The journey of building companies, especially from their early stages to established organizations has always thrilled me. I enjoy people-facing roles, doing high-impact work, and believe in outcomes over output. During my 9 year tenure at Zomato, I was lucky to be given a chance to wear multiple hats across many domains of the organization - sales, ops, strategy, and finance. I consider these years of my time there as a “hands-on MBA” of sorts. At age 20 when I was hired on campus, little did I imagine that I would spend my twenties there laying the founding blocks of who I am today - all while witnessing Zomato’s trajectory from startup to IPO. The first three years of my time there were all about the grind. How do you convince an Indian-Chinese food joint owner with a 400sft shop that advertising can help his business? (let alone buying digital ads on a platform that rhymes with “to-mah-toe”) or going from outlet to outlet distributing tent cards and convincing the staff that this collateral will help them get more customer reviews.“No pressure, no diamonds” they say. And rightly so. Looking back, I would go as far as to say that if it wasn’t for these years, I would not have been given the opportunities in the times to come.Subsequently, my stint in Doha, Qatar - I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. Almost 85% of the population in Doha is expat - from Southeast Asia, Europe, America, Australia, Kenya, Lebanon, Iran, and Egypt - to name a few. Being in a client-facing role in a country with such a cosmopolitan demographic is a dream come true for anyone keen to get some international work experience. Every culture does business differently. My biggest learning here was how to work with (and sell to) people from all over the world. Following this, moving to the HQ back in India - working closely with CXOs and being exposed to their working styles, decision-making frameworks, and mental models accelerated my personal growth by 10x. Over those 4.5 years, I got 360-degree exposure to all of Zomato’s key stakeholders - customers, restaurant partners, delivery partners, third-party providers, and even potential job applicants. Here I learned customer-first thinking, learning how to learn, aligning business decisions to company objectives, building 0-1 businesses, failing forward, detachment to outcomes, and much more. It has been a ride of a lifetime so far. And now, I’m excited to build the India business at India Index.