Housing is sacking 600 employees

Weeks after firing CEO Rahul Yadav, the board of Housing, one of India’s top web companies, has decided to sack 600 employees, according to a report in The Economic Times.

“The rationale behind the restructuring is three-fold. Walk away from verticals that are not generating revenues and clean up the operations to get ready for fresh rounds of fundraising. And three: monetize assets as the flab is cut away,” an unspecified Housing source told Firstpost.

The three-year-old startup plans to shut down non-core areas like commercial properties, short stays, and land businesses. A few of the people working in these verticals have been asked to either move to the digital or tech teams, or quit. It will also cease operations in smaller cities and streamline its focus on revenue-generation and building an advertisement business in large cities and towns.

Among the ones sacked are underperformers in its engineering and product divisions and operations staff it had hired for expanding to new cities.

Founders losing ground

After a series of controversies, including insults that Yadav hurled at Sequoia’s managing director Shailendra Singh and Times of India journalists, Housing investor SoftBank formed an executive committee led by Jonathan Bullock which took control of the finances and operations of the company. All top employees now report to Bullock.

The company later went on to elevate COO Rishabh Gupta as its interim CEO and also added Housing angel investor Haresh Chawla and chief technical officer Abhishek Anand to the the committee.

Housing: Run by professionals, not founders; Revenue & Expenses being talked about; performance reviews, layoffs! Nothing Startup about it.

— Kanchan Kumar (@kanchankumar) August 10, 2015

SoftBank is said to own a 32 percent stake in the company after it pumped in US$90 million in December. It is reportedly said to have agreed to invest another US$30 million in the company as a bridge round, provided Housing meets certain operations targets.