 is probably one of the stars start-up that started about eight years ago now the Pindu, ten you should really give it to him and ten years he's built a global food organization and I was I was just telling him that I was in Lisbon about six months ago in Portugal and I asked the cab driver I was traveling in that where should I go out for a meal and he said just open your phone and check on the matter you'll figure out which restaurant to go to and I asked him do you know where's the matter comes from he says no is it it comes from India I am from the same country so it was such a moment of pride to be in another country and have somebody like a cabbie actually referring an Indian company back to you it's something I've always read about as an editor but to actually have it and go through it so the Pindu hats off to you for putting that one and making India and putting India on the globe it's commonly known that most of the startups actually come from IIT and so did you so you know we love to know at IIT what was it that sort of worked you about food or not having enough food that made you found the matter the answer to this that question is fairly simple Domino's didn't answer my phone how do you think restaurants have changed in this last ten years since you know you've brought the delivery model into it and I mean not most restaurants at that point of time used to actually think in terms of delivery they used to think of sitting customer so how do you think their customer sort of base has become more broad based just because delivery has got into the system so I think seven eight years ago only pizza used to be ordered right so and and if you compare the cost of going out to eat at a restaurant to let's say New York I think we roughly spend the same amount of money and here in Delhi so if two to three people go out have dinner some place have a couple of drinks you're going to spend four five thousand rupees at a decent good enough restaurant which is comparable to a similar restaurant in like say New York or anywhere so I think given the average income of India restaurant industry when you go dining out when you when you talk about dining out can't really scale beyond a certain point right so and the reason is commercial real estate prices are very very high right and that's that's the biggest chunk of cost for most restaurants and that's what just contributes to dining out not really scaling beyond a certain point beyond that food ordering is this extra revenue for dining out restaurants right and one of the most interesting things that's happening now nowadays so we list all restaurants on Sumato right so we have we're almost like a database of all restaurants and we can see what kind of restaurants are coming up what kind of restaurants are actually shutting down about 85 percent of new restaurant openings in the last one year are actually dark so they don't have dining in spaces they're just like they're just outlets maybe not even in a prime real real estate and rentals are so low right so I think dark kitchens because they don't have like any front of the house they can actually survive in non-commercial real estate as well so that's what makes the price of ordering food much much much slower than price of having food when you go out somewhere so that's been contributing to a lot to the growth of the sector you know Zomato has had various shades to it the been there and I think under your leadership that it has been it is a delivery company it's a it's a content company it's a food company and now probably even a data company you have more insights on consumer behavior and then eating habits then probably all the restaurants in the world put together because you know you have such a big spread and you have a customer ordering right in with his preferences what do you regard on what what change has it brought to Zomato and what learnings has it brought to Zomato doing this journey and today I think how that learnings can have helped you sort of grow your business scale by scale step by step into different directions a couple of years ago we started this initiative called Zomato hygiene right so what we used to do was I mean we still do it we go to restaurants and we actually audit their kitchens and check whether they meet hygiene standards or not the the sad part of that story was that only about 20% of the restaurants that we audited made the cut and and I mean we have been in this industry for almost 10 years but only in the last couple of years we got to a point that maybe we should not be eating this and so we thought that we need to bring more transparency into the system so let's actually start doing hygiene ratings at a we actually then lowered the cost of a hygiene rating audit to almost 10% of what we started with like we started taking the cost on us eventually we figured out that it's not like people don't want to do good work they just don't know how to do good work like they just don't know how to source where to source clean vegetables from how to run their kitchens better how to actually dispose the garbage how to actually dispose their cooking oil a lot of restaurants maybe like 75 80% of them don't know how to do this well so eventually so nowadays we are almost a full-stack company right so we have this business called hyperpure where we source pesticide free veggies and antibiotic free meats to supply to restaurants right so that the quality of food that we I mean eventually like I have a five year old daughter I want her to eat from restaurants without fear of like whether this restaurant is high quality or not right so that's the whole point like can we actually improve the quality of restaurants and for that you have to do all the work like we are saying that we will do everything for a restaurant except cook so we will do all the science and we will let restaurant owners do the art if you go to Europe eating out is cheaper than actually cooking at home correct and even in Hong Kong even in Hong Kong in most other countries India we are not there yet so the the real shift in the favor of restaurant industry will happen once we are able to price it under a dollar 60 70 bucks per meal like that's when the real shift is going to happen and that's a very hard challenge in India right so trying to deliver a meal to someone but you're able to do it outside India outside of India the infrastructure and all of those things are actually much better so restaurants are more efficient in general right so they actually are community kitchens in a way so there's there is less wastage there's less manpower there's a lot of things which work in favor of restaurants that's why the prices are actually cheaper as well the restaurants have more bargaining power in terms of buying as well so all these things play in favor of restaurants outside of India India I think we we still have to get down to very low prices in order for restaurant industry to scale to almost every household in the country I am reasonably sure that even if women don't get into the workforce but if we can provide a good hygienic meal for like 50 60 bucks for everybody all the time there's no reason for anybody to cook at home in India the the more volume of ordering comes from smaller cities or in bigger cities smaller cities really how is that I mean in smaller cities I think there's all the more time to cook we are still figuring this out why is this happening we have some answer first but I can give you some examples there is a small town maybe hundred thousand people we launched food delivery maybe 45 days ago six weeks ago this Sunday we got six thousand orders in a city of hundred thousand people and you can assume a family of three to four I can't imagine any other 20% of the population of that town eating food from Zamato on a single day it was probably IOC's problem then that's actually everywhere we are in 240 cities right now and yeah the growth is staggering this is huge anything that you have I mean you know which you can say that this is a culture that has got evolved in the matter and I think the I mean what I'm going to say is painful and empowering at the same time but we don't have a org structure at Zamato I think the top 500 people don't know who they actually report to so who report to no one so are they so are they like should you sort of say that okay if you're three years down in the system then you don't need to report to anybody or is it just random I mean you have to take directions from somebody even if you don't report to somebody it's more about goals like here's what you've got to do figure it out like and if you need help ask someone so and the same person would not go back and ask them that what happened to that no much it's visible right so you're able to see whether someone needs and this goes more for your coding teams or even for your other teams engineering teams yes I think first two three levels of business teams and do you set targets or we set unnatural goals it's more or less like let's grow 5x this year or let's go 10x and you're able to achieve that we're able to achieve maybe 30 40% of that so which means 2x which means 3x 4x sometimes last year was 3.5x