A CoinSwitch spokesperson said that layoffs only impacted the customer support team but reports claim that operations team has also been impacted The mass layoffs come at a time when the crypto ecosystem has been reeling under the impact of the government’s heavy taxation and compliance posture towards the industry The industry has already witnessed 3 crypto startups shutting operations The layoff saga continues to unravel for the Indian startup ecosystem. Now, Tiger Global-backed crypto exchange CoinsSwitch has laid off 44 employees as part of a restructuring exercise. As per the startup’s LinkedIn, it employs 519 people which would mean that 8% of the CoinSwitch’s total employee base has been impacted by the layoffs. A CoinSwitch spokesperson confirmed the development to Inc42, stating that the layoffs predominantly impacted  the customer support team. As per the company, the layoffs at the company took place earlier this month with impacted employees ‘voluntarily resigning’ from their positions.  “We continuously evaluate our business to stay competitive, prioritising innovation, value, and service for our customers. To that end, we right-sized our customer support team to align with the present volume of customer queries on our platform. This impacted the roles of 44 members of our customer support team, who voluntarily resigned from their roles after a detailed discussion with their managers earlier this month,” said a CoinSwitch spokesperson. However, according to a Moneycontrol report, the company has also laid off employees in the operations department. Several positions including team leads, agents, support staff, senior managers and quality analysts were also impacted by the layoffs, the report added citing an employee. In response to this, the company said, “At CoinSwitch, we embrace a flat organizational structure with minimal hierarchy. As an example, our Head of Customer Support directly reports to the COO. Our Customer Support team is also sometimes referred to as the Customer Operations team. There is no separate operations team for our Virtual Digital Assets Business.” Meanwhile, a source familiar with the developments revealed that CoinSwitch has hired 60 employees since April and was actively recruiting for various roles. The person further claimed that the crypto exchange still has a funding runway of five years. Launched in 2017, CoinSwitch has raised over $300 Mn since its inception from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital India, Ribbit Capital, Paradigm, and Coinbase Ventures. As of May 2023, the crypto exchange had 13 Mn users. The layoffs come at a time when the entire crypto ecosystem has been reeling under the impact of the government’s heavy taxation posture towards the industry. Be it 30% tax on gains from sale of virtual digital assets (VDAs) or 1% tax deducted at source (TDS) for all cryptocurrency transactions worth INR 10,000 and above, the crypto industry has been mired under regulatory uncertainty.  This heavy taxation regime has more or less dissuaded the general populace and has led to sharp drop in volume in the range of 85-90%. The collapse of the crypto giant FTX also added fuel to the fire, raising questions over the legitimacy of crypto exchanges.  Back home, crypto exchanges have seen multiple raids by enforcement agencies even as WazirX’s cofounder Nischal Shetty publicly sparred with Binance’s CEO Changpeng Zhao over alleged acquisition of Zanmai Labs in 2019.  Meanwhile, the industry has seen three crypto startups shutting shops, including Pillow, Flint Money, and WeTrade. Just last week, another crypto unicorn CoinDCX also slashed 12% workforce citing macro conditions in the prolonged bear market and the impact of TDS on domestic exchanges resulting a dip in the startup’s overall revenue.

The National Incubator Capacity Development Program is a joint effort by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) and Invest India. The partnership has selected the top 25 incubators that will go through a 3-month mentorship, advisory, and capacity-building program. The initiative, in association with Villgro, is part of the Start-up India campaign.It is dedicated to improving social startups and entrepreneurs and propelling the rapid expansion of India’s thriving startup ecosystem.The program, which will be spread for 12 weeks, adopts a cohort-based hybrid approach to enhance the skills and abilities of the incubators. It includes a comprehensive set of self-learning modules, virtual and physical boot camps, exposure visits and customised learning for incubator heads and sessions dedicated to efficiently managing the Startup India Seed Fund Scheme (SISFS). These sessions will be provided by a distinguished group of incubator business advisors, including Chand Das, Rama Kannan, Arun Venkatesan, etc. Apart from this, participants will gain access to VITALS (Villgro Information Tracking and Learning System), a technology-based information system designed to track enterprise incubation progress.Speaking about the program, Srinivas Ramanujam, CEO of Villgro, said, “Incubators play a pivotal role in nurturing social enterprises and transforming India’s vibrant startup ecosystem. Over the last 23 years, we have observed this first-hand and have been perfecting our incubation model. We aim to strengthen the capacity of the incubators by sharing our expertise and wide networks through intensive mentorship and advisory support. We hope to catalyse their growth and create a thriving ecosystem for social innovation.”“The National Incubator Capacity Building Program is launched to help build quality incubators across the country with an emphasis towards Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities and encourage cross-learning from larger cities and lighthouse incubators to address the needs of startups building for Bharat. We are pleased to announce the commencement of the training sessions with industry veterans and experts. Their invaluable insights and expertise will be instrumental in shaping the dynamic cohort of 25 incubators, empowering them with the necessary support and mentorship to create an enabling ecosystem for entrepreneurs to flourish,” said Prashanth Prakash, Member of the National Startup Advisory Council and Partner at Accel.Given the presence of over 92,000 DPIIT-recognised startups nationwide, coupled with a limited number of approximately, 1100+ incubators the imperative to establish and bolster new incubators has become paramount. However, there remains a limited level of training, sensitisation and knowledge building for new incubator managers and their teams, especially in emerging cities and beyond India’s metros. The National Incubator Capacity Development Program seeks to bridge this gap by providing training and growth hacks for incubators to ensure their sustainability.How these incubators were selectedThe Startup India Platform hosted a call for applications, inviting incubators from all over India to participate. The jury panel, comprising experts from various industries, evaluated 83 applications. Out of these, 25 exceptional incubators were selected to be part of the program. The evaluation process began with an incubator pitch that encompassed startups from diverse sectors, including women entrepreneurship, mobility, agriculture, rural incubation and sustainability among many others. The 25 incubators participating in the Incubator program are Pilani Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Society, AIC ADT Baramati Foundation, AIC – SKU Confederation, AIC BV Foundation, AIC Raise Foundation, BSC BioNEST Bio-Incubator, RCB Faridabad, Agri-Business Incubation Foundation, IIT Kharagpur, IIMV Foundation for Incubation Entrepreneurial Learning and Development, AIC-JKLU (Atal Incubation Center-JK Lakshmipat University), Crescent Innovation and Incubation Council, MOTION CoE, AIC-RNTU Foundation, EdVenture Incubation Foundation, AIC BAMU Foundation, IIT Bhubaneswar Research And Entrepreneurship Park, AIC Banasthali Vidyapith Foundation, AICNIFTTEA Incubation Centre, PDEU Innovation and Incubation Centre, ANGRAU R Agri-Business Incubator, FOUNDATION FOR CfHE, K L Technology Incubators Foundation, Centre for Incubation and Business Acceleration, BioNEST-BHU InnoResTech Foundation, IIM Kashipur Foundation for Innovation & Entrepreneurship Development, STEP (Shakti-The Empathy Project)The National Incubator Capacity Development Program represents a milestone in the development of India’s startup ecosystem. NICDP will empower and equip a pathway to the incubators’ sustainability. By empowering incubators with the necessary knowledge and resources, the program also aims to foster an environment conducive to innovation, job creation and social impact.

Baron Capital increased Swiggy’s valuation by 33.9% QoQ to $8.54 Bn at the end of June 2023, while it marked up the valuation of Pine Labs 10% QoQ to $4.92 Bn The investment firm slashed the valuation of BYJU’S by 44.6% to $11.7 Bn at the end of June 2023 from $21.2 Bn in March 2023 Baron Capital noted that Indian equities returned to leadership after two consecutive quarters of underperformance and valuation reset After a wave of valuation markdowns, US-based asset management company Baron Capital Group has marked up the valuation of portfolio startups foodtech giant Swiggy and fintech major Pine Labs as of June 2023. In its quarterly report, Baron Capital internally increased Swiggy’s valuation by 33.9% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) to $8.54 Bn. On the other hand, it also marked up the valuation of Pine Labs by 10% QoQ to $4.92 Bn.  However, the investment firm trimmed the valuation of BYJU’S by nearly half. It slashed the valuation of the edtech decacorn by 44.6% to $11.7 Bn at the end of June 2023 from $21.2 Bn at the end of March 2023.  The increase in valuation is a major reversal of sorts, especially for Swiggy and Pine Labs, as both suffered valuation markdowns by Baron Capital in the quarter ended March 2023. While the firm had cut the foodtech major’s valuation by 10%, it slashed the fintech player’s value by 5% on a quarterly basis at the end of March this year.  Baron Capital also highlighted that Indian equities returned to leadership after two consecutive quarters of underperformance and valuation reset. It added that economic and earning expansion in the country continued on a healthy course. “This reversal was the principal driver of our second quarter outperformance and we maintain conviction that India likely offers the most attractive long-term investment opportunity in the EM (emerging markets)/Asia universe,” the asset management company added.  This comes after months of valuation cuts of Indian startups by global investment firms from Prosus to Neuberger Berman.  Amid raging funding winter and mounting losses of Indian unicorns, the focus, at the beginning of the year, shifted to profitability and sustainability. As clamour grew for streamlining operations and focussing on healthy numbers, Indian startups undertook drastic measures in their push for profitability, including layoffs and shutting down cash-guzzling businesses. As a result, profitability has emerged as a buzzword in the Indian startup ecosystem, with many companies putting out claims of having turned profitable. On the other hand, BYJU’S has been marred by legal challenges as well as a debt crisis. 

Dolby Laboratories has unveiled Dolby Atmos FlexConnect — its latest innovation in immersive audio that pairs together a TV’s sound system with accessory wireless speakers for an “immersive” Dolby Atmos sound experience. It intelligently optimises the sound for any room layout and speaker setup, it said.“Dolby Atmos FlexConnect is an entirely new category of experience that offers consumers the freedom and flexibility to choose how they want to arrange their devices while still getting a great immersive Dolby Atmos experience,” said John Couling, senior vice president, entertainment, Dolby Laboratories. According to Frédéric Langin, chief commercial officer, TCL Europe, Dolby Atmos FlexConnect can help users “unlock incredible immersive sound no matter how they arrange their audio devices.”How Dolby Atmos FlexConnect worksDolby Atmos FlexConnect aims to mitigate the problem of placing speakers in their optimal position to get the best audio possible out of their sound system. It enables users to place one or more wireless speakers anywhere in a room without having to worry about whether they are placed perfectly. The solution adapts to the device types as they are added.The system then intelligently combines each accessory device with the TV’s speakers and delivers a Dolby Atmos sound experience tailored according to their home. Dolby acoustic mapping features leverages microphones in the TV to locate each wireless speaker in the room, calibrating the system automatically to ensure optimal audio performance.Apart from elevating Dolby Atmos experience, the Dolby Atmos FlexConnect provides flexibility to users to place speakers anywhere they want to.TCL first brand to use new featureDolby announced that TCL will be the first to implement Dolby Atmos FlexConnect in its 2024 TV lineup. The company will also launch a line of accessory wireless speakers designed to complement its upcoming lineup of TVs with Dolby Atmos FlexConnect.

For those new business leaders interested in expanding their website by starting a company  blog, what’s one piece of advice you’d give them, and why? These answers are provided by Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most successful young entrepreneurs. YEC members represent nearly every industry, generate billions of dollars in revenue each year, and have created tens of thousands of jobs. Learn more at yec.co. 1. Do Something Different If I had to give only one piece of advice about starting a blog, it would be this: Do something different. There’s more content on the internet than ever before, and more is added every day. When planning and writing a post, ask yourself, “What makes my work different?” If you can’t answer this question, you may need to go back to the drawing board and choose a new, unique angle. – John Turner, SeedProd LLC 2. Focus on Sales Journey Stages Focus on the prospect’s sales journey stages. Target 50% for newbies, providing valuable info to nurture their interest and to be remembered when they’re ready to purchase or seek services. Then target 25% for intermediates by offering advanced insights to showcase your expertise, and 25% for experts, delivering high-level content to position yourself as the optimal partner for scaling their businesses. – Ron Lieback, ContentMender 3. Leverage Storytelling Techniques Storytelling adds depth and relatability, capturing the attention of readers and making your brand more memorable. By weaving narratives into your blog posts, you create an emotional connection that resonates with your audience, ultimately enhancing engagement and leaving a lasting impact. – Abhijeet Kaldate, Astra WordPress Theme 4. Cover Evergreen Topics My advice to new business leaders interested in expanding their website by starting a company blog is that they should focus on covering evergreen topics that best align with their respective industries. By doing this, not only will they be able to connect with a relevant audience, but they’ll also protect their content from getting obsolete over time and ensure maximum yield from their efforts. – Chris Klosowski, Easy Digital Downloads 5. Set a Realistic Publishing Schedule A blog can be a great way to share more about your expertise and help with SEO. My biggest piece of advice would be to not bite off more than you can chew as it pertains to a publishing schedule. Blogs need to be updated regularly, but you need to find a schedule and process that realistically works for you. Having a blog without a new post in over a year can do more harm than good. – Leila Lewis, Be Inspired PR 6. Invite Guest Writers to Contribute When you’re planning to expand your website by starting a company blog, I think it’s a good idea to invite guest writers who can offer new perspectives to your audience. This can be especially helpful if you have just started out. Having guest writers also means more exposure because they will obviously want to share their work with their friends and connections. – Andrew Munro, AffiliateWP 7. Exude Authenticity Start with authenticity, not sales pitches. Your blog isn’t another billboard — it’s your voice. Use it to show your expertise, values and vision. Let people see the brains behind the brand. The more they trust you, the more they buy from you. Remember, in a world full of ads, authenticity is the loudest voice. – Idan Waller, BlueThrone 8. Keep It Simple Don’t overthink it. Put your content out there and then zero in on what’s bringing in your readership. You should set a sustainable target — once a month, once a week, whatever you feel like you can keep up for a whole year. Just keep pushing new content until something really sticks. Then do more of that! – Kaitlyn Witman, Rainfactory 9. Split Up Text With Images and Videos Make your content readable by adding images and videos. While search engines love longer and more comprehensive articles, readers have short attention spans. To break up any text, add relevant images or videos. You can also use infographics and interesting fonts, all while preserving the substance and content of your article. – Shu Saito, SpiroPure 10. Produce Content That Addresses a Need Focus on providing valuable, informative content that solves specific problems or addresses the needs of your target audience. Avoid purely promotional content and aim to establish your blog as a go-to resource in your industry. This approach positions your business as an authoritative voice, driving traffic to your website, enhancing your brand’s reputation and potentially attracting new customers. – Andrew Saladino, Kitchen Cabinet Kings 11. Take a Data-Driven Approach I see many blogs just put out content, but it’s good to monitor and analyze your blog’s metrics. By tracking metrics like page views, bounce rate and time on page, you can gain insights into your audience’s behavior and identify areas for improvement. This data-driven approach helps you optimize your content strategy, make informed decisions and continually enhance the user experience. – Pratik Chaskar, Spectra 12. Ensure Your Content Is People-Centric If you want to expand your website by starting a company blog, make sure that your content is people-centric rather than business-focused. Your goal should be to generate awareness and help your audience find answers to their questions. Not only will this help you build trust, but it will also enable you to stand out from other players in your industry, which in turn facilitates your growth. – Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms

But despite the removal of what many feel to be both a core capability and function of any internet chatbot, large numbers of people continue to talk to the “characters” of Character.AI—a term the platform uses loosely, even encompassing things like AI assistants, which answer queries just as ChatGPT might, but with humanoid names and faces. There’s extensive guidance for character creation—essentially teaching users to do the work of training bots themselves—and the terms of service makes it clear that everything on both the training side and the chatting side is the intellectual property of those who input it, leaving the platform itself as a mere middleman, though not a particularly transparent one. Even if Character.AI might want you to get emotionally attached to its coding bots (your fellow “pair programmer”) or its grammar bots (your “English teacher”), it’s the characters you’ve heard of, real or fictional, that have sparked the most interest across the social web. “Billie Eilish” currently has six times the amount of interaction of “Joe Biden”; both of them eclipse “Alan Turing.” “Remember: Everything Characters say is made up!” reads a cheerful message atop every chat, and which evokes memories of Historical Figures, the supposedly -educational app that went viral earlier this year when users’ chats with, well, historical figures spit out utter nonsense (and not even interesting nonsense). Character.AI is already proving a complex space, from fans’ relationships with the companies that own characters to fandom’s wide range of opinions about AI to what it means to directly interact with a character you love. But the app’s fictional characters have also garnered a fair amount of attention from fandom, where the idea of chatting with your actual favorite character might hold more affective appeal than chatting with a fake English teacher. The #characterai tag on Tumblr is awash with screenshots from the platform, many of them also tagged “self-insert” or “x reader,” a subgenre of fan fiction in which you engage with known characters (often—but not always—romantically and/or sexually) via the second-person narration of an unnamed “reader,” sometimes written as Y/N, or “your name.” X reader fic is regularly invoked in discussions of Character.AI and fandom, as is chat-based roleplaying, which fans have been engaging in for decades. But these parallels only resemble what’s happening here on the surface—and for fandom, Character.AI is already proving a complex, sometimes thorny space, from fans’ relationships with the companies that own the characters to fandom’s wide range of opinions about AI to what it means to directly interact with a character you love. “Chatbots have existed in the context of fandom for the past 10 years, and gained more traction around five years ago,” says Nicolle Lamerichs, a senior lecturer in creative business at the University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht. “Often these chatbots were initiated by companies to market to fans specifically, and allow for more interaction with their brand.” Most of these pre-programmed bots offered a limited number of responses and interactions, like Disney’s Facebook Messenger–based Zootopia chatbot, or Marvel’s Conversable, also via Facebook as well as X (previously known as Twitter), which let you DM Marvel characters. But the rise of generative AI has utterly altered the top-down, corporate-sanctioned way fans were previously able to chat with characters. “These tools have become democratized,” Lamerichs says. “This is leading to new types of fanworks and fan interaction, which is very interesting to observe.” This democratizing element opens up complicated questions about copyright and AI, but right now, like most questions about copyright and AI, there are no clear answers. “We’re still very much in the vocabulary-building phase,” says Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel at Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy organization that focuses on tech issues. “You have copyright specialists who now have to learn specifically about the tech that underlies this stuff—and because things like fair use determinations, which are crucial to AI discussions, are very, very fact-specific, you have copyright experts who need to understand all the intermediate steps that go on under the hood in a generative AI platform, and that kind of learning takes a lot of time.”

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To push profitability, Chingari is spending less than 1 Cr a month on user acquisition; the startup is also focussing on streamlining its workforce Inc42 reported earlier that Chingari was seen building an adult entertainment app with salacious ads and promos In FY22, it reported a net loss of INR 139.4 Cr, a jump of 225.7% from INR 42.8 Cr in FY21 Short-video sharing platform Chingari has turned operationally profitable, Chingari CEO and cofounder Sumit Ghosh claimed.  “We are finally profitable and will do business with our monthly revenues from now on. Not burning VC cash anymore or need to raise to sustain the business. We still have a few million USD left in the bank, which we have kept aside for the rainy days,” Ghosh claimed on Twitter. The announcement comes at a time when Chingari has laid off more than 50% of its workforce in the second round of layoffs within two months. The layoffs impacted employees from product, customer support, design and marketing teams. Navigating the Path to Profitability In the startup’s early stages, he stated that the primary objective was rapid growth, regardless of cost. The startup invested heavily in acquiring users through inorganic means without giving much thought to revenue generation or a sustainable business model, he said. He was of the view that money would follow if Chingari was able to show growth.  “In 2022 Markets turned, mid of 2022 even though we were growing at 500K downloads a day, no VC would take a bite as there was no clear monetisation plan. I realised this won’t lead us anywhere, reduced all inorganic media buys, focused on quality user acquisition, users who can be monetised,” Ghosh added. At present, the startup is allocating less than INR 1 Cr per month for user acquisition, with a Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio of 4:1. Chingari kicked in monetisation strategy in May 2023 and anticipates improved financial metrics soon. According to Ghosh, profits generated each month will be reinvested to fuel further growth. “When we raised funds, specially around GARI launch, we had raised lots of capital. We thought oh now we will become a big company, we need to hire professional people across the board, this was our biggest mistake, along with the good guys, we actually hired a bunch of corporate bozos who just came, did nothing, gave corporate Gyan and warmed chairs all day and left,” Ghosh said in his recent Twitter post. Ghosh added that the Bengaluru-based startup eventually fired them due to low delivery, while the startup overspent on this talent pool. He also acknowledged that building a D2C business and figuring out a viable business model is difficult in India as the companies have to pay Google or Facebook to acquire users, Google or Apple 30% tax on all the store billed payments, pay a GST on the income from users, among other expenses. Last week, the startup laid off more than 50% of its workforce after firing 20% of its workforce in June. Chingari now has an employee base of 50-60 only following the latest round of layoffs.  While it is cutting costs on employee expenses and finding more avenues to profitability, it recently became a digital partner of the UK-based Southall FC, an eighth-division football club. Chingari will offer a range of digital services to help enhance the club’s online presence and fan engagement. Chingari In Troubled Waters Founded in 2018 by Sumit Ghosh, Aditya Kothari, Biswatma Nayak and Deepak Salvi, Chingari rose to prominence after the Indian government banned Tiktok and other Chinese apps in 2020, citing security concerns. Earlier this year, its cofounder, Kothari, exited the startup. At the beginning of this year, Chingari received an undisclosed amount of equity funding from Aptos Labs, the company behind the launch of Layer 1 blockchain Aptos. Last year, the short video startup secured $15 Mn in a funding round led by Republic Capital. In October 2021, it introduced a crypto token named $GARI and a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace. $GARI is the native token of Chingari and enables short-form video creators to monetise their content on the blockchain. As per CoinMarketCap, GARI was trading at a value of $0.01393 on Monday (August 28th), 98.67% down from its highest value of $1.05 in January 2022.  This year, Chingari forayed into 18+ content with paid live one-on-one calls between creators and users to improve engagement and increase app downloads. In an extensive investigation, Inc42 also found a series of recruitment posts for creators with promises of big payouts, in addition to several social media ads and videos featuring salacious promises. The creators on the platform were found encouraging users to make 1-on-1 calls, and most users tend to accept them upon receiving an in-app gift. While it could be one of the ways to monetise the platform, the moral and ethical questions arise if Chingari can take this route. In FY22, the startup reported a net loss of INR 139.4 Cr, a jump of 225.7% from INR 42.8 Cr in FY21. Meanwhile, the total income rose 137X to INR 49.4 Cr from INR 36 Lakh in FY21.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is not too prolific on social media. He has a Twitter (now known as X) account but he isn’t one of those who posts daily on social media. Which is why it came as a surprise when an Instagram account under his name was spotted. A report by 9to5Mac reveals that the account — which is followed by senior Apple executives — is actually a fake one. The account does look ‘real’ and till now has just two posts. One was made on August 20 — World Photography Day — and shared two images clicked by the iPhone. The second post is related to an ad campaign by Apple. The fake account is followed by two senior Apple vice presidents — Lisa Jackson and Alan Dye. A few other Apple employees also follow the fake account, reveals the report. Not too active on social media As mentioned above, Cook doesn’t have too many social media accounts. He does have an account on Weibo — the Chinese social media platform but apart from that Cook doesn’t do too much social media. While Apple does have official accounts on TikTok, and Instagram, the company CEO has refrained from making personal accounts on any of those platforms. Meanwhile, we can expect Cook to soon share a few posts on X in the next month. Apple is expected to reveal the new iPhones sometime in September. Traditionally, Cook does make a few posts. One on the event day and then after the iPhones are announced. He also generally posts on the day the iPhones are expected to go on sale. Otherwise, Cook’s posts are far and few in between and are focused on Apple. Cook doesn’t use his X account for anything personal but his posts are about important Apple announcements, or images clicked by iPhones or when he wishes people on some festive occasions.

Better.com CEO Vishal Garg is known most for his infamous Zoom call in 2021 during which he fired over 900 employees. During the brutal call, he reportedly accused at least 250 terminated employees of stealing from the digital mortgage company by over-reporting their working hours. Garg is said to have later admitted to his remaining staffers that he had “blundered the execution” of the job cuts. But despite that since 2021, Better.com has laid off over 90% of its workforce. In 2022, Better.com merged with SPAC Aurora Acquisition Corp. The combined entity is called Better Home & Finance Holding Company. The company recently made its public debut Thursday on Nasdaq Capital Market. On the occasion, Garg spoke to TechCrunch. He answered a number of questions including that infamous Zoom call.What Vishal Garg saidWhile answering a question on how he has worked to rebuild trust within, and outside, the company, Garg replied. “A lot of leadership training. I think I was very mission-centric, customer centric, and really, really focused on what it took to drive growth. And I think I’ve learned now that in order for our customers to be delighted, our teammates also have to feel delight. So I’ve worked really, really hard to change the way that I show up to the team every day, and to be more empathetic and to treat them with the same level of kindness that I showed our customers.”“And then the second thing is we’ve continued to innovate on our mission, which is to make homeownership more affordable and more accessible, and ultimately the 1,000 people that are at Better.com today are driven not just by me but really by our mission, which is to make homeownership more affordable and more accessible,” he added.