Talk:Vishal Garg (businessman)

WP:UNDUE

I believe Garg was notable when the Forbes article was published; it attracted some attention to his management style, such as this article in The Real Deal, and there was earlier coverage of him and Khan as business successes, documented at MyRichUncle (which remains rather promotional in addition to containing an awful lot about the student loan scandal and resulting state and federal laws) and also see this Forbes blog post from October 2021 on Better.com. But the extensive coverage of the firings has in any case put him over the top. However, since this is negative and almost entirely one event, we need to guard against undue emphasis on a single episode of negative news coverage, or this will become a hit piece on a living person. (There are also sensationalist articles about him cropping up like mushrooms, which is why I kept the Personal life section so brief.) I think I owe fellow editors an explanation for why I removed a mass of quotes and a reaction from a journalist, selected for its variation from the general tone; that's why. Readers have several citations in which they can find the original video and further details about the firings, especially now that he's apologized and that's been covered in the New York Times. (It would however be nice to have a second reference for the apology to a news site that doesn't restrict free views so parsimoniously.) Yngvadottir (talk) 23:08, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Undue weight and balancing aspects

 Not done for now: Please establish a consensus with editors engaged in the subject area before using the {{Request edit}} template for this proposed change.

 – ;; Maddy ♥︎(they/she)♥︎ :: talk  17:15, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

Hi everyone, my name is Kristin, I work for Better and I'd like to make some suggestions for improving this article. Before I get into the particulars, I want to thank Yngvadottir for their efforts to safeguard against undue weight here. Despite those efforts, though, the article remains significantly imbalanced. This may have happened because the article currently leans so heavily on one source (the Nov. 2020 Forbes piece), but whatever the reason, I think other editors will agree with this assessment.

The most striking example of this is the fact that much of the article is focused on Raza Khan and his account of the events in Vishal Garg's career, instead of focusing on Garg himself, the actual subject of the article. See how many sentences begin with Khan as the primary focus ("With Raza Khan..."; "Khan's brother provided..."; "Khan became concerned..."; "Khan has alleged...").

Here are some practical ways that I propose resolving this problem:

1. MyRichUncle section
   • In the first sentence of the section, re-center the emphasis on Garg: In 2000, Garg partnered with Raza Khan, a fellow Indian immigrant whom he met in high school, to found an investment company that became the online student loan provider MyRichUncle.
   • Add more (limited) context about what MyRichUncle did in the years it was active, such as the following sentence (sourced to the same Forbes article): By 2007, the company was publicly traded and became one of the largest student loan providers in the United States.
2. EIFC section
   • Rewrite the first sentence as follows: In 2009, Garg again partnered with Khan to start EIFC, a company that analyzed loan portfolios to identify potentially problematic loans.
   • Remove the second sentence. The inclusion of Khan's resignation from EIFC and the lawsuit that followed - which the court dismissed in 2018 ([1] [2]) - is hardly due weight for an encyclopedic summary of Garg's career.
3. Better.com section
   • Add more context about Better's founding: Garg created Better.com after he and his wife experienced challenges trying to obtain a mortgage to buy what would have been their own first home. According to Garg, one of his aims in founding the company was to incorporate successful aspects of MyRichUncle into the mortgage lending process, such as easy online access and quick approvals.
   • Remove The Daily Beast's estimate of Garg's equity in Better, per WP:DAILYBEAST.
   • Add more (limited) context about Better's history: the company launched its first business Better Mortgage in 2016 and later added subsidiaries dedicated to real estate, title and homeowners' insurance services. In 2021, the company gained attention for its plans to go public via a SPAC merger valuing it at around $6.9 billion
   • Refocus the second paragraph solely on the lawsuit brought by the group of investors, and not on Khan's misappropriation allegations or on a comment Garg made one time at a deposition, neither of which is an encyclopedic piece of information or should be given any weight in the article. Rewrite the paragraph as follows: In June 2020, a group of investors filed suit alleging diversion of funds through a venture capital firm founded by Garg called 1/0 Capital.

References

I hope these suggestions make sense to others. I also want to stress that I've tried to avoid "whitewashing" or making overly promotional suggestions here, and I'm happy to be told if my suggestions overstep in this regard. Thank you, Kristin at Better (talk) 14:34, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Pinging a few editors who have been active either here or at the Better article, in case anyone would like to chime in: Castncoot, Eviolite, Aismallard, Qflib. Thanks again! Kristin at Better (talk) 17:54, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Noting here that, after thinking on the matter, I decided against further editing on Better.com or related topics. aismallard (talk) 18:01, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Pinging Fuzheado (article creator) as well. My personal involvement with the article has just been reverting one bit of vandalism and adding a short sentence when it was a stub, so I don't have any particular opinions on the content of the article right now. I might take a look at it later, though. eviolite (talk) 18:02, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for asking here, Kristin, but I strongly disagree about putting in more information on his companies. That's for articles about those companies (note that two of them have articles); while the number of successful companies he co-founded/founded is part of his notability, having lots of information about how well companies did and how they broke new ground is a hallmark of business hagiographies. I'll look at the WSJ source regarding the point about Garg and his wife having problems obtaining a mortgage, but I may have already seen it and thought it was too interview-driven; plus using details from within WSJ articles is problematic since I and most readers can't see them except in searches targeted at a precise phrase. There may well be other paywalled sources on Garg's career that I was not able to see and that would offset what you see as a problematic overuse of the 2020 Forbes article; can you find us any? Also in relation to balance, I disagree that the article overemphasizes his former partner's lawsuits, because the press coverage is dominated by it in second place to the coverage of the teleconference firings. I will look again at the wording side by side with your suggestions to see whether Khan's name is overemphasized in the account of each company, but in a reread a moment ago, I find Garg being always mentioned first and don't see the problem; the main issue regarding weight from my point of view is that before the firings there was already quite extensive coverage of allegations against Garg, and the article is more open to an accusation of downplaying those issues than of being overly critical. I included Garg's apology, but his previous statement in the deposition was official and a number of news sources refer to it; similarly with the "dumb dolphins" remark. I take your point about The Daily Beast being a "use with care" source, and will see whether some other statement about his success/wealth can be substituted at that point, but I believe the amount of equity he held in a particular business is far more germane to a biography than statistics about how well the company had done, and it is not a deprecated source for such a matter, unlike one of the data pages on businessmen that rest heavily on publicity releases. I have pre-emptively removed a set of changes by a New York IP editor that did seem to be whitewashing/hagiography, along with your addition of an infobox, which is not needed and will either become a place to exhaustively list companies with which he's been involved, a target of the vandals seeking to paint him as notable as a bad boss, or a place to overemphasize his family life, about which there are very few sources; I'll examine the sources the IP substituted on his wife (someone else had earlier provided a source on her current position at Better.com), but I particularly want to keep this article from saying a lot about her or other aspects of his private life. Very few sources come up on search; she isn't yet notable; maybe she will at some point become so and can have her own article. Perhaps from your point of view his education history and its role in the foundation of MyRichUncle is off-topic? From mine, education history is an important part of a biography that readers expect, and Khan being a schoolmate and fellow NYU student and their different fields of study are reported in multiple press articles. As I say, I'll look at your suggested wording, but I'm not seeing undue attention to Khan's role and their relationship such that that material can be put in fewer words or is magnified beyond what the sources have. Yngvadottir (talk) 22:44, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

I've now made the following edit after examining the IP editor's changes and your arguments and sources above. I found the IP editor had removed all mention of Embark, including leaving a sentence with a gap in it, and all uses of Inside Higher Ed (which you cite above). I was able to use their Harvard Alumni source to replace one such citation and state when she became president there, but not their other source, a Forbes "contributor" piece; those are generally unreliable, and this one is in addition an interview and doesn't even name Garg (or make clear that he owned Embark), but it did attest to their having had a third child since the Harvard bio was published, so I continue to judge it better to leave out all mention of their children.

I've used the WSJ reference on the impetus of his founding Better.com, but the remaining suggestions and sources about MyRichUncle and Better.com belong in their respective articles. I have a personal note from when I was working on MyRichUncle and on this article that the Better.com article needs a lot of improvement, but how high it's valued and how much funding it has received in the run-up to going public are not biographical information about Garg. (We are already citing the Forbes piece on which you say the article relies too much, which covers those plans for IPO.) In addition, I was working hard not to use sources such as this in TechCrunch from December 10. I have however looked for new news coverage this year, and found and added a New York Times reference for his return and the company having taken a look at its internal culture.

My re-examination reminded me of just how far the preponderance of news coverage of Garg has been negative, including wide dissemination of Khan's legal claims and of the events of the deposition for Garg's counter-suit. The coverage in reliable sources makes this aspect of his career encyclopedic and does not permit minimizing it, and we cannot cite a legal primary source, such as this that you suggest using. (In any case I see some counts not being dismissed in that ruling?) Can you find third-party coverage of the dismissal of some or all of the claims? I'm sorry, and I refer you to the top section on this page that I added on December 8 concerning the risk of this becoming a hit piece, but I don't see any way to move the balance of the article toward the positive unless there are other extended articles about him in reliable sources that I have not found. We cannot seek to do that by omitting or minimizing information that is in multiple reliable sources, or by padding out the article with information on his companies. Yngvadottir (talk) 04:13, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for replying. I have a few thoughts:

• I completely agree with you that this should not be the place for extended content about Garg's companies. But there needs to be some more basic context about the companies in order for the content about Garg himself to make sense to the reader. This is the proper way an encyclopedia article should be written, per WP:RELART, and that context is currently lacking in the article.
• I can supply a copy of the WSJ article privately, if that helps, or perhaps another editor has access. The source certainly should not be rejected for lack of easy access.
• Here are sources for Garg being recognized in 2006 on Fast Company's "Fast 50" list and on BusinessWeek's "Tech's Best Young Entrepreneurs" list: [3] [4]. I didn't suggest using these sources initially, as I didn't want to emphasize any potentially promotional content, but perhaps they will help in the effort to add balance here.
• Here is a source referring to and explaining the dismissal of the lawsuit in 2018. It is a law firm's blog, so I wouldn't necessarily suggest using it as a reference, but only to explain how the fraud claim against Garg was dismissed as described in the court document I cited earlier.
• Most importantly: Currently, all three company sections still serve mostly as a platform for negative material about Garg, making the article an attack page or very close to it, as it exists primarily to disparage its subject. It certainly violates WP:BLPBALANCE. If, as you say, you don't see a way to move the balance of the article toward the positive then maybe the article should not be preserved - irrespective of the preponderance of negative news coverage - and should instead redirect to Better.com.

Thanks for continuing to keep an open mind. Kristin at Better (talk) 14:10, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for those three sources! All added, and enabling a sentence for why he and Khan were listed for MyRichUncle by Fast Company and Business Week. Although some editors would flinch at citing such distinctions, rightly I think if they were used to create an Awards section, in my view that's the kind of career-related specific, like his being a billionaire for which we're citing The Daily Beast, that is biographically relevant; how well the company did, on the other hand, isn't, especially if there's an article on the company. (I haven't looked at that talk page, but I hope you are also proposing changes to the Better.com article? There's a lot of coverage in recent years of its funding rounds and so on.) I believe the legal blog falls under expertise, so I'm happy to add that too, but it's 2018 so had to come before the sentence about the 2019 deposition. I already added the WSJ article and its point about the impetus for Garg's starting Better.com; sorry if I didn't note that clearly above. I can see the point in the image caption and first paragraph. Does it have any other useful information about his career that isn't interview-based, or are there any points we are already making to which it could be added as an additional reference, to offset the impression of over-reliance on the Forbes profile?

I noted as I examined the Fast Company and Business Week articles that both listed Khan before Garg (esp. since that's the reverse of alphabetical order), and it's Khan Business Week quotes. Back then, Khan had a slightly higher profile, presumably because of the innovative software. As I wrote above last December, I believe Garg was already notable prior to the firings and the coverage that resulted. But Fuzheado created the page on December 7 in response to that coverage. There is no log entry indicating the previous existence of a redirect; indeed in my editing of the promotional, verbose, and under-referenced MyRichUncle article, one of the first things I did was create a red link for Vishal Garg (entrepreneur), which I redirected to this article after finding it had been created at "businessman". But I think you have WP:RELART wrong; only the most basic information about the companies, primarily what business they operate(d) in, when they were established if by Garg, and if so whether he established them alone or with one or more co-founders, is needed for the reader to understand the context of Garg's biography, particularly where there is an article all about the company to link to. More than that would be easily and usually correctly characterized as padding for purposes of glorification. I think the analogous situation is what kind of school Stuyvesant is; I explained for the benefit of readers unaware of the pecking order of New York City high schools that it is an academic magnet school, but didn't characterize it as extremely hard to get into or give its percentage of graduates admitted to Ivy League institutions. Yes, there's a problem with the balance in the coverage of Garg; that's why I posted that section above on December 8, and why for a while I watched over the article to guard against negative changes. If you can't live with a lean, drily factual article and think it would be better for Wikipedia to have nothing but a redirect to his current company and unlinked mentions at, for example, MyRichUncle, then your best course of action is to put it up for deletion. This can be done manually; I've done it for several articles, but you'll need 2 Wikipedia tabs open at once to follow the instructions. One argument you could cite is WP:BLPREQUESTDELETE, if Garg himself wants the article deleted. But note that that is for biographies of people of marginal notability; even if Garg does want the article deleted and you therefore invoke that argument in your nomination statement, the discussion will hinge on his notability. I will argue for the article to be kept; working on it has confirmed my impression that he was already notable. But others may disagree with any of my points here. And it's possible the outcome of a deletion discussion would be deletion regardless of my opinion; many editors at English Wikipedia have become hostile to business biographies and business articles in general in response to a high level of publicist editing. (The other possibility that remains open is that you manage to find one or more other profiles of Garg in reliable sources that I haven't turned up, to further flesh out the coverage of him that we cite and further offset the critical.) Yngvadottir (talk) 03:30, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir: Thanks for explaining your position on this. I still believe that only the most basic information about the companies should constitute more than currently appears in the article, and also that the article focuses unduly on Khan and his conflicts with Garg. And the deposition comment seems to me somewhat of a non-sequitur, adding only color and no substance to the paragraph (unlike the "dolphins" comment, which one could argue is a pertinent example of the subject of that paragraph). But the two of us don't need to continue litigating this, and I hope other editors will assess the article on their own at some point and provide some additional opinions.

Regarding the WSJ article, I will provide a few non-extensive quotes to avoid violating WP:COPYQUOTE:

• More about the experience that led Garg to found Better: "Mr. Garg said he was motivated to start the new online lender after an experience applying for a mortgage with Citigroup Inc. that he felt took too much effort for too little payoff. In 2013, he and his wife were looking for a loan to buy an apartment near a Manhattan nursery school where they wanted to enroll their son. After several visits to a Citigroup branch and hours spent filling out application forms, Mr. Garg received a basic preapproval letter from the bank, which he said wasn't enough to persuade the seller to pick him over another bidder. Mr. Garg and his wife have been renters ever since."
• More about Garg's aim in founding Better: "In his new lender, Mr. Garg aimed to re-create the features of the MyRichUncle model that worked—easy online access, quick approvals—while spending less time looking for alternative credit attributes to find the perfect borrowers."
• How Garg bought an existing California-based mortgage lender in order to encourage early investment: "So Mr. Garg took another step that he would have considered anathema in his MyRichUncle days. He conceded he had something to learn from the establishment and bought a California mortgage lender called Avex Funding. The fact that Better Mortgage had Avex's licenses and customers helped convince venture-capital firm IA Ventures to invest in Better Mortgage alongside Goldman last year, said Jesse Beyroutey, an IA Ventures partner who handles the investment."

I will see if I can track down some more reliable sources in addition to the above. Thanks again, Kristin at Better (talk) 20:39, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the quotes! I continue to disagree that this article should be padded out with information about the companies, because that's what it would be, in my view. (Also in checking regarding Avex, I initially misspelled that and the results included a flood of negative coverage of his return to Better in January.) The first two passages you quote add nothing useful: they amplify the point about the impetus for founding Better.com and then say more about his vision for the company. But the early/initial acquisition of Avex seemed like a usable nugget, so I searched, the WSJ passage came up in the search, and I also found a local news piece from October 2016. So I've added that point, citing the WSJ again, and initially had a link to financial crisis of 2007–2008, but removed that when I recalled we link to the subprime mortgage crisis just above. I've glanced at the recent history of Better.com and at its talk page and I see you have indeed been working there; I am surprised the acquisition of Avex (and hence its licenses) isn't covered there, and I recall a lot of coverage about a pending lender agreement from December, not all of it in the context of Garg's actions toward employees. I think that article should be further expanded. The following is of course my point of view, but it's that of an experienced Wikipedian who has written both biographies and articles on businesses and tried to save both at AfD and to get both kinds of article out of AfC draft status. Recall the role of hyperlinks in Wikipedia, its most important difference from earlier encyclopedias from the reader's point of view. In a biography, blue links on companies the subject founded are invitations to click through for further information, and are a suggestion of the person's importance insofar as the companies themselves merit an article. If substantially the same information about the companies is also in the biography, it clogs it up for the reader (especially a reader on a tiny mobile screen) and gives readers who do click through the sense that Wikipedia wasted their time in doing so—and that there may be business puffery involved (the "puffery" reaction being particularly common among Wikipedia editors). By the same token, some articles on businesses have a lot about the founder; if there's no article about that person, I believe readers accept it and skip it if they aren't interested in personalities, but if there is also a biography, it becomes unnecessary publicity material. A reader who does click through from a biography is interested in the topic of the company; this may be because the biography neglected to say something important about the business, in particular what field it's in (mortgages; student loans; software for college and university admissions departments; venture capital ...), in which case we're frustrating the reader the other way around (and some biographies on both businesspeople and academics do neglect to give that context), but with that basic context, we preserve a readable article on the arc of a person's career and retain the good will of readers with different backgrounds and interests, providing they have a decent enough connection to click through and the WMF or a DDOS isn't doing something to make the site slow that day. Does that help explain where I'm coming from? Yngvadottir (talk) 00:46, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

• I now see that while I was researching and making that edit, and after it, a new editor, XtraEditor, made several edits to the article. I am about to go through those with a careful comparison to the sources (I note edit summaries referring to court filings and admitting they cannot be used, and at least one such edit summary asserting the published third-party sources are wrong), but I already see two important deviations from the sources.
  • Neither cited source mentions Harvard University making a statement in support of Garg; Inside Higher Education mentions Harvard saying something very different: "Several universities, including the University of Michigan and at least one graduate program at Harvard University, have threatened legal action against Embark. Officials at both those institutions said they were paid by Embark after they made those threats."
  • Khan's allegation of misappropriation of software is in the Forbes source: "His former business partner and college friend, Raza Khan, claims that Garg improperly moved $3 million from a software company the two men started to his personal bank accounts, and then used stolen technology to help build Better."

I believe this is biased editing, and it doesn't help. But I will take a look at the edits in detail to see whether they contain any usable sourced information, and I'm flagging them here not only to make XtraEditor aware of the ongoing conversation but in case any others watching the article want to weigh in. Yngvadottir (talk) 03:06, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

reply to Yngvadottir

Hi Yngvadottir! Thanks for the feedback and apologies - I'm not trying to add bias or be sloppy and thanks for your patience as I learn the right protocols here (including responding in the talk section). I am aware that there are many allegations of IP claims about software being used for Better (that's in the quote you shared and I left that section intact) but my edit had been to a sentence that originally had stated MyRichUncle software was used for EIFC (which doesn't appear to be true). Hopefully a detailed read of the article and my comment helps clear that up. On the Harvard reference - I was referring to Harvard Law School's comment about everything being "squared away" but if you feel that's overly rosy given the noise in the rest of the article then certainly feel free to roll it back and someone else can make an edit if and when they find a press reference to the dismissal of the claim. Happy to be an observer on this page and to start making minor edits to one that's a bit more fleshed out XtraEditor (talk) 03:43, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Hi XtraEditor; you may want to talk to Kristin at Better about Wikipedia protocols; I'm very impressed with the way she's articulating her concerns while working within the system. And I did use the Stern School of Business alumni source you turned up, which provided useful information about his early career, but I don't believe we can link to Issuu for copyright reasons. However, the two cited sources—Inside Higher Ed and especially Forbes substantiate the statements you took issue with. However, since courts subsequently rejected the bulk of Khan's claims (albeit on procedural grounds, according to the court document and law firm blog that Kristin cited above), I did make a change from "became concerned" (supported by the cited sources at the time) to "came to believe". Regarding whether he resigned or was pushed out, I can only go on those sources. I invite you to read through the discussion above—as well as the note with which I started this talk page. And by the way: if you have any connection with the subject of this article, you should read this page on how Wikipedia defines a conflict of interest and on the WMF's requirements for editors who receive compensation of any kind for their edits. Yngvadottir (talk) 04:19, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! Will do. The NYU alumni and other source you mentioned weren't from edits I had submitted but thanks - I can see where you made updates related to mine. Please feel free to delete/archive our exchange as appropriate and thanks for your guidance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by XtraEditor (talk • contribs) 06:03, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Whoops, you're right! Kristin, you aren't supposed to edit the article directly, and I'm afraid those promo bios from companies that people are associated with are not reliable sources to cite for their careers, though they do provide terms on which to search, and the Stern source was usable. XtraEditor, I've indented your comment so the course of the thread is clear. Sorry for my goof. Yngvadottir (talk) 10:03, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir: Sorry about that. I will limit my direct editing to uncontroversial changes going forward. Thanks as well for the clarification on sources. Kristin at Better (talk) 13:03, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir: have you finished reviewing this request? Is this ready to be closed as answered? Z1720 (talk) 01:17, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

Yes, this section wasn't a formal request and I think discussion has moved on, but that's not to exclude further issues and queries being raised. Yngvadottir (talk) 02:03, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

Infobox

Hi everyone. I recently uploaded a photo of Vishal Garg to Wikimedia Commons under a free license and I'd like to suggest adding it to the article as part of the following infobox:

Proposed infobox
Vishal Garg Born India Nationality American Education New York University Occupation Entrepreneur Title CEO of Better Spouse Sarita James Website www.vishal-garg.com

Yngvadottir, I know you've expressed that you feel an infobox is not needed, but now that there is a usable image available, I hope you'll feel differently. Thanks, Kristin at Better (talk) 14:53, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks very much for the photo - added :-) I didn't feel a caption was necessary; it would be just "Vishal Garg in 2021". Note that Commons has tagged the photo as lacking a source; I think the problem may be that you put c:Commons:Template:Subst:OP in the edit summary rather than on the image page? If it's in both, never mind, it'll get sorted when they act on the e-mail.

Infoboxes are not mandatory, although some WikiProjects act as if they are, and editors invested in Wikidata do too, because they send information directly there. Google also uses them to construct its summary boxes, but Google will construct a box of its own quite readily, drawing on the article text, so if the concern is that a Google search won't produce a box like others have, don't worry, especially now that there's a pic. I am extremely leery of infoboxes for most living people or controversial people, both of which obtain here. First, infoboxes are reductive—that's what they're for, to summarize. (So for me the big exceptions to the rule are sportspeople, where the teams/championships need to be listed, and politicians, with the elected and government positions.) That means the information in them, especially the personal details, gets undue prominence: for example his wife, who, although she may at some point merit an article under Wikipedia's notability criteria, is still at this point a private citizen who probably wouldn't want the klieg light of publicity that popping up a couple of lines under his name in every search would bring. I note you've omitted the number of children and the approximate birth date, and that's the other problem: someone would add them. Both people who want to help and people who have it in for the article subject see blank lines, and lines like "known for", and add things, or change them to something nasty. We've seen an uptick in hostile edits here recently' an infobox would attract more of them, with more prominent results in search. So that's why I believe this is a particularly bad article for an infobox (quite apart from the fact that unless we clutter it up with a list of his former companies, there isn't much minutiae to be organized; in contrast for publicly held companies there's a stock trends arrow that gets drawn from somewhere, and I suppose some people think that makes the company look more impressive, and for buildings there's a fairly bad map generated by the coordinates, which I suppose the WMF thinks improves the articles). So, unless the bad news stops coming, I am particularly strongly opposed to an infobox here. Yngvadottir (talk) 21:51, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

I am closing this as answered, per Yngvadottir's comment above. Z1720 (talk) 01:18, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

Proposed additions

I'd like to suggest a few short new additions to the article.

"Early life and education" section

• Add after the second sentence: He also worked at the investment bank Salomon Brothers as a runner and order-entry clerk.
• Add after the sentence about Garg having attended NYU: Garg also co-founded the school's Young Alumni Leadership Council.

"Better.com" section

• Add between the second and third paragraphs: In 2020, Garg stated that his company would focus on hiring hospitality workers who were laid off due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Personal life" section

• Add a second sentence: They live in New York City, have three children and foster rescue dogs.
  • Note: I believe a self-published source is acceptable for this information per WP:ABOUTSELF.

References

Thank you, Kristin at Better (talk) 13:19, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

Hi Kristin, good to see you again! I have added two details from the Crain's source: the neighborhood in Queens and the Salomon Brothers experience (just runner and clerk, no links except to the bank and no specifics on what data he entered). I consider that an ABOUTSELF source, too, since it's basically an interview. I did not make the other additions, although someone else may disagree with my reasoning. The foundation of the alumni group would in my view look like promotional padding. So would the statement that he planned to hire laid-off hospitality workers; if he'd been reported in the news (not in an interview) as having done so, that would be another thing; plus, given the two rounds of layoffs, the invitation to further resignations, and the leaked video where he says he "overhired" (see my previous edit to the article again condensing material based on recent press), such a statement would look ironic in hindsight to readers. And given the negativity of most of the press coverage since December, and of major sources before that, I'm taking a hard line on information about his family (the policy being WP:NOTPUBLICFIGURE, a section of the BLP policy). Where living people reside is in any case unencyclopedic except where relevant to their work/notability, such as in the case of elected officials; until any of them become independently notable or receive extensive mentions in published reports by third parties, further information about his wife and mention of their children is potentially privacy-violating, and I don't consider it justifiable to draw attention to them just to add personal details to the article about Garg. This page is not search-indexed, but I'm nonetheless avoiding being explicit even here. As ever, other Wikipedians may disagree in whole or in part, but there is my reasoning. Yngvadottir (talk) 21:25, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir: Thank you, and sorry for the delay in responding. Everything you wrote here makes sense to me and I appreciate you taking the time to explain your reasoning. I hope you'll take a look at my next request as well. Kristin at Better (talk) 13:31, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

Other companies founded by Garg

Hi everyone, it's Kristin again. I'd like to propose the addition of a few new sentences about Vishal Garg's having founded several other companies over the course of his career, beyond those currently described in the article, as well as a sentence about a job Garg had starting in 2009, after MRU closed. Each of the following paragraphs can potentially occupy its own small section, or we can consider creating a new larger "Career" section with each company as a subsection:

After working at Morgan Stanley, Garg founded the investment firms 1/0 Capital and Schwendiman Technology Partners.

In August 2009, Garg joined asset recovery firm Aram Global along with Khan and led a team dedicated to asset-backed securities.

In 2013, Garg co-founded Future Finance, a Dublin-based company that provides loans to students in the United Kingdom and relies on big data algorithms to assess credit risk.

In 2014, Garg and three others co-founded Climb Credit, a student loan origination company that uses return on investment calculations to evaluate loan applications.

References

Thanks, Kristin at Better (talk) 13:31, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

@Kristin at Better: I see nobody else has added these companies, so letting you know I've seen this but it may take me a while to look at the sources. 1/0 Capital is already mentioned in passing, since it came up in the Forbes article. Yngvadottir (talk) 02:43, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

I've now looked at the sources and have edited the article to mention Future Finance and Climb Credit, and I agree that an overarching Career section makes sense, so I've gone ahead and made that change.

I don't believe the SEC document is an acceptable source, both because it's a legal primary source and because the biographies of Garg and Khan there are clearly personally generated. I looked unsuccessfully for a usable 3rd-party source to mention Schwendiman Technology Partners.

I considered adding Aram Global, but can only see the very start of the Global Capital source, without mention of Garg, and it hasn't been archived at the Wayback Machine (which I often use to circumvent paywalls). I found a mention at this Pitchbook page and in this Forbes "contributor" interview, but neither is an acceptable source.

For both Future Finance and Climb Credit, the second of the two suggested sources didn't mention Garg and therefore was unsuitable for use; the TechCrunch article on Future Finance is also badly out of date. I also didn't mention the "big data" aspect of Future Finance's approach as suggested, because it sounds substantially identical to MyRichUncle's approach; but I did characterize Climb Credit's approach following the information in the TechCrunch article I cited on that, because the innovation emphasized in that article was different. I also included the co-founders' names for both companies, partly because Garg's involvement wasn't stressed in either source, partly because they demonstrate he has worked with a variety of partners.

As previously, I emphasize that other editors may disagree with my decisions, and it's primarily for that reason that I've laid out my reasoning in detail here. Yngvadottir (talk) 03:21, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir: You can see the full Global Capital source, which says "Garg and Khan joined in late August after MRU closed down in February," by viewing Google's cached version of the page - I hope that's helpful.

As for using the SEC source, I understand what you're saying. I thought it might be acceptable in light of a few WP:RSN discussions where the consensus seemed to be that such sources were OK. In particular, an admin wrote here that I think this would generally be acceptable under WP:SELFPUB because a company has no incentive to lie in its SEC filings about company biographies ... and because if they did permit someone to lie in their filings, they would be liable for misrepresentation. But in any case I will respect your judgment on this. Thank you, Kristin at Better (talk) 13:43, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for that link! Google has been trying very hard to hide its cache links from me, and in this case sent me to a completely different article. And the article is indeed substantually about Garg and Khan. Added, once more in my own words, but in this case following your lead in providing informational links. As ever, others may disagree with me, especially since I didn't know there had been a discussion about SEC filings, but those self-provided bios still in my view represent spin; and if no reliable 3rd party source has seen fit to mention Schwendiman Technology Partners (unlike 1/0 Capital, which came up in passing in a reliable source, albeit in the context of an accusation), then I don't see the justification for mentioning it. However, in addition to the possibility of others disagreeing, you may well have access to business press sources like that GlobalCapital one that demonstrate its noteworthiness and can be cited accordingly :-) Yngvadottir (talk) 01:29, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

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