Rahul Yadav, co-founder & 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 realty portal, in what comes across as an unprecedented move by a company founder and leaves him with no skin in the game. Yadav held around 4.5% stake in Housing, once touted as the hottest campus startup to have emerged out of IIT-Bombay, but which is now marred by controversies.
Known for having an abrasive demeanour, Yadav said in a written statement, “I’m just 26 and it’s too early in life to get serious about money,” which is why he was relinquishing his entire stake in Housing. People present at the town hall told that most employees were shocked with the sudden announcement.
A press statement sent out late Wednesday evening said, “Rahul Yadav, CEO of Housing, took everyone by surprise when he announced that he has allotted his personal shares worth Rs 150-200 crore to all the 2,251 employees of Housing who will get approximately one year of their annual salaries worth of company stocks.”
Yadav holds the highest shares among the founding team, which is now down to nine members from 12 when Housing began operations in 2012. Besides the 4.5% that Yadav holds, the rest of the founders together own about 8-9% in the realty portal. The ESOP pool at Housing had reached abysmally low levels at about 2% due to back-to-back funding rounds which led to talks among investors and founders to shed some of their stakes to lure talent and motivate employees in the company.
Yadav was previously embroiled in a social media spat with Shailendra Singh, MD of VC firm Sequoia India, having written a brusque email to him which went viral and later with The Times Group, which publishes this paper. Housing competes with the likes of 99acres, MagicBricks, part of the Times Group which publishes this paper, and new age startups like Bangalore-based Common floor.