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Tuesday, December 7, 2021

Better.com sacks 900 workers via zoom call

CEO Vishal Garg accused the sacked employees of “stealing” from their colleagues and customers by being unproductive.

• December 6, 2021
Vishal Garg
Better mortgage CEO, Vishal Garg

Better.com, an online mortgage lending company, has laid off 900 of its workers. The CEO Vishal Garg announced the mass sack on a Zoom webinar.

“If you’re on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off,” Mr Garg said on the call, a recording of which was later posted on YouTube and other social media accounts. “Your employment here is terminated effective immediately.”

While on the Zoom call, Mr Garg told the dismissed employees that the company would provide four weeks of severance and one month of full benefits, citing low productivity and changing market conditions as the reason for the mass sack. 

Fortune later reported that Mr Garg had accused his employees of “stealing” from their colleagues and customers by being unproductive and only working two hours a day.

The report notes Mr Garg saying that, in the last month, the firm started reviewing employee productivity data.

This included missed telephone call rates, number of inbound and outbound calls, employees showing up late to meetings with a customer, and other metrics.

In May, the online mortgage lending platform announced that it was going public through a Special Purpose Acquisition Company and in October, Better.com became a unicorn company and was valued at $6.9 billion.

However, TechCrunch reports that the company received a $750 million infusion from Aurora Acquisition Corp. and SoftBank.

This is as both companies amended the terms of their financing agreement to provide Better.com with half of the $1.5 billion they had agreed to initially.

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