Better
- Better.com CEO Vishal Garg is known for firing hundreds of staff on a Zoom call in 2021.
- Garg now says he has "worked really, really hard" to be a kinder boss.
- The businessman said he underwent a lot of leadership training to rebuild trust with his staff.
Better.com CEO Vishal Garg says he's "worked really, really hard" to be a kinder boss after firing over 900 people on a Zoom call.
Garg is best known for laying off hundreds of Better.com staff via a brutal Zoom call in 2021. At the time, he accused at least 250 terminated employees of stealing from the digital mortgage company by over-reporting their working hours, per Fortune.
Garg later admitted to his remaining staffers that he had "blundered the execution" of the layoffs.
The businessman told TechCrunch in an interview published Wednesday that he went through a "lot of leadership training" to rebuild trust with his staff after that infamous Zoom call.
"So I've worked really, really hard to change the way that I show up to the team every day, and to be more empathetic and to treat them with the same level of kindness that I showed our customers," Garg told TechCrunch.
"I think I was very mission-centric, customer centric, and really, really focused on what it took to drive growth," Garg added.
But he said he later realized that he needed his staff to "feel delight" if he wanted Better.com "customers to be delighted."
The company has just under 1,000 employees now, Garg said.
Garg took his company public through a long-delayed SPAC deal on Thursday. Better.com started trading on the Nasdaq stock market on Thursday after merging with blank-check company Aurora Acquisition Corp. The stock trades under the ticker symbol BETR, and fell by more than 90% at the opening bell.
A representative for Garg did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider sent outside regular business hours.