
Housing.com CEO gives his entire stake to employees - hiby007
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Housing-com-CEO-Rahul-Yadav-gives-away-his-entire-stake-worth-Rs-200-crore-to-employees/articleshow/47272859.cms?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=TOI
======
arihant
> _Yadav had reportedly written a resignation letter on April 30 to the board
> and investors and questioning their "intellectual capability" and giving
> them a one-week deadline to "help in the transition". However, on May 5, he
> withdrew the resignation and apologised for his outbursts._

I call unstable. This CEO isn't maverick, world-changing bastard. He is simply
unstable.

Moreover, there are huge questions about quality of hiring at Housing. Their
website, app have had same bugs for 6 months, and they still remain. Over 2000
people can't make a decent bug-free website to see property listings?

The whole point of Housing was Airbnb style property listings - real
verification, owners -only, professional photos and VR. And somehow their UX
is one of their weakest points.

~~~
nrao123
I actually think their UX is the best UI I have seen from an Indian
website/app. When it first came out, the UI was way way ahead of anything from
CommonFloor, MagicBricks, 99 Acres etc. That in turn put pressure on other
real estate sites to improve the UX. You can see the transition by going
through past archives of these sites.

Interestingly - thier UX when it first launched allowed you to specify a
radius on a Map by drawing over it. They then reverted to a more common real
estate UX of a search box. As a side note- Map based real estate listings look
cool & then probably after A/B testing, they tend to revert to a list based
view with a map based view to supplement it (42 Floors also went from Map
based view to list based view).

About bugs & 2000 employees- my understanding is that most of these people are
in the sales/operations side & note on the tech side. Just like a vast
majority of Google's 53,000 employees are not engineers. Regardless, I am not
sure of the co-relation between number of employees & bugs. In some cases,
more engineering employees could introduce more bugs.

About customer satisfaction, its a hard problem, Rahul Yadav realizes it. Here
is him on that topic in an interview.

 _End users are not satisfied when it comes to finding a house through the
portal. People are asking why Housing is spending so much on ads when it can’t
help people find real houses? “The industry is such! We’ll get there. Our
current customer satisfaction rate is 25% and in theory, we can only reach to
about 70%. We are pretty happy with the 25% rate considering when we started,”
he says. Rahul stresses on the challenges of the industry and believes that
becoming a marketing leader first is very important and then the growth can be
along with the market._

[http://yourstory.com/2015/05/rahul-yadav-
housing/](http://yourstory.com/2015/05/rahul-yadav-housing/)

~~~
arihant
Their UI is good, not their UX. Bugs simply destroy the experience.

I'm also fond of their branding somehow, and their aggressive campaigning,
their staying away from TV, and them not forcing me to download their apps.

But that all falls short when the website fails 11 times just while I'm trying
to put up a listing.

~~~
Rambunctious
Have put up my apartment for rent on Housing and all the other major realty
sites.

In my experience, Housing has: a) The best UI and UX b) The best customer
service in terms of tele-service, the agent coming over and taking photos,
etc. c) The best response - on the other sites, even when I clicked and
uploaded my apartment photos, the response rate on Housing was the best. d)
Interesting add-on features such as 'lease agreement' maker and so on (which I
only used to draft my own agreement with my tenant)

As regards 'aggressive campaigning', so many other companies are burning more
expensive television moolah (e.g. Car Trade, Car Dekho, YepMe, Practo and
more). And yet, this company interestingly attracts more than its fair share
of criticism of aggressive campaigning - possibly thanks to some of media
houses that also run property portals :)

~~~
arihant
Didn't go down that way for me. Their sign up form kept giving 503, and each
time it did that, the form reset saving nothing I entered. That is a UX fail.

The form is not clear on expectations, when you don't follow them, it fails,
resetting itself. That is a UX fail.

The service is only available in Metros, but they never say that during
onboarding. Even their sign up form has all Indian cities. You put up your
listing and if Housing is not in your city, you simply never get contacted.
Fail without notice. That is a UX fail.

I managed to have 3 accounts with same e-mail. That is a massive, massive
incompetent engineering. That is a UX fail.

UX and UI are not the same thing. Beauty is seen. Experience is felt.
Housing's interaction design is absolute junk.

------
lquist
To anyone monitoring the housing.com story, this just seems like the latest in
a series of increasingly erratic events by housing.com CEO Rahul Yadav.

[http://www.livemint.com/Companies/DQevn4TkemzICqPeSNe8vI/Its...](http://www.livemint.com/Companies/DQevn4TkemzICqPeSNe8vI/Its-
business-as-usual-for-Housing-CEO.html)

[http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-05-05/news...](http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-05-05/news/61833210_1_nexus-
venture-partners-softbank-housing-board)

[http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/housin...](http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/housing-
com-ceo-rahul-yadavs-victory-sign/articleshow/47235790.cms)

------
shubhamjain
Housing.com is dot-com-bubble era extravagant startup with no good forseeable
business model. In their initial rounds, they spend $1M ( 40% of funding ) to
get the fancy domain and phone number. Its almost as if they are doing exactly
opposite of Sam Altman's every advice - low burn rate, focus on product, hire
slowly, build and iterate. One of my friend who works there told me that they
are working simultaneously on 16 projects.

I don't believe a company like this would find itself existing in the next few
years unless, they get a new CEO who knows how to get shit on track which
would mean firing of lots of people and cutting down on their stupid
campaigns. I don't know weather this move was because of his sheer goodwill or
to save his face or to get back on news again but considering his moves in
past few months, he is an arrogant cocky teenager-like mentality person who
doesn't think twice before making a move

~~~
arihant
Sam Altman's advice is for early stage startups working on small seed rounds,
not for companies getting 2.5MM, then 18MM, then 90MM USD in funding. I don't
know if you have ever raised, but you have to justify to investors how you
will spend money. They most definitely told their investors that they will use
their money for fancy domain and given the Indian market, they were probably
okay with it. No investor would give you tens of millions and expect you to
sit on it eating ramen increasing your runway to 4 decades. The idea is to use
the damn cash to grow faster.

16 projects does not sound very high given over 2000 employees.

Property listing startup with no business model? Are you kidding me?

~~~
shubhamjain
> No investor would give you tens of millions and expect you to sit on it
> eating ramen increasing your runway to 4 decades. The idea is to use the
> damn cash to grow faster.

So its just about getting a stake? Currently, Housing.com won't survive a day
if VCs pulled the plug. If the stake becomes worthless, what is the point of
investing?

>16 projects does not sound very high given over 2000 employees.

Most of their employees are photographers and not engineers. The problem is
not on working on so many things but working at them all at once, with no
focus at all which seem pointless since they don't really have a gold-laying
hen working for them, yet. Making a loss ~50 Cr is not cool [1].

> Property listing startup with no business model? Are you kidding me?

The business model on which sites like Sulekha and CommonFloor operate is to
urge the user to give out his contact details which they can sell to their
clients. Essentially, spamming and even that is incredible low-margin model.
Would Housing.com go that way?

[1]:
[http://www.livemint.com/r/LiveMint/Period1/2015/04/06/Photos...](http://www.livemint.com/r/LiveMint/Period1/2015/04/06/Photos/g_housing_web.jpg)

~~~
Rambunctious
On your earlier point about the domain name, if you had the money and had an
option to buy your brandname.com (especially "housing" for the business they
are in), $1 million is a good investment.

There are a whole lot of things they can start monetizing. Sure, I am not
going to buy an apartment based on slice view, but based on my experience with
Housing as regards getting tenants and prospective buyers, I would gladly pay
them for the service :)

------
obilgic
[https://housing.com/in](https://housing.com/in)

Unfortunately 'Our Brand Story' video on their homepage, made 0 sense to me.
Its probably me though.

~~~
chetanahuja
Rule one of branding. Don't call it branding. Don't say the word "brand" in
your brand advertising. I guess those were two rules. But hey, miscounting is
my brand now.

------
beedogs
And HackerNews calls the man unstable, deranged, insane. Nothing is valued
here but greed to some folks.

 _Edit:_ The downvotes don't really prove me wrong, guys.

~~~
stickfigure
Or it could be that HN values stability, rationality, and sanity. If you read
beyond the headline you will find plenty of crazy.

Or more likely, if someone is trying to convince you of their pure altruism -
especially the CEO of a huge corporation - they're trying to scam you in some
way. This guy is playing with large quantities of other people's money. If I
were an investor I would be terrified.

------
general_failure
Most comments here are so sad. Looks like most people are simple jealous of
Yadav's success. People calling him a bastard and mentally unstable. Shame on
you guys. Make me wonder what these commenters have achieved. Especially
@arihant. Calling another a bastard and unstable is more telling of @arihant
himself rather than yadav.

~~~
arihant
I said he _isn 't_ a "world-changing bastard".

And if you're running a 1500 crore company and spend time fighting on Twitter,
crashing cars, impulsively resigning, abusing your own investors, giving away
your shares impulsively, you would be hard pressed to find people who will
call you stable.

Is there any guarantee that Rahul won't retract this decision by next week?
There isn't, and that is unstable behavior.

~~~
anirvan_m
>> fighting on Twitter, crashing cars...

Wouldn't that put Elon Musk in the bad books as per your rather prejudicial
yardstick of measuring the worthiness of a person at the helm of a company?

Also, it was Advitiya (the other co-founder) at Housing who crashed his car.

~~~
arihant
Correlation is not causation. Just because Elon Musk did so does not mean that
rate of success among car crashing CEOs is not lower than the rest of them.

You've got to look at a nominal case, the median, not the outlying example to
justify your mistakes.

------
jakejake
As generous as that may be, is it a wise move for a CEO to essentially divest
all of their shares in the company?

~~~
bobbles
Probably not, considering his weird behaviour and statements about being too
young to care about money I doubt it will spur investor confidence in the
direction of the company.

------
rahulgr8888
Why, just why would anyone do that? I understand wanting to give 50%.. 70-80%
even, but all of it? Does that seem crazy only to me or is there a hidden
motive to it somewhere?!

~~~
jsprogrammer
Presumably he is still an employee, so will have some ownership. Why _shouldn
't_ the people who _are_ the company have real ownership as well? Why should
the CEO retain the most ownership?

~~~
mkagenius
> Why should the CEO retain the most ownership?

That depends on where the company is since its inception.

------
Brig303
1\. His stake might be all options or at best illiquid stock so unsure if it's
comparable to "cash" 2\. He's not on the best terms with his VCs and owns <5%
of company: might be on the verge of getting kicked out. 3\. Yadav already
made his $$ with each round; he just bought a Porsche.

------
mpdehaan2
That's incredibly awesome.

Many CEO's get paid so ridiculously much that the stock just pushes it into
absurdity.

It's great to see folks realize the work input of all employees at a company
is about the same and to share the wealth more equally.

The Gravity payments CEO was another great example - clearly he already pulled
in a lot and had a lot of stock, but this is setting things right -
[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/business/owner-of-
gravity-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/business/owner-of-gravity-
payments-a-credit-card-processor-is-setting-a-new-minimum-
wage-70000-a-year.html?_r=0) (I'd also argue his original salary was massively
more than needed).

------
ignoramous
Eccentric. To draw a parallel, Rahul reminds me of Evan S of SnapChat, but
only that Evan managed to correct his act and that's down to the mentors he
had.

Either way, there much to learn from Yadav and his amazing team at Housing.
They managed to create a great business in a short amount of time, sustained
growth and managed to iterate rapidly. Now, I don't know for sure if all that
growth happened inspite of Yadav, or because of him; but its hard to find
fault with him, and he's achieved a lot in his short career already, and has
to be credited for a lot of wealthy individuals he's now created in the
process.

So much money has been poured into Housing at absolutely sky-high evaluations
($900m in a round led by Japan's SoftBank a few months back), Housing.com's
competitor CommonFloor.com has its founding team intact (and one that's much
mature in terms of experience). So there is some cause of worry.

Indian start-up scene is going through an unprecedented amount of growth
propelled by all the talent that isn't leaving the country any more (most
unicorns are founded by IITians that otherwise would have left the country for
Silicon Valley) as VCs and Angles continue to pour a lot of money into the
ecosystem.

IMO, Housing is a success story (as much as Ola Cabs, Zomato, Snapdeal are).

Orig comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9491156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9491156)

------
BinaryIdiot
> Rahul Yadav has decided to allot all his personal shares[...]

So I'm not very well versed in options but does this _literally_ mean all of
his shares or is there a difference between personal shares and some sort of
other shares? Did he really give away _every share he owned / is entitled to_?

Edit: erm, thought questions were okay. Why the downvotes? I just wanted to
know if there is some sort of legal distinction with "personal" shares or if
it simply means all of his shares.

~~~
mkagenius
This is all his shares.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Thanks!

------
ShirsenduK
A founder CEO puts(should put) in more than anyone while getting paid industry
standard salary or less in best cases. The only upside/motivation for them is
the equity which can make him/her a millionaire. With that out one would look
for the nearest exit because it's a thankless job and people don't care how
you feel or how many sleeping nights have you had.

------
Red_Tarsius
Their pitch is a work of beauty, but it doesn't tell me much about what they
actually do. It's definitely the most memorable ad I've ever seen.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyYyKRiJR4M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyYyKRiJR4M)

They learned well from Simon Sinek's _Start with Why_ , but I'm afraid they
jumped the shark: it comes off as _trying too hard_ to inspire.

------
cocobolo
I think this guy has an OCD, constantly trying to achieve publicity by using
the "Yadav" image for marketing Housing.com. I just feel like this is another
similar move, to re-establish his image after all those hatred going around
him to the point that he was called the Rahul Gandhi in IT.

He could be X times more successful than me, I'm not going to waste time
fighting that argument otherwise I eagerly want to hear out his argument for
this move.

------
deedorgreed
it's easy to forget that he _raised_ $90mm to begin with. So somebody came
away impressed enough to drop the money into the company:

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/15/softbank-housing-dot-com-
in...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/15/softbank-housing-dot-com-india/)

With the money they didn't stand still, they started hustling and built an
outstanding buy/rent site that kills the ugly competition (magicbricks,
commonfloor, indiaproperty).

Have to admit that the "Look Up" campaign has been nothing short of silly.

------
sidcool
Quite a maverick move.

------
MichaelCrawford
I don't know much about Mr. Yadav, but quite likely my own mental illness
would put his completely to shame.

At the same time, whenever I have four dollars, I use it to buy a slice of hot
pizza for a homeless person. Many of my professional colleagues - who earn
quite a lot more money than I could ever hope to - regard that as
irresponsible of me, to feed the poor.

What you describe here in the comments - I haven't read the India Times story
yet - sounds like Bipolar Mania.

But even so, some people really do practice sincere generosity. The simple
fact that Mr. Yadav gave away all his stock doesn't mean there is something
wrong with him.

------
abalone
How does a startup hire 2,251 employees in 3 years?? Insane.

------
gauravnews12
Rahul Yadav is good man and good thinking beacuse he should not give money to
people who are money minded but give to charity or open something poor people.

