BEYOND THE MENU

FROM FOOD DELIVERY TO Q-COMMERCE TO B2B, DEEPINDER GOYAL IS SCALING ETERNAL INTO AN ECOSYSTEM GIANT.

- BY URVASHI MISHRA

DEEPINDER GOYAL IS a founder who has seen every phase of a business cycle and decided that the sensible thing is to treat each problem as precisely as you treat a leaky pipe: find the leak, patch it, stop the damage, repeat. In fact, Goyal's public story is often told in soundbites—the man who delivers food himself, the founder who stays at a lush green five-acre farmhouse in Delhi's Dera Mandi area with a fleet of gleaming machines—Porsche, Aston Martin, Lamborghini, and Bentley—in the driveway. The private story, as he relays, is quieter and more arithmetic: no grand vision, just “one step after the other”.

At his farmhouse, about an hour's drive from Central Delhi, Goyal comes across as a man of few words. Humble. Direct. The cars are background noise; the person is not. “I didn't even start this to build a company or a unicorn,” he says, smiling. “When I started Zomato in 2008, the idea was to list restaurant menus, and make some ad money, maybe a couple of lakhs a month. I didn't want to do a job.”

Back then, he was a young consultant at Bain & Company, restless with the idea of doing someone else's work for long hours. But slowly, Zomato, which began as a side project, became a phenomenon. “I actually started this to work less, but ended up working more,” he says. What began as a simple directory morphed into India’s largest food delivery platform—and from there, a consumer tech group spanning food, quick commerce, dining out, ticketing, and supply chains.

The approach has defined Zomato’s evolution—and survival. The shift from restaurant listings to food delivery in 2015, Goyal recalls, wasn’t strategic foresight, but a necessity. “Food delivery happened because we thought our listings business would be under threat if we didn’t do it. It wasn't a matter of choice or vision. It was pretty much, we have to do it, or we'll have to shut down.”