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Comment by schnevets | Hacker News Reader

I did a search here just to figure out what Better.com did without visiting their web page, and the results are quite a saga:

> 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)

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Don't forget the wild email he sent to one of Better.com's largest investors. You can't make this stuff up.

Link: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkpgkm/bettercom-ceo-called-...

Wow...

One of the wildest things I have ever read

Can't blame him, those investors sound pretty terrible...

I don't think he is any different the vast majority of CEOs/Entrepreneurs. He just got caught being bad.

Sure, let's take the example set by specific individuals and extrapolate that to an entire group of people that share some commonalities. That usually works well.

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.

Jesus. How did this guy ever manage to become a CEO?

being aggressive is a pretty good strat to being successful, dickish or otherwise.

Why is this surprising? Elon Musk for one is known to act like this. Many other CEOs as well

> Mortgages, Fraud Claims And 'Dumb Dolphins': A Tangled Past Haunts Better.com CEO Vishal Garg (1 year ago)

At first I was defending this CEO as there is no good way to lay off employees.

"Better.com CEO Vishal Garg Threatened to Burn His Business Partner Alive"

Huh what the fuck?

Sounds like his mental health issues finally caught up with him and resulted in involuntary burnout.

I'm not sure it's mental health issues so much as "got away with being a bad person to work with and then couldn't anymore".

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.

Your appraisal seems accurate to me.

Thanks for doing this!

I was tempted to do the same to my business partner. After he bailed on me the day before we were going to close a funding round, among other things.

I think about that quote from Elon sometimes, that starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.

I think your situation is different.

> 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...

Yeah, I was exaggerating. While my situation sucked, it definitely wasn't as bad is this.

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