| Tuesday, 06 January 2026 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
There have been enough hot takes on Eternal co-founder and chief executive Deepinder Goyal’s statements on delivery workers’ New Year’s Eve protest. I don’t have yet another clever takedown of his remarks. Sorry!
I’m instead interested in something that has been playing out for much longer.
We have, on multiple occasions, written about how Eternal (formerly Zomato) struck at the heart of how a publicly listed company is expected to communicate with its shareholders.
The internet company was bold enough to ditch the boring quarterly earnings deck in favour of a conversational, mostly jargon-free shareholder letter.
Since Eternal, formerly Zomato, popularised the practice of addressing investors every quarter—instead of a soporific note in the annual report—in 2021 in India, most tech companies have lapped it up with the fervour of a born-again Christian.
Delhivery, Ola Electric Mobility, Swiggy, Urban Company, and Groww all publish shareholder letters. There are exceptions, though, including Nykaa and Ather Energy, which stick to the more traditional slide deck. Paytm* publishes a commentary-heavy earnings release in addition to the presentation.
Any venture capital-funded company that goes public now and eschews the shareholder missive will undoubtedly stick out like a sore thumb.
The welcome plainspeak of shareholder letters, The Ken
Eternal even said no to the customary earnings call when it went public in 2021, but it had to give in to analysts’ demands within a year.
Just as radical as the shareholder letter and the short-lived decision not to have an analyst call is having a top executive who doesn’t pull his punches on X and Linkedin.
Until Eternal came along, most CEOs and owners of Indian listed companies had no interest in ruffling feathers on social media. The few prolific posters, such as Anand Mahindra, wrote about everything but their companies.
Goyal isn’t quite as unrestrained as Bhavish Aggarwal, but no one can accuse him of being dull.
This was evident in his response to a controversy over a Zomato customer-support agent telling someone in Tamil Nadu to learn Hindi when he sought a refund.
Eternal fired the agent, but Goyal wanted to have the last word on X.
An ignorant mistake by someone in a support centre of a food delivery company became a national issue. The level of tolerance and chill in our country needs to be way higher than it is nowadays. Who’s to be blamed here?
But last week, he was in the eye of the storm when he said help “from local law enforcement helped keep the small number of miscreants in check”, and that people “shouldn’t get swept up by narratives pushed by vested interests.”
He followed that up with a screed on the “guilt” and “moral discomfort” of the “consuming class”. His post quickly moved from philosophical musings to the practicalities of his business.
Ban gig work and you don’t solve inequality. You remove livelihoods. These jobs don’t magically reappear as formal, protected employment the next day. They disappear, or they get pushed back into the informal economy where there are even fewer protections and even less accountability. Over-regulate it until the model breaks, and you achieve the same outcome through paperwork instead of slogans: the work evaporates, prices rise, demand collapses, and the people we claim to protect are the first to lose income.
Not only was there a barrage of disagreements over his arguments, but X users were quick to point out that Goyal’s post had AI stamped all over it.
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