Part IThe Story
The Thing on His Temple
For most of four hours and thirty-seven minutes, the audience was not really listening to him. It was looking at the side of his head.
The episode of Raj Shamani's Figuring Out went up during the first weekend of January 2026, and it should have been a reckoning. Days earlier, on December 31, delivery workers across India had called a nationwide strike against the quick-commerce companies. Deepinder Goyal, founder and then Group CEO of Eternal, which owns Zomato and Blinkit, had answered with a LinkedIn post defending the system and a description of the strikers as "miscreants," a word worker associations did not forgive. A member of Parliament, Raghav Chadha, had spent New Year's Eve with riders in Delhi's Old Rajinder Nagar. The podcast was the founder's first long-form appearance in the middle of the storm, and Shamani did not go easy. He asked about the 5,000 delivery partners Zomato terminates every month for fraud. He asked why five co-founders had left within four years. He asked, in a chapter the producers later titled with a bluntness Goyal seemed to enjoy, "Why he hurts people intentionally."
None of it was what the internet clipped. What the internet clipped was a small metallic patch stuck near Goyal's temple. It was an experimental device, also called Temple, built to measure blood flow to the brain, and it was the product of a theory he had published weeks earlier holding that gravity, by pulling blood away from the head over a lifetime, may be a primary driver of ageing. Within days, doctors were posting about it. One called it "a fat band-aid stuck to the Temple." A radiologist at AIIMS Delhi called it "a fancy toy for billionaires." On January 9, Goyal posted a reply on LinkedIn: "You are advising people not to buy an 'unvalidated' device that isn't even available to order or pre-order yet. That's funny, tbh."
There is a particular irony in that patch, and the rest of this piece circles it. Midway through the conversation, Goyal said something he had said before in other forms but never this plainly. As a boy in Punjab, he had a stammer. "Mid-sentence, people used to start talking about something else," he told Shamani. "They'd stop listening and look away." Now he had a country's attention for four and a half hours, and the country was again looking somewhere other than at what he was trying to say.
He admitted the format still frightened him. "It makes me nervous. For example, this one also. It's not easy and comfortable for me to do this. That's why I do less of this." He had not held a spoken town hall for his own company in roughly eight years. "I do my Town Hall on chat," he said. The founder of one of India's most valuable consumer internet companies, a business that by its own count served 109 million Indians in fiscal 2026, had run it mostly in writing: emails, shareholder letters, LinkedIn posts, a book he titled Culture, and, at the beginning, scanned restaurant menus.
Seventeen days after the episode aired, he resigned.
By the Numbers
From Scanned Menus to Eternal
₹2 lakhBorrowed from family to set up Foodiebay in a living room, 2009
21Countries Zomato operated in by early 2015, before the retreat
647MFood orders delivered across 800 Indian cities in FY23
$568MPrice paid for Blinkit (formerly Grofers), June 2022
₹20,243 crEternal consolidated revenue, fiscal year ending March 2025
109MIndians who transacted across Zomato, Blinkit and District in FY26
~8 yearsSince Goyal last held a spoken town hall, by his own account
The Boy They Looked Away From
Start with the father, because the son has spent much of his life arguing with him.
Harbans Lal Goyal was born into a family of farmers in a Punjab village called Lambwali. He wanted to be a doctor. He became a biology teacher, and Megha Vishwanath, whose 2025 book on Goyal is the closest thing to an authorized interior history, describes the trade-off in one clause: he chose "stability over ambition." His wife, Kaushalya, taught English. They raised two sons, Geetinder and Deepinder, in Muktsar, a town in southwestern Punjab still recovering from the violence of the 1980s. Theirs was a house, Vishwanath writes, "where books mattered more than money." In that sentence you can already see the shape of the conflict to come: a family that had organized itself around the safe choice, and a younger son who would not make one.
Deepinder was born on January 26, 1983, Republic Day, and seems to have spent his childhood failing at the things a schoolteacher's son was supposed to do well. He was, in his own description, "a very short, dark, stammering kid. I used to struggle with my studies as well. So, all of those things combined, my friends' parents used to tell them, 'Don't be friends with him.'" At one point his father had to go to the school and ask that the boy be promoted past the fifth grade. His elder brother was the studious one, and the comparisons stung in a way that never fully healed. "Even now," he told Vishwanath, "I hate being compared to others." Neither he nor his family knew it then, but by Vishwanath's account he was living with undiagnosed Asperger's syndrome, which shaped how he took in a world that already seemed to be talking past him.
What hurt most was not the bullying about his looks. It was being interrupted.
— Deepinder Goyal, on Raj Shamani's Figuring Out, January 2026Mid-sentence, people used to start talking about something else. They'd stop listening and look away. It's like whatever I'd say did not have any value.
His family told him the stammer was in his head. They pointed out that he never stuttered when he sang. It made no difference, and his explanation forty years later is precise: "Even if your home is supportive, you don't think of that as valid. It's like, 'The outside world is speaking the truth. You're supposed to love me. You must be lying to make me feel good.'" He never saw a speech therapist. Of the stammer he says, "I just stopped telling myself that I'm bothered with it. So, I just moved on." That is either the most practical sentence in his biography or the most revealing, and it is probably both.
The turning point was an act of cheating, and Goyal has never pretended otherwise. In the eighth grade he sat a quarterly exam unprepared, and a teacher, who either pitied the boy or found him a lost cause, fed him the answers. "When the exam results were declared," he has said, "I was in the top three of my class." For the first time other children wanted to be his friends, and the attention worked on him like a drug. Then the teacher left the school. In Vishwanath's telling, Deepinder panicked, began studying obsessively to keep a standing he had not earned, and finished the year first in his class. The lesson he took from it is one he has kept ever since: "Success didn't need endless hours. It needed focus."
There was a poster on his bedroom wall during those years: I was born to lead. I was never born to be ruled. When Shamani asked about it, Goyal laughed at his younger self. "That poster is also a little stupid, because in 10 plus 1, I got 42% marks or something like that." Forty-two percent in the eleventh grade, under a poster about destiny. He tells the story with the poster and the mark side by side, and he does not try to resolve them.
The Empty Chair at the Back
In the summer of 1998, a lanky boy from Patiala walked into a National Talent Search Examination camp in Chandigarh and found the good seats already taken.
Albinder Dhindsa had grown up as the smartest kid in every room he entered. Chandigarh was the first place that was not true. Vishwanath reconstructs the scene in her book: the boy hesitating at the door, his eyes going to an empty chair at the back next to another student who looked just as lost. He sat down and offered his hand. "Hi, I'm Albi." The other boy hesitated before taking it. "Deepi."
The two went home for their tenth-grade board exams and came back a year later to DAV College in Chandigarh to finish school. They ended up at the same IIT coaching centre, which that year had 300 students, sorted on the first day by ability. The top performers got the prestigious batch. Albi and Deepi barely made the lowest one. They decided to sit the IIT entrance exam anyway, "for experience," and both passed. Dhindsa studied mechanical engineering at IIT Delhi. Goyal took the integrated master's in mathematics and computing and graduated in 2005.
Dhindsa's path afterward ran west: two years as a transportation analyst at URS Corporation, more than three at Cambridge Systematics working on logistics and supply chains, then an MBA at Columbia Business School starting in 2010 and a short stint at UBS. Goyal's ran into a lecture hall at IIT, where he fell for a mathematics student named Kanchan Joshi, whom he later married. He built small websites, sold code, and came up with ideas that failed quickly. One of them, which he called Foodlet, would turn out to be the seed of everything else.
It helps to keep the back row in mind. Twenty-eight years after that camp, Goyal's letter to shareholders announcing his resignation named Dhindsa as his successor and said of him: "His ability to execute far exceeds mine." The boy who sat down in the empty chair would end up in the other boy's seat.
Bain & Company's office in Gurugram had a cafeteria problem. Every day at lunch, consultants queued at the pantry to look through a pile of crumpled takeaway menus, one person at a time. Goyal joined Bain in 2006, a year after IIT, and watched the queue for about a year and a half before doing anything about it. What he did was scan the menus.
On January 26, 2008, his twenty-fifth birthday, he put them online at Foodlet.in. A colleague, Pankaj Chaddah, helped spread it around the office. Chaddah is a recurring figure in the founding story who never quite becomes its subject: a Bain colleague who saw a small internal fix and helped it reach more people, who would later take a leave of absence rather than resign outright, and who would eventually leave the company quietly. Traffic jumped. The site was renamed Foodiebay, and on July 10, 2008, the date Zomato still celebrates as its birthday, the pair launched it as a proper restaurant-listing website. Within nine months it was the largest restaurant directory in Delhi-NCR. By the end of 2009 it covered three cities.
It is worth being clear about what Foodiebay actually was, because the later mythology tends to flatten it. It did not deliver food, cook food, or take orders. It took the most basic document in the restaurant business, a menu, and made it searchable. The company that would later be valued in the tens of billions started as a digitization project for paper.
In November 2009, Goyal and Chaddah quit Bain to work on it full time. (Chaddah, by Vishwanath's account, took leave rather than resigning.) Harbans Lal Goyal was furious. Fifteen years later, at an event held on May 20, 2024, at the Delhi residence of Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri, his son told a room of founders and officials what his father had said: "Janta hai tera baap kaun hai?" Do you know who your father is? "His point was, 'You can't do a startup,'" Goyal explained. "I come from a small town in Punjab. That's my background." The line is usually a threat in Hindi cinema. From a small-town biology teacher who had once traded medicine for a classroom, it was something else: a reminder of where they came from, and of what people from there did not do.
They borrowed ₹2 lakh from family and worked out of the living room. Kanchan cooked for the team. When there was no money for rent, the company operated out of a farmhouse. Goyal taught himself web development because there was nobody else to build the site. On January 18, 2010, they incorporated as DC Foodiebay Online Services Private Limited.
Money arrived through Info Edge and its founder, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, whose emails in Vishwanath's book read like those of a man who has seen several cycles and expects to see several more. His view of early-stage investing is the most useful idea in the book: "The secret of early stage investment is to back companies and founders who will succeed anyway. With you or without you." He was betting on the founder more than the model. Between 2010 and 2013 Info Edge put in roughly $16.7 million and by February 2013 owned 57.9 percent of the company. Years later, on a stage at the Startup Mahakumbh in March 2024, Bikhchandani would tell young founders to stay frugal and close to their customers, and Goyal, sitting next to him, would say: "You should be so passionate about something, you should be willing to risk your life for it."
In November 2010 Foodiebay became Zomato, partly to avoid a trademark fight with eBay and partly, as the founders put it at the time, because they were not sure they would "just stick to food." A mobile app followed the next month. In 2011, when the internet opened the
.xxx domain, Zomato registered zomato.xxx for close-up food photography. "People looking for food porn come to Zomato.xxx," Goyal told The Economic Times. It was the first of many deliberate provocations. An Economic Times profile from those years noted, without apparent irony, that he did not follow any fitness routine and usually woke up around 10:30 a.m.Twenty-One Flags and One Blind Spot
The international expansion is the part of the story Goyal has since disowned most completely, and the reasons are clear in the chronology.
In 2012, Zomato launched in the United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka, Qatar, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, and South Africa. In 2013 it added New Zealand, Turkey, Brazil, and Indonesia, building sites in Turkish, Portuguese, and Indonesian. In 2014 came Chile and Portugal, then Canada, Lebanon, and Ireland. It bought menu sites across Europe and Oceania: MenuMania, Lunchtime.cz, Obedovat.sk, Gastronauci, Cibando, Mekanist. In March 2013 the trade press reported that Dubai had broken even. In July 2013 it reported that India had too, in the same headline that announced the New Zealand launch. The company was profitable at home and spending that profit abroad. By early 2015 it was in 21 countries.
The man running international operations for part of this period was Albinder Dhindsa, back from Columbia. He did not stay. In 2013 he co-founded Grofers with Saurabh Kumar, an on-demand pickup service for neighbourhood stores that later became a grocery delivery business. The friend from the back row had left the global ambitions to work on something smaller and closer to home: delivering things from the corner shop.
In January 2015 Zomato bought Urbanspoon, the Seattle-based restaurant discovery site, for a price variously reported as $50 million and $60 million. The deal took it into the United States and Australia and into direct competition with Yelp and Foursquare. That April, Forbes India ran a profile of the thirty-two-year-old founder under the headline "Why it's all cool for the Zomato chief," describing a man who "manages to stay unruffled despite competitive pressures." In June 2015, five months after the purchase, Zomato shut down the Urbanspoon brand and redirected its traffic to its own app. The acquisition was eventually written off.
Parikshit Shah, reviewing Vishwanath's book, put the verdict more harshly than a profile would: the international expansion was "by Deepinder's own later admission, a mistake that everyone except him could see. Not market research, not a sound strategic call — ego." The company came close enough to collapse that everything it had built was at risk.
The ego had a cost beyond the money: it kept him from seeing what was happening at home. In 2014 a Bengaluru startup called Swiggy began delivering food. Sreekant Khandekar, reviewing Unseen for afaqs, summarized the problem: "Deepinder obstinately refused to see what now seems obvious: that food delivery would be a whole lot bigger." Zomato launched delivery in March 2015, relying on third-party logistics companies (Delhivery, Grab, Runnr) to carry orders from restaurants that had no riders of their own. By January 2016 it had shut down online ordering in four cities. It was late, it was outsourced, and it was losing.
Then came the security breaches. On June 4, 2015, an Indian security researcher found a vulnerability exposing data tied to 62.5 million users, including phone numbers, email addresses, and, through linked access tokens, private Instagram photos. Zomato fixed it within 48 hours. On May 18, 2017, a security blog reported that 17 million user records, including email addresses and password hashes, had been stolen and listed on the dark web. The hacker took the data down after Zomato agreed to start a bug bounty program. In effect, the company paid off its attacker by hiring him as a reviewer.
Sometime in 2017, at one of the lowest points in the company's history, Goyal emailed his team. Vishwanath reprints the message.
— Deepinder Goyal, email to the Zomato team, 2017All the shit that we are going through is on me and I will make up for it.
Set that next to the 2015 Forbes headline. The unruffled founder of two years earlier is now writing an apology to his staff, and the apology is in an email, not a speech.
The comeback happened in pieces. In February 2017 Zomato launched a paid membership, Zomato Gold. In September 2017 it bought Runnr, one of its delivery partners, and moved to its own fleet. Open magazine's 2017 wealth issue put the thirty-four-year-old founder under the heading "Comeback Kids." In February 2018 Ant Financial invested $200 million at a $1.1 billion valuation, making Zomato a unicorn. In the same year Pankaj Chaddah, who had once spread Foodlet around Bain's floors, left the company. In March 2019 Zomato sold its UAE delivery business to Talabat. The 21 flags were coming down one by one, though the formal exit would take until 2024.
No Appointment
By the end of 2019, according to Vishwanath, Zomato had money for only a few months.
Uber Eats was leaving India. Its business looked certain to go to Swiggy, which was better funded and growing faster, and if that happened Zomato's competitive position would have been effectively over. So Goyal and a few colleagues flew to San Francisco, to Uber's headquarters, without an appointment. Three days later they left with an all-stock deal.
The terms were announced on January 21, 2020. Zomato acquired Uber Eats' India business, and Uber received 9.99 percent of Zomato, a stake KrASIA valued at around $206 million. Uber Eats closed its standalone Indian app and moved its users and restaurants onto Zomato. On industry estimates, Uber Eats had less than 5 percent of the market, and the deal was projected to give Zomato 52 percent. The value of the deal was not really in what it added. It was in keeping those customers away from Swiggy, and paying for that with shares rather than cash Zomato did not have.
Two months later the pandemic closed India's restaurants.
What followed was a stretch of improvisation that, read in order, looks less like strategy than like an organism trying out mutations under pressure. In April 2020 Zomato launched Zomato Market and delivered groceries and essentials in more than 80 cities, then shut it in June to refocus entirely on food. That same April it introduced contactless dining at partner restaurants. In May it started delivering alcohol in West Bengal, Jharkhand, and Odisha, and exited in April 2021, citing poor unit economics. Each experiment got a few months and then a decision. Vishwanath records a midnight phone call during this period in which Goyal was trying to raise $5 million just to keep the company running.
Within a year the money was enormous. In September 2020, Tiger Global and Temasek put in $160 million. In December, a $660 million round brought in Tiger, Kora, Luxor, Fidelity, D1, Baillie Gifford, Mirae, and Steadview. In February 2021, another $250 million valued Zomato at $5.4 billion. A company that had been looking for $5 million at midnight was, nine months later, choosing among crossover funds.
Goyal has described this kind of volatility as normal operating conditions. "Failures are awesome," he once told Entrepreneur India. "If you are within Zomato, you would know we fail 100 times in a day." That sounds like a slogan until you look at the 2020 record and see that it was literally true.
The Bell He Didn't Hear
In July 2021, Zomato listed on the National Stock Exchange and the Bombay Stock Exchange. The ₹9,375 crore public issue opened at a valuation of more than $8 billion, and the shares rose as much as 80 percent on the first day of trading. It was, as Vishwanath's publisher puts it, the first Indian tech unicorn to go public. Commentators treated it as a test of whether Indian public markets would back a loss-making consumer internet company. They did.
Vishwanath's account of the founder that day is the most striking detail in her book's framing. While the company celebrated, Goyal was "largely untouched by the reverberating glory." The book's blurb says success for him "was never a finish line but a shifting horizon." Without the publisher's language, it describes a man who reached the outcome Indian founders had been chasing for a decade and did not seem to feel much about it. On the Shamani podcast, one chapter is titled "Complacency after the IPO." Asked separately whether being number one mattered, Goyal said: "Being Number 1 is a state of mind, it's an infinite game, I don't think there is any such thing as winning, you just to be able to continue to play for it as long as possible."
The listing changed the format of his communication but not its medium. It made him write more. In May 2022 the Q4FY22 shareholders' letter appeared as a dialogue between Goyal, his CFO Akshant Goyal, and "Ms Savvy," whom he described as "a fictitious, savvy investor." The letter answered the questions a sharp fund manager would ask before the analysts could ask them. "We believe this is a more direct and informative approach to answering your questions," he wrote on LinkedIn, then pointed readers to the earnings call at 5:30 p.m. on May 24. The comments under that post are mostly delivery partners asking him to reactivate their rider IDs and customers posting order numbers for refunds that never arrived. The letter was elegant and the comments were not, and both were in writing.
This is how he ran the company from then on. The town hall happened on chat. Quarterly results came as a letter with an address (shareholders@eternal.com) where anyone could reply. Investors who dealt with him tended to describe his writing more than his presence. Vishesh Shrivastav of Temasek, one of the longest-serving investors, told Vishwanath that "when it comes to intellectual honesty, Deepinder is a benchmark." It is hard to be intellectually honest out loud when the words keep catching. In writing, the stammer disappears.
In November 2021, four months after listing, Zomato said it would stop operating everywhere except India and the UAE. Over the next two years it shut operations in Australia and, quietly, New Zealand, and by early 2024 it had liquidated more than ten overseas subsidiaries. The global restaurant guide, Goyal's most expensive mistake, was finally closed out.
Ten Minutes
It started, as Khandekar retells it from Unseen, with a casual conversation between old friends. Albi was running Grofers, a grocery business struggling to stand out. Deepi suggested that the way to hook consumers was to deliver in ten minutes.
The idea sounded absurd and turned out to define the industry. In 2021 Dhindsa rebuilt Grofers around speed and renamed it Blinkit. In June 2022 Zomato agreed to buy it for $568 million, in a deal Vishwanath describes as marked by "drawn-out negotiations, investor doubts, and leadership pushback." Inside Zomato, there were people who saw a struggling grocery company being bought by the CEO's oldest friend. The market saw the same thing, and the shares fell.
What happened next is the strongest argument for Goyal's judgment and also the least comfortable one, because so much of it depended on one friendship. The ten-minute idea had passed from Goyal to Dhindsa as a suggestion and came back to Goyal as an acquisition. A Goldman Sachs analysis two years later valued Blinkit at about $13 billion, more than Zomato's core food business. By July 2025 Blinkit had overtaken food delivery in total transaction value. By March 2026 it had more than 2,200 stores. In the third quarter of fiscal 2026, it reported positive adjusted EBITDA for the first time, while net order value grew 121 percent year over year. Goyal left the board of Urban Company in March 2023 after Blinkit moved into home services, choosing his friend's business over his board seat.
Meanwhile the experiments continued, and most of them failed. In 2022, Zomato Instant tried ten-minute food delivery with partner restaurants; it improved kitchen prep times but, as Goyal later wrote, "we couldn't find the right economic model for restaurants and hence shut it." In August 2022, Legends launched to deliver food between cities, a biryani from Hyderabad or kebabs from Lucknow sent to Delhi. It closed two years later. In October 2023, Xtreme offered hyperlocal parcel delivery using the company's 3-lakh-strong fleet. It closed for lack of demand.
In March 2024 came the most damaging experiment: a "Pure Veg" fleet, riders in green uniforms delivering only from vegetarian restaurants. Critics said it effectively sorted riders by the food they carried, echoed caste-based ideas of purity and pollution, and exposed riders in the standard red uniform to harassment in segregated neighbourhoods. Goyal dropped the green uniforms and boxes within 24 hours. He kept the routing algorithm. The visible part was withdrawn and the logic behind it stayed, which is worth noticing.
In January 2025 he launched Bistro, a separate app offering snacks and meals in ten minutes, aimed at office workers who otherwise used vending machines. The National Restaurant Association of India called it a private label in disguise. On January 17 Goyal wrote to restaurant partners. Zomato, he said, "will never compete with its own restaurant partners, unlike players such as Amazon who sell their own private labels on Amazon." Even at 1,000 outlets, he argued, Bistro would be about 0.5 percent of the market. He ended with a line whose tone sounds conciliatory, though some readers heard it as patronizing: "Running a restaurant is a hard job, we know it as much as you – and you are the best people to do it."
By then he was a billionaire. In July 2024, after the stock had risen more than 300 percent from its July 2023 low to ₹230, his 36.95 crore shares, a 4.24 percent stake, were worth more than ₹8,300 crore, making him India's wealthiest professional manager. In August 2024 Zomato bought Paytm's ticketing businesses for $244.2 million and combined them in November into District, an app for films, events, and dining out. That gave the company four businesses: Zomato, Blinkit, Hyperpure (supplies for restaurants), and District. The name "Zomato" no longer described the whole.
He had already chosen a new one. In January 2023, a new Blinkit employee named Sumanyu Vyas was told during orientation that he was joining an organization called Eternal. The name had been used internally since the Blinkit deal. On February 6, 2025, it became official: Zomato Limited was renamed Eternal Limited, while the consumer apps kept their names. Goyal announced it on LinkedIn with five words and a link: "Announcement – eternal.com/letter.pdf." Many commenters objected. One wrote, with some care, "Ferrari can't be Red Candy." Another, more cynically, said the timing was meant to pull attention back from a rival that had launched car deliveries the day before. Both missed that the decision was two years old. Goyal had named the company long before he announced it.
The Rider at the Door
There are two ledgers on the delivery workers, and they do not reconcile.
The first is generous and specific. In July 2019 Zomato acquired Feeding India, a hunger-relief nonprofit started in 2014 by Ankit Kawatra, who was twenty-four when a Rediff profile described him as "the 24 year old who wants to feed India." He is another young man from outside the establishment who saw food being wasted and built a system to redistribute it. By May 2022 the company said the program was serving more than 200,000 meals a day, and it raised awareness through concerts in Mumbai headlined by Post Malone in 2022 and Dua Lipa in 2024. During the pandemic, Goyal gave ₹700 crore of his own stock to the Zomato Future Foundation to pay for the education of delivery partners' children. He announced "Rest Points," shelters for gig workers from any platform, not only his own. He and his wife spent a day delivering orders themselves. Zomato offices introduced crèches and 26 weeks of paternity leave. In October 2025 India's Ministry of Labour partnered with Zomato on gig-economy employment.
The second ledger is harder to read. In 2023, hundreds of Blinkit delivery workers in the National Capital Region went on strike over sudden changes to their payouts, briefly shutting operations. In late December 2025 the strikes went national, focused on ten-minute delivery and pay. The December 31 strike largely fizzled after Blinkit, Swiggy's Instamart, Zepto, and BigBasket raised incentives for the day. Goyal wrote on LinkedIn: "If a system were fundamentally unfair, it would not consistently attract and retain so many people who choose to work within it. Please don't get swept up by narratives pushed by vested interests." He called the strikers miscreants.
On January 2 he posted a longer essay on X, which drew 2.8 million views. He argued that the discomfort around the gig economy was not mainly about money or labour rights but about visibility and guilt. For centuries, he wrote, the poor had worked out of sight of the wealthy; the gig economy brought them to the front door, and seeing their exhaustion made inequality personal. It is a sharp argument, and an uncomfortable one coming from the person who owns the front-door system. A former Google engineer, Deedy Das, ran the post through an AI detector, which labeled it "Fully AI-generated," and said major CEOs were now using ChatGPT for crisis communications. Someone asked Goyal directly whether he had used AI. He answered in one word: "No."
So the man who had built his leadership on written communication was now accused of not having written it. Whatever the truth, the accusation hurt because writing was the one channel in which nobody had ever doubted he was the author.
The Indian Express sent reporters out and found that riders who took the work for flexibility could earn meaningful incentives only after working more than twelve hours a day. On the Shamani podcast Goyal gave his own numbers: Zomato terminates about 5,000 delivery partners a month for fraud, and 1.5 to 2 lakh leave voluntarily each month. He described an internal "karma" system for scoring fraud on both sides, including customers who put hair in their food and send AI-generated photos to claim refunds. He seemed to think the numbers explained themselves. To some listeners they showed that the system works, and to others they showed how much it consumes.
A Ken newsletter headline from this period summed up the bind: "Deepinder Goyal learns the cost of 'going direct.'" He had spent his whole career skipping intermediaries such as PR firms, spokespeople, and spoken town halls in favour of his own words. In January 2026 he found out what that costs when your own words are what people are angry about.
Gravity
The ideas he wanted to pursue next were stranger than anything at Eternal.
About two years before he resigned, Goyal had started Continue Research, which he insisted was "neither a startup nor a company" but a seed fund with a research team, aimed at finding simple leverage points in the human body that could change how we age. In October 2025 he committed $25 million of his own money to fund outside researchers working on basic questions of human biology. In late 2025 he published the Gravity Ageing Hypothesis, the claim that gravity reduces blood flow to the brain over a lifetime and drives ageing. Temple, the patch, was built to test it. On the Shamani podcast he described it the way an engineer would: non-invasive, "like a sticker or a patch with a double-sided tape applicator," a battery life of five to seven days, "You can swim, sleep, or do anything with it; it won't come off unless you peel it off."
He also co-founded LAT Aerospace with Surobhi Das, a former Zomato executive, putting $20 million of his own money into small short-takeoff aircraft with up to eight seats for regional routes. In January 2026 he posted a video of the Lat One v0.1 prototype demonstrating an ultra-short takeoff. He was the son of a man who had settled for a classroom, and he was now spending his own fortune on two projects designed to get things off the ground: blood to the brain and aircraft into the air.
On January 21, 2026, he posted the letter. "Today, I am going to step away from the Group CEO role, and subject to shareholders' approval, will remain on the board of directors as Vice Chairman. Albinder Dhindsa (Albi) will be Eternal's new Group CEO." The reasoning is unusually explicit about governance: "If these ideas belonged inside Eternal's strategic scope, I would have pursued them within the company. They do not." He wrote that he had the bandwidth to do both, but that "the expectations, legal and otherwise, of a public company CEO in India demand singular focus." All his unvested stock options, worth ₹900 to 1,000 crore, would go back to the employee pool. Akshant Goyal told analysts that this meant about 3.3 crore shares added to a pool of roughly 20 crore.
"I have spent eighteen years, almost half my life, building this company. I will continue doing that." He named the businesses he would keep watching and the areas he would keep: "long-term strategy, culture, leadership development, and ethics and governance." Then he praised the boy from the back row, generously and without hedging: "He has the DNA of a battle-hardened founder and his ability to execute far exceeds mine."
The Indian Express noted that the letter did not mention the strikes. A LinkedIn commenter named Karthik L, in a post that drew 146 reactions, wrote: "Change the company name. Change the CEO. Change the story every few months." That is the cynical reading, and it is not entirely wrong. Eternal's story did keep changing. But a man who cannot reliably finish a spoken sentence on his first attempt learns to be comfortable with revision. The menu becomes a directory, the directory becomes a delivery service, the delivery service becomes a holding company, and the CEO becomes vice chairman. Each new version is written down before it is said aloud.
His LinkedIn profile, after 18 years running a company now worth ₹3.2 lakh crore, describes him in two words: Curious child.
Go back to the podcast, to some minute in those four hours and thirty-seven minutes. A word catches, the way words have caught for him since Muktsar. He has made his peace with it: "Okay, I'll get stuck. Finally, the word will come out." Shamani waits and the cameras keep recording. Thousands of people will later replay the clip, and most of them will be looking an inch to the left of his eyes, at a small metallic patch held on with double-sided tape, which is counting the blood as it climbs toward his brain. The patch stays on through all of it, because it does not come off unless he peels it off.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is less a set of rules than a pattern in Goyal's decisions, read from eighteen years of choices, retreats, and letters. Some of these principles worked spectacularly. At least one is a warning. Together they describe an operator who made a weakness into a working method, misjudged badly, then corrected faster and more completely than most of his peers.
The principles
- 1.Run the company in writing.
- 2.Digitize the dumbest document in the room.
- 3.Put the blame in an email, with your name on it.
- 4.When the ego bet fails, liquidate it all the way down.
- 5.Late is survivable; half-committed is not.
- 6.Show up without the appointment.
- 7.Give away the idea; buy back the company.
- 8.Give every experiment a clock.
- 9.Name the house before you need it.
- 10.Install founders, not managers.
- 11.Separate your risk appetite from the company's.
- 12.Directness is a tool, not a temperament.
Principle 1
Run the company in writing
Goyal's stammer pushed him toward text, and he made text the company's operating system. He has held town halls "on chat" for roughly eight years. His shareholder letters, including the Ms Savvy dialogues co-written with his CFO, are designed to answer the hard questions before analysts ask them. Major strategic shifts, such as the Eternal rename, the Bistro dispute, and the resignation, arrived first as written letters with URLs, not press conferences.
The advantages are concrete. Writing scales, so ten thousand employees read the same words. It leaves a record, so the 2017 apology can be quoted back to him years later, and that accountability is part of its value. It also rewards the precision that Shrivastav called a "benchmark" of intellectual honesty. A spoken meeting favours whoever talks fastest. A written one favours whoever thinks most clearly, and Goyal arranged his company so that was usually him.
The cost showed up in January 2026, when an AI detector cast doubt on the authorship of a post. If writing is your main channel, people's trust in the channel becomes the same as their trust in you.
Tactic: Replace one standing meeting this quarter with a written memo that anticipates the three hardest questions, and make yourself answer them before anyone asks.
Principle 2
Digitize the dumbest document in the room
Zomato did not start with a theory about logistics or marketplaces. It started with a cafeteria queue and a pile of crumpled menus. The first product was a scanner and a web page. In the letter announcing his resignation, Goyal described his own creation as "a menu scanning company," and he meant it affectionately.
The lesson is that the most useful starting point is often a dull piece of paper that a lot of people already depend on. Menus were universal, constantly updated, and almost entirely offline. Making them searchable created a directory, the directory created traffic, the traffic attracted restaurants, and the restaurant relationships eventually made delivery possible. None of the later business could have been designed up front. Each piece grew out of the one before.
Tactic: Find the paper artifact your target users consult every day, put it online in its plainest form, and watch what they try to do with it next.
Principle 3
Put the blame in an email, with your name on it
"All the shit that we are going through is on me and I will make up for it." The 2017 email works because it does not soften anything. There is no talk of "headwinds" or "market conditions," and no passive voice. It names who is responsible and promises to repair the damage.
This came after the Urbanspoon write-off, the four-city retreat from ordering, and two security breaches, at a point when the company's own staff had reason to doubt it. A founder in that position usually manages perception. Goyal instead gave his people something they could hold him to. Two years later he took the first flight to San Francisco without an appointment, and the email reads as the promise that trip was meant to keep.
Tactic: The next time something goes wrong because of a decision you made, write the first sentence of your explanation in the first person and send it before anyone asks.
Principle 4
When the ego bet fails, liquidate it all the way down
The international expansion went into 21 countries, bought seven foreign platforms, and took the Urbanspoon brand from purchase to shutdown in five months. By Goyal's own later account, it was driven by ego.
What he did afterward is unusual. Most founders who make a mistake like this keep a token presence so they can say they are still global. Goyal unwound it completely: the UAE delivery business was sold to Talabat in 2019, a near-total exit was announced in November 2021, and more than ten overseas subsidiaries were liquidated by early 2024. The cleanup took longer than the original expansion. It also freed capital and attention for Blinkit.
⟲
The Long Retreat
How long it took to undo an expansion built in three years.
2012
Launches in UAE, Sri Lanka, Qatar, UK, Philippines, South Africa.
2013
Adds New Zealand, Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia; India breaks even.
2015
21 countries; Urbanspoon bought in January, brand shut in June.
2019
UAE food delivery sold to Talabat.
2021
Announces exit from all markets except India and UAE.
2024
More than ten overseas subsidiaries liquidated.
Tactic: For any initiative you now believe was a mistake, write down a complete exit plan, including the legal entities, and give it a deadline.
Principle 5
Late is survivable; half-committed is not
Zomato was late to delivery. Swiggy started in 2014, and Goyal, in Khandekar's word, "obstinately" refused to see what was coming. The first delivery effort in March 2015 was outsourced to Delhivery, Grab, and Runnr, and by January 2016 it had pulled back from four cities.
The recovery depended on committing fully. In 2017 he bought Runnr and built his own fleet. In 2020 he absorbed Uber Eats' entire Indian business. By FY23 the company was delivering 647 million orders across 800 cities. Being late cost him years. Staying half-committed, with someone else's riders carrying his customers' food, would probably have cost him the company.
Tactic: If you are entering a market late, identify the one piece of the value chain you have been renting and own it outright within twelve months.
Principle 6
Show up without the appointment
With a few months of cash left, and with Uber Eats about to go to his main rival, Goyal flew to San Francisco without a meeting on the calendar. Three days later he had an all-stock deal that gave Uber 9.99 percent of Zomato and pushed Zomato's projected share to 52 percent.
The flight was not a gamble so much as a calculation about the other side's position. Uber needed to exit cleanly, and an all-stock offer let it keep some upside without negotiating with a better-funded buyer. Showing up in person told Uber that Zomato was serious and willing to move quickly. A founder who would not hold spoken town halls was willing to sit in a room in San Francisco and negotiate face to face when the company's survival depended on it.
Tactic: When a deal matters to survival, go in person to the decision-maker's office, and bring an offer structured around what they need to say yes.
Principle 7
Give away the idea; buy back the company
The ten-minute delivery idea was Goyal's, offered casually to his friend Dhindsa, who was running a struggling grocery startup. Dhindsa built it into Blinkit. Zomato bought it in 2022 for $568 million, over investor doubts and internal pushback. By July 2025 it was larger than the food business by transaction value, and by 2026 it had 2,200 stores and its first positive adjusted EBITDA quarter.
The pattern is deliberate. Goyal did not try to build quick commerce inside Zomato, where it would have fought food delivery for resources. He let it grow under a founder who cared only about it, then acquired it once it had proven itself. There was real risk in the friendship, since the deal looked like a favour to many observers. The protection was performance, judged in public every quarter.
Tactic: Share your best adjacent idea with the strongest operator you trust, and keep the option to acquire it once it works.
Principle 8
Give every experiment a clock
"We fail 100 times in a day," Goyal said. The record shows a company that launches quickly and also shuts things down on schedule.
⏱
The Experiment Ledger
Most bets end. The point is that each one ends on a decision.
| Experiment | Lifespan | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Zomato Market (groceries) | Apr–Jul 2020 | Killed |
| Alcohol delivery | May 2020–Apr 2021 | Killed |
| Zomato Instant (10-min food) | 2022 | Killed |
| Legends (intercity food) | Aug 2022–Aug 2024 | Killed |
| Xtreme (parcels) | Oct 2023–2024 | Killed |
| Bistro (10-min snacks) | Jan 2025– | Testing |
| District (going out) | Nov 2024– | Building |
| Blinkit (quick commerce) | Acquired 2022 | Scaled |
What stands out is how candid he is about the closures. His Bistro letter explains why Zomato Instant ended: "we couldn't find the right economic model for restaurants." A clear record of why things were shut down makes the next launch easier to believe.
Tactic: Set a review date and a specific kill condition for every new initiative when you launch it, and write down which one you hit when it ends.
Principle 9
Name the house before you need it
"Eternal" was being used internally from the time of the Blinkit acquisition. Blinkit employees heard it in orientation in January 2023, more than two years before Zomato Limited was formally renamed on February 6, 2025. By the time the public objected that Ferrari couldn't become Red Candy, the organization had already adjusted.
The early naming did real work. It told Blinkit staff they were not, as one put it, a "second fiddle to Zomato." It let a holding-company identity form before the business mix justified it, so that when Blinkit overtook food delivery the company was not caught in an identity crisis. The public announcement came after the internal change.
Tactic: Start using the name of the organization you are becoming inside the company well before you announce it, and let the public change come last.
Principle 10
Install founders, not managers
Goyal's resignation letter calls Dhindsa a "battle-hardened founder" whose execution "far exceeds mine," and it promises that "all our business CEOs will continue operating with the autonomy they have always had." When Aditya Mangla took over food delivery in July 2025, Goyal praised him specifically for his willingness to disagree: "We don't need more people who agree with everything."
The structure is a federation of founder-led businesses, with the group setting culture and capital allocation. It explains how a founder who avoids speaking in public could run four businesses: he did not run them directly. It also explains the turnover, including five co-founders gone within four years, because people with founder-level ownership tend to leave when they lose it.
Tactic: Give each business unit a leader with full operating ownership, and judge them on whether they will argue with you.
Principle 11
Separate your risk appetite from the company's
The resignation letter is close to a governance document. Goyal wanted to pursue longevity research, a cerebral-blood-flow wearable, and short-takeoff aircraft, none of which belong inside a listed food and grocery company. Rather than adding them to Eternal or trying to run both, he stepped aside, kept the board seat, and returned ₹900 to 1,000 crore of unvested options to the employee pool.
The reasoning is the useful part: "If these ideas belonged inside Eternal's strategic scope, I would have pursued them within the company. They do not." Investors who bought Eternal for food and quick commerce did not sign up for gravity research. Keeping the two separate protected both. The open question, raised by shareholders in the comments, is whether a "brain-trust discount" will appear if the founder's best future ideas end up outside the listed company.
Tactic: Before starting a high-variance project, decide in writing whether it fits your company's risk profile, and if not, fund it separately.
Principle 12
Directness is a tool, not a temperament
This is the warning. Going direct, through LinkedIn posts, open letters, and a four-and-a-half-hour podcast, worked when Goyal was apologizing, explaining a rename, or defending Bistro to restaurant owners. It failed when the issue was workers' pay and the audience included the workers. "Miscreants" was the wrong word. The fraud termination numbers, delivered calmly, sounded like an account of how many people the system uses up. The Pure Veg reversal within 24 hours showed he can retreat fast. Keeping the algorithm showed that the retreat covered the visible part, not the underlying logic.
The underlying lesson is that writing removes friction, and some situations need friction: a pause, an adviser's objection, a second draft. A founder whose distinctive skill is unmediated clarity has to know when the subject is too close to other people's livelihoods for that clarity to help.
Tactic: Before publishing anything about the people who do the physical work of your business, have someone who does that work read it first.
Free playbook
Get The Business Model Playbook
58 business models, one visual page each: how the money flows, the metrics that matter, and who runs it. Free when you join the Faster Than Normal email.
Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Deepinder Goyal, on Raj Shamani's Figuring Out, January 2026Now I'm like, okay. I'll get stuck. Finally, the word will come out. I'm very at peace with it. Okay, it will get stuck. We'll see. I think that also comes with, even if I stammer, people will now listen to me. I've earned a little bit of that.
— Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Info Edge, as quoted in Megha Vishwanath's UnseenThe secret of early stage investment is to back companies and founders who will succeed anyway. With you or without you.
— Deepinder Goyal, note to Eternal employees on Aditya Mangla's appointment, July 2025Leadership is not just about knowing what to do. It's about learning how to see.
— Deepinder Goyal, letter to shareholders, January 21, 2026Eighteen years ago, the idea that a menu scanning company could be worth tens of billions of dollars, provide livelihoods to hundreds of thousands of people, and serve millions of families daily would have seemed absurd. We helped prove it was possible.
— Deepinder Goyal, to Entrepreneur IndiaFailures are awesome. If you are within Zomato, you would know we fail 100 times in a day.
For the fullest account of the person behind these lines, Vishwanath's Unseen, drawn from hundreds of interviews and three years of following him, is the essential source. As she admits in her afterword, "I began this book thinking it was about a company. It turned out to be about a person."
Maxims
- Write what you cannot say. A constraint on one channel can become an advantage in another, if you commit to it completely.
- Start with paper. The best digital businesses often begin with a dull document many people already rely on.
- Sign the apology yourself. First-person accountability in writing gives your team something to hold you to, and that is the point.
- Exit to zero. When a bet was driven by ego, unwind all of it, including the legal entities.
- Own the step you rent. A late entrant survives by controlling the part of the value chain the incumbents outsourced.
- Get on the plane. When survival depends on a deal, go to the decision-maker's office without waiting for an invitation.
- Give the idea to a friend. Some ventures do better under another founder, with you keeping the option to buy them back.
- Set the kill date at launch. An experiment without an end condition turns into a cost center.
- Rename the inside first. Identity changes that start inside the company are already settled by the time the public hears about them.
- Know when directness backfires. The voice that wins investors and employees can deepen the anger of the people your business depends on most.
