Deepinder Goyal and the two decades of Zomato
From scanning menus in a Delhi office to building Eternal, one of India’s defining consumer-tech companies.
Zomato began as Foodiebay in 2008 – a simple directory of scanned menus for hungry colleagues. Deepinder Goyal’s insight was not food delivery; it was that restaurant discovery in India was broken.
Surviving every cycle
Zomato outlasted funding winters, global expansion missteps and brutal competition by repeatedly cutting what was not working and doubling down on what was – discovery, then delivery, then quick commerce with Blinkit.
The IPO moment
Its 2021 listing made it India’s first major consumer-tech IPO, opening the public markets for a generation of startups.
The takeaway
Longevity is a strategy. The founders who last are the ones willing to kill their own features, re-found the company every few years, and let the market tell them what it wants.
