Housing.com's chief operating officer Rishabh Gupta will lead day-to-day operations at the property search site in the interim after Rahul Yadav, the co-founder and CEO of the firm, was fired by the company's board early this month.
Gupta, who is also an IIT Bombay alumnus like the co-founding team of Housing but is not a co-founder himself, had previously worked at Flipkart for two years before joining Housing in 2013.
Gupta along with Haresh Chawla, India Value Fund Advisors' partner and an early private investor in Housing.com, and Abhishek Anand, cofounder and chief technology officer of the venture, will be part of the operating committee that has been controlling the company for the past two months. The committee led by Jonathan Bullock, representative of lead investor SoftBank, also has Navroz D Udwadia, CEO of Falcon Edge Capital, another investor in the online realty startup, as an existing member.
Housing.com will hold a board meeting later today to approve these appointments and to decide whether Gupta should be designated interim CEO. An email sent to Housing.com employees by SoftBank’s Bullock said Gupta will work with senior management that includes co-founders Sanat Ghosh, Amrit Raj and Advitiya Sharma.
Housing.com board had mandated executive search firm Spencer Stuart to find external CEO candidates as differences between Yadav and investors started brewing a few months ago.
While the company has been struggling to fend off distractions and controversies after Yadav’s exit, its website was hacked a few days ago, in what appeared to be an expression of solidarity to the co-founder and former CEO.
