Bonuses didn’t work, ‘spite’ did: Bengaluru-based CEO on employees working nights, Sundays
When Resentment Outperforms Paychecks: A Bengaluru Founder's Unconventional Motivation Playbook
Theindiapostdaily.com – Workplace motivation research has long catalogued the levers that drive employee performance: competitive compensation, career advancement, equity stakes, and structured incentive programs. Yet one Bengaluru-based technology executive recently argued that none of these conventional tools matched the raw energy unleashed by something far less dignified — a personal grudge held by his staff against a former client.
The story broke into public view when Vikram Pai, co-founder and chief executive of ReferRush, a referral-marketing platform headquartered in India's tech capital, took to the social platform X to describe how his team had begun volunteering for extended night shifts and Sunday work sessions. The catalyst, as Pai framed it, was not a market shift or a product deadline but the decision by a past customer to enter the same competitive space after what the CEO described as a period of poor treatment toward his employees.
The Trigger: A Former Client Turns Competitor
Pai laid out the sequence of events in a post that quickly drew tens of thousands of readers. His account described a client relationship that had soured, with the customer allegedly behaving in ways that left his team feeling disrespected. That same individual then moved to develop a product competing directly with ReferRush's offering.
"A customer of ours who treated my team terribly decided to go build a competing product."
According to Pai, the reaction inside the company was immediate and self-organising. Employees began staying late into the night and showing up on Sundays without being asked. One team member, whose message Pai shared as a screenshot in the post, declared he would take no Sundays off for the following three weeks unless an emergency demanded otherwise.
Conventional Incentives Fall Short
What made the anecdote circulate widely was not merely the existence of overtime, but the CEO's candid admission that standard motivational levers had failed to produce comparable intensity. Pai stated plainly that he had already deployed the full toolkit available to a startup leadership team.
"I've tried everything to make us move faster: bonuses, incentives, deadlines, equity. Nothing has worked quite like this. My team is so pissed off they're voluntarily working nights and Sundays."
He followed that with a wry summation of the episode:
"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 crossed the 23,500-view mark within hours of publication, pulling in a mix of fellow founders, HR professionals, and general internet commentators who weighed in on both the practicality and the ethics of resentment-driven labour.
Online Skeptics Question the Logic
Not every reader accepted the narrative at face value. A recurring thread of replies focused on what several commenters called a logical gap: why would a customer who mistreated a sales or support team respond by building a competing product rather than simply switching vendors or filing a complaint?
"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 commenter offered a shorter, more philosophical shrug:
"Humans are wired differently."
A third reply pressed the distinction between the customer's behaviour and the employees' emotional response, asking why the team's anger should translate into competitive urgency rather than, say, a formal grievance or a product-features discussion.
What the Episode Reveals About Startup Culture
Stripped of its anecdotal colour, the episode touches on a well-documented tension in early-stage technology companies: the gap between what leadership believes motivates people and what actually moves behaviour. Academic literature on intrinsic motivation suggests that autonomy, mastery, and purpose often outperform extrinsic rewards in knowledge-work settings. Pai's story, whether taken literally or as a compressed metaphor, lands in that territory — employees who feel personally wronged may channel that energy into outperforming the perceived wrongdoer, something no bonus structure can replicate.
At the same time, the online pushback highlights a legitimate concern. If a team's primary competitive drive is personal animus toward one individual, the sustainability of that effort is questionable. Three weeks of Sunday work, as one employee pledged, is a finite burst. The longer question for any founder watching such a spike is whether the underlying product strategy, customer value proposition, and team culture can sustain momentum once the emotional high fades.
For Bengaluru's dense startup ecosystem — home to thousands of seed- and Series-A-stage companies competing for talent and market share — the anecdote also underscores how informal, emotionally charged narratives travel faster than polished case studies. A single screenshot of a colleague's defiant message, paired with a founder's self-deprecating humour, can generate more discussion about organisational psychology than a white paper ever would.
The Broader Takeaway
Whether one finds the story inspiring, absurd, or both, it reframes a familiar question: what actually makes people show up at 11 p.m. on a Friday? The tidy answer — better pay, clearer goals, fairer equity splits — remains valid. But Pai's experience, as he chose to tell it, suggests that the untidy answer, rooted in personal stakes and perceived injustice, can temporarily eclipse every structured incentive a leadership team has at its disposal. The internet, for its part, spent the following days debating whether that temporary eclipse is worth courting, or whether it is simply a symptom of a culture that has not yet resolved its conflicts through process rather than spite.
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