Application for the position of Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal's chief of staff

I was taken in by the swag and cool of your job posting. But you back-pedalled. So this application is withdrawn

Dear Deepi,

 

I know you are no longer accepting applications, but what the heck! Let me give it a shot. But I must level with you first.

 

Several nice people told me not to apply for your chief of staff position. They believe it is not fair to ask the successful candidate to pay up in the first year.

 

There is this friend of mine who sold his startup and became a social media influencer on a sensitive subject. He went from zero to 1 million followers on Insta in 17 months. He swears that one gets more attention (read: more followers) by “pulling stunts”. This has apparently gone too far, with several chief executive officers (CEOs) spending more of their time devising stunts to pull, instead of trying to solve problems.

 

My friend, however, concedes that your job posting sounded like a good idea. For Rs 20 lakh — we are talking possibilities — you can learn like crazy and get the kind of experience no B-school can match.

 

Let’s take a sec to look at what is rolling out of our schools and colleges. Recruiters shake their heads at the quality and use a myriad of terms to describe this crowd, of which “unemployable” is the only one that can be reproduced in a family newspaper such as this.

 

Some are good, but that number is not very large. The venerable Economic Survey for 2023-24 makes this point forcefully: One in two graduates are not yet readily employable straight out of college. As Raghuram Rajan pointed out in an interview with Vir Sanghvi, you’ve got something like 19 million applying for 60,000 railway jobs… PhDs applying for jobs as peons.

 

Yesterday, a business newspaper that comes out on white newsprint— can’t remember its name — reported that IIT grads were joining edtech and coaching centres as teachers. The message lost is that these teachers could not get great industry jobs, so they became teachers. How are they inspiring  hordes more to join engineering colleges?

 

One can learn a lot more by becoming your chief of staff. After all, you are the man who created a unicorn. More importantly, you bought Blinkit in a distress sale and now it appears to be outshining the mothership, Zomato. One can go to a B-school and read a case study on this turnaround. Or, one can become your CoS and see from close range how you do what you do.

 

That said, why not create a system for this? Not just you, maybe other startup founders can come together to create a programme where deserving candidates get a chance to work with successful founders.

 

But, you might have a problem at your hands. You said you received 18,000 applications. What are they like? I suppose some applicants would be really-really keen to learn. Some could be your fans. Some could be people caught in dead-end jobs. And some — several, I fear — could be those who did not get anything and are now trying to coax their parents into coughing up Rs 20 lakh.

 

Which one am I?

 

I am just taken in by your post. The swag and the cool. And the audacity. You actually want someone who “wants to do the right thing, even if it comes at the cost of displeasing others”. That resonates with me (not merely because the second part comes to me naturally).

 

I am quite sure you are not a flake. The man who turned Blinkit around cannot be. You are putting your reputation at stake. You will make sure it is worth the fellow’s time and money. I think you are going out on a limb in promising, “10x more learnings than a 2-year degree from a top management school”.

 

It also attracts me that the Rs 20 lakh I pay will become a direct donation to Feeding India and you will contribute Rs 50 lakh to a charity of my choice. In one year, I will have done enough charity for two lifetimes, given my income levels.

 

Also, if artificial intelligence delivers on its promise, human productivity will improve like crazy and there will be so much more for everyone that salaries will become far less critical. I am counting on it.

 

However, just to be sure, I called another friend, Kanwaldeep Singh. I called him because he is an executive and leadership coach and because he always takes my call. He advises a deep conversation right at the beginning between you, me, and ideally a facilitator as well.

 

This conversation should connect us at a human level. We should tell each other what our expectations are. Am I just going to maintain your schedule and help you prepare for meetings? How will I get frequent peeks into your mind? Will I get a 360-degree view of the organisation? What if I develop doubts after, say, three months? At the end of the year, what will determine whether this was worth our time or not?

 

I know you will not hire me. You wanted a 200-word letter and this is about 950. But that is all right. I am less kicked about the job after you back-pedalled. You explained that the Rs 20 lakh was “merely a filter” and you would reject most of the applications that “talked about the money”. You went to the extent of posting the screenshot of a DM to prove that charging the money was never part of the plan.

 

I understand the pressures of social media. But this is being defensive. Not cool. So, consider my application withdrawn.

 

But did you enjoy reading it? Would you like to learn to write like this? We have our annual internship programme coming up. It is for a month and we pay Rs 30,000.