In a brutal Zoom call, Vishal Garg, the CEO of a US-based digital mortgage lending company Better.com fired 900 of his employees in India as well as the US on a Zoom call ahead of the holiday season. The Indian-American CEO Garg said market efficiency, performance and productivity were the reasons behind the mass lay-off.
Garg made a Zoom call last week to the employees of Better.com. The chief executive of a US-based company started his address by telling his employees that he doesn’t have 'great news' to give to them, adding the market has changed and that companies need to work accordingly.
“Thank you for joining. I come to you with not great news. The market has changed as you know, and we have to move with it in order to survive so that hopefully we can continue to thrive and continue on our mission,” Garg starts off in the viral video.
“We’re laying off about 15 per cent of the company for a number of reasons — the market, efficiency and performances and productivity,” he says.
The Better.com boss later corrected the 15 per cent figure, saying the actual number was closer to 9 per cent.
“If you’re on this call, you’re part of the unlucky group being laid off. Your employment here is terminated effective immediately.”
Those laid off get four weeks of severance, one month of full benefits, and two months of cover-up paid for by the company, Garg said.
Garg reportedly lashed out at his staff later for being "lazy and unproductive".
"You guys know that at least 250 of the people terminated were working an average of 2 hours a day while clocking 8 hours+ a day in the payroll system?" he wrote in a blog post on the network Blind.
They were stealing from you and stealing from our customers who pay the bills that pay our bills," he added.
Garg, who founded Better.com in 2016, has courted controversy earlier too. In the past, in an email Garg called his employees “dumb dolphins” who “get caught in nets and eaten by sharks.”
"You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS... SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME," Garg had written in the email.
Better.com has raised over $400 million in equity capital since its inception. The company was ranked Number. 1 on LinkedIn’s Top Startups List for 2021 and 2020 as well as on Fortune’s Best Small and Medium Workplaces in New York. Besides Better.com, Vishal Garg is also the founding partner of One Zero Capital, an investment holding company.
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