11–20 of 49 posts
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.
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.
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?!
Edit: The downvotes don't really prove me wrong, guys.
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
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
> 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 quali…
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.
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.
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 does not sound very high given over 2000 employees.
Property listing startup with no business model? Are you kidding me?