Ousted Housing founder Rahul Yadav explains what went wrong, talks about his new venture

The CEO panel today at Flipkart’s Slash event.

It was a packed audience at the CEO panel discussion at Flipkart’s annual technology event Slashn, which was held in a Bangalore convention center on Friday. The event featured a star-studded panel with the CEOs of billion-dollar startups like Paytm, Flipkart, and InMobi. But the biggest star of the evening wasn’t any of those CEOs. Instead, it was Rahul Yadav, the maverick former CEO of Housing.com, who got fired from his own company in July.

Yadav, 26, got a thunderous applause when welcomed on stage by Flipkart’s product head Punit Soni as “India’s jobless CEO.”

“What now, Rahul?” Soni asked as the audience burst into laughter. That’s when Yadav disclosed for the first time ever that he has started a new company, Intelligent Interfaces, and has received funding from Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal.

“This time I have decided not to take VC money,” he said, getting applause from the audience.

Intelligent Interfaces, Yadav said, will provide tech solutions to government agencies to solve India’s problems through e-governance.

Yadav, was fired from his own company Housing.com in July, this year after a series of clashes he had with the board members. “There was a clear disconnect from the beginning,“ he said.

Housing.com was founded by 12 young engineers from IIT-Bombay in 2012. The company went on to raise about US$100 million from investors such as Nexus Venture Partners, Softbank and Helion Venture Partners. It still holds the record for the largest funding in the real estate classifieds space in India, and is currently being run by Jason Kothari.

What went wrong between Yadav and his investors

Yadav talked about how a venture capitalist invested in Housing who would ask him about the page- views of the mobile app. “Now how do I explain that we were a one page mobile and desktop app with a single flow?” Yadav said. “You can’t ask Gmail its page views!” the audience burst into laughter.

Rahul Yadav, former CEO of Housing.com

Talking about dealing with investment firms, Yadav said that it was all very good at the top. “I was advised that relationship between investors and entrepreneurs is like marriage….and all that,” he said. “But when it came down to guys at third or fourth levels, they would start asking for revenues.”

“In this [smartphone] era, some of them were still using Blackberry,” he said, amusing the audience again.

Yadav also addressed some of his own alleged mistakes. On his marketing campaign called ‘LookUp’ which burnt almost 25% of the capital raised by Housing, Yadav said that the company was looking for a big bang approach.

What would you do?

Don’t get married