'The brightest person in the room': Meet Gaurav Gupta, co-founder, Zomato

Focused and passionate, but level-headed and approachable. That is how people who have worked or dealt with Gaurav Gupta, the Zomato co-founder who recently quit the food delivery firm, describe him.

Gupta has been the face of Zomato leading up to its blockbuster initial public offering in July this year, and his exit came as something of a surprise. Known to people within the company as GG, he is known to be a people’s person.

“GG was the calm to Zomato’s chaos,” says a person who has worked with Zomato. “He could handle (difficult) situations very well, and was often the brightest person in the room,” this person added.

He was the chief operating officer in 2019 when Zomato named him as a co-founder, the first to be elevated to co-founder under the “Zomato Founder Program”, which rewards “people who have contributed to Zomato deeply; have built/scaled businesses, and have consistently demonstrated a founder’s mindset for a reasonable period of time, are acknowledged for their passion, commitment and perseverance”.

He joined the company in 2015 as business head, table reservations, and also held the position of global advertising sales head and president, large enterprise accounts, before being named chief operating officer in 2018. Gupta was a key figure behind the launch of Zomato’s ambitious but controversial Gold programme, and also launched the table reservation business. He was also responsible for scaling it up across India, UAE and Australia.

Gupta, an Indian Institute of Technology and Indian Institute of Management graduate, worked at A T Kearney before joining Zomato.

While co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal has largely kept his interactions with the press selective and few, Gupta has been taking questions and more about the business and other issues. He was also the person who led many of the conversations with restaurants who were unhappy with food aggregators such as Zomato and Swiggy’s aggressive deep discounting.

In 2019, at the heart of the conflict was Zomato Gold, the Gurugram-based company’s premium plan that allowed subscribers to have free dishes as part of their orders at restaurants. There was a very public face-off between Zomato and the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) over these issues.

“Gaurav and Mohit (Gupta, co-founder and CEO, food delivery) came for a lot of these meetings,” says a person who was part of the meetings. “He (Gupta) was always very respectful and willing to hear out the issues the restaurateurs had. They would also often crack a joke or two, in sp­ite of the issues at hand,” the person added.

Many of the issues remain unresolved, and the NRAI approached the Competition Commission of India in early July, requesting the regulator to carry out a detailed probe against Zomato and Swiggy.

Three days later, Zomato launched its IPO. When asked how he views the complaint, and whether restaurants’ concerns are valid, Gupta told Business Standard: “I think there are two parts of that one. We work with a very large restaurant base, we make sure that we’re doing the right thing by them, and we’re helping them grow because if they grow, only then we’ll grow. There are many NRAI members and other restaurant partners we keep speaking to. So it doesn’t worry us, but it is something that we believe that we should fix.”

There have been reports of Gupta and CEO Goyal falling out because many of the businesses that Gupta was overseeing have been shut down — international subsid­iaries, grocery delivery and nutraceuticals.

“I can’t say for certain if there has been a falling out,” says the ex-Zomato employee. “Deepinder and GG have been very good friends. I think maybe GG was trying to figure out which business he really wants to own, since his positioning and role in the company have shifted in the last year and a half,” the person added.

Gupta’s employee stock options in the company were valued at about Rs 197 crore, according to details provided in the company’s IPO documents. There is no clarity on whether he liquidated any of this share.

In his exit email, Gupta said he was star­ting a new chapter in life. “I won’t be able to stay away from all of you and you will see me around and in action every once in a while. How can I not be there for the town halls — aisa to ho hi nahin sakta (it can’t happen),” he said. That doesn’t mean he’s coming back. It’s merely a reference to a long-standing Zomato tradition for some former employees to show up at town halls.