The resignation u-turn: Epic saga of Housing.com's Rahul Yadav

“You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain” Max Respect Rahul Yadav

This is the first post that shows up on Housing.com’s CEO’s Facebook wall but it appears the drama at real estate portal Housing.com has finally come to an end with Rahul Yadav’s surprising withdrawal of his resignation. This, of course, was no ordinary resignation. In a letter to investors announcing his resignation on Monday evening, Yadav called them ‘intellectually incapable’ of conducting a sensible discussion and said he doesn’t have time to waste on them. He gave the company a notice period of seven days. “I had calculated long back (by taking avg life expectancy minus avg sleeping hrs) that I only have ~3L (hours) in my life. ~3L hrs are certainly not much to waste with you guys,” Rahul said in his resignation letter. Now, less than a day later. He was back in the saddle and sending smileys to his employees.

“After some frank and healthy discussions with the Board I have agreed to withdraw my resignation and I apologize for my unacceptable comments about the board members. I look forward to staying on at Housing as CEO and building an even greater company, while working in full harmony with the board,” Yadav said in a statement. This rather brash attitude isn’t new. [caption id=“attachment_2150189” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Rahul Yadav. Image courtesy: Housing.com[/caption] “I’ve always been like this. It was the deans during college and now it is the VCs,” he told YourStory in an interview yesterday before the ‘supposed’  resignation became public. It may also explain why Housing.com has been grabbing headlines for the last two months. While the company came into the limelight after raising $90 million in an investment round led by Softbank in December 2014 at a valuation of Rs 1,500 crore, Yadav has reportedly been criticised for burning money with an expensive blitzkrieg “look up” advertising campaign. He was also in the news recently when he became embroiled in a public spat with Sequoia Capital’s Shailendra Singh . This led to another flare up when reports emerged about Housing.com investors looking to replace him as the company’s CEO. Essentially, things went downhill for Yadav when he accused Singh of poaching Housing.com’s employees and “brainwashing them to open some stupid incubation”. A war of words on Quora ensued. While the letter was subsequently removed from Quora, Yadav went on to vent more aggression on the Q&A-based networking platform making a string of personal remarks against Singh, following which many prominent names in the start-up space took sides as well. Flipkart’s Sachin Bansal tweeted, “Sequoia isn’t an investor with us. I would just say I’m glad to have it that way.” Avlesh Singh, co-founder and chief executive of WebEngage, had said, “Buy billboards, buy print ads…got more money? Badmouth someone and hire a public relations agency to ‘get the word’ out.”

Then Economic Times, which is owned by the Times group, reported on the spat, adding that it had prompted Housing.com’s investors to consider removing 26-year-old Yadav from the position of CEO. This led Yadav to react again and he shot off another internal email, claiming that the Times Group was attacking Housing.com because the group’s magicbricks.com portal ‒ a competitor to Housing.com ‒ was attempting to raise funds in the US. This then led to Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd, the holding company of Times Group, sending a legal notice to Housing.com owner, Locon Solutions Pvt Ltd., and the board for alleged defamation. The notice asked Rahul Yadav and the directors of the company to issue an unconditional apology, and also sought Rs 100 crore  in damages. Post these incidents, reports began speculating on Yadav’s likely exit. And if this wasn’t enough, everyone was talking about the various ‘Look up’ banners all across India. Alok Kejriwal, CEO and founder of contests2win group of companies, had clicked pictures of two Housing.com hoardings that were barely visible behind a canopy of trees and posted it on his page, calling the owners - Rahul Yadav and Advitiya Sharma - “dumb”. [caption id=“attachment_2229164” align=“aligncenter” width=“542”] Screengrab from Facebook[/caption] To this, Rahul publicly replies on Facebook “Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal, your arguments are dumb. You just took the picture from a really bad angle and wrote some non-sense post about Housing.com.” [caption id=“attachment_2229182” align=“aligncenter” width=“485”] Screengrab from Facebook[/caption] And it did not end there. According to a Mumbai Mirror report , Housing.com’s Ishan Shrivastava ambushed Kejriwal online and even vandalised his Wikipedia page, editing his locations and passions to plug their real estate brand - sometimes with ridiculously funny effect. For instance, Kejriwal’s posh Peddar Road address was changed to: “he lives under two housing.com hoardings.” So it’s not surprising if Alok Kejriwal, an internet entrepreneur, and the CEO and founder of contests2win group of companies, responded to Yadav’s resignation like this:

Twenty-six year old Yadav who founded the online real estate portal with a bunch of IIT Bombay graduates in June 2012, may have been the brains behind Housing.com, but badmouthing everyone that dares to criticise the firm is just  wrong. As Deepak Shenoy, founder of CapitalMind writes in this blog post " It would make more sense that the CEO was going to be superceded or replaced, for him to write such a disparaging letter. The funding has led to “visual” spending of ginormous proportions, with their ads on outdoor locations everywhere.  The technology is good, but the housing market is crap in general, and if you want “exponential growth” in a market that, beyond the rabid craziness of Mumbai, is benign and slowing, arrogance will only take you so far. At some point investors start asking for numbers and justifications and demand that heads roll. That’s the nature of the game." It was under Rahul’s leadership that Housing.com attracted four rounds of funding—including the massive investment from SoftBank, which then valued the company at $250 million. But it appears that Yadav wasn’t too impressed by these jaw-dropping valuations.

“Valuations are all in the air. It’s simple, there is no logic behind them..  Raising funds is for lazy people. For people who want to get things done quickly," Rahul is quoted as saying by YourStory.   In another interview with Mint , Rahul said, “I don’t talk to investors. Why should I? Our relationship is need based. Because if you go back to the investor for every small thing, then they will also think that how will you run a large company?” These two comments could perhaps explain his not so charitable letter to Housing.com’s investors, which pretty much reads like a teen boy’s break up letter and in no way justifies his decision to quit. Perhaps Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal’s tweet best explains the current fiasco at Housing.com