10-15 years ago if one invested in stocks like HUL, ITC, Nestle you pretty much have been part of the great India consumption. So, what is Zomato — a technology company, a brand, a consumer company or perhaps a company which will continue to experiment, continue to deliver and continue to add new formats?
I think we are actually all three of these things because technology helps us scale, brand also keeps us on top of the mind and it also makes sure that our marketing costs are low and the consumer story sort of make sure that we ride the wave of India’s growth. So it is a combination of all three.
Historians have divided world in two parts AD and BC. So let me divide my next question in a similar manner. Deepinder Goyal before the company went public and after the company went public, what has changed for you?
I think I went through a phase of trying to discover whether there needs to be a new me and I went through a bad phase like ups and downs but eventually I recognised that I was fine the way I used to be and I need to bring the same level of energy, commitment and drive back, I do not need to be reacting to what other people ask of me.
But Zomato gets a lot of attention. It attracts a lot of extra attention if I may use the word. How do you keep yourself calm, when a man reaches you, when a shareholder writes an email to you?
I think we are just like so used to it now.
So Zomato is growing, Zomato will grow, the best is yet to come and you will be conscious of your employees and you will take care of shareholders?
Fingers crossed.
In general if you have to talk about performance, are you more than happy with the performance of how things are moving for let us say the new businesses which you have incubated, the 10-minute delivery for example did not work, but now it is home cooked food, food from different cities. Are you happy with these new businesses which you are incubating?
I think the cost of all these new things is pretty low.
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What is the average cost which you committed?
It is actually small team, a couple of locations so it does not really move the needle for us overall in terms of cost and we have to keep trying new things to understand where the market is going, how the culture of the country is shifting. If we do not try new things, we will never learn. I think these businesses have to grow, evolve, change, adapt and Zomato also was a reviews and listings business earlier. It actually has become what it has become right now. So, I think we need to continue learning and growing and changing.Now let us talk about possibility, like you said that you never expected that Zomato would become a 5000-employee company and it in a sense will become listed, it was almost like a garage start-up idea which got incubated on your work desk. Do you think there is a possibility that in five, six, seven, eight years Zomato would be a $100 billion company?
I hope so and surprised. I am actually surprised why your saying this because internally that is what we actually aspire for. Internally, that is the goal that by 2030ish we should be about 100ish billion and the way we see the business growing and changing in terms of scale and profit I think we can easily be billion dollars plus in profit in seven-eight years’ time. But who knows like fingers crossed again.
But for the entire architecture to work you also need a team and a lot of yes and no has actually happened with the recent exits, founders are exiting, four key team members after public they have gone different ways. Why is that?
First of all there is nothing wrong with people leaving the organisation anyway. I mean people come here for five years, ten years. We have about 175 people who have spent more than eight years. So, we do not have attrition problem inside the organisation. Now, see different people leave for different things. Sometimes they have to spend more time with the kids, sometimes they want to do different things, sometimes they are done with active work life, they want to spend less time at work, sometimes I would like to raise the bar on someone and they fail to get there, so many things happen. Outside of the timing issue like which was like three-four people in like three-four months it is all normal here. And the timing issue I think happened because of the IPO. So, IPO was a big thing and it changed a lot of people’s lives. So, a lot of people’s personal lives changed, a lot of people’s mindsets changed, ambitions, hunger like so many things changed, like their form changed and yes that was it and then suddenly we were like okay let us just like usher ourselves into the next phase and let the old make way for the new.
So we have discussed the two Ps — possibility and performance. Performance pe toh aayege abhi, ab last P hai paranoia. What are you paranoid about?
I am paranoid about failing, about our customers not liking us, about us not making money, about us not growing, about our partners not actually seeing the kind of effort that we like put in and seeing the benefit of the effort that we put in. I think just these things. I am just paranoid about things not working the way they should in terms of quality as well as speed.
What are you doing to increase the reach and the moat of your company?
I think the quality of service that we have is one of the biggest moats and we have very little orders which are actually delayed. There are very few things which go wrong with the service right now. So it is basically the quality and consistency of the service which is the moat and it takes years to build, it is not an overnight thing, it is little by little like you have tuned hundreds of thousands of things to get here.
What is that one biggest constant customer complaint jo aap ko milti hai, aap kaise solve karoge isko? You are in a food business, so customers will always have the view point.
I think the quality of food or the taste of food is something which we cannot solve because we do not actually control that aspect of life but with a tighter ratings, the ratings that you see for restaurants I mean we are able to solve for most part, I mean customers know that if they are ordering from a 2.5 rated place they cannot expect high quality food but if they are ordering from a 4.5 rated place then they can and like really expect high quality food. So rating system solves that but we still get a lot of hey! this food is not good, but we cannot do much about that.