Buildit: The inside story of Blinkit's rise and India's quick-commerce boom

Albinder Singh Dhindsa's Buildit traces Blinkit's rise from a small startup to a quick-commerce giant, offering insights into entrepreneurship and India's digital economy

Buildit: Building Blinkit in an Evolving India

By Albinder Singh Dhindsa

Published by Harper Business

233 pages ₹599

 

It could be a coincidence that an autobiography by Albinder Singh Dhindsa, the person behind the 10-minute delivery phenomenon, Blinkit, was published within months of a biography on Deepinder Goyal, Zomato co-founder. Mr Dhindsa and Mr Goyal, friends from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in the early 2000s, make generous references to each other in their books, emphasising the proximity of their worlds. 

Buildit: Building Blinkit in an Evolving India narrates the founder’s journey at Grofers (later Blinkit), capturing the joys and pains of the start-up world. Saurabh Kumar (or SK), as a co-founder and friend, is present through the book, reflecting the importance of bonding in entrepreneurship. Rishi Arora, later elevated as a co-founder, adds to this narrative. Mr Goyal and Zomato remain at the centre of things, however. Mr Dhindsa worked at Zomato as head of international operations (2011-13) before starting his own business. In August 2022, Zomato completed its acquisition of Blinkit in a $568 million all-stock deal. Blinkit was deep in the red at that point. Two years later, in 2024, as a division of Zomato (Eternal), Blinkit was estimated to be valued upwards of $13 billion, making it more valuable than the parent company’s food delivery business. 

Though Buildit ends in 2024, the writer’s tryst with Zomato took a transformative turn after that. On February 1, 2026, Mr  Goyal stepped down as group chief executive officer (CEO) and managing director (MD) of Eternal (formerly Zomato). He transferred the group CEO position at Eternal to Mr Dhindsa, who was till then the Blinkit CEO. Now, the bet is truly on quick commerce — a concept that India cannot live without any more. 

This book comes out at a time when action in quick commerce is thick and fast. Zepto has filed its draft red herring prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Board of India for its initial public offering. This will be the first standalone quick commerce company to go public. After its confidential filing, media reports suggested Zepto was ahead of Instamart (Swiggy’s quick commerce company) in order volumes but behind Blinkit in scale and profitability. In another significant development, Tata Group’s BigBasket recently witnessed a shuffle at the top in the company’s effort to make a success of quick commerce. 

Buildit is a more personal account of entrepreneurship while going deep into the challenges of gig economy, fund raising, and policy lacunae.  Written simply and without jargon, this is a quick read, in sync with the quick delivery philosophy. 

Punjab to Delhi to Orlando to Gurgaon: Mr Dhindsa joins the dots from his childhood to entrepreneurship. After graduating from IIT, when he reached the United States in 2004 at age 22, the efficiency of the country impressed him. 

“On my second day in Orlando, the university’s support desk for foreign students had recommended that new students buy whatever they needed on Amazon.com,” he writes. That was his introduction to quick commerce. He was fascinated by this example of American enterprise. “Suddenly it felt like I had accessed a portal that empowered me to solve all my problems in life,” he recalls. 

Fast forward to 2011 and Mr Dhindsa was back in India exploring the startup scene with Mr Goyal. He joined Zomato for two years before moving on to found Grofers. 

Grofers’ start, mainly in the chemist/pharmacy area, was small with two delivery partners and the founders pitching in to deliver packages. Even as the business grew, there was uncertainty every day about how many employees would turn up. “As getting people to turn up for work got challenging, the phrase catching attention for this behaviour was— employee is absconding,” Mr Dhindsa writes. 

In a long chapter on the subject of labour, the writer points out that in 2014, the law of the land meant an unreliable workforce, deep distrust of small businesses, limited economic opportunity for unskilled workforce, insufficient investment in upskilling, social exclusion of manual jobs and archaic regulations. He then recounts the changes in the gig economy, which is especially relevant given the recent agitation by delivery workers and the government’s attention in this area through the Labour Codes. 

The book has many interesting anecdotes. For instance, while seeking strategic investors, Mr Dhindsa is in conversation with seniors in an unnamed conglomerate. “We had to build large scale infrastructure, invest in technology and scale well ahead of time and only then would we be able to amortise these costs as the scale of the business grew. This holds as true today as it did in 2014 and 2015. And as with Indian businesses in 2015, the ability and willingness of businesses to invest in future technology and growth still remains limited.’’ He explains this is because markets tend to punish any significant investment in loss-making ventures and that meant almost negligible investment levels from the top 50 listed companies in India in future businesses except where it was their primary business. 

On the core theme of quick commerce, the author remembers Mr Goyal saying, “speed is the dopamine that this business needs”. From Mr Dhindsa becoming a customer ordering cookies while making coffee and getting it just in time to describing his mother’s experience with the platform, the route to Blinkit’s stardom is redolent with personal notes. With Blinkit turning profitable for the first time in March 2024, a new era of quick commerce has begun.