Better Founder Vishal Garg | Courtesy of Wikipedia; Scott Rosenthal
When the Living is Easy
Some businesses experience seasons where everything falls into place. New customers flow your way with almost no effort. One anchor deal covers payroll on its own. A competitor closes and some of their revenue ends up on your balance sheet. The work feels easy.
Most operators respond to that influx the same reasonable way. You hire to keep up. You sign the bigger lease and update the comp plan around the new run rate. Somewhere in the middle of this, you decide the good fortune has to be a result of your talents. Every month this season continues to reinforce the perception, so you hold the pattern.
This works until conditions change, which is one of the few guarantees in business building. When that happens, staying the course eventually exposes every dysfunction in the business until something drastic must be done. A public fintech company just ran that pattern to the end of the line with auditors and a board of directors watching every step of it.
The Wave of Nearly Free Money
Better Home & Finance sells mortgages online. Its pitch was speed by underwriting loans with software instead of a room full of loan officers. Better founder Vishal Garg says he spent a decade building toward it.
The pandemic gave Better the best market conditions a lender could ask for. Mortgage rates fell to record lows, and homeowners refinanced in enormous numbers. The company was in the right place at the right time collecting fees while expensive loans were being replaced with cheap loans. Better funded $58.0 billion in loans in 2021 leading to peak revenue upwards of $1.21 billion.
Then rates climbed through 2022. Refinancing stops making sense for anyone already holding a cheap loan, and the main revenue driver drained away inside a year. Loan volume fell to $11.4 billion that year. Same software, same pitch to the same customer base. The price of borrowing moved, and everything else at Better moved after it.
Better reached the stock market in August 2023 through a back door in which publicly traded shell company Aurora Acquisition Corp. merged with Better to take it public without a traditional IPO. The deal was announced in May 2021, with the boom still running. It closed more than two years later, into a market that had turned, and the stock collapsed 90% on its first day.
Better's most recent annual report shows loan volume last year at a small fraction of the 2021 peak, and it notes that 2020, the first full year of cheap money, is still the only year in the company's history that produced an annual operating profit. The years in between closed in losses running to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Internal Friction Working Against Momentum
In December 2021, the tail end of the best year on record, Garg fired about 900 employees on a single Zoom call, weeks before Christmas. The video leaked, and the viral backlash was immediate. He took an indefinite leave of absence, and the volatility held up the Aurora merger.
In 2022, Better cut about 3,000 more jobs that March and another round in August. A whistleblower lawsuit was filed in June, which triggered an SEC investigation. The investigation ended in 2023 with no enforcement action; the lawsuit was dropped in 2024.
Garg spent years arguing the turnaround was happening. He pointed to the trained AI models doing mortgage work that used to take teams of people days, a partnership with Neo Home Loans that doubled productivity and halved origination costs, and notable partnerships with Intuit, Coinbase and OpenAI. "We're winning. We've tripled loan volume. We're close to profitability," he said in August.
With Garg fighting for the future of the company and his job, more shifts were happening.
On July 27 the board elected Daniel Lewis, a hedge fund manager, as a director. A week later it removed Garg and made Lewis interim chief executive. Better's own filing says the board found him unfit and voted unanimously without him. Garg claims that Lewis convinced the other directors to do it.
The governance battle continues to heat up. Garg retained Alex Spiro and started gathering signatures to remove a majority of the board. Better sued him on August 18, alleging he broke securities disclosure rules. A special committee adopted a poison pill two days later, and it says the progress under Lewis is real. A federal judge heard argument on the restraining order on August 26, and no ruling had been issued as of this writing.
The Boom Was Doing the Work
A business whose demand disappears when external forces move is renting its Market strength rather than owning it. Better read a rate environment as proof that customers wanted what it had built. The paper trail from Better's own filings shows the price moving while the product stood still.
That Market weakness had a cascading effect on Mindset. The perception of the environment Better was operating in shaped a number of bold but disastrous missteps. The Zoom call, the leave of absence, and the fight Garg started once the board removed him are all influenced by Mindset that eroded as the company was in a five-year freefall.
Mindset weakness directly influenced Leadership turmoil. Better named the chief executive's litigation history as a material risk to the business in annual report after annual report, most recently in the report filed in March 2026. The board put that warning in writing and kept him in the job. The directors could take the chief executive's title from Garg, and in August they did. The governance in decision-making at the top level of the company is revealing cracks as this battle plays out.
Finance is where the external and internal forces became most legible. A company carrying an $8 billion valuation on paper in the boom is worth about $300 million today, and no single element on the chart got it there alone.
The Lesson For You
As the tides of good fortune come and go, the worst decision is to drop anchor and stay put. It could be a price you haven’t revisited since the last time margins felt comfortable or the client base that keeps the lights on. Tailwinds will reinforce the status quo, while headwinds will challenge it.
List the conditions you didn’t create, then model what would be true without them. Put down what you would cut and at what trigger. Do the work in the middle of the good season, because waiting until the trouble arrives means writing the same list under pressure with less runway.
Which part of your best year came from something you intentionally built versus conditions you happened to be standing in?
If your largest customer or your cheapest channel disappeared this quarter, how much of your cost base is counting on it?
What have you stopped paying attention to because the number kept coming back fine?
The Vital6 Assessment gives you an unbiased read on strength and balance in your business so you’ll know how to make your next move.
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