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‘Spite might be the greatest incentive’: Bengaluru CEO on employees working weekends
Vikram Pai, CEO and co-founder of ReferRush, shared on X that his team is voluntarily working nights and Sundays out of animosity toward a former customer who launched a competing product. His post, which has sparked debate about workplace motivation, included an employee's screenshot pledging to skip Sundays for three weeks.
By Tertius News AI Desk2 distinct · 2 mastheads · 2 articlesVersion 1Coverage Published
CEO says rivalry with ex-customer spurs team to work weekends
Vikram Pai, CEO and co-founder of the Bengaluru-based company ReferRush, has said his employees are voluntarily working late nights and weekends — not for bonuses or equity, but out of spite toward a former customer who went on to build a competing product. Pai shared the story in a post on X, along with a screenshot of an employee declaring he would not take any Sundays off for the next three weeks, except in an emergency.
In the post, Pai wrote: “A customer of ours who treated my team terribly decided to go build a competing product.” He said he had previously tried conventional incentives to accelerate his company’s progress, writing: “I’ve tried everything to make us move faster: bonuses, incentives, deadlines, equity. Nothing has worked quite like this.” He added: “My team is so pissed off they’re voluntarily working nights and Sundays.”
Pai concluded: “Turns out spite might be the greatest employee incentive of all time and as a founder I’m way too happy about this.”
Social media reacts
The post has attracted significant attention on X, with view counts reported at over 22,000 by Hindustan Times and more than 23,500 by Livemint. Users have commented on the unusual motivation, with one writing, “Humans are wired differently,” and another saying, “I tried this too but my employees spent the time DDoSing his product.”
Some commenters questioned the plausibility of the story. One user wrote: “That really does make 0 sense. How does one treat a referral org badly and go on to make a competing product? What logic is this? Call it by name if it’s real.” Another asked: “If the customer treated your team terribly, why would they build a competing product? It was your team.”
Pai declined to name the rival CEO, saying he would “rather not.”
How each outlet told it
A framing line is our reading of that outlet's own text — an interpretation, not a quotation and not a fact we assert. Check it against what the outlet published.
Framing: The headline highlights the paradoxical claim that spite, not bonuses, motivated employees, framing it as a quirky insight from a Bengaluru CEO. — Curious and slightly amused
Facts Included:
Vikram Pai, CEO and co-founder of ReferRush, shared the story on X.
Pai said the motivation came from a former customer who allegedly treated his team badly before launching a competing product.
Pai's post included a screenshot of an employee saying he would take no Sundays off for the next three weeks, except in an emergency.
Pai wrote: “A customer of ours who treated my team terribly decided to go build a competing product.”
Pai said he had previously tried bonuses, incentives, deadlines, and equity.
Pai wrote: “Nothing has worked quite like this.”
Pai wrote: “My team is so pissed off they’re voluntarily working nights and Sundays.”
Pai wrote: “Turns out spite might be the greatest employee incentive of all time and as a founder I’m way too happy about this.”
The post has attracted more than 23,500 views.
Several users questioned the logic of the story, with one writing: “That really does make 0 sense. How does one treat a referral org badly and go on to make a competing product? What logic is this? Call it by name if it’s real.”
Another user commented: “Humans are wired differently.”
A third user wrote: “If the customer treated your team terribly, why would they build a competing product? It was your team.”
AI-extracted; can misattribute a claim — see Methodology.
Each row is one claim, attributed to the outlet whose wording states it most clearly. Confidence rates how directly the source text states the claim — explicit and unhedged rates high; hedged, pieced-together, or internally inconsistent statements rate lower. It does not measure whether the claim is true. Status is Contested when two claims on this page negate each other; otherwise it counts the distinct outlets we found asserting that specific claim — so a single-source claim can still show high confidence, and a multi-source claim can show medium. Every one of those outlets is named beside the status, so you can check the count against the list. For claims extracted before we began storing that list, the row says so: it names the outlet the claim is quoted from and states that we have not recorded which outlets backed it. Outlets wrote at different times, so a figure that evolves — a casualty count, for example — can legitimately differ between rows; check the "as of" time next to each claim's source.
Claim
Confidence
Status
ClaimVikram Pai is CEO and co-founder of ReferRush.
ClaimVikram Pai shared a post on X about employees working weekends, saying the motivation came from a former customer who allegedly treated his team badly before launching a competing product.
ClaimSeveral users questioned the logic of the story, with one writing: “That really does make 0 sense. How does one treat a referral org badly and go on to make a competing product? What logic is this? Call it by name if it’s real.”
ClaimA third user questioned the connection between the former customer's behaviour and the employees' response, writing, "If the customer treated your team terribly, why would they build a competing product? It was your team."
ClaimPai said he had tried every trick in the book to make his product move faster, including better incentives, bonuses and equity for staff. Nothing, however, had worked quite as well as animosity.
ClaimPai said he was pleased to see his employees putting in additional effort voluntarily, before summarising the unusual source of motivation behind it.