Your local trucker is giving us creator economy vibes

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Friends, we’re almost there: the end of the year that felt like a decade. This week, Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex put aside their 2021 fatigue and talked through a week full of news – and […]

Better.com CEO Vishal Garg apologizes to current employees for ‘blundering’ of mass layoffs; SPAC delayed

Better.com CEO Vishal Garg apparently realizes he’s done wrong. (As if the barrage of negative publicity wasn’t enough evidence of that.) Today, a letter to current employees was leaked on Blind by a verified Better employee. In the letter, Garg apologized for the way he (mis)handled the layoff news last week, writing: “I failed to show […]

Better.com’s PR, comms, marketing heads submit resignations in wake of layoffs fiasco

Better.com continues to find new ways to make itself look bad. This week, sources familiar with internal happenings within the company told TechCrunch the company’s VP of communications, Patrick Lenihan; head of public relations, Tanya Gillogley; and head of marketing, Melanie Hahn, have all submitted their resignations. Insider also reported the news earlier today. The […]

Ahead of public market debut, Better.com lays off 9% of its staff

One day after announcing an amendment to its SPAC agreement, digital mortgage lender Better.com confirmed today that it is laying off roughly 9% of its nearly 10,000 person staff. Doing the math, that amounts to about 900 people. The company declined to comment beyond the following written statement from CFO Kevin Ryan: “A fortress balance […]

Better.com gets $750M cash infusion in new agreement with its SPAC backers

Digital mortgage lender Better.com, which announced in May that it was going public via a SPAC, is getting a cash infusion from its backers sooner than expected. Blank-check company Aurora Acquisition Corp. and SoftBank have decided to amend the terms of their financing agreement to provide Better with half of the $1.5 billion they committed […]

Constructor finds $55M for tech that powers search and discovery for e-commerce businesses

One of the biggest problems in the world of e-commerce is the predicament of shopping cart abandonment: when shoppers aren’t getting to what they want fast enough — whether it’s finding the right item, or paying for it in a quick and easy way — they bounce. That singular problem is driving a wave of […]

Extra Crunch roundup: China’s new data privacy law, fractional farming, debt vs. equity

China’s first data privacy laws go into effect on November 1, 2021. Will your company be in compliance? Modeled after the EU’s GDPR, the new regulations “[introduce] perhaps the most stringent set of requirements and protections for data privacy in the world,” writes Scott W. Pink, special counsel in O’Melveny’s Data Security & Privacy practice. […]