'I Blundered the Execution': CEO Issues Apology After Brutally Laying Off 900 Employees Better.com CEO Vishal Garg is under fire after a Zoom call where 9% of the company's workforce was let go went viral.
By Emily Rella Edited by Amanda Breen
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It might be too little too late for the employees who are still left at Better.com after a brutal mass firing of nearly 900 workers over a Zoom call that went viral earlier this week.
CEO Vishal Garg formally issued an apology to employees and in a bizarre publicity strategy, posted the document to the company's website as an attachment.
"I failed to show the appropriate amount of respect and appreciation for the individuals who were affected and for their contributions to Better," Garg penned. "I own the decision to do the layoffs, but in communicating it I blundered the execution. In doing so, I embarrassed you. I realize that the way I communicated this news made a difficult situation worse. I am deeply sorry and am committed to learning from this situation and doing more to be the leader that you expect me to be."
Related: CEO Lays off 900 Employees in Shocking Video Call
He went on to tell employees that he was "grateful" for their contributions to the company and "dedication" before announcing that there would be a company-wide All Hands meeting to lay out the plan for 2022, namely major goals and metrics that will be evaluated.
The call, which was videotaped and shared to YouTube on several channels, announced company layoffs that accounted for 9% of total employees.
"Your employment here is terminated effective immediately," Garg said at the time.
The Better.com website was temporarily taken down upon the spread of the news, showing an error message on the landing page that said the site was "doing a little home improvement."
Garg said that the idea for Better.com began after he discovered the mortgaging process in the U.S. to be "inefficient" per his own experience.
"I started looking at the things that mortgage investors actually cared about when pricing and decisioning a mortgage. I realized these data elements were actually available in most cases via an API and could be automatically filled for most consumers," he wrote. "From there, I knew we could put the consumer in control, providing a platform that could fetch data automatically and verify it instantly."
Better is reportedly worth $7 billion, with Garg's net worth estimated to be around $4 billion.
