[NEWS] China’s housing unicorn Danke appoints ex-Baidu exec as new COO – Loganspace

A couple of months after nabbing an appealing$500 million funding spherical, China’s shared housing startup Danke House obtained a skill enhance.

On Monday, Danke launched the appointment of Gu Guoliang as its unique chief working officer to ramp up the firm’s offline operational crew. Gu, whose nickname is Michael, stepped down fromBaiduafter 5 years as one among the critical figures in search, historically the firm’s supreme income-generating division. He’s known to maintain managed loads of tens of thousands of promoting group and helped generate gross sales of shut to 100 billion yuan ($14.44 billion) for Baidu yearly.

Gu’s arrival adopted a length of explosive growth at Danke, which is now managing almost 500,000 items of rooms across 10 Chinese language cities after founding four years ago. The startup takes the co-residing plot equivalent to that ofWeWork’s Weliveand rents out completely furnished residences focused at young mavens who can’t come up with the money for a elephantine suite. Backed by Tiger World and Alibaba’s financial affiliate Ant Monetary, Danke’s valuation crossed$2 billionin its funding spherical in February.

Gu is one among the former Baidu executives who resigned at some level of arecent high-level exodus(fable in Chinese language) that involved no longer much less than 5 leaders, including the search division bossXiang Hailong,to whom Gu reported. There had been speculations that Xiang’s exit may maybe maybe want caused his lieutenants to proceed, though TechCrunch has discovered from an particular person shut to Gu that he had left “one to two weeks” sooner than Xiang’s departure.

For Gu, becoming a member of Danke would almost feel worship returning dwelling. “We welcome our comrade and factual friend Michael,” stated Danke chief govt Gao Jing, who beforehand worked alongside Gu at Nuomi, the local companies startup that became once sold to Baidu for$3.2 billionand maintain become integral to the gain large’s online-to-offline alternate. Derek Shen, an investor and most up-to-date chairman of Danke, co-founded Nuomi in 2010 sooner than heading up LinkedIn China between 2014 and 2017. Several other core individuals of Danke maintain additionally hailed from Nuomi.

Danke is confident that Gu’s addition will likely be a boon to its operational capability. “Gu has mighty expertise in operational administration, fascinating alternate insights, prominent leadership, and a deep knowing of the gain sector and particular person wants,” stated Gao. “Below his route, Danke will enter a brand unique section of refined operation.”

By that, Gao system Gu will likely be tasked with rolling out more focused marketing and marketing, more setting pleasant housing renovation, more right acquisition of condominium feature, among other quality-shield an eye on measures to drive sustainable development at the firm.