Better.com's CEO: giving real fake authenticity a bad name

Well, I just spent an hour+ writing an overlong post about what a putz Better.com's CEO Vishal Garg is. 

And then, puff, just as I was about to hit the Publish button, it disappeared on me.

Good thing I have nothing better to do with my time.

Oh, wait a minute, I actually do. So my brilliant, funny, overlong post which, as is so often the case with Pink Slip, included bits about my own brilliant career, will not be replicated in anywhere near full. 

Instead, I'll just focus on Vishal Garg and what a putz he is.

If you're scratching our head trying to figure out who Vishal Garg is, he's the founder and CEO of Better.com, a digital mortgage lender that took off during the pandemic, adding 7,000 employees.

Well, 900 of those employees have now been laid off. This despite the fact that Better.com just got a cash infusion of $750M, has $1B in cash, and was declared by Fortune to be a unicorn. 

I know, I know, business can be nasty and brutish, and careers can be short. And sometimes difficult decisions have to be made. Like laying off 900 employees a couple of weeks before Christmas.

This lay-off made the news because it was conducted, en masse, over Zoom. Everyone invited to the meeting was pink slipped (virtually, metaphorically).

When announcing the meeting, Garg mentioned that, when he'd done lay-offs in the past, he'd cried, but that this time he was going to hold it together.

I cried. Awwww.

I'm guessing this revelation of his vulnerability was either suggested by someone in HR, hoping it would give Garg some aura of authenticity - authenticity being all the rage amont today's leaders - and/or that Garg had just speed-read a two-minute article from the Harvard Business Review on authenticity (and how to fake it).

I'm all for authenticity. But when someone is being laid off, they really don't give a hoot about your feelings. What they care about are their feelings. Spare them your pain, please.

After the Zoomerama lay-off, Garg addressed the remaining employees, speaking out with a bit of a forked tongue. On the one hand, he lamented that he hadn't done the lay-offs three months earlier. On the other hand, having gotten plenty of blowback over his method and message, he apologized for not being sufficiently appreciative of the contributions and respectful of the feelings of the pink slippers.

Ah, man's quest for authenticity.

Garg might have been able to pull it off if it didn't slip out that he had been shit-posting anonymously on a networking site called Blind, complaining that at least 250 of those who'd been let go were dishonest slackers who'd only been working 2 hours a day, and, thus, stealing from customers, investors, colleagues, and - I guess - Vishal Garg. (Garg was outed for his posting, but has confirmed that it was, indeed, him.)

Truly, what in God's name is a CEO doing trashtalking about his employees - even if they are now ex-employees - on an anonymous site?

This is where the employees should be grousing, not the head guys. 

Of course, leaders have feelings that they want to express, too. Authentic ones.

Still, if more than one-quarter of the laid-off employees were only putting in two-hour days, that's a management problem, pal-ly, that Vishal Garg's managers should have been addressing. Maybe he should have been reading a five-minute take from HBR on Management 101, rather than brushing up on his personal authenticity. 

In the wake of all this, three of Better's top executives (in communications, PR, marketing) have quit over the way everything's been handled. (Garg has a pre-lay-off reputation as a bully who demeans employees, so I'm guessing his authentic self is the trash-talker.) 

Like all good unicorns, Better is planning an IPO, which was likely the main impetus for the lay-off.

Meanwhile, Vishal Garg is giving real fake authenticity a bad name.

If you can't be best, Mr. Garg, at least next time try to be better. 

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Thank you to my cousin Ellen for sending this one my way. As for the cites I'm usually so meticulous about, they went 'poof' with the post, and I have better things to do than try to refind them. Just google Zoom lay-off and/or Vishal Garg and I'm quite certain you'll uncover all sorts of source material!