“To be absolutely blunt, I’d never managed more than 10 people in my life.” Better CEO talks to Insider after months out of the spotlight while the company struggled through market downturn.
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Better CEO Vishal Garg acknowledged past blunders with his online mortgage company but said he had no plans to step away from the company he founded nearly a decade ago.
In an interview with Insider, the embattled CEO reentered the public spotlight for the first time since the start of a series of missteps that began when he laid 900 employees off on a Zoom call last December.
His company ballooned in size to over 10,000 employees and sold $58 billion in loans in 2021, but the December layoffs were only the beginning of troubles for Better. It has since shed around 60 percent of its workforce. Its long-standing attempt to become a publicly traded company has been delayed multiple times including as recently as August.
Garg told the outlet it would have been easier for him to sell his company or walk away. But he still has no plans to do that. In fact, whether it goes public or not, Better plans to expand its business offerings soon.
“I would regularly tell my team that I think I’m the right founder for this company,” Garg told Insider. “I think I’m the right leader for this company. But do I know how to be the CEO of a 10,000-person company?”
After briefly taking a leave from the company following the backlash from the Zoom layoffs, Garg returned a few weeks later. It has undergone several more rounds of layoffs since then.
The company specializes in low-contact, online-first mortgage processing. That set it on a path to rapidly grow through the COVID-19 housing boom. It began offering more services including