Vishal Garg's Better.com was on hiring spree in India before Zoom layoffs: report

Better.com CEO Vishal Garg had apologised for his manner of handling layoffs. (Image credit: LinkedIn)

The proportion of Better.com employees in India increased to 44 per cent in December 2021, from 38 per cent in June in the same year as the US mortgage company, which infamously let go of 900 workers over a Zoom call, was on a hiring spree in India, Bloomberg reported.

For most of 2021, Indian-origin Vishal Garg’s company was hiring actively in the United States and in India. However, his December layoffs affected the company’s workforce harder than its India counterpart, Bloomberg reported, quoting a regularity filing.

The firings effectively meant that Better.com’s India unit ended up having 1,000 more employees than its US unit.

In January this year, the company’s board announced Garg’s return in an e-mail to employees. Garg, who founded Better.com in 2016, had apologised for his manner of handling the layoffs at the company after a video of him firing 900 people via a Zoom call went viral on social media in December 2021.

The CEO, who was widely criticised for the ‘Zoomgate’, had cited the market performance and productivity as reasons behind the decision to lay off employees in the US and India.

Following Garg’s return as CEO, Better.com were leaving the company in “droves”, TechCrunch had reported.

Better.com had said in May 2021 it would go public through a merger with blank-check firm Aurora Acquisition Corp, in a deal that valued it at $7.7 billion.

Garg is also the founding partner of One Zero Capital, an investment holding company. At 21, the New York University graduate dropped out of the investment banking analyst program at Morgan Stanley and started private student lender MyRichUncle. It went public in 2005 and was subsequently acquired by Merrill Lynch, which was then acquired by Bank of America.