‘Zomato always innovates, drives growth’
Zomato chief executive officer (CEO) Deepinder Goyal on Monday said the company’s culture of embracing disruption and being paranoid to evolve and stay ahead, is driving innovation in its business.
He hinted that in one year’s time Blinkit could be bigger than Zomato. Goyal—who is counted among India’s growing tribe of celebrity founders—said at the Startup Mahakumbh event: “Zomato has a business plan competition going within the company, which is going to offer funds to a small team which will disrupt the businesses that we are in, and that could lead to Zomato version 5 or Blinkit version 2.”
Blinkit - the quick commerce platform - itself is part of Zomato ‘version 4’ he said. “I don’t know how long Zomato will have its own relevance,” he said. During a fireside chat with Info Edge founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Goyal said: “As soon as we start saying nothing can happen, we are dead. So we have to be paranoid about it... that someone can do something and we should be the ones doing these things on our own.”
He shot down a suggestion from the audience about drone delivery being the new frontier for Zomato and said “it is not going to work out”.
Goyal advised entrepreneurs to be led by passion and drive while building the company of their dreams, and cautioned that starting a venture with the sole desire of making money won’t work and may lead to “bad governance calls”.
“I see a lot of founders starting a lot of companies, and I ask them why did you start this company, and the answer is ‘I want to make a lot of money’... I don’t think that works, because that leads to bad governance calls...that’s not the purpose with which you should start a company,” he said.
Goyal emphasised that continuous innovation is “must” for businesses, as no business model can survive for more than a decade or two without innovation.