Last edited Tue Dec 7, 2021, 02:59 AM - Edit history (1)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/bettercom-ceo-vishal-garg-threatened-to-burn-his-business-partner-alive-now-hes-a-billionaire
He Threatened to Burn His Business Partner Alive. Now He’s a Billionaire.
Vishal Garg is a billionaire, thanks to his SoftBank-backed mortgage lender Better.com. There are a lot of questions about how he got here.
Noah Kirsch
Updated Aug. 19, 2021 2:40PM ET / Published Aug. 19, 2021 5:02AM ET
Last fall, employees at one of America’s fastest-growing startups began making anxious phone calls. They believed that CEO Vishal Garg—a volatile entrepreneur with a history of disgruntled business partners—had been giving huge amounts of equity to one of his most loyal lieutenants, in a way that violated norms and seemed to defy explanation.
Those employees may have been right.
New public filings, interviews with high-ranking company officials, and internal documents reviewed by The Daily Beast reveal that the executive, Elana Knoller, was given stock options potentially worth tens of millions of dollars. Unlike normal employee packages, it vested immediately. It isn’t clear how much the board knew in advance.
She also received at least $8,000 per month for two homes, including one in Puerto Rico, and other perks. It does not appear that any other executive got a comparable deal at the firm, a SoftBank-backed mortgage lender called Better.com, which is about to go public via a SPAC at a massive $7.7 billion valuation.
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2020/11/20/mortgages-fraud-claims-and-dumb-dolphins-a-tangled-past-haunts-bettercom-ceo-vishal-garg/
“HELLO — WAKE UP BETTER TEAM,” writes Vishal Garg, the CEO of Better.com, in an email to employees obtained by Forbes. “You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and…DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.”
Born in India, Garg moved with his family to Queens when he was seven. Early on, he displayed both intellect and entrepreneurialism. As a student at Manhattan’s academically competitive Stuyvesant High School, he bought CliffsNotes and books, and then sold them to students at a markup.
“My superpower, I think, I was good at math and good at, like, being able to spot an opportunity,” Garg said in a podcast last year. Another high school venture, he told the interviewer, was buying clothes at thrift stores and reselling them for a profit on eBay. (A Better spokesperson, however, said that wasn’t true as eBay wasn’t founded until after Garg left high school.)
... Khan says he was drawn to Garg’s ambition, and recalls spending nights discussing philosophy with him at tea houses on the Lower East Side. Though they were close friends, he says their philosophies didn’t always align. “People lie all the time, we should do it more often,” Khan remembers Garg saying in 2001. “I thought he was kidding. But I think part of him, in every joke there may be a little bit of truth."
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