Better.com CEO Vishal Garg steps back as employees detail how he ‘led by fear’
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> Simple, Online Mortgage – Better Mortgage (3 years ago)
> Better.com CEO Vishal Garg Threatened to Burn His Business Partner Alive (2 months ago)
> Better.com CEO Vishal Garg lays off 15% of employees [video] (7 days ago)
> Better.com CEO blasts laid-off employees, accusing them of ‘stealing’ (4 days ago)
> The Better.com CEO says he’s ‘deeply sorry’ for firing workers over Zoom (2 days ago)
> Better.com's's CEO is 'taking time off effective immediately' (2 hours ago)
I think about that quote from Elon sometimes, that starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.
> His former business partner and college friend, Raza Khan, claims that Garg improperly moved $3 million from a software company the two men started to his personal bank accounts, and then used stolen technology to help build Better. Garg denies those claims and is countersuing, in a dispute so bitter that during a deposition Garg threatened to burn his former friend alive.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2020/11/20/mortgages...
Link: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkpgkm/bettercom-ceo-called-...
We have a wide range of those: Muslims are terrorists. Farmers are racist Ku Klux Klan followers. Black dudes are just waiting to steal your car. So we can add: CEO and entrepreneurs are abusive assholes.
Looking in from the outside, it seems like he kept more or less succeeding (financially, in the eyes of friends/family, etc), while doing dodgier things and insulting more people, which spurred him to keep going along as before. Eventually he flew too close to the sun.
"Better.com CEO Vishal Garg Threatened to Burn His Business Partner Alive"
Huh what the fuck?
It seems like the model is to have a slick UI and hire contractors from India with second rate English skills handle the grunt work. There were multiple instances where there was miscommunication, no reply, or we couldn't get ahold of someone to get the current status. Overall it was really frustrating.
I wonder if their recent 'success' with outsourcing is the primary impetus for the layoffs.
They'd ask for a document that they hadn't asked for previously and make a big deal that I needed to provide it to them in the next few hours or else we'd lose our rate, then when I did provide it I wouldn't hear from them for 2 weeks. Overall, even with an appraisal waiver, it took like 3 months for it to go through and I never waited more than a day to respond to requests for info/documents.
A lot of this started after the rate lock was set to expire and they had to keep extending it (costing them a bit of money each time), so part of me thought the whole "You have until tomorrow morning to send us this document you've already sent us 3 times, or else your lock will expire" was a way for them to get out of it, but more likely it was just incompetence/overwork.
Front end UI is slick but at the backend they did not have proper CRM workflows. Marketing mindset and not a product tech one.
Seems more and more common unfortunately
At one point, Better asked what title company I wanted to use. They had a bunch of services under "you can shop for this, or use what we recommend", so I figured it was like that and said "I have no idea, I'll let you figure it out". Well they picked a closing company, and then my agent and the closing agent were like "oh we already picked one, can you change it?". So I forward along to Better, they say sure, but the website doesn't update. A couple days before closing it still doesn't update but they assure me it'll be fine. During closing, neither us nor the title company noticed it wasn't updated on the documents. And the check from Better hadn't showed up yet, but they figure it was a delay so they sent us home to our new house and told the sellers the check should be ready later that day. Around 3pm, after celebrating our new house, I get a panicked call from my agent. The money never showed up. Have I heard from Better at all? Nope. I call them. Can't get through to my loan officer. They finally call me back and say they sent the down payment to the original title company. They're going to try to get it back but it might not be today. And I need to go back to the title company to re-sign since it's all the wrong title company on the docs. The sellers are FURIOUS (they're supposed to move to another country in a couple days, understandable). When we get to the title company to resign, my agent says the sellers might take the keys back. We've started unpacking and our dogs are at the house. Better offers me $1500 off the closing costs, which we forward along to the sellers, so they're at least moderately pissed rather than furious. Right before 5, the money finally lands in the correct title company's account and they cut a check to the sellers. One of the happiest days turned into one of the most stressful days.
That's what I've heard is their secret sauce. They spider the best rates on the web, and price a few bps lower so they always show up in google searches.
Abusing employees is more or less expected, out in techland.
Ruffle investors' feathers, however, and there may be consequences.
Keep it up, and you have to start looking for a new employee.
That's the platonic ideal, at least. The reality on the ground is often far different.
Because that's their main power
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29320078 Your Board of Directors is Probably Going to Fire You 718 points
Which techland do you live in? In my techland there are tons of jobs at places without abusive leadership where you can get a job in a few weeks. No one I know in my land expects this sort of treatment as everyone knows it won't stand.
I think companies who are tech companies or where tech is central to the product tend to attract good tech leaders who treat their teams well.
But at companies where tech is seen as a secondary to the product tech employees are sometimes treated poorly, with things like overwork/abuse of agile processes to extract more work out of developers, unsustainable on-call rotations, unreasonable support response expectations, understaffed teams, restricted budgets, inadequate equipment like super cheap budget laptops, etc.
Sure they might add a foosball table and buy a pizza once in a while, but by and large many companies don't treated tech especially well. I'm not sure if it is a lack of respect (some companies see developers as a pluggable commodity) or resentment for having to pay them more than they think they should have to.
I guess it depends on where you live, but some cities just don't have a lot of pure tech companies, so you are stuck with places like these.
Lack of mobility used to be an issue as well, but with all the current remote work possibilities this is no longer the case. The bad employers will end up with the bottom of the barrel, just like in cities with lots of good options, as all their talent will be able to find work elsewhere.
I work in consulting, so thankfully I don't get stuck somewhere bad for long, but I have seen it first hand on many occasions. Enough to be jaded I guess.
You're right that remote work helps this a lot.
I do think that landing a remote job is probably more difficult for someone who is only an average / mediocre developer. You're competing against a larger pool of talented developers.
And they tend to get crushed by real tech companies. Honestly the test is pretty simple; if you go grab a drink and it's anything other than free and if you see anything other than retina screens on the floor it's a red flag.
If you go as far as to negotiate an offer and it's not exclusively engineers or former engineers between you and the CEO or if there's no stocks/equity you know you are off to a pretty bad start.
> I guess it depends on where you live, but some cities just don't have a lot of pure tech companies, so you are stuck with places like these.
Just come to the valley/work remote.
There are monitors with fine enough colors, and (actually more important my PoV) better base / stand infrastructure, for example. And don't know about you, but some us don't particularly like seeing that dystopian forbidden fruit logo everywhere you look. Or supporting the company behind it any more than strictly necessary.
Point being - yes, beware of sweat shops with substandard hardware. But brands aren't where it's at.
Oh and also: just give me decent cash comp, 40 hours at most, and a useful amount of actual, real PTO (not this "unlimited PTO" nonsense). And an office (to the extent I have to be there) that doesn't make me feel like I'm losing plasma by the end of the day. And investors that don't make my skin crawl, please.
Equity is nice, but it's just gravy.
> And they tend to get crushed by real tech companies.
You'd be surprised how many legacy businesses are out there, places in the US other than the west coast, who are thriving still and haven't been disrupted.
Things like banking, insurance, manufacturing, healthcare. All of these industries have competition from startups, but are far from being crushed by them... Not yet at least.
I like your litmus tests though. I think it is helpful for people to have some specific things they look out for as red flags, as some "little things" can really be an early indicator into how it would be to work there.
All of these are either low margins or extremely regulated (healthcare). Not interesting targets.
I feel like we watched this movie before.
**cough**WeWork**cough**
I worked for a nice version of this, spot raises, flying around trying to aquire other companies. Drinks on the company card. Every Friday we'd go out drinking !
The it happens, we're all brought into a room. Given 2 weeks serverance. Apparently we forgot to make money. The CEO apologized to each one of us personally, I said thank you.
If your going to be immature at least be kind.
I hope if I'm ever CEO I'm just stupid and not mean
I'm not saying the culture isn't toxic, I'm saying it's surprising how well they hid it.
Abusers work very hard to make sure other people don't realize what's going on behind the scenes (whether that's the office, or at home).
Compared to my experience with Rocket it was great. I sat on a phone with Rocket for hours having them put me on hold and go to a manager to negotiate rates only for them to have shuffled the numbers around so that the interest rate looked lower, but the total cost of the loan broke even due to extra points and fees rolled into the loan. The salesperson was manic and desperate. They pretended to have a nice async process on the front end, but they end up dumping me into a phone call at the end where I had to tell them everything I just typed in. Several other online companies had similar tactics. The worst was one that just harvested my info and sold it to every shady lender who proceeded to call me non-stop for weeks.
Standard toxic leadership.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/the-hearts-of-men-american-...
But keep in mind, in that situation, I am fairly sure the CTO was only pretending to be angry, which is to say, his anger was under control, and was deployed for a specific purpose.
As a general rule, self-control is essential to pragmatic leadership. By contrast, Vishal Garg's behavior does not seem strategic, and he does not seem to be under self-control. I wrote some thoughts about how destructive this kind of leadership can be here:
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/self-control-is-essenti...
https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo...
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/psychopaths-versus-good-bos...
In time I've concluded it's about trust or something. It's one thing if I feel like the person is on the same side and we both want to do better. When I feel like the other person isn't acting in good faith though, or is just doing things that are unnecessarily abusive, it's different.
1. Be a nice boss.
2. Fire people as discretely as legally possible. Don't do it over a Zoom call that will leak and make you the face of the #EvilCEO archetype the Internet hates so much.
LinkedIn: 50 Top Startups in the U.S.
#1 Better [Financial Services]
After filling out their questions I was pre-approved almost immediately. When their broker emailed me for details though, I explained my situation and rather than looking into it at all he just told me it probably wouldn't work.
I was able to make the purchase through another mortgage broker a few weeks later so I don't think my situation was actually all that complicated, it seemed like their broker just couldn't be bothered.
As a bonus they sold my info to a real estate broker who continued to harass me for weeks even after I told them to stop contacting me.
They were great. Everything was automated through a decent web site. Everything signed electronically except closing where they sent an attorney to my house.
They also never called me unless I wanted, everything was through their web site.
This is in contrast to previous mortgages that were paper based and full of people who didn’t seem very tech savvy and wanted faxes, multiple phone calls just to review stuff.
And their estimates were all exact with closing. And closing was early.
I was always amazed how shitty the processes were for mortgage so it was nice that somebody finally set up some simple RPA.
If I refinance again, I’ll probably use them.
How much of that was employee theft, and how much of that was Better.com simply being overstaffed? Hence the layoffs that were (most probably) agreed to in the most recent raise.
search term might be "is your boss a psycopath" or similar