[Music]
heading into the new year effective
immediately prior to this meeting i
informed about 10 of the company that
they were turning
my name is clint rainey i am a
contributing writer for fast company and
i am here today with christopher and we
are going to
watch some footage of a video that was
leaked to us it is from a an all hands
meeting that better.com held on december
1st follows a much more famous video
where the ceo vishal garg laid off 900
employees without notice and this is the
meeting that began immediately after 30
minutes later where he spoke for the
first time to the remaining 8 000
employees at the company and he let them
know essentially what he had just done
with the 900 former co-workers of theirs
off about 10 of the company
today
we did it for a number of reasons
to increase productivity reduce head
count performance management and to
right-size the business
in order to survive
and eventually thrive
we have to change with the market the
thing that jumps out when i watch that
first 30 seconds is if he had kind of
stayed right there in that spot that he
was in you know essentially
breaking down why we had to do this like
it might have been fine it's not as if
no one has sympathy for a ceo having to
lay off nearly a thousand
employees at this company but whatever
amount of empathy he had at the start
the longer he talks it seems to slowly
dissipate
we've continued to improve our
technology and our processes
we've been able to identify
through the technology
those of you
who haven't been as productive
and those
who are perhaps great but in the wrong
roles or performing the wrong task and
we've tried to exit many of them from
the company earlier today
to the extent possible we've cut
underperformers
but make no mistake about it we did also
eliminate redundant roles we also did
eliminate folks
who might be strong performers but were
just in the wrong place at the wrong
time with the wrong task
and weren't mission critical
to taking the rocket ship forward
the indication he gives there is that if
you're still on this call you are
critical to our new mission to our
leaner meaner versions of ourselves but
then of course like what what we don't
know
at least what these employees didn't
know at the time was they were going to
lay off at thousands more so like a lot
of people on this call ended up losing
their jobs anyway it was very frank that
he said we're using this technology to
figure out who's productive but then he
didn't really go into detail about how
it's used if i were remaining an
employee the first thing i'd want to
know is how are they using this stuff on
me two things to put next to one another
here are 250 underperforming employees
but that wasn't enough we had to lay off
another 700 and they just
had the misfortune of being in the wrong
place at the wrong time
some of you might ask why if we're
firing ten percent of the workforce
we're continuing to hire on campus
continuing to hire interns continuing to
hire
various people to come into the company
it's because we expect those people to
be super productive and to add value and
if they don't we will exit them too
this line of guards is
one of the few that almost everybody
remember you'll notice that garg
has a habit of going off script and this
is one of those moments where he seems
to do that i don't know what the script
said beforehand but my guess is that the
part where he just suddenly goes and we
will exit them too is him just throwing
that out there to you know just as a
little warning or something to um what
what's what's to come i guess there's
only one way to take that if you're
a new employee if you're a current
employee if you're someone who's
thinking about working at a place like
this it's a clear warning or even a
threat you might look at it as a threat
say you better be super productive or
will exit you i mean there's no other
way to take it and that he would say it
on a call with the entire
you know all hands staff
it's pretty remarkable we are going to
be leaner meaner and hungrier going
forward
we will not be spending time
trying to raise capital
we will not be spending time focused on
what investors think
we will be spending time grinding this
business forward in what will likely be
a bloodbath so this is the other line
that everybody remembers it just kind of
shows a sort of lack of empathy again a
word that gets used to describe fargo a
lot of times is mercurial and he does
have sort of this sharp edge to the way
that he talks that doesn't just sound
robotic i mean he can be robotic too but
that line bloodbath he says was so much
passion and emotion you know he really
you can tell that he feels that that is
true so he's capable of showing that
kind of um emotion when he wants to
and it never comes out when he's talking
about his employees it comes out when
he's talking about how much money they
stand to lose in the market moving
forward he is
you know someone who clearly almost sees
himself as being ruthless maybe
necessarily so you can see that in those
two moments because he's so animated by
the thought of you know the bloodbath
and then also the exiting the employees
when they're not being super productive
i mean you can you can clearly see the
the parallel in his mind that he's
drawing are we going to make new
mistakes yes
mistakes
failure is the way we learn
failure is the greatest teacher
today we acknowledge that we over hired
and hired the wrong people
and in doing that we failed
i failed parts of this organization that
have not been deadline-centric before
will be extremely deadline-centric going
forward
you will not be allowed to fail twice
you will be encouraged to fail once
but not allowed to fail twice
not reading deadlines will not be
accepted
so this is probably the closest he comes
to uh maya culpa but the admissions that
he makes there are kind of wild right
yeah this was the i mean this was the
most incredible moment in the whole
video like he here is saying
essentially
he didn't manage the company well and
that's why we're in this predicament and
he then
kind of tells the employees they're not
going to be allowed to fail in the same
way that he did
which i find incredible it's a warning
wrapped in an irony because
um
you know
three months later
more than three times as many employees
get laid off and
that one's not handled well either
it
guard didn't do it through a zoom call
again but you know there's a
serious amount of mismanagement that
went into the way better handled that
round of layoffs and then since then
they've continued to kind of make
blunder after blunder so um yeah if he
was holding himself to that same
standard of not being allowed to mess up
twice he unfortunately wouldn't still
have jobs