‘85% of my equity has vested and I’m not leaving!’ Rahul Yadav of Housing

The Housing saga rambles on. The brash 26-year-old CEO has been in the news constantly for the last couple of weeks. First, he resigned, and took it back the same evening. Then he is in the news for a profile picture on Facebook. On May 13, he called a meeting of his employees and also released a note about offloading all his shares to the 2251 employees of Housing.

On the day of Rahul Yadav’s resignation and pulling it back, YourStory published a detailed profile of Rahul.

His personal shares are estimated to be worth INR 150 crores. In a bizarre turn of events, Rahul stated in an email to his employees that it’s too early in life to get serious about money and gives the following reasons for the move:

1. House hunting problem is unsolved globally. Just the problem statement gives me a lot of kick.

2. In each and every country there are four to five players doing the same poor job and are 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 one company can afford a much higher level of R&D and technological innovation to push the category forward.

Today morning, many in the startup industry woke up to an email about a Facebook post by Rahul who has challenged the CEOs of Zomato and Ola to follow suit (both of whom have replied in comments). The turn of events almost seems to be a farce now, but it has all the ingredients of a story that’ll be remembered for long.

I wrote to Rahul with a few questions and the answers are amusing:

YS: Are you doing this for publicity?

Rahul Yadav: For fun (posts a grin smiley).

YS: What is your response to people who ask: "Why don't you focus on building the company?"

RY: Tell me one company that has better product than Housing, a better brand than Housing, a better culture and has been built faster (than anyone) while maintaining quality. We've beaten eight to nine year-old players like the largest media group TimesGroup and largest public internet company Info Edge in just two-and-half years.

YS: The first institutional round came in 2013, has all your equity even vested?

RY: Eighty-five per cent is already vested.

YS: Also, terms usually say that if a founder decides to leave, equity gets transferred to the ESOP pool, is this what is happening? 

RY: WTF! I'm not leaving bro! (posts a smiley).