Pankaj Chaddah

Founded by the trio of Pankaj Chaddah, Deepinder Goyal and Gunjan Patidar, Zomato has been one of the most promising startups from India. While still at Bain & Company, Deepinder had started up Foodiebay and Pankaj joined him soon afterwards. Building from there, rebranding in the process, Zomato has come a long way and has managed to occupy a huge mindshare amongst Indians online. Pankaj Chaddah, is the brain behind Zomato’s marketing programs.

He joined Bain in July 2007 where he met Deepinder. He had been working on Foodiebay for a few months before he got on board in mid 2008. Together, they worked at Bain for a year and a half while dedicating weekends to Foodiebay. By the time they left Bain, they had already launched in 4 cities (NCR, Kolkata, Mumbai & Pune) and had a handful of clients on board. It was getting difficult to manage both and before Foodiebay could affect our work at Bain, we decided to quit and work full-time on Foodiebay; luckily, by then, they had also had Gunjan to work on the tech side of things. While at Bain, they could sustain the on the financial side but it became difficult after they quit their jobs. So they raised a small sum of money from their friends to keep the startup running and launched their Bangalore operations. And then to make things better and bigger, they raised their first round of funds from Info Edge and opened their first office in New Delhi.

“Overall, the experience has been great”, says Pankaj Chaddah. Pankaj says, “he loves his job and can proudly say that most of the people at Zomato will also say the same”.