My 3 cents on the Zepto story as a founder
Tldr; Fully support it.
I have 3 points
- I am a founder here. And one of the major yardsticks you make decisions as a founder is based on how successful startups similar to you did.
Self-righteous folks on Twitter and Grapevine won't admit it, but the truth is some of the biggest companies in the world prioritised Growth over Work Life Balance and ig, they did FINE.. by work life balance yardstick, the likes of Zomato, Uber, Amazon won't be the huge giants they are today..
Simple - Zepto is following the proven pathway of success.
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More so, they are open about it. Aadit literally mentions everytime that they are choosing growth over Work Life Balance and the folks who chose them should do the same. Otherwise, there are 1000s of "healthy startups" to work for. And the truth is people are doing the same.
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And finally, building an operations heavy company from scratch is insanely heavy task. And the moment you slow down, your entire existence can be wiped down by your huge competitors who have truckloads of cash.. If you are fighting such an underdog battle, speed is your biggest weapon.. Zepto is using it well, I would say..
The fact is there is no one way of building the company and the outcome you are chasing pretty much determines the path you take as a company. And sorry, you can't create a $5Bn company in 3 years with "work-life-balance"
ps: We are not chasing that outcome, and that's the reason we work at a slightly above usual hours (~50-60 hours per week). But I totally understand why Zepto's doing it and truth is, if you or I were building another Zepto, we would have done the same (until unless you wanna disappear in 4-5 years)
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I do not know truth about Zepto but many founders chasing growth as an excuse to have a bad office culture (Navi/Paytm), customer service (Ola), dark patterns and frauds (Byjus). Founders surround themselves with sycophants, chose the worst sustainable metrics, force needless perpetual firefighting and when things go south, layoff without cause.
Hypergrowth itself is a problem. Why should founders aim for an outcome of $5Bn company in 3-5yr in a hypercompetitive industry? What are they trying to solve? If the startups only alphas are VC money and trying to squeeze more out of employees than your competitors, then that is a race to the bottom.
Entrepreneurship is hard, very hard. And for many it is not even a choice. But one choice that founders have is scale.
Most founders are going for the largest scale (hypergrowth) needlessly. The most common reason for this is their ego. The problem arises when you make life hell for customers and employees because your choice (hypergrowth) has limited upside to them but let them face the brunt when things are bad.
Basic thing I feel is, those traits (not the wlb part) of these founders show their intrinsic cunning/fraudster nature. What comes out as outcome is the PayTm and Byju. Remember how they used to be lapped up as great success of Indians just some time ago, and what actually came out as reality. They work with the mindset of winning at all cost, and that’s what brings them their downfall.
Stupid post. I am less concerned about work-life-balance and more concerned about discipline and respecting everyone’s time. If you are not disciplined, if you don’t respect others time, then you don’t deserve any respect. Making money/profit is not a big thing, even thugs and ganglords make money, making money the right way is what is important.
As a founder, being a leader, one of the most basic trait should be respect for time and show some self-discipline. Your disrespect for others time just depicts your lack of respect for others. Your indiscipline and haphazard behaviour depicts your lack of seriousness about the work you do. Showing millions of profits etc., is one thing, being great in one’s field should come with some basic sense of discipline and respect for time.
If you are comparing startups who work longer hours to thugs, Sure you have won the argument. Enjoy :)
And I am pretty sure they are not looking for respect from everyone. You are free to not choose Zepto as your new work place if you value free time more..
I'm ok with working hard. But I'm not able to understand how these are ok- The founder not being able to get up till 2 pm, coming late to all meetings, not being able to retain any senior people, running the company with bhai bandhu only. And what's the need to glorify long hours? I've done 80-100 hour work weeks myself and they were not fun. Most of the time we were redoing things because our manager could not make up his mind. It's poor planning most of the time.
We want to move to a culture where we glorify the output and not the number of hours we slogged
how exactly is working odd hours help scale ? do enlighten, u think more hours per day leads to more scale, bs :)
accept it, its the inane inner insecurity that somehow doing things fast (read fast via pressuring people to do more per day) is a lead indicator of future success while clearly its the cost incentive and survivorship which drives this so like slaving :) and just bcoz their r people available to do that doesn't mean u become a company of zombies :)
checkout paul graham and brian chesky or netflix philosophy which prescribe mutual trust based share ownership as key to success where u ket people be as they r with broad goals set
Is it the same netflix that fired 1/3rd of its staff at once in 2002 in it's early days? And give me one example of a company , like literally, which has reached Zepto's scale in 3 years without sacrificing wlb.
And yes, if you are in P&G, you should understand that more people working for more hours WOULD help in scaling an operational business from scratch. The tech team had to scale to 15Mn users working with 5000+ items every day in 3 years so they had to put in overtime. They literally started new categories & scaled it in 6 months, so that category folks needed to put in overtime and so on.
If you come out of the righteous bubble, you'd understand
100% agree - this is being blown out of proportions.
Building anything meaningful is never easy - it’s a deliberate choice to be part of something fundamentally big. For startups taking on legacy industries, the challenge is immense, and speed is non-negotiable.
True alpha, whether it’s growth or monetary returns, requires intentional focus and prioritization - you can’t expect outsized outcomes with the same inputs as everyone else.
Zepto is playing the game it needs to win, and it seems to be working so far - nothing but mad respect for what the early team has managed to build (ya, I said early team and not just founders).
I don’t think anyone mentioned it here so I’ll do it.
If you want work done 16 hours a day then double your workforce as simple as that.
TBH no point discussing this with the founders here, all founders are blinded by “growth” and lost their humanity way back.
There are lots of companies that failed with bad WLB. Cherry picking success examples doesn’t make your point valid.
I hope employees in your company are doing ‘FINE’. Btw, do you pay overtime for the slight extra hours they put in?
There are 1000s of companies with excellent work culture that failed too, what's your point? I am saying, as a founder, they would go with probabilities and it's so clear as a day that going all in for growth even if it comes at a cost of working more hours is a bigger probability of success in an ops led business.
Thanks for the concern for our employees. I am pretty sure they are reasonable enough to balance their choices for themselves.
Another founder looking to treat employees as slave by taking undue advantage.
What advantage will employees get for going above and beyond for your startup ?
There is no employee protection laws in our country so you companies are getting away from these things.
If an employee has joined company for 8 hours paycheck they will work for that. If you want them to work more hours then pay for overtime.
Overtime ka pay Dena nai hai, thoda revenue down hote hi layoff kardenge aur inko employees chaiye that don't care about work life balance.
Amazon pays 80Lpa for sde2, that's why employees are there keeping up with over work. Doge aap bhi 80Lpa ?
The zeal to defend is extraordinary!
Fanboy or PR - which one is it?
I think it's alt account of adit or his PR. Just look at the comments of this guy trying his best to defend zepto and founders.