'Feels like we reached semi-finals and lost': Advitiya Sharma on quitting Housing

Thursday March 10, 2016 , 3 min Read

Advitiya Sharma, one of the founding members of Housing.com earlier today announced in an internal email marked to CEO Jason Kothari and the whole team at Housing about his decision to move on from the company. After taking a short break of 10 days, he plans to return and start a new venture, much like Rahul Yadav, the former CEO of Housing.

Better times ahead

In the email, which YourStory has a copy of, Advitiya admitted that the last nine months at Housing were the toughest time in the startup's history, with the company having to shut down a few departments, rethink their vision and even let go of many people.

Now with the company in a better position and having raised a 100 crore round from Softbank recently, Advitiya felt it was the best time to leave Housing and venture out on his own. Advitiya said it was not a pre-planned move but he felt strongly about it for the last five days and after talking to his peers at Housing and a few mentors, decided to hang up his boots at Housing. Speaking to YourStory over a call, he said,

I want to take what I have learnt at Housing and build something new. We made a few wrong decisions over the past few years and now my aim is to come back and win the World Cup. It feels like we reached the semi-finals and lost this time.

New Venture

Advitiya plans to take a break for the next 10 days or so to meet his friends and family and then return swiftly to Mumbai to work on his new venture. He told YourStory,

I'm in the zone now with everything that has happened recently, so want to get back to work quickly.

Talking about the exit, Jason, CEO at Housing added that the company is in good hands and will execute its plans of buying and selling homes in India. He said, "Advitiya has played an invaluable role in the birth of Housing. It's always hard to say bye to a friend and colleague, but we're excited about what he will create next."

Advitiya was not willing to elaborate much about his new startup at this stage, but added that it would focus on a fundamental problem that affects a lot of people. He admitted that building capital intensive products and services was one of their mistakes in the past and he doesn't want to repeat the same.

We had some misconceptions that growth is the only thing that matters and expanded quickly, opened more offices and expanded into many categories.

In hindsight Advitiya admitted that if they had done certain things better, things may not have gotten so out of hand. Wiser now, he aims to start working on the new startup by focusing on the 'first principles' of starting up and working on something that doesn't require constant capital infusion.

He aims to bootstrap the new venture and then approach investors when he has something substantial to show. Advitiya ended the email promising to return '10x stronger'.