Bloomberg Television Sep 17, 2026 24m 13m saved
With Deepinder Goyal, founder of Eternal, the parent company of Zomato and Blinkit
Deepinder Goyal put $2.5 million into LAT Aerospace, a startup that would build eight-seat short-takeoff planes and fly them from neighborhood air stops rather than airports. He gives it a 0.1% chance of working.
That is an unusual number for a founder to say out loud, and it sits oddly beside the business he actually built. Goyal turned a college directory of restaurant menus into Eternal, whose Blinkit unit made ten-minute grocery delivery ordinary in Indian cities, and then stepped away from the chief executive job to work on a brain-blood-flow sensor and an airline.
"So a hyper-dense flight network is just almost quick commerce principles applied to aviation. It's a very hard project. I have like 0.1% expectation that it will work."
Goyal started what became Zomato in 2005, quit Bain to run it when advertising revenue reached about $3,000 a month, bought Blinkit for close to $600 million against the market's objection, and is now one of India's youngest self-made billionaires. Bloomberg's Latitude filmed him at his home in Delhi.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 24 minutes of audio, 11 minutes of reading.
Here are the 13 arguments that matter.
Key Takeaways
Blinkit is the only profitable quick-commerce company in India, Goyal said, because the models underneath differ
The Blinkit acquisition was defensive — he said Zomato would have died in three years without it
Delivery speed comes from store density, not riders driving fast, which is his answer on rider safety
The ten-minute promise is gone as advertising, not as a capability
Almost 800 APIs sit between Eternal's apps and any AI agent that wants to order for you
He calls AI disruption "a possible myth" and says the company works best under threat
He put $25 million of his own money into Temple, a wearable that tracks cerebral blood flow
1. A College Project
Goyal's first attempt was putting restaurant menus online for himself and his classmates in 2005. It failed, he joined Bain, and he concluded the problem was that he had made it too complicated. He went full-time only once restaurants started calling to buy advertising.
"I started Zomato as a college project. I had no idea what business meant." — Deepinder Goyal
"It failed miserably. It was back in 2005. Just way too early for any such thing." — Deepinder Goyal
"So we started making some money. A little bit like, let's say $3,000 a month. And that was more than what I was getting paid." — Deepinder Goyal
Asked about coming close to running out of money more than once, he was unsentimental about it. His parents were teachers, he had no family business behind him and no mentor.
"So I started off as broke. So it wasn't so bad." — Deepinder Goyal
2. Buying Blinkit
Eternal acquired Uber Eats India and then bought Blinkit for close to $600 million, a deal analysts called premature and the market punished. Goyal described it as defense rather than expansion: whoever owned fast grocery delivery would find it easy to move into food, and food was his business.
"How I thought of it is that if we don't do this, we are going to die." — Deepinder Goyal
"So we were sort of defending Zomato when we bought Blinkit." — Deepinder Goyal
"So what? I mean, we had to do what we had to do, right? I mean, either we faced this right now or we face an inevitable death three years from now." — Deepinder Goyal
3. The Only Profitable One
The interviewer noted that quick commerce was widely treated as a money pit and now draws heavy competition. Goyal's claim is that the category name hides the differences, and that the companies named alongside his are running different businesses under the surface.
"So quick commerce is not the same everywhere. Okay, so every single company has a different strategy, although on the face of it it might look like they're doing the same thing." — Deepinder Goyal
"The quick commerce models under the hood are actually different. So Blinkit is the only company which is actually profitable." — Deepinder Goyal
"Indians love speed." — Deepinder Goyal
4. Riders and Speed
Riders have died, protests have followed, and the government has intervened. Asked about the tension between speed and rider safety, Goyal did not dispute the problem and said a new solution always creates new problems. He rejected the specific charge that the company's software pushes riders to hurry, on the grounds that riders are never shown the customer's promised time, and argued that a flat hourly fee would not change the behavior either.
"And every solution to an existing problem leads to new kind of problems. It's always been the case." — Deepinder Goyal
"I mean, I don't think that our algorithms push anybody for speed, because we don't even give a timer to our riders that this is the amount of time or this is the time we promised to the user." — Deepinder Goyal
"And some of these problems, I think, are not even solvable." — Deepinder Goyal
His example of an unsolvable one was traffic behavior and who gets noticed breaking the rules.
"I mean, for example, in India, everybody breaks traffic rules, okay." — Deepinder Goyal
"And, our riders wear a uniform, so therefore you can easily spot them breaking traffic rules." — Deepinder Goyal
5. The Ten-Minute Promise
Blinkit has dropped the ten-minute promise. Goyal said the promise was advertising and the speed is architecture: stores are placed a kilometer or so from the customer, which is where the time saving comes from.
"Yes, but see, the speed of delivery doesn't come from anybody driving fast." — Deepinder Goyal
"So the speed comes from the density of the stores, and every store is up to a kilometre away from you, kilometre and a half away from where you are right now." — Deepinder Goyal
"Ultra fast deliveries are here to stay, but I think the ten minute delivery advertising promise sort of goes away and we just do what we can, right?" — Deepinder Goyal
"I mean, pushing people to do something faster is a bad business, right?" — Deepinder Goyal
6. The AI Threat
A February 2026 report from a little-known research firm named food delivery as a target for AI agents, and Indian technology stocks including Eternal's fell the day after it came out. The shares took months to recover. Goyal's defense is integration cost and interface limits.
"We have physical infrastructure and we've got so many things, there are almost 800 APIs to be hooked on to the app, to be able to pull that off, and the amount of work that it takes for those AI companies to integrate with us is going to be a lot of work." — Deepinder Goyal
"And a chat interface really can't do everything that a dedicated app can do. Not yet." — Deepinder Goyal
"I think AI's disruption is a possible myth for us, and we function the best when there's a threat." — Deepinder Goyal
He added that Eternal can build conversational interfaces of its own and tune them to its own use cases better than an outside company could.
7. Brands, Not a Super App
The second part of his answer on AI was about which name comes to mind when a customer wants something. Goyal said that is why Eternal deliberately does not operate a super app, keeping Zomato for food, Blinkit for groceries and general merchandise, and District for something else.
"Not brand loyalty. Recall, brand recall." — Deepinder Goyal
"Because, like, Zomato is food ordering, Blinkit is grocery and e-commerce, and District is something else." — Deepinder Goyal
"So that's a deliberate strategy that we follow to make sure that use case to brand recall stays like super close to each other." — Deepinder Goyal
8. Stepping Back as CEO
Goyal left the chief executive role and described it as a test of the company rather than a departure. The group was renamed Eternal two years ago, and he said a company with that name cannot depend on one person.
"And, for our company to become that, it has to grow beyond one single person." — Deepinder Goyal
"So it's sort of an experiment for us as an organization as well, that, can this organization sustain and grow even when I'm not there day-to-day?" — Deepinder Goyal
Asked how the experiment is going, he said: so far, so good.
9. Temple and Blood Flow
Goyal launched Temple early in 2026 with $25 million of his own money. The device is worn on the temple and measures blood flow to the brain, which he suspected is involved in aging. While wearing prototypes the team noticed a second signal that rose with stress, food and exercise and fell with sleep, meditation and cold showers. That signal turned out to be metabolic rate.
"I actually started Temple as an exploratory science project for something I had an insight on. So it started off as a personal project." — Deepinder Goyal
"And Temple was an experimental device, which we built to track cerebral blood flow in real time, and we ended up doing it." — Deepinder Goyal
"The other things, the entropy that we measure, which is the metabolic rate per second, is the main point of Temple." — Deepinder Goyal
Pressed on what distinguishes it from existing wearables, he argued that heart rate misleads people about their own training, because heart rate can rise for reasons that have nothing to do with aerobic capacity.
"So heart rate is a bad proxy for your VO2 max." — Deepinder Goyal
On regulation he was precise about where the product stands and where it is going.
"It's not a medical device yet." — Deepinder Goyal
"So we will launch it as a wellness device with peer reviewed studies and everything." — Deepinder Goyal
10. The Longevity Question
The interviewer asked why wealthy people are so occupied with longevity, naming Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson, and put it to Goyal that the pursuit is a display of access others do not have. He disagreed, and made the causation run the other way.
"I think all of these people are people for whom wealth was actually a side effect of what they were doing, and they loved doing what they were doing. Wealth is not the point." — Deepinder Goyal
"I don't think it's a flex per se." — Deepinder Goyal
11. LAT Aerospace
The airline project is aimed at two things: cities too dense to move through, and rural areas that stay poor because executives will not travel to them to build factories. His proposed answer is eight-seat short-takeoff aircraft flying between neighborhood air stops, so a 300-kilometer trip to Chandigarh or Lucknow stops being a six-hour door-to-door journey.
"LAT Aerospace is again a personal project slash passion." — Deepinder Goyal
"The disconnectedness due to the infrastructure that we have/don't have is what I'm trying to solve for." — Deepinder Goyal
"So a hyper-dense flight network is just almost quick commerce principles applied to aviation. It's a very hard project. I have like 0.1% expectation that it will work." — Deepinder Goyal
He was specific about why the odds are that bad. Engineering is hard; regulation, real estate and the need to build the whole airline, planes and radar included, are harder.
"But then the regulations, and then finding real estate, and then it's a full stack airline, right?" — Deepinder Goyal
12. Business Over Charity
Asked what he wants to do with his wealth, Goyal said he gives a lot away and does not believe giving solves anything structural. His argument is that money put into businesses creates jobs at scale, and that connecting villages to cities is how wealth actually moves.
"Philanthropy is something that we do quite a lot, but I don't think that that is the way to solve societal problems at all." — Deepinder Goyal
"I think business is the answer to all problems." — Deepinder Goyal
13. Never Good Enough
The last stretch was personal. Told that he is an inspiration to a country of 1.5 billion people and asked whether he feels vindicated, Goyal said no, and pointed at Temple as work he has no background in and may not be able to finish.
"So I'm like learning from zero. I sometimes ask myself that, can I actually pull this off? Am I actually capable enough to do this?" — Deepinder Goyal
"And there's always that lingering self-doubt which just keeps me on my toes." — Deepinder Goyal
"It's still not enough. And I know that I am going to die not knowing whether I've done the job. So I'm at peace with that." — Deepinder Goyal
Bonus Insights
Goyal said founders and their companies grow together, and that when a company outgrows its founder the founder has to leave, while a founder who grows faster has to pull the company along
He does not hold town halls. He said he stammers and feels nervous speaking in public, and has built the organization around a stated purpose so that it does not need a person at the front: "they're not following a person. They are working towards a cause"
There is a hyperbaric chamber at his house, which he described without ceremony: "I just use it to freshen up when I'm having a bad day."
He connected his two obsessions through table tennis, saying ping pong is about flow and Temple is about the flow of blood to the brain
On legacy he was blunt: "I don't know or care about leaving a legacy. I just want to do great work." He said he would be satisfied if the companies outlast him even if nobody remembers who built them
Goyal's bottom line is that the businesses worth building are the ones that create economic activity rather than redistribute it, and that he expects to die without knowing whether he managed it.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Eternal (The renamed parent company; Goyal stepped back as chief executive to test whether it can run without him)
Zomato and Blinkit (Food ordering and quick commerce, deliberately kept as separate brands rather than folded into a super app)
Swiggy and Zepto (The competitors named by the interviewer; Goyal said their models differ under the surface and that Blinkit is the only profitable one)
Uber Eats (Its India business was acquired by Goyal's company on the way to the Blinkit deal)
Bain & Company (The job he left once advertising revenue passed his salary)
Temple (His $25 million wearable that tracks cerebral blood flow and metabolic rate; launching as a wellness device, not yet a medical one)
LAT Aerospace (Eight-seat short-takeoff aircraft and neighborhood air stops, funded with $2.5 million and given a 0.1% chance by its founder)
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