A Zoom meeting (not the Zoom meeting referred to in this article). — © AP
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“Unfortunately, if you’re in this Zoom conversation, you’re one of the unlucky ones to get fired.” Vishal Garg, the CEO of mortgage lender Better.com, is horrified at the way he evicted a crowd of employees via video conference.
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Tom Le Bacqn, Telegraaf
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Footage from the meeting made its way to the internet after an upset employee shared them on her Facebook account. “I don’t have such great news for you,” Garg began in the video footage. “The market has changed, as you know, and we have to move with it in order to survive. Hopefully then we can flourish again and continue our mission. If you’re in this video call, you’re part of the unlucky group. Your contract will be terminated with immediate effect.”
Not first time
The video sparked outrage worldwide. It wasn’t that Garg was ready for his test either. The CEO of the company that offers mortgages to buy houses has made headlines several times with the way he treats his staff. Better.com, however, is worth around six billion dollars and recently raised hundreds of millions during a capital round.
Garg also wrote an anonymous blog post in which he accused his staff of stealing money from his company and from the customers because they were not productive enough and “only worked two hours a day, when they said it was eight”.
Garg made headlines last year when a crude email was leaked to his employees. “You’re too damn slow. You are a bunch of stupid dolphins and stupid dolphins are caught in nets and eaten by sharks. I’m ashamed of you,” he emailed, according to business magazine Forbes.
Garg (43) was born in India and came to America at the age of seven, he told Forbes. His career began at Morgan Stanley investment bank. He gave up on that after more than a year, to set up his own hedge fund that invested in tech companies.
From the profits, he founded MyRichUncle, which provided loans to students. Garg bought an existing lender in 2014 and digitized the application process. Two years later, it was relaunched as Better.com, which grew at lightning speed and has already provided more than $30 billion in mortgages. More than 9,000 people still work after the mass layoff.
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