You can take food away from a Punjabi, but you cannot take a Punjabi away from food. That rings true of Deepinder Goyal, founder of Zomato, who was born and brought up in Punjab. Armed with a Master’s degree in technology from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Goyal should have been happy punching the clock as a consultant at Bain & Company, a prestigious consultancy. But the job, with all the trappings of a cushy career, could not satisfy his appetite. As this foodie searched for the perfect choice, he found it right in the middle of his company’s canteen. Always intrigued by the who-gets-it-first race for the free-delivery menu cards at lunch time, he decided to save everyone the trouble of queuing up by putting everything online. That’s how the idea of Foodiebay.com was born. The company was launched by Goyal, his Bain colleague, Pankaj Chaddah and an IIT student, Gunjan Patidar, some years ago. It has since been rebranded as Zomato.com and has also managed to attract external capital. Goyal might be taking his business to different parts of the country, but he is still doing what he does best—tracking, and training his team to track, the best aromas in town. He is happy hanging around his new office in Gurgaon, discussing food menus over lunch and doing the least bit of travel. When not thinking of innovative ideas and better strategies for Zomato, he loves using his scrumy.com notes to delegate tasks to his team.

As a co-founder of a flourishing online food portal, many would imagine that my day is spent dashing across town, meeting managers and investors, or chasing customers and clients. But, I hardly do that.

The way I work is more an aberration than an inspiration. But, that’s just how it is. I believe in working smart, and not necessarily hard. I usually get up by 10.30 in the morning, even on weekdays. I am not much of a believer in fitness. I only believe in earning calories and not burning them. Once the morning chores are out of my way and I’m done with breakfast, I head straight for office.

Fortunately, my office is very close to my home. I usually get to work by half past eleven. Prior to acquiring our office space, we worked out of our respective homes. I kind of like hanging around the place now, contemplating the next step, the next innovative idea, the next strategy. The only physical movement that I make at work, though, is when I press the keys of my BlackBerry to respond to e-mails.

My mornings are usually spent discussing the overall strategy with the team, including issues like content acquisition, legal issues, competitor benchmarking, marketing, growth and sustainability. We are constantly trying to innovate—that’s the only way to keep the brand alive. It’s like no matter how much you hate or love Apple products, you cannot ignore them. Either way, you have to be in the limelight; more so, if you exist in the virtual world.

Since we started this venture, I have played every conceivable role possible at Zomato, earlier known as Foodiebay. Be it designing the first landing page of the website, collecting menu cards from hotels and restaurants in and around Delhi; scanning, rating and uploading those; marketing the portal at almost no-cost; and of course, getting hold of advertisers. On many days, I’m also playing agony uncle to the team.

When not thinking about the big ideas, I try to make the lives of my employees more efficient (read hell!). Recently, I discovered this new tool called scrumy.com. It is essentially a glorified version of sticky notes, and relatively unknown. It has a companywide dashboard with hundreds of sticky notes with different colours for different people. Each sticky note is basically a task for someone to do. Anyone can add a task for me to do and vice versa. We also divide tasks by departments—so our sales, marketing and tech teams have separate sticky note dashboards. To maintain transparency between different functions, every dashboard is free for anyone to see and add tasks to. This keeps everyone at Zomato on their toes. If anyone gets sloppy at work, it’s up there for everyone to see. It’s amazing how this tool has got everyone working more efficiently than before.

Most of our time goes into mulling over what to eat and from where to eat—essentially the question we help others solve through our portal. We also make it a point to have lunch together every day. On Fridays, nobody gets lunch from home. We order pizzas to check everyone’s appetite. A healthy appetite for food is a must for anyone who wants to work here. You have to be passionate not just about eating; but also about knowing good food, and more importantly, zeroing down on the place where it can be found.

Training team members is an important element of my day. We don’t have a big team in any department, nevertheless, a lot of effort goes into preparing the data collection and sales teams before they set out into the field. For example, we get a lot of traffic on our website from expatriates, so it makes sense for upmarket hotel eateries to publish their menus with us. However, it can be real hard to convince these high-end hotel chains to come on board, not merely as an advertiser, but as a participant. We spent a lot of time and effort strategising, convincing, aggressively selling and data crunching to get various restaurants on a single platform.

Expansion is also something that constantly plays on my mind. The thing with a start-up is that no matter how much you have grown in the last year, you can always do better than that. We had started in the National Capital Region and now we are in six cities. We can grow multifold from here.

Apart from this fast growth, nothing much has changed in my life as a founder. I still don’t travel much, despite the fact that we have grown beyond Delhi now. I had only one business visit to my credit. One would think that’s insane for a business owner who’s seeking more business from new centres. But I believe travel is not the nature of our business.

When I was in Mumbai looking for business, it suddenly struck me that it made more sense to hire a person locally; she would have a better understanding of the city’s taste buds and popular eateries , and would be better equipped to handle the job. So, we decided to delegate the local operations to experts in that particular city. For example, we are currently setting up an office in Chennai, and we want the head of operations there to know the city like a true Madrasi does. Only then will the idea get executed in the right manner.

Another reason for minimum travel is to keep a tight watch over costs. As a start-up, you just cannot afford to spend that extra dime. Till we moved into our new office in Gurgaon, we worked out of our homes. The only cost I had to worry about was that of human resource. There would be one person in each city to get us the data; a centralised team, based out of the NCR, would process that data and another team would pitch the idea to advertisers. The business model couldn’t have been skimpier.

Now that we have received some funding from Info Edge, the parent company of Naukri.com, we are moving from size zero to size one company. Since the funding, our expenses have shot up but that is largely because of the new cafe-like office in Gurgaon, a bigger workforce and multi-city operations. But thankfully, the revenue figures have kept pace.

In fact, growth is the reason behind rebranding the company, and moving on to Zomato. We realised that if we had to embrace growth, we could not restrict ourselves only to food. The idea is to diversify into other food-related avenues like nightlife, pubs and events. For this, we had to look beyond Foodiebay. It wasn’t easy to get consensus on a new brand name, so we did it in the most democratic way possible. Zomato got the maximum number of votes from our employees. Fortunately, our users are accepting it well, too.

We are very proud to be associated with our investors. A part of my job now is to make sure that our investors stay tuned into the innovations at Zomato. I send e-mails on a weekly basis to keep them updated about what’s cooking in our company.

Success at work also depends a lot on the dynamics on the home front. Your family members have to support you in your endeavours. Fortunately for me, it was only my wife who needed to be convinced about Foodiebay. In fact, she remains quite kicked about the venture and also contributes whenever she can. In fact, once back home, I spend more time with my Sony Vaio than with her, but she is almost always fine with that.

A bit of a geek at heart, I like being surrounded by technology, even at home. If I am not exploring the World Wide Web, then I will be watching a movie on my home theatre. The thing about geeks is that they aren’t the most voracious of readers.

The only piece of literature I have read, and read again, is the commencement speech delivered by Steve Jobs at Stanford University. His words were so inspiring that you cannot but just believe in him when he says:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever”.

I hope that when I look back five years from now, the dots I am connecting now will make a lot more sense.