 "Do we need more people like housing.com's Rahul Yadav?")
Rahul Yadav is someone who all lovers of poetic justice would like to see fail. But Jane Austen is not really popular in IITs; Ayn Rand is. Any comparison to Rand’s iconic character Howard Roark in her popular novel Fountainhead would attract an accusation of glorifying Yadav. May be he is not even one per cent of the fictional individualistic young architect who chooses to struggle in obscurity rather than compromise his artistic and personal vision.
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But Yadav appears to be fearless, non-compromising and intelligent enough to challenge established players. His brashness is deplorable, but his statements are profound. He finds it difficult to be diplomatic and believes it to be too early in his life to get serious about money. It would have been acceptable if he had said so while eloping with his sweetheart. After all he is just 26. But he is doing it all to prove his mettle.
At his age, people are worried about buying a house and paying its EMIs. He has seen an opportunity in their worries and calls it a problem statement. He claims to have resolved it to an extent with his 3-year-old start-up housing.com and in the process has created personal wealth of Rs 150 to Rs 200 crore.
Now, by allotting his personal shares to employees, he seems to not even be scared of losing it all and is prepared to start over. Earlier, he dropped out of IIT in his final year; more recently, he resigned from the CEO’s position, with some choice insults for the Board, to convey his strategic point (he subsequently retracted the resignation, and tendered an apology). He is more thrilled with solving the problem than creating personal wealth or getting academic recognition. To say the least, he is rare and intriguing in the world where even so called entrepreneurs behave like managers.
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Other established players who are now finding Housing.com their biggest rival should introspect why they were not able to come with the ideas, tools and solutions that Yadav and his team did. He is certainly not Einstein. But he is a disrupter in a business world that believes in copycat solutions.
Most of the older, established players were duplicating whatever was already available in the US. It was an easy business to do and polished, diplomatic managers fit the job requirement. And a decent salary with yearly negotiation for increment satisfied employees’ job aspirations.
Yadav is not a genius, but he is ready to take on challenges and dream big. We need more Yadavs, not because he has allotted all his shares to employees but because he is truly passionate about being an entrepreneur and providing real solutions to real-life problems of customers. We also need more mentors like SoftBank who are mature enough to put up with founders’ idiosyncrasies.