Housing.com CEO gives his entire stake to employees

Re:Housing.com CEO gives his entire stake to employees by shubhamjain on Thursday May 14, 2015 @02:11AM (#9543680)

Housing.com is dot-com-bubble era extravagant startup with no good forseeable business model. In their initial rounds, they spend $1M ( 40% of funding ) to get the fancy domain and phone number. Its almost as if they are doing exactly opposite of Sam Altman's every advice - low burn rate, focus on product, hire slowly, build and iterate. One of my friend who works there told me that they are working simultaneously on 16 projects.

I don't believe a company like this would find itself existing in the next few years unless, they get a new CEO who knows how to get shit on track which would mean firing of lots of people and cutting down on their stupid campaigns. I don't know weather this move was because of his sheer goodwill or to save his face or to get back on news again but considering his moves in past few months, he is an arrogant cocky teenager-like mentality person who doesn't think twice before making a move

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Re:Housing.com CEO gives his entire stake to employees by arihant on Thursday May 14, 2015 @02:21AM (#9543701)

Sam Altman's advice is for early stage startups working on small seed rounds, not for companies getting 2.5MM, then 18MM, then 90MM USD in funding. I don't know if you have ever raised, but you have to justify to investors how you will spend money. They most definitely told their investors that they will use their money for fancy domain and given the Indian market, they were probably okay with it. No investor would give you tens of millions and expect you to sit on it eating ramen increasing your runway to 4 decades. The idea is to use the damn cash to grow faster.

16 projects does not sound very high given over 2000 employees.

Property listing startup with no business model? Are you kidding me?

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Re:Housing.com CEO gives his entire stake to employees by shubhamjain on Thursday May 14, 2015 @02:35AM (#9543736)

> No investor would give you tens of millions and expect you to sit on it eating ramen increasing your runway to 4 decades. The idea is to use the damn cash to grow faster.

So its just about getting a stake? Currently, Housing.com won't survive a day if VCs pulled the plug. If the stake becomes worthless, what is the point of investing?

>16 projects does not sound very high given over 2000 employees.

Most of their employees are photographers and not engineers. The problem is not on working on so many things but working at them all at once, with no focus at all which seem pointless since they don't really have a gold-laying hen working for them, yet. Making a loss ~50 Cr is not cool [1].

> Property listing startup with no business model? Are you kidding me?

The business model on which sites like Sulekha and CommonFloor operate is to urge the user to give out his contact details which they can sell to their clients. Essentially, spamming and even that is incredible low-margin model. Would Housing.com go that way?

[1]: http://www.livemint.com/r/LiveMint/Period1/2015/04/06/Photos...

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Re:Housing.com CEO gives his entire stake to employees by Rambunctious on Thursday May 14, 2015 @02:58AM (#9543789)

On your earlier point about the domain name, if you had the money and had an option to buy your brandname.com (especially "housing" for the business they are in), $1 million is a good investment.

There are a whole lot of things they can start monetizing. Sure, I am not going to buy an apartment based on slice view, but based on my experience with Housing as regards getting tenants and prospective buyers, I would gladly pay them for the service :)

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