Housing.com CEO gives his entire stake to employees | Hacker News Reader

Housing.com CEO gives his entire stake to employees

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

111 pointshiby00743 comments

> 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.

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/

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.

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 :)

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.

UX of Housing.com is only matched by Cleartrip in India. I have been using their since since years, and do it almost every 1 - 2 months.

It's amazing just how much they iterate. I haven't come across a single bug to date. If anything, it's their inventory I am not satisfied with.

Their UX is quite good. I was quite impressed when I saw their UX and even had an offer to join. But i was not impressed with interviwers and somehow felt arrogance whenever they talk. Now I understand why they grew that way.

That's what I was thinking. Albeit incredibly altruistic, the CEO's job is to steer and control the direction of the company. Most of the time that it done due to his position, but sometimes that power is wielded due shares owned in the company.

This man does not sound like he should be the CEO.

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://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-05-05/news...

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/housin...

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

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?

> 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...

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 :)

https://housing.com/in

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

Some convoluted copywriting going on indeed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Please don't pattern match the wrong things. Fighting /Crashing Cars/Impulsive could be said of any of the greatest founders including Steve Jobs/Bill Gates. I am not saying that fighting / crashing cars is a pre-requisite to building a great company. You can build a great company despite those characteristics.

Here is another anecdote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9496238

I have a great story about a startup run by a bunch of insane guys. One of the founders cashed out a ton of money early and bought a $100k car; another founder's dorm buddy proceeded to wreck it within a month. Ron Conway's son used to bring cash to one of the founders, who blew it on drugs and partying while supposedly spending it on business development. Crazy. Irresponsible. Negligent. Bill Maris would NEVER invest in such people. All of the Valley VCs who are outraged with Secret and the founders' cash-out would NEVER want any of those guys in their portfolios. Too bad those crazy kids ended up building a $250B company, huh?

>> 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.

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.

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

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.

It has been done effectively converting a privately owned company to a worker coop. But this normaly happens towards the end of ones life eg John Lewis and Baxi in the UK.

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?!

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?

> Why should the CEO retain the most ownership?

That depends on where the company is since its inception.

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.

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-... (I'd also argue his original salary was massively more than needed).

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

> 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.

This is all his shares.

Thanks!

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

Quite a maverick move.

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com