Why You Must Pay Your Employees On Time?

0:34Or how they just simply conduct their finances improperly by not paying their employees. You know that, Halachically speaking, you must pay your employees on time, and if you delay payment to your employees, you have a very serious cheshbon with Hashem. We're not talking about, you know, listen, I'll pay you at 2 o'clock instead of 1 o'clock. No, as long as you're paying the same day, there's no problem. But sometimes the employer says, "Listen, it's Friday, I like having the money in my pocket for an extra couple of days. I'll pay you on Monday." what if I don't have? You should have worried about that on Thursday. Go borrow, go sell, go do something, give him stuff. Don't let the guy come home with nothing. Now, if you have nothing, literally, that's a different story. But the reality is, most people have something. They have something to give, and they choose to delay the payment. I have one student in Los Angeles who worked for a technology company. The rotten people...

2:02Why? They knew they had something promising. Their product had the potential to be unique. They gathered a team of tech experts to develop apps and technology. While I'm not familiar with all the specifics, they had a group of talented individuals create this app for them and proposed, "Listen, we want to give you paychecks, but the main thing is we want to give you stock options." Why? Because as soon as this thing launches, as soon as it goes live, we're going to take the company public, and everyone's going to become rich. So the guys, they're really focused on his dream. They're working, and yes, once in a while, they get a paycheck to pay their bills. But if there's a little bit of a delay, a week, a day, it's not a big deal. Why? Because they're getting these fake stock options. They're hoping that after finishing this big work they're doing in three, four, five, six months, it's eventually going to be released. People are going to love it, they're going to buy into it, and they'll become millionaires. Well, guess what? This company took advantage of these poor little kids, young kids. And one week delay became a two-week delay. And a two-week delay became a three-week delay. And a three-week delay became a two-month delay. Three months they didn't pay anybody. The guys had to start borrowing money from family just to survive, to go to work, in hopes that maybe, just maybe, when they finish working eventually, they're going to get paid by stock options, by this, by that. Long story short, the company never paid them.

3:28they all eventually left the company, and I believe the company went belly up. But the point being, rabotai, it didn't go belly up because the idea was bad. The idea was great; the deal is still great. The management was bad, the people were bad. A lot of times when businesses fail, it's not because the business itself is bad; it's because the people behind it are bad. I remember years ago, we invested in a company that... was one of the innovators behind the thing called MiFi. You guys ever heard of the MiFi? It's a hotspot, a little credit-card-looking device that creates internet hotspots. It was a company named Novatel, one of the originators of this idea. A fantastic idea, especially at the time—this is 10 years ago, maybe more. And we invested a few million dollars in this company, thinking it was going to be a big deal. The product is good. The price is right for the company. What could go wrong? Until we started realizing that the management is the wrong part. The CEO is corrupt. The CFO is even worse. The one below is a criminal. One after another, they're all on the same team. One guy is worse than the other. Little by little, they destroy the company. Until this day, they haven't recovered.

4:46The idea itself is fantastic. You go buy a MiFi device from Verizon or one of these other companies, but they had to go private. Why? Because in the public eye, nobody gets arrested, all of them go free. Sometimes the ideas are fantastic, but the people behind them are rotten.