SoftBank-Backed Mortgage Startup Better.com Lays Off 900 Workers Just Before Holidays
Better.com’s billionaire founder, Vishal Garg, previously made news for berating his staff and threatening to burn his business partner alive.
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Happy holidays: Better.com, the SoftBank-backed mortgage startup with a wildly temperamental founder, is laying off roughly 10 percent of its workforce today, or about 900 people in the U.S. and India, according to two people familiar with the situation. The company has struggled to prove it can be sustainably profitable amid broader industry headwinds. Better, which added several thousand employees this year, has been working to go public via a SPAC, and just yesterday it announced an accelerated $750 million cash payment from participants in that deal. A source says that American employees who were laid off will get severance through December and health-care coverage through February. Better’s chief financial officer, Kevin Ryan, pitched the layoffs as a fiscal win: “A fortress balance sheet and a reduced and focused workforce together set us up to play offense going into a radically evolving homeownership market,” he said.
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