"If you are on this call, you are part of the unlucky group being laid off," said Better.com CEO Vishal Garg to 900 employees over a Zoom call on Friday. "Your employment here is terminated, effective immediately." Garg prefaced the bad news by telling the sacked employees that he cried the last time he had to lay off staff. As one YouTube commenter noted: "wow that makes the people who got fired feel so much better. They can really feel good in their struggles knowing that at least the CEO 'felt' bad."
Better is a home mortgage lender. Garg, who founded better in 2014, is a billionaire who got a bonus of $25 million from Better.com in 2020.
Garg sounds like a swell guy. From an August 2021 Daily Beast article:
[Garg] or his companies may have misappropriated tens of millions of dollars from prior businesses; that his companies engaged in fraud; and that he used ill-gotten money and stolen technology to found Better in the first place. As Forbes reported last year, the litigation has grown heated. In one deposition in 2019, he told a former business partner—once the best man at his wedding—that he was "going to staple him against a fucking wall and burn him alive." (Garg later apologized.)
Insider reported that Garg also "laid out a vision of what he called 'Better 2.0,' with a 'leaner, meaner, hungrier workforce' that will source more business from Better's burgeoning real-estate-agent division. He said he hoped to grow Better Real Estate 10 to 100 times. Achieving that goal, he added, will necessitate that workers adhere more strictly to deadlines and be subjected to more attentive management than before.'If you felt in the past that people weren't looking — well, everyone is looking now,' Garg said. He later added: 'You will not be allowed to fail twice.'"
