Rahul Yadav: An Inspiring Story of the Housing.com CEO
Rahul Yadav‟s : an unusual story
Rahul Yadav a 26-year-old from Alwar, Rajasthan, wasn‟t the brightest in class. He ranked 20th among 30 students in his Class 10 exams. A sarcastic comment by his uncle about his grades made him work hard and become a topper in Rajasthan in physics-chemistry-maths, based on which he got a 75 per cent scholarship to prepare for IIT-JEE. He became class representative in his second year at IIT Bombay and, later, secretary of its student association. As part of his election manifesto, he had to create a question bank from old exam papers. This sparked his technopreneurial bug and he built the popular exambaba.com which the institute made an official
IIT-B archive. After a brief internship in Israel, Yadav returned to build apps for Google
Chrome. And then, in his final year, dropped out of IIT. Later, he joined his friends to co-found
Housing.com.
Rahul Yadav, a college drop-out in the final year of IIT-BOMBAY (unbelievable isn't it but quoting his own lines here,“If things aren‟t working, I can write them off,” he says disparagingly in an interview to Forbes magazine. “The problem with Indian start-ups is that people spend years on the same ideas that just don‟t work!” He says his parents still don‟t know he has dropped out. ( And “thank god they don‟t read Forbes!”)
Co-founder Advitiya Sharma, 24, another self-professed small-town boy (from Jammu) and
Housing‟s chief marketing officer, had been warned about the difficulty of finding a house after graduating. When he and Yadav started contacting brokers they realized how limited the information on online listed properties was; they also realized how good the money in Mumbai‟s real estate brokerage business brokerage was. They eventually took a house in Powai, close to the IIT-B campus. Many people from IIT-B were taking houses there and that‟s also when they
figured out that since they had a good network of prospective clients among their IIT friends and batchmates, they might as
Rahul Yadav a 26-year-old from Alwar, Rajasthan, wasn‟t the brightest in class. He ranked 20th among 30 students in his Class 10 exams. A sarcastic comment by his uncle about his grades made him work hard and become a topper in Rajasthan in physics-chemistry-maths, based on which he got a 75 per cent scholarship to prepare for IIT-JEE. He became class representative in his second year at IIT Bombay and, later, secretary of its student association. As part of his election manifesto, he had to create a question bank from old exam papers. This sparked his technopreneurial bug and he built the popular exambaba.com which the institute made an official
IIT-B archive. After a brief internship in Israel, Yadav returned to build apps for Google
Chrome. And then, in his final year, dropped out of IIT. Later, he joined his friends to co-found
Housing.com.
Rahul Yadav, a college drop-out in the final year of IIT-BOMBAY (unbelievable isn't it but quoting his own lines here,“If things aren‟t working, I can write them off,” he says disparagingly in an interview to Forbes magazine. “The problem with Indian start-ups is that people spend years on the same ideas that just don‟t work!” He says his parents still don‟t know he has dropped out. ( And “thank god they don‟t read Forbes!”)
Co-founder Advitiya Sharma, 24, another self-professed small-town boy (from Jammu) and
Housing‟s chief marketing officer, had been warned about the difficulty of finding a house after graduating. When he and Yadav started contacting brokers they realized how limited the information on online listed properties was; they also realized how good the money in Mumbai‟s real estate brokerage business brokerage was. They eventually took a house in Powai, close to the IIT-B campus. Many people from IIT-B were taking houses there and that‟s also when they
figured out that since they had a good network of prospective clients among their IIT friends and batchmates, they might as