Rahul Yadav, co-founder and CEO of Housing.com, announced at a company town hall held in a suburban hotel in Mumbai that he is allotting all his shares to employees of the company. Yadav owns about 4.5% stake in Housing which is estimated nearly INR 200 Cr.
Being called as the most controversial CEO of the year, Yadav had resigned on April 30 from the CEO’s role, which he subsequently withdrew at a company board meeting last week.
He also apologized for his negative comments against the Housing’s investors he made during the whole drama that flooded in the social media, which some are calling as a PR stunt.
Started by 12 IIT-Bombay grads in 2007, Housing is the leading real estate portal in the country which helps people rent, sell and buy houses. Its investors include SoftBank, Nexus Venture Partners, Helion Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and Falcon Edge. Softbank invested $90-million in the company, valuing it at about $250 million then.
In this occasion Rahul Yadav said, “Housing was started because of 2 reasons. First, house hunting problem is unsolved globally. Just the problem statement gives me a lot of kick. Second, in each and every country there are 4-5 players doing the same poor job and still not able to solve the problem. Across the globe there are 500+ players. We want to unify all and create a global giant for real estate so that the one company can afford much higher level of R&D and technological innovation to push the category forward.”
“Other than these 2, there is no other factor at play here, including money. I’m just 26 and it’s too early in life to get serious about money etc,” he added.
With this announcement all 2251 employees of Housing will get approximately one year of their annual salaries worth of Housing.com stocks.
