Better.com CEO Vishal Garg lays off 15% of employees [video]

C suites tend to want to personalize messages by adding context to how they feel, but in cases of such severely negative news it's always going to come off badly. "Firing people hurts my feelings" is a moot point unless you've slashed your and the rest of leadership's paychecks.

I'm mixed on the method of putting a bunch of people in a meeting and the CEO telling them directly they're being laid off. In some ways, I think it's much better than slowly pulling employees in and letting them know 1:1. In those cases, word about the layoffs travel much quicker than the layoffs, and people will spend all day with dread about whether they are laid off or not.

Pumping volume before their IPO. Supposedly the layoffs were a condition of the latest funding round with Softbank.

> The layoffs come as the company received a $750 million cash injection from its biggest backer, Softbank, ahead of its plans to go public through a SPAC merger with Aurora Acquisition Corp., giving it $1 billion in cash on its balance sheet.

https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/better-com-layoffs