Matt Ryder was fired at 16 from an ice cream parlor after joking about selling the shop's recipe to Cold Stone. His boss took it as corporate espionage and called it a liability. He later became an eight-figure CEO.
2 days later, got a phone call saying that I was a liability and that I was being fired for corporate espionage. We used to do 8-hour shifts for $6.25 an hour. It was a '50s-themed ice cream parlor. They had all their own boutique flavors, and the guy was really into that, but he was a real kind of strange dude. I made a joke about selling the recipe to Cold Stone, you know, one of the sort of larger competitors. I made a joke about it, but he took this super seriously. And instead of having a conversation with me about it where I could have just said, oh, I'm sorry, it was in poor taste, but I was just joking, he decided to bottle that up for days at a time and then like proceed to fairly aggressively fire a 16-year-old child, right, for literally corporate espionage. That is what was on the little piece of paper that I got.
