Zomato founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal has revealed how the food‑delivery giant came within just 45 days of running out of cash during Covid, before employees’ voluntary salary cuts and later ESOP windfalls helped pull the company back from the brink. The story, shared on Raj Shamani’s podcast, lands at a time when Goyal is again under scrutiny over gig worker protests, 10‑minute deliveries and his recent public defence of Zomato’s labour model.
“We were down to 45 days of cash”
In the podcast, Deepinder Goyal recounts Zomato’s Covid near‑death moment:
- When lockdowns hit, food delivery revenues were “completely wiped out” almost overnight, but the company’s fixed cost base remained.
- Zomato typically kept 4–5 months of runway in the bank; suddenly that shrank to about 45 days of cash, with a monthly burn he estimates at around USD 4–5 million.
- For the first time, he feared not being able to meet payroll: “If you make one wrong call, you are not able to meet payroll… it scares me to not pay salaries on time.”
Goyal says he did the obvious first step: call every large existing investor and ask bluntly if they could wire “1–5 million dollars” each just to get through the next payroll cycles. No one came through. “Zero,” he recalls. “Everybody was struggling with their own issues… it was feeling like the end of the world for everyone,” so even a quick bridge cheque was off the table.
The failure of the investor calls forced a far tougher internal decision.
Voluntary salary cuts and the ESOP upside
With capital markets frozen and no fresh money forthcoming, Zomato turned inward:
- Management set a target to cut the salary bill by roughly 30%.
- Instead of imposing a flat cut, they asked employees to volunteer what they could afford: some took 100% cuts, some 50%, some said they could not afford any because of family responsibilities.
- In Goyal’s telling, over 80% of employees (out of roughly 4,000 at the time) opted for some level of salary cut, purely on trust that the company would survive.
Crucially, Goyal says the leadership had decided in their minds to compensate people later with meaningful ESOPs for every rupee of salary they gave up—but they did not communicate a specific multiplier upfront. The message was: help Zomato through this crisis now; the company will take care of you later.
After the crisis eased and Zomato moved towards its 2021 IPO, the company allocated significant ESOPs to those who had volunteered cuts:
- Employees who had let go of, say, ₹100 of cash salary saw that sacrifice turn into roughly 30x at the IPO price, according to Goyal’s estimate on the podcast.
- He frames the grant explicitly as a “thank you” for standing by the company when it was on the edge, insisting it was not a formal quid‑pro‑quo trade at the time of the cuts.
This Covid episode mirrors Deepinder goyal’s broader public positioning around compensation: he himself announced a full waiver of his cash salary for 36 months starting April 2021, and has previously pledged IPO‑linked ESOP proceeds (around ₹700 crore) to the Zomato Future Foundation for delivery partners’ children, even as his ESOP grant cost to the company drew scrutiny.
