Rahul Yadav: Housing.Com's Maverick Entrepreneur
| Case Code: LDEN102 Case Length: 14 Pages Period: 2012-2015 Pub Date: 2016 Teaching Note: Available |
Price: Rs.500 Organization : Housing.com Industry: Online Realty Market Countries : India Themes: Entrepreneurship |
Abstract Case Intro 1 Case Intro 2 Excerpts
Introduction
On May 7, 2015, Genesis Burson-Marsteller, the public relations firm of the real estate portal, Housing.com, based in Mumbai, announced that the board of Housing.com had decided to retain Rahul Yadav (Yadav) as the CEO of the company. The decision was announced after a round of public spats between Yadav and the investors went in his favor. Having announced its decision to retain Yadav, the board at Housing.com 'reaffirmed its faith in Rahul Yadav's vision at Housing'. Housing.com was co-founded in 2012 by Yadav and eleven other alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, as a real estate online search portal that allowed users to search for houses based on geography, number of rooms, etc.
Yadav had been in the news for all the wrong reasons since March 2015. It all started with an e-mail he wrote on March 6, 2015, to Shailendra Singh (Singh), Managing Director of venture capital firm, Sequoia India (Sequoia). Yadav was in contact with Singh since Sequoia had earlier showed an interest in investing in Housing.com. However, after some differences cropped up between Yadav and Singh, Sequoia backed out. In the e-mail, Yadav accused Singh of poaching employees from Housing.com. The e-mail to Singh was reportedly circulated to all the employees of Housing.com. With the spat between Yadav and Singh becoming public, on March 12, 2015, The Economic Times (ET), a prominent newspaper in India, carried a report stating that the investors at Housing.com were considering removing Yadav from the post of CEO as there were concerns that his behavior could jeopardize the future of Housing.com. Denying the claims made by ET, Yadav maintained that he was not being replaced.
Yadav again courted trouble when he sent an internal e-mail to his employees on March 12, 2015, alleging that one of India's largest media conglomerates, the Times Group, was tarnishing Housing.com's image in India. The Times Group, of which Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. (BCCL) was the holding company, competed with Housing.com in the real estate market through MagicBricks.com, a real estate online portal. The e-mail also claimed that MagicBricks was raising funds in the US. In response to this e-mail, on March 17, 2015, Locon Solutions Pvt Ltd., owner of Housing.com, received a legal notice from BCCL for alleged defamation. The notice, naming Yadav and the directors of Housing.com, claimed US$ 16 million in damages and demanded an unconditional apology....
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