The three executives who run the online-mortgage startup Better's marketing, communications, and public-relations divisions have resigned, Insider has learned.
The company's three most senior communications representatives — Melanie Hahn, head of marketing, Tanya Hayre Gillogley, head of public relations, and Patrick Lenihan, VP of communications — have all resigned from the company.
Better did not respond to a request for comment by press time. The three executives declined to comment.
The news comes after CEO Vishal Garg laid off about 900 employees, or 9% of Better's total workforce, over a three-minute Zoom call. Garg's handling of the layoffs and divisive management style have been the object of social-media outrage this week, particularly on the employer-review website Blind.
"Anyone who is leaving right now, these are folks that have tried to make it work and given their all to a company they believe in but who ultimately get undermined by a CEO that doesn't take advice from anyone and believes he's always right," a person familiar with Garg told Insider.
Forbes has highlighted Garg's "tangled past" and "fraud claims," while the Daily Beast published a profile of him in August that said he "threatened to burn his business partner alive."
Better, founded in 2016, has received funding from the unicorn-minting factory SoftBank, Goldman Sachs, and the venture legends Kleiner Perkins. Earlier this year, the company announced that it planned to go public through a special-purpose acquisition company merger with Aurora Acquisition Corporation, a blank-check company sponsored by Novator Capital. The deal values the company at $6.9 billion and included a $1.5 billion investment from SoftBank.
On November 30, the company announced that half of SoftBank's SPAC investment would actually come early, in the form of a $750 million bridge loan, instead of being contingent on the SPAC merger. On December 1, the company executed a round of layoffs, captured in a video leaked to YouTube that has now racked up almost 1 million views.
Insider reported that Garg addressed remaining employees shortly after the layoffs, saying, "We should have done this three months ago." In a leaked video of that Zoom meeting shared with Insider, he blamed himself for overhiring and said that Better lost $100 million last quarter. Later, Fortune reported that Garg accused "at least 250" of staffers who were let go of only working "two hours a day," saying that they were "stealing from our customers."
Garg also laid out a vision for "Better 2.0" in the post-layoff meeting, saying that the company would be much less forgiving of mistakes and implying that he would more quickly fire subpar staff.
"If you felt in the past that people weren't looking — well, everyone is looking now," Garg said in the meeting.
These resignations echo the pre-public-offering woes of another SoftBank-backed startup, WeWork. After concerns began to mount about WeWork's initial public offering in September of 2019, two senior communication executives resigned their positions in the company.
Do you work at Better? Do you have a story to share about working there or insight into its layoffs? Contact reporter Alex Nicoll via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (646) 768-4772 using a non-work phone, email at anicoll@insider.com, or Twitter DM at @AlexONicoll.
