The Wildest Stories of Corporate Espionage We’ve Ever Heard

alright a sentence that has never been said before b to b enterprise hr software space is the most riveting the most compelling espionage sp and story you'll ever hear i feel like this episode is gonna have to start with the netflix like duh because this a netflix original level drama i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looked so alright we gotta do this story parker conrad who is the ceo of a company called rip they do like payroll as well as other kinda of back office stuff for for startups tweeted came out two days ago and said rip sued deal today our lawsuit alleges that deal cultivated a spy at rip and workers orchestrated a long running trade secret theft the spy search deal in our system twenty thought twenty three times a day on average letting him spy on deals own customers who are considering switching to rip and any post screenshots of the lawsuit did you read this yes and we should preface this saying i think you have friends a deal i'm an investor and deal i invested in deal many years ago it's one of the best investments i really like alex i know i'm super like we're not like buddy buddy but like alex the founder of deal i think is awesome and i used deal i think deals a great product and so that's kind of my con my bias in context coming in is i like deal and i invested in deal and what i everything everything here it's allegedly and it's also this is just what the the lawsuit says and also it's just comedy for me like i don't i i don't know about any of this and i am just like everybody else on twitter is this for entertainment for me so please i'll take this too seriously what's the baseline story okay so basically the story is rip notices he's he's he's saying we noticed somebody was looking up deal a lot in our systems so then this word gets good he's like so we created a honey putt the best the what the the the story behind this is basically 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 rip founder and their legal team and maybe one other executive were in a room one night saying themselves do deal is spying on us what is going on how do we catch them and they said blake how did they know they were spying like is don't really that they just noticed on the logs this guy was searching deal a lot that's fine i don't know so crazy yeah so there's always you know no matter outfit fit a pancake there's always two sides isn't my dad always tells me so i don't know we we only that's alright yeah 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 gonna call it deal defectors meaning all of deals ex employees who now working at rip they're talking trash about deal and they're spilling the beans turns out that was a channel that no one at the at the rip was a part of but they emailed the deal team and they go this exists and you would love to see it and then the next day after setting the letter they noticed someone tried to log in to this deal defectors slack channel and that seems strange since the only people who know about this are deals three people on their executive team and rip links three person executive team and it wasn't us rip therefore it had to be one of the deal executives who knew about this espionage and spying situation and had access to the back end of rip login is that right i think that's right so that's allegedly what happens so they go to the local authorities because i think this has happening in ireland by the way like he's working at the ireland off the the dublin office and they go to local authorities to get like whatever the the ability to kinda like subpoena his phone so that's 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 alright let's go get it so they go up they're 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 it goes to the bathroom locks himself in the bathroom real quick and then mc story goes the the person heard him doing something quote doing something on his phone and he's shout knocking on the door is shouting out of like hey if you if you delete anything on that phone you're in violation of the law the story goes that the spy goes that's a risk i have to take he saw that's a risk i'm willing to take he said that that's a that's what they wrote this thing so and do they hear a flush right they hear a flush and then the guy flee the premises they don't get the phone and then rip orders somebody to go check the plumbing of the building to see if you flush the phone couldn't find a phone in there no phone and so that's that's where the story stands today and then the that's why they came out publicly and tried to like you know win this in the in the court of public opinion instead can i give three little bits of advice to anyone listening if you're ever gonna get in trouble one don't say shit do not say that's a risk company say don't say anything just say yeah i don't wanna talk or you'll be a lawyer the second thing don't write down anything that you'd be afraid for to be found in discovery and three do not delete messages when you think you're in trouble that's against the law dude i don't know if i don't know if any of this is true there's a whole bunch of back and forth so here's the here's a bit of the other side of the story so i think someone from deal came out and here's what a deal spokesperson said weeks after rip is accused of violating sanctions law in russia and seating false foods about deal rip is trying to shift the narrative with these sensational claims we deny all go wrongdoing doing and look forward to assert our counter claims alright i too look forward to them assert the counter claims you know what's funny is i lived in san francisco and i was a so the guy who started rip i was a customer his name is parker conrad parker previously started zen and back in thirteen or fourteen or fifteen that era i think zen was the fastest growing company ever i think it grew to like a hundred million dollars in revenue something insane and parker from what i remember he got fired by the board because zen was like a payroll and benefits company which means you need to be pretty up tight and i think that he was accused of being a little loose goose like it was like people were if i remember correctly the articles were like people at the parties were like having sex in the hallways or something insane like that and like i don't think that was the well maybe that was happening but i don't think that was that was the issue that got no that was it but but that was like a canary in the it was like dude this guy like he does it like not everyone it has their health benefits license something some license like that that you need to sell benefits yes in order to like be a broker a licensed broker you you had to have it like all every state that you were operating in and that's was there's a bunch of compliance things and what he would what had happened was either some people didn't have it or there was another thing which was he had created a macro like a piece of software that would just take the tests for you yeah so you he's like speed through this and get your license like way faster to keep up with the growth and like kinda he didn't actually do it yourself and i think that's when he got in a lot of talk trouble and he's got again in this case you know like basically he got shamed he got kicked out of the company david sachs took over david sa was his coo and big investor i think sa had put in like ten or twenty million dollars of his own money into the company and then came in a coo because it was like the next big hot start and then this came out and then sa basically threw conrad under the bus but they use like the these guys are partying in they're banging in the hallway it look like the whole thing was a mess whatever yeah and then and and and he said took over and he he got basically the shaft then rip was sort of his revenge company but yeah this guy finds himself a drama i guess parker likes a party parker parker put in the pa party i mean he like he likes to get down and now i'm hearing about and i didn't know about this russia stuff so parker lives lives life on the edge and you know he's kind of the bad boy the hr saas industry what can you know what can he say he needs to go jen leather jacket just pure snake skin too bad boy of hr saas here i like parker parker party's man like he just he gets down he he's always finds himself in a sticky situation sign me up parker should come on to to m mfa and we should go hang out but this guy likes a party you know alright so alright a lot of forms speculation here feel like we're gonna be hit with a with a lawsuit gonna go alright wasn't gonna say that he does a party like is that sla parker ring doorbell has shown him to be home for eight pm every guy yeah the parker does demand in the polo of jeans not like to get down we we deny these allegations alright so whatever so there's the deal rip thing there's a bunch of funny tweets about this it's just good comedy i have act actually a different angle here i know if you have anything else you wanna say on this but i have a different angle which was got me thinking what are some other great examples of corporate espionage history and i have some for you sam oh okay cool i i like that alright so so check this out actually i went down a little rabbit hole and i tried to find you know examples of great corporate corporate espionage cases that have happened in the past i wanna start with the british east india company okay are you prepared for this so yeah basically back of the day we're talking about like the eighteen hundreds the british east india company basically it was a trade it was a a trading company between the uk and india okay and they did two notable things one which is unrelated to corporate did you know they had their own corporate army well i know that they were like the the the baller of of the earth they like started in like sixteen hundreds and like basically like help shape global trade so they were so prolific that like other parts of europe like they say they were attacked on their trade routes and there was like a lot of security concerns so they formed their own corporate military which is pretty bad ass and i think it's awesome if i'm per perplexed or something like that if i'm like the third or fourth tier ai company right now might just spin up a corporate military just to put some shine on me and what i'm doing make it seem like i got some trade secrets that i need to protect like just armed guards going through soma it'd be amazing yeah i think that every company needs like a fake enemy or a fake emergency to prepare for i think it's good for them it's like when i used to be in college and we would go out and you know i'd be at the bar and just a lot of strike outs what's going on you know low pretty low batting average pretty low slug percentage take a lot of nails what what was your a cold approach open what was like jumping okay here we he go ready just turn around i'll be the girl i'm a i will just get a feel my body so i was sticking out this guy wait hold on what what what is this oh you didn't wanna grind oh shit no okay my bad totally thought you wanted to grind that was it it's a mistake grind with the immediate apology stick that was if it were if it was on the dance floor alright if we're not on the dance floor if we're at the bar right yeah so i'm just turned around i'm looking over here i'm just hanging out hey yeah do do they need do drinks here question just get into question that was it mine used to be hey sal bet how many oceans are there five or seven oh wow that's great yeah this was i'm talking about pre reading the book the game once i read the book the game then it was hey yeah you gotta you guys gotta settle an argument here and i just literally ripped the line from the book where it's like my roommates girlfriend is making him throw mail all the pictures of his ex girlfriend it is apartment is that crazy or is she we think she's crazy is that crazy and they're like no you gotta get rid of that that's like oh do you wanna be my girlfriend no okay never mind do you know what the worst line is is when i would steal all of the lines in the game and then one out of ten times a woman would be hard say yeah i read the game too you douche and it was just like you go home so sad that was the worst i would have thought that worked we have so much in common we love the same books i didn't have that turned shit into gold type of persona back then you know i was there's a reason i was single fur like not just all four years of college but even two years after college like it was it was a long a long drought i felt like the british east india company just exactly the drought that's not exactly a drought because the drought implies that that's not normal no yeah exactly i guess it's just a desert yes one well what are some other ones wait by the way have you ever done this with the company of what corporate espionage you think i'm cool enough to do that like my my extent of it was like having a friend at facebook and then like telling me like what my competitors are doing i've been there done that a few times yeah yeah no i i've never done anything this cool i don't think but you know okay i gotta tell you this british ec day company sorry alright so back in the day china had like a monopoly on tea production and this is a big problem tea was super popular china made all the tea and nobody could figure out how to make the tea nobody had the like the seeds nobody had any of the stuff you needed to like try to break that so they were all trading with china to get tea but they didn't have anything to trade back with china so there was these huge trade imbalances and so basically britain i think it was just trading like opium into into china as this only thing i could get it into china and china didn't like that and it created what was called the first opium war and so there's literally a war broke out because of this trade imbalance with the tea and so what happens is the british decide to to do something about this and so let me tell you this story real quick so the east india company the seen company hire this guy named robert fortune he's this scottish bot nest an adventure and they paid him they were like you were gonna infiltrate china and you were gonna steal the tea industry secrets of china ed by the way google a picture of this guy because i don't know how he pulled this off he looks like a scottish man but he disguised himself as a chinese merchant and went underground he was wearing chinese clothing chinese hairstyle he traveled deep the china's tea region which is actually off limits to foreigners and he was able to get access in any studied tea production step by step everything for planting harvesting drying packaging all of it he didn't just observe he was able to collect thousands of tea plants seeds this it was supposed to be chinese this guy was supposed to be chinese i don't know how he did but don't think me he's you with side burns he sick jobs so wow he not only that then he started recruiting like a like a turning other people so he started recruiting chinese tea growers hiring them and persuading them to leave china secretly and relocate to india and basically he pulled it off he goes and he steals the trade secrets he hires the tea growers he smuggle them out of the country he brings the seeds the tools the knowledge the trade secrets he gets to india and they start growing tea and soon after that india surpassed china in terms of its tea production broke the chinese monopoly on tea and prevented future wars actually dee escalated the conflict because now there wasn't this huge trade balance an opium problem that's insane that this guy pulled this off how long was he in china for i think this was like a multi year thing how exciting that's a life worth that's a life worth living let me give you some other ones alright so now let me give you a more modern example oracle versus microsoft have you heard this story no alright so two giants two successful companies microsoft if you remember in the nineties was doing antitrust cases and bill gates you there's videos of this on youtube he's like in deposition and just were getting hold in front of the antitrust committees and they had to defend themselves so he was being accused of a an monopoly mono behaviors and this really was a problem for microsoft it slowed them down there's i think it's called like the lost decade where basically like for a long period of time microsoft couldn't acquire companies they couldn't like if something got hot they couldn't release a competitor and kinda use their distribution to win because they had just gone through this like you know antitrust product low they had delay low exactly and so microsoft while it's in this this the situation oracle hires all these private investigators to go and dig up dirt on microsoft during this period of time and it gets found out what they were doing was pretty smart instead of digging up dirt on microsoft they were going to all these other companies that were supposed to be independent like they were kind of coming out and providing like testimonials or testimony in support of microsoft and i was like oh this independent council like the the independent the independent institute the national taxpayers union they're coming out in support of microsoft here and larry ellis from oracle is like not way and so oracle hires these private investors to go dumpster diving and so they're digging through the trash of these of these independent organizations finding links where they got paid by microsoft and they get caught they get caught doing this but they also caught that microsoft funded these organizations and so they go to larry ellis and he's like look i had nothing to do with this i wasn't made aware of it till the end and i agree this was a bit un savory but he he goes he goes corporate espionage this is a public service we're doing our civic duty here we are taking hidden information about how microsoft funding these supposed independent org and we are making it public we we're doing we're doing god's work out here and just calling it public service and is doing his civic duty i thought was an incredible spin the other day an elon musk interview and an elon musk interview someone asked him i think it was like ty cruz was like who do you you know you're a lot of people like you're smart who do you consider smart and the first person he said was larry ellis you said that yeah he goes he goes larry ellis he goes i think larry olson is one of the smarter people i work with he said you remember from forrest sc he says stupid is as stupid does elon goes smart is as smart does you so you you take the inverse of that line but thought be funny you smart is is is smart does and i think larry ellis might be the smartest person i know and so it's pretty funny that i didn't up until larry kinda got a little bit more front facing with some of these things i didn't i regarded him as like just a guy who he kind of just started early and became the best i didn't realize how shark not necessarily a bad way that he actually was though yeah how elite he is wow that's amazing elon i think took some of his spin remember when he like he imp that woman who works with him and he was just like under population is the biggest crisis we face and i turned it into i'm saving the planet yeah and i was like whoa yeah yeah play out with no hard at the end man that is that is incredible like can you imagine having the balls to just to just come out and not just defend it not deny it but to claim that you're doing good story that's incredible at high school when you're sit hanging out with your buddy's smoking weed late at night and you're just like r and saying the dumb shit you're gonna do in the next morning when you're sober like we're gonna go dude we're changing it out we're gonna get up we're gonna like gonna start working out first thing in the morning that's like a thing that elon would say is crazy he's like hey like don't these kind of inappropriate you know she works with you she's an executive company maybe there's same balance of power here like are you concerned about this at all and he's like i'm concerned about under well nick cannon just like riding notes out there alright here's some other ones coke first pepsi dude nick cannon just catch a straight bullet little that one yeah he's like the icon for it say they'd so not to candid so two thousand and six coke first pepsi another you know deal rip microsoft oracle coke pepsi these are all just like the legendary rivalry so an ea at coke who's disgruntled this world woman enjoy williams decides you know what screw it she leaves her post as it as a ea and she steals basically some trade secrets she takes a new a can of their new product that's un released and she writes a letter to pepsi and she says i have the formula for coke do you want the secret formula and i have a new un product she sends a letter and she says i'll give you the formula for a price guess what her price was a hundred grand a million i don't know one point five million dollars and what year two thousand and six alright so it's about three million dollars today pepsi being the good guy that it is says you know what not doing it they tell coke they say hey you have this woman she's trying to sell your formula we don't want it tell let's meet you and the fbi let's take this woman down and what they do is they set up a sting operation and so she comes out and she's ready to sell a formula they do a test payment for four thousand dollars to show that they're legit they record her saying what she has and that she's doing this trade and then they lock her up they arrested her and she goes to prison for eight years wow is that crazy wow that's a lot maybe like maybe too months yeah maybe like maybe a few months dude pepsi you guys suck maybe promote her i don't know eight years in prison seems like it was a lot for that so yeah she she got made an example lot of that's crazy this was like a recent story two thousand six so it looks like her boyfriend was like also in on it like they like this is like a this is like a legit scheme yeah that sucks i like when i heard joy i think of like an old woman who's like oh coke you didn't give me a race i'm gonna get back you know what i mean like i think that there was more to it alright that's crazy what do you think about pepsi turning down the secret formula and the trade secrets and deciding to take her down because what are you gonna do with that pepsi is like what am i supposed to do make coke sugar that like like like i don't know what you expect me to do with that with that because like the secret or the the whole thing with coke is that like only like a few people have access to it i don't who the fuck those that there's no way that's true by the way let me give you a couple other quick ones uber and way do you remember this one you probably remember this yeah the the main character of way stole a bunch of stuff from google and uber was going to use it and that uber got sued yeah so exactly so basically anthony le was this guy who worked at way and travis cli recruits him to uber wants him to set up the autonomous driving stuff at uber he comes from he was at way which is the autonomous driving thing inside of google he apparently downloaded fourteen thousand confidential files on the way out maybe bit much maybe a little too many to files and could've have got away with a little less they they they have the the info he ends up getting fired from uber uber has to settle uber settles for point three four percent of uber that google owned which is about two hundred fifty million dollars of stock back in twenty eighteen which i think is closer to a billion dollars now of of uber stock and he had to go to prison for eighteen months but then trump parted him trump part him early and so he got out why he didn't want him to serve all eighteen months i guess well i understand that's why i am part of exists actually i think a big football fan i don't want him to miss the super bowl let me want you hear let's get him out so where's he now this a good question like i wonder is he like damaged goods or is surely not like some some vc he was like dude i don't care that you're like stewart you're not cooler he's a ceo of paula and mobile has been for three years okay i know what that is okay these are great stories i'm i'm in on it do you wanna hear something that's related to security and also i think is almost equally exciting yeah wait before we finish i just have one more little tidbit the us this is actually baked into the dna of the united states out of espionage corporate espionage and so america's founding father and first us treasury secretary alexander hamilton decided that basically realized that the europe was ahead of the us and actually decided to in encourage intellectual pi doesn't all crime sound better when you just give her like a like a longer like more letters make it that make us up better and so what he said was he advocated to reward those who would bring improvements and secrets of extraordinary value into the united states which may which is instrumental in making the us a safe haven for industrial spies and they did this guy samuel slater my boy i love samuel slater what are the greatest stories all time what's what's the story so he brought british textile technology the us what does that is he like they claim they claim us sort of actually they claim he was like had a photographic memory this is like the story that you're told us a kid like in history class which is a he had a photographic memory but basically he was from england and he memorized and partially wrote down how factories in england worked he came to america and he helped reinvent american factories which spurred the industrial revolution which arguably made america what is this are we pro espionage i think i might be so by the way this guy's nickname top five nickname do know samuel letters nickname no slater the traitor yeah called him in the uk yes but but he was like welcomed with open arms here and we loved him so yes samuel sort of american hero that's crazy at the age of twenty one so he literally prism it he photographic memorized all these trade secrets and then came to america and gave to us and spurred the industrial revolution and made america great again well they're not a great for the first time yeah for the first time yeah yeah the the inaugural make america make america great for once yeah yeah but those hats are out of style that's actually pretty funny yeah he made america great i have another story so last year we the the there's two parts of the story last year we talked about this company wiz wiz is a cybersecurity company to most of our listeners we mostly talk about small business stuff these guys are not that they're enterprise cybersecurity company but it has two amazing components so one part of the story that you talked about and by the way these guys whiz remember when we did sarah's they were on sarah's so right we we we kinda i i we didn't exactly nail it because it was yeah a little pat on the back i don't know if the mic pick that one up because they were already like kicking ass and i don't know what the multiple was on when we named them but it was at least double but there's two amazing stories about this the first is how fast they grew i wanna like like show you how fast they grew but before we talk about how fast they grew we have talk about how they started and you talked about this wait you you're buried late they're getting bought for thirty two billion dollars down oh yeah where they got they get bought for thirty two billion dollars sorry so this company wiz is getting bought for thirty two billion dollars the story of how they started amazing the story of how fast they grew also amazing it just happened the of other day but listen to this so you i think are the one who brought this up do were you the one who talked about the this guy gill yes so gill is a israeli cybersecurity so he's exited a few companies in the cybersecurity space and he was also part of this elite group of security specialists in the israeli military called eighty two hundred i believe it's called and he invented cap he invented like a certain type of firewall he invented a lot of shit he's an og the like the og og in in cyber security and so he has this thing i believe it's called cyber starts yeah you can call it an incubator or a vc firm but here's how it works so he teamed up with a lot of young ex military eight eighty two hundred i i think that's eight two zero zero is the name of the part of the military where it the cybersecurity specialist so you leave that after you you finish your compulsory service and you go to gill go gill sign me up i wanna start a company and so what gilead has done is he has this fund and in the fund is dozens or even hundreds i believe of cybersecurity officers at large companies not just israeli companies but america companies and what they do these cybersecurity offices yeah yes they say here's the here's the problems i need solve gill go so go have your young founders create products to solve these problems and i will be your first customer and gill goes to these founders and goes guys i'm gonna invest in your company here's the idea to get you started i guarantee you two million in revenue in the first year and that's amazing because these companies will sell or get they they can raise their next round of funding at twenty times two million revenue so with two million in revenue in the first year they can raise money at forty million dollars valuation that's a no brainer now what's pretty controversial is these cis these chief information officers that these companies are what's the cs a cheap chief information and security officer information they own pieces of gill fund and anytime one of these startups does well and succeeds they get they get paid out well and so it's this very insular group of a lot of israeli guys so they have that bond over that they have the bond over being in jewish and they have the bond that they probably all came from a very similar part of the israeli army so there's just like bond for buying if you're buying and be like yeah look we'll help you we'll get you off the ground and then we're gonna get the money just it just flows around nicely and so that's what he did with these guys wiz and isn't isn't that a crazy setup it's amazing so i'm gonna read you this the numbers from the from his cyber starts fund are phenomenal this was it's about six seven years old now it only has twenty two companies but the twenty two companies combined value was thirty five billion at the time now wiz just sold for thirty two billion itself so it says five of the twenty two are unicorns so that's an extremely high hit rate so you know a normal vc fund i think between one and three percent of the companies will become unicorns yc which is you know the best accelerator in the world ever i think there their numbers between six and ten percent and so this guy is like double yc right so five of the twenty two are unicorns four of them sold in the last twelve months for a total of one point five billion and then it says in all three of his funds he shows an irr so his his internal rate of return of more than a hundred percent with it which is obviously fantastic not a single company in the portfolio has closed to date and he bet he basically beats every vc fund in terms of his performance his first fund he turned fifty four million dollars into one billion dollars that was his stake yeah crazy right you described the model well so basically he's got this network of cis and they're called the the cyber star cyber cyber starts like cis group and they basically all talk they say what problems they have but they also get pitched solutions and it's like kind of the handpicked solution they all start using it they all have a share in the in the fund so if those companies take off they win it's this kinda like i mean there's definitely a conflict of interest with this let's be clear but it's wow what a powerful network and what way what a powerful way to use a network you know like james career came on the podcast i just did an interview with i think it's out yet but he's got this whole thing his fund is called network effects and his his his blog goes called your life on network your your your life on network or your life is a network effect and it's basically like everything you do from the college you choose you're not just choosing a school you're picking a network to join like i joined the duke alumni network when i pick duke right when you move to san francisco you're picking a network of people to join when you pick a company you're picking a network of people to to of people to join and those gonna be the coworkers and future opportunities that that open up for you and so once you realize like your life is dictated by network you the church the religion you're in that's a network the language you speak that's a network the country live that's a network and so similarly here this is like such a powerful example of this guy having this network dating back to the israeli kinda like security intelligence groups to the network of you know fortune five hundred cis how valuable that is that network turned out to be worth tens of billions of dollars and it's pretty amazing he he's so precise about this so look at the first youtube link that i posted in our md b doc so basically there's this video that has four hundred or eight hundred views less than a thousand it has five hundred and twenty eight views so you see that five hundred twenty eight view video in this video he breaks down where he says he goes i've done this thirty five times i have a nine to eighteen month journey that i use to achieve product market fit before building any cybersecurity company and he goes through the key phases which is basically like exploring different pain points and how to find them you spend seven months developing the right solution that mere mortals can use and then here are the questions that you need to ask prospects here's how you find prospects just here's how what a great find only five hundred views on this guy who's given out like you know like a billion dollar playbook and he goes he talks about how he's gonna you wanna accelerate the timeline and what the benchmarks is he gives us whole playbook that he uses and he goes i've i've done the thirty five times and we've turned this into billions of dollars it's it's incredible now here we are with wiz so wiz was founded by a guy named what is his first name soft is it soft or his last name rap rapport but he basically had a company that he had previously sold for something like three hundred and fifty million dollars and he did it when he was like a kids still so when you think what someone dudes that does that well why don't earth are you gonna join this thing well he did join this thing and he left microsoft and even explained he's like told this company to microsoft and he left and he's was like i'm afraid to leave microsoft i'm not sure what to do so he joins this thing and listened to the timeline that he that wiz went through so wiz was founded in when you said he joined wrestling he joined what gill cyber starts sorry okay he joined starts okay he joined cyber starts gill thing and he starts the company in january of two thousand and twenty and they go through the and because he's was already successful and he was part of this gill crew right out the bat they raised twenty one million dollars in funding and they're able to hire a team of ten to twenty people by december of that first year they raised a hundred million dollars so fast forward one year to march so we're still in winter of two thousand twenty one that's one year after founding they're only at forty employees but they are at roughly one hundred million dollars of is that crazy so that's break next right like this is by the way there's a lot of we do this but there's a lot of people who are like dude venture money don't don't raise too much money you know growth growth growth it's it's a problem you know you gotta a bootstrap you gotta you know you know people there's different ways to win this is a great example of like no raise a bunch of money out the gate to call blitz scale this thing and keep raising money and just go for the huge price and and i'm gonna and i have like a takeaway on that but two years after the starting the company we are now in winter of two thousand twenty one they raised two hundred and fifty million dollars at a six billion dollar valuation this is a handful of months after they've already reached a hundred million in revenue with forty people eighteen months in now we're in the year two thousand twenty two this is the second year of business they are at i believe that yeah second year of business they're at a hundred employees and by the end by the end of that year they're at four hundred employees now we're gonna fast forward each year here's south they grew their revenue after a hundred million in revenue by year three they're at two hundred million in in revenue by year four they're at five hundred million in revenue and by that same year they're they sell for thirty two billion dollars is that insane how on earth can you imagine going zero to five years in and you're creating five between five hundred and a billion in in revenue with only like five or six hundred employees was i was watching a clip of their cro talking and he was like we were growing so fast that the only reliable benchmark we could use for how much to grow our head count on our sales team was just he's like we they're they're were like did you use you know like pipeline leads kinda like how did you you do market analysis market studies he goes we just looked at how fold the calendars were ace basically like for every product line in every category we just looked at how like the the calendar density of all of our sales reps and in areas of the calendar density was high we knew that area working hire more people just hire more people based on the density and we measured our calendar density of sales reps to for booked calls for people looking for demos and that's how they knew that that that was the only reliable leading indicator they could figure out for for growth and if you look at their glass door review the ceo has like people ray the bottom them and like you could say i don't know is glass story even accurate not sure you're the only dude who looks at glass door you're the they have one web visitor a month and it's you man i'm telling you you can get so much insight so if you go to glass door you sort by negative and you look at the snake negative reviews and then you look at the positive reviews and the truth is in the middle and i'm telling you you can get learn so much information about what people are complaining about did you ever were you ever on glass door with any of your companies like was successful on glass door yeah and i didn't look because the only people that left for reviews were the people i fired correct and do you think that they had an accurate view of like the company well it's an accurate view of the people who disliked me like so but but there's like there's like so like what i i don't even wanna read it but what what's it say or we had to go i don't know if we have one anymore because we haven't been in business for like independently for years they could have shut it down but like it was probably like the management is good but the ceo like moves too fast and like is not communicating well which is like probably true too handsome too too ripped moves too fast well like i would like make decisions like i'm like smart i would like make decisions quickly and i would say this is what we're doing now and i just wouldn't like communicate with my managers i just say this is it i just can't believe you like reading the the reviews of w employees of other companies i just like what what do you really get out of it like it reveals so much truth like it could it could say like but that thing you said is true about like every company you know like yeah but like likes to move fast it could be like let let's say there's this new startup up and it says like you know the market like like we were could we were gonna do like a better up you know what better up is is like a coaching platform for before hampton we were thinking about getting into and i read the reviews of better up and the reviews were like business boom during covid but now we can't get anyone to sign up for online coaching so that's like an interesting like a macro insight into the market of coaching like a boom during covid i like that and and so you'll see that on like four different coaching platforms glass door reviews or like you know our valuation if you see this in like five different months is way too high i have no idea how we're ever going to grow in this that's not something that you wanna see on four different glass doors of companies in the same industry so you get like insights like that or it could be like ceo's amazing at press don't believe everything you see and if you see a bunch of those and i think to myself i've been like basing a lot of my insights off of public articles i don't know if i should actually do that you know what i mean yeah i just i i personally wouldn't like you know i personally wouldn't trust it because i think you're gonna get a lot of basically false negatives in this that would sp you so for example you ever worked good do you ever working a company that had blind i didn't work at a company when that existed i no or like i i you had one you probably just didn't didn't join it but like blind is basically a private social network let's say you work at a big company there's an app called blind you log in you have to use your i think you have to show that you have a work email there so like only people who work at the company can see it and can post it there still exists but it's all anonymous yes it still exists and it's all anonymous and it's basically just like a back channel for people to bitch and moan and complain and then the upside would be that they you know there's kind of like a whistle type of thing where you can you could call out hard so you're not gonna call out but the reality is that it was all just complaints and the problem was it was misguided complaints because so like for example at twitch it's like i was on the exec team so i knew i knew all the numbers of the company i knew what was going on i knew this strategy i knew who was smart i knew who wasn't because i'm sitting with these people every day and then you read a blind a review on blind or like a post on blind from someone who's like you know just like a mid level employee you know some engineering manager somewhere they would be often be like oh we're bad know there there's no way we're gonna hit our numbers i'm like dude hitting our numbers when you're talking about i could see that i could see the numbers you don't have access to the numbers so you're just like you know just talking out your ass basically but and and the loudest most sort of extreme voices would get the get the most play right they would get the most attention and so it's the same way like when dropbox launches on hacker news and the top comment is like no one's ever gonna use this and he can give you a highly intelligent breakdown of well i nobody's ever gonna use dropbox and the dropbox becomes like so right so i think like a lot of these message board anonymous message board type things are too biased towards negativity from people who don't have real information and are too prone to false negatives to be trusted so like for every example you could find where you get signal you're gonna find counter signal which means to me i can't use this because i can't differentiate signal and counter signal properly only only insight you know no if i think if you read enough of them i think you can start it like example if you're trying to understand like a macro trend or industry analysis i think you can see trends in the class reviews and i think that it could help paint a picture but not be you it's not a fact it's just like is this like is this does this jive with other sources that i'm learning about so that's why i'm on board with it by the way i agree to disagree like i think you're right i think you're right i know you're wrong i think there's some problems with it but there's some some utility you're the only guy i know who uses it which find like funny well like like i wanted to learn about the ceo and i'm like what makes a ceo so great and i read an article about him and it was like don't mistake this guy's gentleness for ruthless it's a don't mistake soft gentleness for someone who's willing to play by the rules yeah and i was like that's like an interesting title so this guy like must be like a really nice guy but he's ruthless and he's kind of a killer that's like an interesting trait like is there like is there is there like anything i can learn from his personality and i went and read his glass door reviews and he had glowing reviews as a ceo where people are like nice guy but total hard ass and i just thought like that is that that mix those mixes of of those two traits when you mix like beat your you could be polite and like hardcore i respect that i like that the if is this a person i wanna learn for let learn from that was kind of like my insight from looking at the glass reviews and also reading interviews things like that right right and so i just thought he's fascinating but we had mark lau the pod mark started diapers dot com which he grew like during like the dot com boom and he sold for hundreds millions of dollars then he did the same with jet dot com sold that for billions of dollars now he's had a new thing have you seen this new thing it's called i think wonder wonder yeah and he had this thing when he came on the pod by the way when he came in the pod he we could tell that he didn't have a laptop and we were like are you calling from your iphone and he was yeah i don't i don't use laptops and we were like is that like a billionaire thing and he was like he was awesome by the way i love that guy's energy like he he was super positive super energetic super optimistic he was great right charismatic he was fun he was he was the best i would love to have him all we gotta get him back on well on the pod we asked them him how we he how we get it and he had one phrase that has always stuck with me because it was almost like saying i'll explain why it's so but it was called vision capital and people he goes those are the three things i care about he goes i find a really big idea and a big opportunity i raise a ton of money and then i go and hire the best people and i pay them all of that money that i raised and i sort of get out of the way and let them do the work and he i have a bootstrap company you have only done bootstrap mostly done bootstrap companies it's really hard to do that because you don't have a lot of money to pay people so you're doing the work so it feels like a a grind and this company whiz is sort of a good example of the founders they raised they found amazing opportunity they raised shit loads of money and this is a perfect example of how it's done when you have a really big idea and you have a really big opportunity and you have a ton of money and i think it's as hard as a bootstrap start do you know what i mean like it's they're of equal challenging in usefulness equal i don't know this scaling at break next speed seems a lot more challenging to me i think if you had a small bootstrap startup that was growing quickly you would feel a similar amount of stress but there is no but there is no chance that you would have a thirty two billion dollar exit in five years one of the funny things about life is that if you decide to start a business you're gonna spend let's just call it ten hours a day maybe twelve early on just obsessed your mind is just obsessed with this company ten hours a day twelve hours a day every single day it doesn't matter if that's a taco truck it doesn't matter if it's wiz selling for thirty two billion that's still gonna to take ten to twelve hours a day of your time and mind share it's still gonna stress you out pretty much equally if you are doing a thing that's you know one million in arr and you're trying to pay the bills and you're trying to pay yourself and you're trying to grow and you're trying to do all those things we guess about what these guys are also trying to pay the bills trying to grow trying to do all you're right like the stress levels are more based on you as a person than the than the company that you're doing and the time is equal whether whether you have you know it doesn't matter how many zeros are at the end of the size of the business this was probably one of the most important lessons than my dad taught me he was like my first my first business was in the restaurant industry and my dad worked in oil and gas his whole life he worked for bp and so he was like yeah the energy industry is just like the restaurant industry you're gonna spend the same ten hours a day except in this there's three extra zeros on the end of every project and so would you rather spend that same time on a small project or a bigger project like that's so that's what you're deciding between here and i was like which is sort of hard to hear right like you're like i'm dedicating my life to this thing you're dedicating your life to this thing but your prize is so much bigger i didn't think it was hard to hear i was like oh that's the truth okay cool thank you like okay what do i do then i pretty much immediately switched and went did a biotech thing with him in australia like you know i was like i was pretty ready to hear the truth i think that most people you're right don't like to hear the truth i like to hear the truth because i realize that basically the truth while short term painful is actually long term less painful and i think most people don't like the short term pain they're willing to have long term pain have you been following these guys like getting acquired did was there anything that you liked about the story or a suck out to you well remember when we first brought this up we first brought this up because wiz was rumored to be selling for twenty three billion and then it's and then something happened where it was like no that's just a rumor or google couldn't do it because of antitrust or for some reason the deal wasn't gonna happen and if you remember us off came out and he tweeted this like kinda like badass memo where it was like first they leaked the deal first deal information got leaked they're in rumors to about an acquisition for twenty three billion then he releases this thing and he's like we're not looking to get acquired let me be i think he said like let me cut to the chase our next milestones are a billion in arr and an ipo and everyone everyone's was like yeah that's it that's the guy guy's a killer and most of us were like most of most of us on the side they're like a nice negotiating like pretty sure it's gonna a sell for i don't know twenty five thirty billion in the next in the next twelve months and that's exactly what happened it sold for thirty billion a thirty two billion in the next twelve months it like came exactly true what a lot of people noticed which was like what was the first offer the first offer was like twenty eighteen twenty five so we got ten billion dollar ten extra billion dollars and i don't even know if the twenty three billion was on the table maybe the twenty three billion was what he wanted at the time and they continue to grow and and this is all part of the negotiation right it's not this didn't i i don't think this leaked because somebody really just wanted the world to know you know this is part of a part of a public negotiation it's a price setting it's an anchoring it's getting the second bidder to up their bid there's there's a whole bunch stuff happening there and when a ceo like we wanna be independent and it's like yeah you do but if the price is right you know we'll see we'll see what happens and almost always once the price is right they they do it i love hearing about this story i'm very excited the the time that we've worked on this podcast this guy has built and sold a thirty two billion dollar company what would you put it like that yeah because you have six hundred fifty thousand subscribers on youtube probably not and now he will try to i bet you this guy's gonna get into podcast podcasting too that that was a funniest tweet saw the other day goes even kings and billionaires wanna be podcast i i was like it's true dude like you see you know whether it's billionaires on the all in podcast or you know bill girly in the his podcast you have did real pain his call elon is tweeting and like crazy and trying to be trying to get his word out there you see gavin news starting the new than his new podcast they want they all want what we got sam they all want what we got we'll sell it it up for thirty two billion it's always been this way you know you look at like who has bought thai magazine and with washington post and bezos you know king or once you've one once you're rich you always wanna be king and to be king oftentimes is to own a media company for some for some reason it's been that ways for hundreds of years yeah yeah it's basically just like there's three buckets if you're rich but but lack status you're gonna chase status if you're high status but no money you're gonna chase money and if you have rich and status you're gonna chase power and those are the three you will fill those like somebody i have a friend who's who who knows elon and he was telling me he's like elon gets all this criticism right now for for backing trump and do and all the stuff and the thing people say is like you know he's doing this to make like he's doing this till like give tesla whatever an unfair man he's doing this to enrich himself hey and he's like are you at idiot he's like he's not doing this to enrich himself he wants status like like not that oh he's doing this holistically but he wants status that's of course what people want when they when they're when they have the money they want the status and when they have the status they want the power like those are the three like things that draw people to do crazy stuff yeah he wants something but it's not money yeah he's got i think at this point when you have that much money more money is probably boring his father did a good thing on dj vlad where he was talking about how he was like elon i knew after he sold zip two that he wouldn't stop until he was number one the richest person in the world he's was like say that yeah he goes i he goes i knew that was that's what he wanted to do and he would never stop until he was number one i could tell he was like that since he was a kid so elon dad did an interview with vlad tv yeah didn't we talk about this yeah there's dude what else was in this this is incredible so vlad tv part of black youtube one of my favorite niches of youtube wait he had what's elon dad's name got know or something like that forget his name he had his dad on the other day and d dj vlad is weird he never just releases the oral earl musk arrow he like releases like clips and he's been releasing clips over the past month of this interview and he talks about what ed elon was like as a kid and how like are the rumors true that you are rich and it sounds like this guy in elon are exactly the same where he made some money and then he's like we're gonna spit it all buying this farm and turned this farm into a thing and it went broke and he's like well to come with some other people to give me money we're gonna start this new thing that worked and he went rich and bust like constantly and he was like i loaned elon money to start zip two and that turned into thirty million dollars and i knew when he made that money he was never gonna stop until he was number one and he just tells these crazy stories along the way do we need to do a whole reacts reaction was any if you're good it's pretty good it's shocking that like if my father said any of this shit publicly it's weird dude you it it makes it's very like they talk exactly the same the way they're they're ten are like his laugh is a dna test in itself or they've their time stamping and it says i swear this is elon the face mimics it the way he laughs the way he rolls his eyes i could see elon here this is this is this laugh is a opportunity test like the spacing and words you know how elon talk slow he like a very like unique structure how he talks it's exactly the same and his dad is insane by the way like there's like some crazy story about how he is now married to his step daughter like he does some wacky ass shit he's married to his step daughter something weird like that he has a kid with a step daughter yeah and there's a and there's like just when he's talking you see i understand why the children who you raised why they're insane and why they're ultra like you order to be ultra successful you have to have some type of like weird like daddy issue and i see him and i'm like oh yeah yeah yeah i get why you have a daddy issue because you're insane like he reveals stuff like he'll be like yeah elon like was crying to me when he was like twenty three and i thought how weak like he like like what's the whole story where he's like disrespect his son in front of everyone and i'm like oh you're an asshole that's why your son behaves this way sometimes it's like a very interesting interview and it was has been totally under talked about yeah this is crazy this is a two and a half hour interview oh did he release the whole thing finally when did that get released normally one he normally does like clips like he releases two and a half hour interview or at least a month ago how many views does it have a hundred and seventy one thousand that's it yeah just just to put that into into perspective here dj vlad it's most popular review is with let's see who's he got here boo boo has six point six and half billion views cardi b five point seven million i mean boo is a good a good lesson it's a great interview five million so we're gonna have to like watch the whole thing but there's like crazy good insight into all this and it it like my takeaway from all this is like it's not worth being successful if you and your father are behave this way to one another like it's very strange to see like you don't have to be a psychologist like watches and be like i i understand why this family screwed up yeah messed up family okay wow that's amazing alright corporate s corporate espionage stories you got what you wanted ever remember everything on this podcast is allegedly and this is a comedy podcast thank you very much don't come after us yeah alright that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back