Maverick startup CEO Rahul Yadav slams India’s media

Ousted CEO of Housing Rahul Yadav has some harsh words for the Indian media. He calls them “poor talent.”
Rahul was fired from Housing in July due to his clashes with the company’s board. Leading up to his sacking, Rahul had said his own investors and board members were not “intellectually capable enough to have any sensible discussion.” In an eventful week in May, he resigned, withdrew his resignation, and even gave away his shares to Housing’s employees.
All this was widely reported.
Speaking on the articles about him in Indian media during that time, Yadav says, “I understand that TV channels play all those masala stories to grab eyeballs and writers write such stuff. But there is still the need to cross-check facts. That’s basic courtesy.” He was speaking at Flipkart’s annual tech conference in Bangalore.
Rahul went on to cite an example: “Some stories said that I am from IIT-Kanpur or Kharagpur.” Yadav is an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. Some stories, he said, incorrectly reported about his family. He dropped out of college to start Housing with 11 of his college-mates in 2012. “Earlier I used to get troubled when someone wrote such stories about me. But now I have accepted and gotten used to it. It’s my mistake, I used to take it so seriously,” he says.
This irked the reporters present at the conference. Before they could voice their dissent, Flipkart CEO Sachin Bansal jumped into a damage control mode. “Maybe we should encourage our kids to become reporters,” Bansal said.
Rahul has been very active on social media, sharing his opinions, posting half-nude shots, and taking potshots at others in the startup space. This has been keeping him in the news, though many times for the wrong reasons.
Tech in Asia quizzed Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma if being a CEO has curtailed his freedom of speech on social media. Vijay replied that there were a lot of issues in India that he would have liked to comment on but held back. For example, recently Bollywood actor Salman Khan was acquitted on a culpable homicide case. “I wish I could tweet about all that,” Sharma said. But being a CEO he can be that open only with his close circle of colleagues or friends.
Last week, Rahul announced his new startup, Intelligent Interfaces. Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal are backing it.