The top U.S. startup is a housing rocket ship fueled by the pandemic, an army of recruits and an unrelenting founder

Welcome to this week’s second installment of?Human Capital , an open exploration of the ideas and people moving financial services forward. This edition is a story we reported on fintech lender Better.com and the ambitious founder leading it to the public markets. Click Subscribe above to be notified of future editions.

Vishal Garg wants to win — for his customers, for his company and for himself.

His startup, Better.com , stems from loss. A previous venture, student lender MyRichUncle, became a casualty of the great financial crisis. Then a dream home slipped his family’s grasp; an all-cash buyer swooped in while his mortgage company dawdled.

And so Better, a fully digital mortgage lender with non-commissioned loan officers, was born. Prospective investors balked at the idea — until they didn’t . Garg was on the path to success.

• Catch up from LinkedIn News: Riding a pandemic-fueled housing boom: Inside startup Better’s ascent

Some didn’t want him to succeed. While Better’s business soars — and as the five-year-old, 9,300-person startup barrels toward an impending debut in the public markets — Garg is now fighting multiple lawsuits from ex-business partners. He denies their accusations of past fraud, relegating it all to “a distraction.”

While the outcome of those allegations may not be certain, one thing is: Better is a rocket ship. Once the fuse is lit, it can’t be stopped. The company has, for the second consecutive year, ascended to the top spot on LinkedIn’s Top Startups U.S. list, a data-driven ranking of where entrepreneurial-minded professionals want to work today.

“The lotus blooms in the swamp,” Garg says of his troops’ forward march amid detractors, competitors and Better’s own growing pains. “If you’re going to try to do something bold, there will always be distractions.”

More than mortgages

The company isn’t slowing down. In a historically tight labor market, with employers struggling to hire for a record number of job openings, Better has enlisted recruits in droves. Headquartered in New York but now employing remote workers across the country, the startup has onboarded a whopping 5,000 hires this year, growing by 112%.

More staggering, Garg wants to employ 100,000 in just a few years’ time, says Sarah Pierce , Better’s head of sales and operations.

As Garg sees it, Better can be so much more than a mortgage lender for customers who want to refinance existing loans or buy new homes. The company now employs salaried realtors to buy and sell customers’ houses — for no commission. It digitally matches homeowners with title insurers and providers of homeowners insurance. And soon, according to its investor presentation , Better will offer home-improvement services and loans. Next year, it’s eyeing life and disability insurance; personal, auto and student loans; even its own debit and credit cards.

“It has become multi-dimensional — it’s not just about mortgages anymore,” says Rajeev Misra , CEO of the SoftBank Vision Fund, which pumped $500 million into Better earlier this year and has committed $1.3 billion more to the company in the coming months.

“It will be a real estate broker; it will be a semi-bank,” Misra says. “It will serve customers continuously with multiple products.”

Multiple products require multiple new teams, which translates into a hiring spree. Better currently has hundreds of open roles across functions, and Pierce says her teams are finding talent in unexpected but rewarding places. During the pandemic, the company hired hospitality workers who had lost their jobs, 100 Broadway and other theater actors whose stage work was scrubbed, dozens of military veterans and others from what she calls “untapped talent pools.” Better also doesn’t require all candidates to have a college degree.

Homegrown talent

To get employees up to speed in roles from sales representatives to loan processors to underwriters, new hires start with at least seven weeks of intensive training. Better then pays for specialized licensing courses and industry exam fees.

“We’re choosing to home-grow our talent,” says Pierce.

“That means building out systems where we can upskill employees,” she adds. “Remember we’re a technology company — we will automate a lot of roles. This apparatus allows us to retrain people into more specialized roles.”

Pierce says she’s watched employees with no mortgage-industry experience become top industry loan officers in six months to a year. Sales representatives and loan processors, making $50,000 to $70,000 a year, become loan underwriters with earnings potential of $200,000 to $300,000. Employees in the mortgage unit are becoming real estate agents as Better builds its brokerage business. In the future, staff can opt to become insurance agents as that division grows.

And those Broadway stars? “They’re amazing on the phone with customers,” she says. “No surprise, they can bring sales scripts alive.”

The investments in training and retraining systems ladder up to a simple yet meaningful goal for Pierce: making Better a place “where people can spend their career.” During her own early days at the startup, constantly on the phone with customers, she realized she was quickly becoming a subject-matter expert in mortgages and residential real estate — multi-trillion-dollar markets with many different available roles and career paths.

“My hope is that over the course of 10 to 15 years, you can look at someone’s resume and they might have 17 different jobs, but they’re all at Better,” she says.

New millionaires

For those who have already given a few years to the startup, it’s an exciting time for an additional reason: IPO riches. Better isn’t undergoing a traditional IPO — a shell company known as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, held an IPO before agreeing to use the proceeds to merge with Better by the end of the year. The $7 billion to $8 billion deal is set to be a christening nonetheless for Garg, his employees and the startup’s early investors.

Garg says he’s recently been on Zoom calls with team members in India — where he grew up and where Better now employs 3,750 — and takes in backgrounds of family villages and homes where employees returned to care for parents during the pandemic. On those calls, he says, he imagines how their lives will be transformed by the merger.

“New millionaires are being made at Better,” he says of the pending deal. “A lot of those people are in their early 20s.”

Despite the coming windfall — perhaps even because of it — Garg and his team say they will be even hungrier stewards of a public company.

“We plan to keep our startup edge and fight like heck,” says CFO Kevin Ryan , a veteran investment banker whom Garg lured to Better a year ago to start preparing for a public debut. “Vishal is just not wired to play defense. He never has been, and I doubt he ever will be.”

For Garg, despite the vortex of activity now swirling around him, he says his focus remains on who’s paying the bills: the customer. It happens to be the No. 1 leadership principle — “customer obsession” — at perhaps the most successful onetime startup ever: Amazon, now worth $1.7 trillion.

“As long as you take care of the customer,” Garg says, “everything else will take care of itself.”

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