This guy must have gotten an F in HR Management

Hey Guys & Gals!

I thought I’d pass on this email from Boardroom Investing. It’s a really interesting story and something I think all business schools should get a hold of on what NOT to do if you are a CEO 😆. Happy reading, and happy trading – and if you’re not on the Boardroom email list, check it out here!

Hey Folks, Jeff Bishop here.

We talk a lot in Boardroom about the “holy grail” for private companies – which I guess could be two holy grails – being acquired for a bananas 🍌valuation or the – one I want to talk about today…going public.

Going public is literally the Superbowl for private companies (yes Football 🏈is on my mind, people as we are now ONE WEEK away from our first real game of the season!!!)...so get ready to hear a lot more football analogies.

However, does going public translate to automatic success for a company? Not so much.

In fact, I have been digesting over the week just one such company that had a swing and a huge miss…

Yep you guessed it: Better.com

You might remember this company from its famous HR blunder in 2021 when CEO Vishal Garg brutally laid off 900 employees on a Zoom call (looks like someone didn’t take HR 101 seriously in business school!).

Beyond even more bad headlines, the real estate startup has been clearly struggling amid high mortgage interest rates and a national housing market slowdown. Yet it continued its march forward to go public, as Garg defended his past mistakes by saying he had been through “a lot of leadership training,” and that he had worked “very very hard…”

Whelp fast-forward to last week, where they trudged ahed with going public. And guess what happened? Shares fell so quickly that trading was halted FOUR TIMES in the FIRST 30 MINUTES! I have never seen something go public and drop 95% in the same day!

That right there, folks, is the Market taking care of business

Headlines were brutal – like this one from Forbes and this one from Fortune:

Vishal Garg, the CEO who mass-sacked employees over Zoom, suffers epic SPAC disaster as Better.com shares nose-dive over 90%

The key takeaway is that the market has no patience for BS stocks anymore. This company had NO business going public.

There are definitely some hard lessons to take away from Better.com’s story - and I hope that all private companies can learn a thing or two to set themselves up for the best possible outcome.

So believe me, when done right - it’s a beautiful thing to see a small company advance healthily and patiently through all the stages of going public. And my hope is that all the Boardroom partners and sponsors would apply lessons like these to their journeys.

And oftentimes it IS done right (hooray 🎉). I have had the pleasure of personally being in the midst of such an exciting accomplishment.

Ringing the bell at the Nasdaq for a newly listed company was one of my most memorable experiences, especially as a trader. I was an early investor in this company, got in pre-IPO, and after they went public they were eventually bought out.

So hats off to them 🎩, and many others that traveled the same path!

That’s it for today’s edition, stay tuned for our newest partner making its debut in the Boardroom just around the corner!

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