Deel vs Rippling: The billion dollar spy scandal

So one of the latest soap operas to play out in the news, especially the tech and business news, is between two startups, one called Rippling and one called Deal. And at its core, Rippling accuses this company called Deal of hiring a spy to come work in their office and, well, basically do corporate espionage, like steal their secrets so that Deal could, well, leverage that information. Familiar with like Russia planning sleeper cells in the United States and, you know, vice versa, governments hiring spies to come in and do this stuff. But companies doing it is kind of a pretty extreme thing. And so the reason we're finding out about all this was there was a bunch of drama where this company called Rippling, and who's raised billions of dollars, right? Caught the guy, like chased him into the bathroom. Like, I mean, it was a whole James Bond kind of mess. And that kind of drama, of course, like, you know, people in the press and reporters and of course consumers, they love to eat that stuff up. If you don't know, not that it's that important for the topic of this video, Deel and Rippling, they are in the kind of payroll and enterprise HR space. So they help sell those kind of payroll services to companies. Deel focusing on global stuff, Rippling kind of getting into that space, but by and large, they're direct competitors. So, you know, ultimately that's why Deel would hire somebody to do this. If they were able to get, say, Rippling's customer list or what those people are paying, you know, given they both sell kind of well, the equivalent type product to the same type of customers, it would give them a big competitive advantage in the market to, well, try to go win more market share and more business. Now I'll put a link below. You can kind of read up on it yourself. Like every reporter's eating this stuff up with a spoon. It's the kind of stuff reporters love to report on. But reading this story made me think of two things and two stories of things that I had gone through in my career. And I think this is, you know, a big takeaway from something like this if you're a business owner. So number one story was one time I was in and CEOing a company. And as CEO of that company, I had somebody come to us and say, hey, would you like to buy your competitor's customer list? You know, you'll know what the customers are, how much they're paying, what contracts they're on, when they'll expire, all that kind of stuff. And the reality was it was tempting to buy it. This is a disgruntled employee who had clearly gotten it from their former employer, our competitor. And, you know, I got that request and something didn't feel right about it. And, you know, we said, hey, let's get back to you. And eventually, after thinking about it, the reaction to being offered that was we said no. And I thought about it in a couple of ways. And ultimately, You know, there's of course the legal liability of being party to something like that. I don't know if this person had a confidentiality agreement or any of that kind of stuff. But it also made me think like, what kind of game do I want to play when I'm running a business? And I look at what these Deal and Rippling guys have done. And well, at least Deal hiring a spy allegedly to go work for Rippling. Like, do I want to be that guy? Do I want to live that life? And is that secondarily, is that the values I want to like model for my employees? And the answer was like, I'd rather make less money and have high integrity and not participate in that kind of stuff and compete in a fair and level playing field and not play dirty than to, well, basically sign up for something like that. If somebody offers you that stuff, if it hasn't happened to you as a CEO or a leader, the ability to kind of get an underhanded advantage like that, it's harder to resist than you think. Like it's something you're like, oh, that would be so useful. Think of all the good we could do. Think of how the team would get excited when we were winning and how it would feel good to, to kind of leverage that stuff and win, right? But the reality is you have to, in that situation, think better about it and realize kind of the person and therefore the kind of company you wanna be. And ultimately, like, I think I've talked about this a lot on the channel, the character that you demonstrate as a leader is the character that your organization is gonna have. And if you start as a small business CEO doing low-character stuff like that, buying competitor lists and that sort of thing, man, who knows what your employees are gonna do to you? They'll say, well, if that leader and that CEO or that owner of this business has that kind of low integrity, well, I guess it's okay for me to be low integrity too. So I'll just take advantage of this situation and, well, whatever situations I can take advantage of. And here's the second kind of anecdote and story that this deal and Rippling situation reminded me of, which was, you know, when you run a small business, there are things that are confidential secrets that you want to keep confidential. You wouldn't want your competitors to see those types of things. And all states, as far as I know currently, especially the great state of Texas where I live, they allow you to Basically sign agreements with people as part of their employment working for you to protect yourself and require them to keep all of that information that is your secrets confidential for some period of time. You know, there, there's reasons for that and it's a good reason, right? If people could totally take your secrets and go sell 'em to the highest bidder or go leverage those with somebody else, that's not good for business. It makes it pretty hard to run a business if you can't, well, legally contractually trust that somebody's not gonna share it with somebody else. I remember in an early time when I didn't sign these kind of confidentiality agreements with folks. And an employee came in one day and asked for a raise and quietly hinted that he was very valuable because he knew all this stuff about the business. And, uh, well, I gave him the raise, but we signed a confidentiality agreement as part of it. And then later on, he left the company, and I was actually pretty happy about it because, man, he told me right in that moment that that wasn't the type of person I wanted to have in my company. He clearly didn't align with our values at all. So those are the two takeaways from this Deal and Rippling scandal. If there's something I missed that you learned from the whole thing or something you think about it, let me know below. Otherwise, I'll catch you next time. And if you like this stuff, give me a follow. See ya, bye.