So, Zomato was in the news last week. 

Across news outlets, the headlines were remarkably similar.

This wasn’t the first time Zomato lost one of its co-founders.

The same thing happened last year, in September. 

And, well, have a look at the headlines again.

But if you thought this was the first time that Zomato lost one of its co-founders, you’d be wrong. 

For that, you’d have to go back another three years—to March 2018.

At this point, you’re probably wondering if the reason why Zomato’s co-founders are leaving has something to do with the financial health of the company. Or something to do with a vesting schedule. Or maybe it's something more salacious, like its work culture or a bitter personality conflict.

So you’re hoping that I’ll explain it all in today’s edition, connecting the dots, weaving a story, across Zomato’s past, present, and future. You’re likely expecting a breakdown with hand-drawn charts and diagrams, focusing on the futile economics of food-delivery.

Nope. Not today. 

In fact, today’s edition isn’t about Zomato at all.  

The reason I won’t be doing that is because you’re missing something really important. 

Zomato lost three co-founders. 

And only one of them was actually a co-founder.

Let’s dive in.

Today’s edition isn’t about Zomato, but it’s our starting point. 

Of the three “co-founders” who left Zomato, only Pankaj Chaddah, who left in 2018 can be described as an actual co-founder—at least in the way that most of us understand the term. Gaurav Gupta and Mohit Gupta were both “elevated” as co-founders in 2019 and 2021 respectively, nearly a decade after Zomato was officially founded. And within two years of their tenures, they were gone.

Sometime in the future, as Zomato churns through its current co-founders, it’ll be replaced by other co-founders. And the rest of us will watch this startup version of the Ship of Theseus play out and write long newsletters about whether Zomato is still Zomato.

However, like I said, this isn’t about Zomato. 

And that’s because they aren’t the only company that’s suddenly transformed executives to co-founders. 

The list is much longer than you’d expect. Here are some of the big names on it: Swiggy. Rebel Foods. Homelane. Housejoy. Dailyhunt. Medlife. Licious. Practo. Ezetap. 

So why is this happening?

And more interestingly, just because you make someone a co-founder, do they actually become a co-founder? 

Honestly, if you ask me, this is very black and white. Either you are a co-founder. Or you aren’t. That term has a specific meaning with a clear definition. You can’t suddenly “make” someone into a co-founder anymore than you can make a cat into a watermelon. It’s not the same thing at all. 

Now, one argument I’ve heard from some people is that the term is not to be taken literally, but figuratively. Sure, maybe these “co-founders” didn’t actually sit together and “create” the company from nothing by signing a document or opening a current bank account. But so what? They worked as hard as any of them and “created” the company. They did what a co-founder would have done. They sacrificed as much as a co-founder would. 

Of course, this is like saying that if your cat is green and just lies around doing nothing all day in your refrigerator, well, maybe it could be a watermelon. 

But actually, if you really examine it, these people may have a point. 

Take as an example, the story of Deep Kalra and MakeMyTrip. 

MakeMyTrip, which is an online travel booking website, was founded in 2000—much earlier than we’d expect. According to a story I found online, here’s an account of its early days.

Then, there’s the online health platform Medlife. 

In 2020, a full five years after it was founded, it appointed Ananth Narayanan as the company’s CEO and co-founder. It even put him on the board of directors. At this time, Medlife was present in 4,000 cities and had a revenue run-rate of Rs 1,000 crore annually. When Narayanan joined the company, he even invested an undisclosed amount into it. In just over a year, he successfully merged the company with Pharmeasy, making the combined entity the largest e-health company in India. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who achieved more in as little time as he did. 

Am I going to argue that Ananth Narayanan technically wasn’t the co-founder of Medlife? 

Of course I am.

The other argument I’ve heard is that being a co-founder isn’t a designation. It’s a mindset. And when companies notice executives who have that mindset, what’s wrong with recognising them for it? It’s the ultimate form of reward. You may not have started the company, but you embody the co-founder mindset, and that makes you a co-founder. 

This is all very good, but there’s one interesting complication. 

Yesterday, I googled the phrase ‘elevated to co-founder’. 

There are close to 14,000 search results. 

I didn’t go through all of them, but I clicked through the first dozen pages, skimming through the instances of companies that had rewarded executives with the co-founder title over the years, ostensibly because they displayed the co-founder mindset.  

And one, inescapable fact stood out. 

I couldn’t find a single company in Silicon Valley that had done this. 

Not one startup. Not a mid-sized company. Nothing. 

Not one instance of rewarding executives with a co-founder title. 

As far as I can tell, this unique, incredible phenomenon happens in exactly one country. 

India. 

Maybe executives all over the world are slackers, and only Indian leaders truly demonstrate a co-founder mindset. Or maybe, every other company globally refuses to recognise the co-founder mindset of their high-performing executives, who’ve spent decades and decades building the firm. Maybe people like Tim Cook, Sheryl Sandberg and Sundar Pichai go to bed at night dreaming of the day they’ll become co-founders of Apple, Meta and Google.

Or maybe, companies in India reward executives by making them co-founders, because successful co-founders matter more to the rest of us than successful executives.

If we look around, there’s some evidence for this. Most people reading this newsletter can tell you who the founders of Flipkart were, but not its current CEO. Go through the list of India’s most valuable unicorns, and see if you can name at least one member from its C-suite, outside the CEO and co-founder. Six of the seven people on the panel of Shark Tank India are founders. On the other hand, go to the Shark Tank US website, and everyone there is described as people who created wealth for themselves. The word “founder” doesn’t appear once in any of their official bios, even though they created companies from scratch to make that money.

Faced with this temptation, you can see why Indian companies and startups throw the co-founder tag to executives, either for reward, recognition, or retention. It’s because it’s something worth fighting for. In India, being a co-founder is the ultimate currency of success and status, because that’s what we accept. 

To its credit, there are Indian companies that have chosen not to play this game. For instance, take Paytm*, one of the few prominent companies that’s been created and led by one founder—Vijay Sekhar Sharma. 

Paytm has always had exactly one founder, because it had been founded by exactly one person. Paytm has created several businesses, and it has rewarded its executives by elevating them to positions that mean something, like “Managing Director and CEO”.  You don’t need to throw a co-founder title if you want to recognise and reward a founder mindset.

In the West, the context of a “co-founder” assumes significance mostly for historical accuracy. The most famous example of this battle is, of course, Facebook, where Mark Zuckerberg was taken to court to set the record straight by co-founders of the company.

There’s a more extreme instance of this which isn’t as famous, but is worth sharing here simply because it involves someone who’s been in the news extensively.