For Better or Much, Much Worse
Siri? “What is irony?” When a company called “Better” really couldn’t have done worse
In a real life scenario that feels like a discarded Succession plot line, Better.com CEO, Vishal Garg decided to kick off the festive season by summarily dismissing 900 employees via Zoom. In the (obviously) leaked Zoom video, Varg is seen weeping about how hard this is on him and how he’ll do better.
It’s virtually impossible he didn’t anticipate backlash or the Zoom video to be publicly leaked. Did Garg want it to be? If his intention was to steer conversation away from the actual 900 employees (including the entire inclusion and diversity team) who lost their jobs in the last month of the 2nd year of the pandemic, it sort of worked.
His immediate and predictable non apology, where Varg even uses the words “I blundered the execution”, has been memed, TikTok-d and shared in some detail on top tier publications across the world. If Garg’s aim was to be infamous, he both succeeded and failed, as people know of the Zoom 900 more than his business accolades.
The 900 are now more of a startling number to say in disgusted but fascinated discussion. The cruelty of it all, the insincere apology, the crocodile tears, those are somehow trumping what facts we do have surrounding him as a leader.
Predictably, his PR, marketing and communications people resigned. They fled the scene of what - for a tech hot minute - is a very big deal. The $1.5B funding deal is still on the table, and although it’s being redrawn, it’s not been withdrawn. He’s still at the helm, and astonishingly, this isn’t the most shocking thing a quick Google search turns up about him. He’s wealthy - and in control of the futures of his investors’ money and the livelihoods of the 91% of his remaining workforce. Better.com isn’t yet publicly traded, so we don’t know what impact this will have financially, but so far the deal is still on.
Perhaps he suffers from the opposite of impostor syndrome. Or maybe he believes that by exposing his vulnerability by crying on video where he absolutely must have known he’d be recorded and leaked, that he’d have a shot at a more impactful redemption story?
What can we learn from this?
Bad press can be overpowered by unflappable, apathetic tech media who are used to bad behaviour by tech CEOs but depend on their bad behaviour for clicks
We devour bad behaviour and essentially reward it; just look at the former president, beloved still by tens of millions
For publicists, getting to walk away from a disaster of this magnitude warrants media coverage of its own, and they look humane for distancing themselves, seemingly abruptly from a sadistic narcissist whose track record makes this “execution” almost boring, except that it happened on Zoom where we all live, now
If you make enough of a debacle after you do something truly heinous, people get distracted enough to focus on that, instead of your original wretched act