When was the last time you were in Bengaluru?
In 2017…seven years ago. You don’t need to come here (Bengaluru) to build a startup!You told me in 2022 that you were trying to make an average company great, working the hardest… What’s it been like, and where are you on a scale of 1-10?
The IPO was good, business was doing well, and people made lots of money for the first time in their lives. These were competent people. Competent people can’t recognise that they are actually being complacent… They don’t seek progress anymore, they just start filling in the time… They don’t want to tell themselves that I am checked out. They are really putting in the hours and are basically stalling all the work… That’s what we had come down to. There was no work happening inside the organisation for a while. I had to literally clear out pretty much everybody who had lost that drive and then reboot the organisation.
Also Read: ETSA 2024 | Had to clear out senior Zomato executives who lost the drive post-IPO: Deepinder Goyal
Where are you right now in terms of your organisational role at Zomato?
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I mainly do the HR guy’s role nowadays…and the team is pretty competent and very prudent. We are a very high trust team and nobody wants to do somebody else’s job. So, we go to each other whenever we need help or inputs.
What is your lowest low as a founder having run into so many difficult situations?
The lowest lows are not when you are running out of money, as you can fight back, figure out something, or pivot. My lowest lows happen when the people I trust…don’t show up. I am sure I also do that to people sometimes where they would expect me to show up and I don’t show up, and that would be their lowest low. Those lows are more personal than business.
For Zomato, what was that most insurmountable point…you’ve had many moments of crisis?
The only moment…(we felt) we were dead was when Swiggy raised $1 billion and we had $35 million in the bank. That was bad.
Till 2016-17, you were clear you didn’t want to get into the delivery… From that to now, Zomato has become such an execution and operations-heavy company. What made that change?
It was a survival instinct. If we hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be here. Acquiring Runnr…and the last mile was something that we needed to do to survive. Even Blinkit was a survival instinct deal. The food delivery network…the last mile is quite large. But let’s say if there’s a new quick commerce company, which has a large rider base, it can easily enter food. However, food delivery can’t enter the quick commerce business easily because you have dark stores. Food delivery is 10% as hard as Blinkit. But if we don’t do this right now, 10 years from now, we’re done. So, everything’s been a survival instinct.
Quick commerce is highly competitive, plus there is a kirana (mom-and-pop store) angle and regulatory challenge that may spring up?
The growth of quick commerce has been a surprise for us as well. What we have noticed is that Blinkit is not really eating into the kiranas, it is not even affecting companies like Dmart. We are more or less eating into Amazon and Flipkart’s shares as well as the modern retail space in the larger cities. Also, we are increasing consumption a little bit. Regulation wise, we’ll do what the government asks us to do.
Also Read: ETSA 2024 | Quick commerce not impacting kirana stores: Zomato’s Deepinder Goyal
What are your plans for District (Zomato’s events and dining out spin-off)?
Six months ago, we were in 3.5 businesses, food delivery, quick commerce, HyperPure and dining out. Dining out was like an orphan child and it was part of the main Zomato app. When the Paytm deal came to the table, a separate app made sense. Now we’re going to join it up and be in four of these businesses instead of being in 3.5. So, that’s how we think of it. District is going to be a separate app with dining out plus ticketing, concerts, events…maybe shopping, staycations, everything that you do stepping out.
You’re constantly diversifying… Are you aware that in the sectors (like ticketing where BookMyShow is a big player) that you enter, incumbents get rattled?
At our end, we’re super scared of everybody else. BookMyShow is 20 times our size. What do they have to be scared of? They have contracts with people which are decades long. There’s no way we can break them.
How much of this diversification is to add to your market cap? In 2021, you had told us in an interview that you wanted to acquire companies if they added at least $10 billion to Zomato’s market cap…
Back then, it was a very different state as we were thinking of buying, but now we have our hands full. Coming from a public market point of view, we don’t operate like we are a publicly listed company. We do our job and the score takes care of itself. We don’t look at the share price at all, and we don’t even act to the expectations of what investors would say. Luckily, the public market has been responding nicely so far.
What is the message that you have to give to Indian new-age startups which are looking to go public?
Our timing of the IPO, in hindsight, was great, but we didn’t time the IPO. We started the IPO process when the market was at its lowest point. So, first of all, companies should not think of timing the IPO well. They should think of an IPO as part of a long-term journey and do it whenever you are ready for it.
Do you think a lot of companies are going public because the markets are hot?
Yes, and they may not be ready for public markets. If you are private, you are forgiven for a lot of things and when you are public, the only way to sleep peacefully at night is to be absolutely transparent with anything that’s going on. There’s zero line or trying to manipulate the stock price. Don’t do any of those things. Be transparent.
Through your appearances on Shark Tank, we’ve seen a lot more of you in public. How’s that experience been?
The startup culture of India is too much about valuations, showmanship and so on. I just went there (Shark Tank) to set a different narrative…be real and change how people perceive startups and how they should be built. I felt it to be my moral obligation to go there once and did it over a weekend.
You’re not going back?
I unfortunately can’t go back because Swiggy sponsored Shark Tank this time and kicked me out… That’s what I heard – that they said this is the sponsorship and Deepinder Goyal can’t be on the show.
So, what’s your take on Swiggy’s impending IPO?
I genuinely don’t know, and we don’t even think about it, so we’ll see what happens. What’s the point of thinking what can happen when you don’t really know what will happen. Better get an extra hour of sleep.