The Wildest Stories of Corporate Espionage We’ve Ever Heard

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, a sentence that has never been said before. B2B Enterprise HR Software Space is the most riveting, the most compelling, espionage story you'll ever hear.

**Shaan Puri** (0:11)
I feel like this episode is going to have to start with the Netflix, like, da-dum. Because this is a Netflix original level drama.
So, all right, we got to do this story. Parker Conrad, who is the CEO of a company called Rippling, they do like payroll, as well as other kind of back office stuff for startups, tweeted, came out two days ago and said, Rippling sued Deel today. Our lawsuit alleges that Deel cultivated a spy at Rippling and orchestrated a long-running trade secret theft. The spy searched Deel in our system 23 times a day on average, letting him spy on Deel's own customers who were considering switching to Rippling and then he post screenshots of the lawsuit. Did you read this?

**Sam Parr** (1:04)
Yes. And we should preface this saying, I think you have friends at Deel.

**Shaan Puri** (1:07)
I'm an investor in Deel. So I invested in Deel many years ago. It's one of the best investments. I really like Alex. I don't know him super well. Like we're not like buddy buddy, but like Alex, the founder of Deel, I think is awesome. And I use Deel. I think Deel is a great product. And so that's kind of my bias and context coming in is, I like Deel and I invested in Deel.

**Sam Parr** (1:27)
And everything here, it's allegedly, and it's also, this is just what the lawsuit says.

**Shaan Puri** (1:33)
And also it's just comedy for me. Like I don't know about any of this. And I am just like everybody else on Twitter, this is for entertainment for me. So please don't take this too seriously.

**Sam Parr** (1:45)
What's the baseline story?

**Shaan Puri** (1:47)
Okay, so basically the story is, Rippling notices, he's saying we noticed somebody was looking up Deel a lot in our systems. So then this is where it gets good. He's like, so we created a honey pot.

**Sam Parr** (2:00)
The best. The story behind this is basic. Like I don't, I wouldn't even be smart enough to come up with the idea of this. This is amazing. So the way it worked was, I think I read that it was Rippling's founder and their legal team and maybe one other executive were in a room one night saying to themselves, dude, Deel is spying on us. What is going on? How do we catch them?

**Shaan Puri** (2:24)
And they said, Do you know how did they know they were spying? Like, is it really that they just noticed on the log this guy was searching Deel a lot? That sounds so crazy.

**Sam Parr** (2:32)
Yeah. So there's always, you know, no matter how fit a pancake, there's always two sides. This is what my dad always tells me. So I don't know. We, but we only, that's a good one, right?

**Shaan Puri** (2:40)
Yeah.

**Sam Parr** (2:41)
We only know this side. So this side is that they had a suspicion and then they're sitting there one night and they go, I got it. Let's make a screenshot or let's actually make a fake Slack channel that no one at the company knows about. And we're going to call it Deel Defectors, meaning all of Deel's ex-employees who now work at Rippling, they're talking trash about Deel and they're spilling the beans. Turns out that was a channel that no one at the Rippling was a part of, but they emailed the Deel team and they go, this exists and you would love to see it. And then the next day after setting the letter, they notice someone tried to log in to this Deel Defectors Slack channel. And that seems strange since the only people who know about this are Deel's three people on their executive team and Rippling's three person executive team. And it wasn't us Rippling, therefore it had to be one of the Deel executives who knew about this espionage and spying situation and had access to the back end of Rippling's login. Is that right?

**Shaan Puri** (3:39)
I think that's right. So that's allegedly what happens. So they go to the local authorities, because I think this is happening in Ireland, by the way. Like he's working at the Ireland office, the Dublin office. And they go to the local authorities, they get like whatever, the ability to kind of like subpoena his phone. So I guess what happened is, person comes in, says, hey, you've been served, you need to hand over your phone right now. And he says, oh, it's upstairs in my bag. Like, all right, let's go get it. So they go up, they look in the bag, just a laptop in there, no phone. And they're like, okay, where's the phone? He's like, I gotta go to the bathroom. So he goes to the bathroom, locks himself in the bathroom real quick. And then the story goes, the person heard him doing something, quote, doing something on his phone, and he's knocking on the door, basically shouting at him like, hey, if you delete anything on that phone, you're in violation of the law.