieces of each other.

I'm just like, why are two companies coordinating on something that's so obviously totally, totally just.

Okay, this is why we need American caresses. We should deal. Rippling gusto. Parker, let's get you all together. You all get 20% of each other's companies, and then we can all work together to destroy Japan. Japan doesn't stand a chance in payroll once we build American B2B SAS kratsu. Let's get everyone in there.

Great.

The scheme was halted with multiple arrests, and the case was described at the time as possibly the largest industrial espionage case in history.

So this is crazy. Hitachi pleaded guilty in 83 with two executives, and they paid fines of $10,000. $10,000.

How will they ever recover?

Yeah.

They also issued an apology to IBM and entered a legitimate technology licensing agreement. The case, the early case, raised awareness of overseas competition targeting US Technology and led companies to tighten their security on sensitive R and D. Yeah. Wild. It's funny. Should we go into the hair care product espionage of 2001?

Of course.

I mean, people have been asking about our hair care routines. Again, you know, the answer is we. Is we conduct a large espionage on the.

Yeah. We have moles inside of Unilever and Procter and Gamble.

Yes.

And they're just giving us, you know, sort of, you know, chemicals out the back door that will. Won't hit the market for another decade.

Exactly.

That's really.

Exactly. Yeah. So in 2001, consumer products giant Proctor and Gamble was caught spying on its rival Unilever to gather intel on Unilever's hair care business. PNG's tactics cross the line from normal competitive intelligence.

I just have to say something really quick. So when governments do this, or hard tech. Oh, yeah, defense. They do it. It's like, oh, this is like, this is really bad. And then when, when, when hair care companies and HR sacrifices.