“Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it more from his wandering.” — Charles Dickens

At an early age, the Spartan child was weaned away from his home. Constantly tested, tossed into the wild. Left to pit his wit and will against nature’s fury. It was his initiation. For when he had conquered what was within, he would return to his people a Spartan. Something similar is happening to me today. Sans the six-pack abs, I am returning home to Zomato as a Zoman.

More than 5 years ago, sometime in July 2010, the meal I had eaten 400 times already had lost its appeal. I needed something different. Except, I couldn’t find a single damn thing online. Then, a friend of mine who attended IIT Delhi told me to look up this site called Foodiebay, built by one of his college seniors.

Foodiebay? What? Was it a restaurant?

The site was terrible to navigate initially, but it was a brilliant idea. It had scanned menus for all the areas around Hauz Khas (where I stayed) — I loved it! Who did this stuff? For the next 5 days, I made everyone around me use it. I even started listing my extremely elementary suggestions down in a notebook. Then I had to find out who made this site. I looked up the whois directory and found it listed under some dude named Deepinder Goyal.

“Well, Mr. Deepinder Goyal, I have a bunch of things for you to do to your site. Here you go…”, I thought as I sent that email to the CEO of the startup. I was under the impression that this at least 20-kid operation would be willing to take my suggestions as a user. But I got a one-line reply —

“Hey Karthick — thanks for the suggestions, would you like to meet? DG.”

A one-line email. Sent within 5 minutes of my email. Did this guy even read my f**king email?

I decided to meet him anyway, at a cafe. Unassuming chap, and from IIT Delhi, so I assumed he was reasonably smart. What surprised me was how much he had thought about all the points I had written. He went over each of the points I had written, and told me some were in the works, and some were already done. But then we got to a few points that he wanted more details on, and we ended up debating and talking about how things should function and work. He ended the catch-up with a “nice meeting you, let’s chat again”.

Two days later, I got a phone call from DG. “Hey, let’s meet up. I want you to meet my co-founder, PC.”

So DG and PC met KG at a pizza place. We had upgraded from a cafe because there were 3 of us now. The pizza was great, but the conversation even better. And what was supposed to be a 30-minute meeting ended up being a 3-hour conversation. They offered me a position to be employee #9. Amused, I accepted.

A lot of people enter Zomato, but not everyone leaves a Zoman. For being a Zoman means being so caught up with what you’re doing that you don’t notice you’re working well into the night — the adrenaline rush is so strong that you don’t want to. It means meeting near-impossible deadlines, knowing death might come to us, but not giving up that day. And most of all, it means celebrating the hard-won battles with people who aren’t just colleagues, but are family.

After a year at Zomato, I was weaned away from home. I needed to wander.

Over the years, much has changed at Zomato. New goals, new people, rapid progress, and a much larger canvas to paint on. In traditional companies, the larger you are, the slower you move. Zomato was in between — not yet a large corporation, yet no longer a startup. Zomato had become larger, and a little softer.

But the Zomato of today — the one that taught me to focus on the hunger — beckoned again. It was returning to its startup roots by going back to relentless focus and constant hustle.

That Zomato is familiar to me. From the early days of painting the new office walls and packing and moving furniture ourselves, the excitement of releasing our android app, and hitting the 1000th restaurant listing, we thought we had come a long way. Little did we know those were the little battles, and the war ahead was a huge one.

Zomato is one of the very few startups I know in India today that can win the war on a global scale. Here’s why.

Reason #1. Caring intensely about what you are building.

July 2015. I was in Greece in the summer, attending a bootcamp on startups and entrepreneurship. One of my close friends was presenting some ideas on building a great mobile application. What you need to focus on, and how you need to deliver. This was an international forum, with people attending from around the world.

He went up on stage and said, “After much research, I am going to talk about 10 mobile apps that are world-class, based on utility, function, and design.” You had the usual suspects — Uber, Twitter, Facebook, Messenger. But there was only one that was Indian by origin.

Zomato.

I couldn’t stop the nostalgia from rushing in, with just a twinge of regret.

Reason #2. Clear vision. Incredible talent. Never dying. Never done.

I live in Chennai. If you read the news lately, you’ll know that the last few weeks have been hell for the city. More than 200 lives lost in the floods. Millions rendered homeless. Everyone in desperate need of food and drinking water.

Where do you go? How do you get it? How can you afford anything when you don’t have any money? One company didn’t paralyse itself into inaction with all these questions. They moved fast, innovated, and reached out to their community and their friends to feed the needy. To provide what were basic human necessities.

That company? Zomato.

200,000 meals delivered. 600 meals being ordered a minute at its peak. They had to stop accepting orders because the restaurants couldn’t keep up with the goodwill pouring in through Zomato. And they got shit for that. Can you believe it? They weren’t parading equipment with stickers around, they were feeding people and saving lives. I was right there on the ground, with the entire Zomato Chennai team which was working tirelessly to fulfill the promise made to the people of Chennai.

A lot of startups and companies have great goals like world domination, wanting to be the XYZ of the industry, hitting the road to an IPO, and making tons of money. How often do startups go beyond their capacity as a company and act quickly to save lives?

When you have ambition combined with incredible talent and purpose, you achieve remarkable things. We recruited people who didn’t have stellar Ivy League degrees. They didn’t know about forecasting future technologies. Heck, food-tech wasn’t even a ‘thing’ then. But we recruited them anyway, because they had the fire in their belly. The hunger was evident. The desire, immense. To achieve more, to build better, to serve more. Plaques, commendations, accolades, and the parties you attended didn’t matter. Could you get shit done? That’s all we worried about.

Companies are great not just because of what they do and how they do it. It is why they do it, and with whom.

Reason #3. Never have a bad meal.

The human race will always be eating. Thus, Zomato’s audience isn’t restaurants, but everyone who eats. We have over 7 billion people to reach out to; to ensure they never have a bad meal again. For a lot of people in this world, this just means having a plain and simple meal, even at just the comfort of their homes. So the mission is clear. We have a lot to do at Zomato.

Wait. We? Who was we? I wasn’t a direct part of it anymore. I was just an overenthusiastic evangelist on the sidelines. But then it hit me again.