Zomato: ETSA 2024 | I had to clear out Zomato’s senior management who lost motivation after the IPO: Deepinder Goyal

Food delivery giant Zomato’s CEO Deepinder Goyal said that after the company’s 2021 IPO, he had to restart the organization and purge the management team who had become “complacent”.

“The IPO was good, the company did what it did, and many people made a lot of money for the first time in their lives, and these are competent people. Competent people cannot recognize that they are becoming complacent. They are no longer looking for progress…,” Goyal said at the Economic Times Startup Awards 2024.

“They are tuned this way, but they don’t allow any progress. This is what we’ve come to. For some time, nothing happened inside the organization. I had to literally purge almost everyone who had lost that motivation and then restart the organization,” he added.

Since Zomato’s IPO in July 2021, several senior executives have left the company. These include co-founders Mohit Gupta, Gunjan Patidar, Akriti Chopra and Gaurav Gupta. Other senior executives such as Rahul Ganjoo, Pradyot Ghate and Siddharth Jhawar have also left Zomato. Ganjoo and Ghate have rejoined Zomato working on the District offering.

“They don’t want to tell themselves that I’m proven, they actually spend a lot of time and basically delay all the work,” Goyal said.

After going public, Zomato’s shares initially performed poorly, which affected its market capitalization. This situation was further deepened by the instability of the global market. However, now the situation has changed for the better and Zomato has now become the favorite stock of investors. According to BSE, Zomato shares have returned 121% year-to-date.

Goyal also mentioned Zomato’s relatively late entry into the fast-growing fast commerce sector, expressing his surprise at the sector’s exponential expansion. “I didn’t think the number would increase so much,” he added. During regulatory scrutiny, Zomato’s CEO said high-speed trading was not reducing the market share of kiranas. “Blinkit doesn’t even affect companies like Dmart. We are more or less leveraging the share of e-commerce players like Amazon and Flipkart as well as modern retail,” he added.