Saying it was “too early in life to get serious about money,” Rahul Yadav, the 26-year-old CEO of real estate e-commerce website Housing.com, has allotted all of his personal shares – said to be worth between Rs. 150 crore and Rs. 200 crore – to the 2251 employees of Housing.com, the company said via a press statement on Wednesday.
Yadav made this announcement on Wednesday at the company townhall that was attended by all employees of Housing.com. Employees will get approximately one year of their annual salaries worth of Housing.com stocks, the statement added.
Yadav and Housing.com were in the news recently when the CEO controversially resigned while questioning the intellectual capability of the board, only to withdraw his resignation later.
Housing.com is seen by many as one of the big success stories in India’s e-commerce space. Last December, the company received $90 million (approximately Rs. 575 crore) in funding, led by Japan’s SoftBank, valuing the portal at about Rs 1,500 crore. The company said it planned to use the funds to map over 40 million houses across 300 cities. Its other shareholders include Nexus Venture Partners, Helion Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures, Nirvana Ventures and Falcon Edge Capital.
Explaining his reasoning behind the move to effectively give away his personal fortune, the statement quotes Yadav as saying, “Housing was started because of 2 reasons. First, house hunting problem is unsolved globally. Just the problem statement gives me a lot of kick. Second, in each and every country there are 4-5 players doing the same poor job and 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 the one company can afford much higher level of R&D and technological innovation to push the category forward.”
“Other than these two, there is no other factor at play here, including money. I’m just 26 and it’s too early in life to get serious about money etc,” he added.
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