‘I am deeply sorry.’ CEO who laid off 900 in Zoom call tells staff he ‘blundered’
The head of an online mortgage company has apologized to remaining employees for laying off 900 former workers in a mass Zoom call.
“I own the decision to do the layoffs, but in communicating it I blundered the execution,” Vishal Garg wrote in a letter posted on Better.com “In doing so, I embarrassed you.”
Garg wrote that his decision to conduct the layoffs in a video call “failed to show the appropriate amount of respect and appreciation” and “made a difficult situation worse.”
The apology is directed at remaining Better.com employees, not those who lost their jobs, CBS News reported.
Garg informed about 900 employees their jobs had been eliminated in a Dec. 1 video call over Zoom, McClatchy News reported. Only those to be laid off were invited to the call.
“I come to you with not great news,” Garg says in the video, which has been posted to TikTok, YouTube and Twitter. “The market has changed, as you know, and we have to move with it in order to survive.”
“If you’re on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off,” Garg says in the video. “Your employment here is terminated effective immediately.”
Garg tells workers he hopes they will be “more successful, more fortunate, and luckier in your next endeavor.”
“The last time I did this, I cried,” Garg tells workers in the video. “This time, I hope to be stronger.”
In the call, Garg said the company was laying off 15% of its workforce, but the company clarified the layoffs amount to 9% of its workforce, TechCrunch reported.
The company has offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and Charlotte, among others. A LinkedIn profile shows it employs 835 people in Charlotte, 587 in Orange County, California, and 546 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company also has employees in New York City, Texas and India.
Response on social media was swift and harsh, with many pointing out Better.com, valued at $7 billion, had recently received a $750 million infusion of cash, as reported by Forbes.
In his follow-up letter to employees, Garg wrote that he is “grateful” for their efforts and planned to be more transparent about the company’s goals in the future.
“I am deeply sorry and am committed to learning from this situation and doing more to be the leader that you expect me to be,” Garg wrote.
This story was originally published December 8, 2021 at 11:38 AM with the headline "‘I am deeply sorry.’ CEO who laid off 900 in Zoom call tells staff he ‘blundered’."