Twice at the brink, now at the top: Albinder Dhindsa’s astronomical rise at Eternal

Twice at the brink, now at the top: Albinder Dhindsa’s unlikely rise at Eternal

“A large part of Blinkit’s turnaround in recent months is certainly because of Deepinder’s operating muscle. He’s an execution machine and knows how to get stuff done the right way,” a senior executive who has worked closely with Blinkit chief Albinder Dhindsa told Moneycontrol early last year.

The executive paused before adding a caveat that, in many ways, summed up how the industry had long viewed Blinkit’s leadership equation. Dhindsa, he added, was “a solid guy”, but the contrast was hard to ignore. Why hadn’t the same results shown up during the Grofers years? And how had Blinkit suddenly begun firing on all cylinders?

Versions of that assessment, sometimes kinder and sometimes sharper, have circulated quietly across the startup ecosystem. For years, many industry stakeholders believed that Eternal founder Deepinder Goyal was the brain and the engine, the operator who stepped in when things needed fixing, while Dhindsa played a more muted, secondary role, particularly after Blinkit was acquired by Zomato.

On January 21, Eternal’s board decisively upended that long-held perception.

In a move that closes one chapter of India’s consumer internet story and opens another, Goyal stepped aside as Group CEO, naming Dhindsa as his successor. For a founder who was asked to step down, twice, in three years, after the Blinkit acquisition, the appointment is less a sudden elevation and more the culmination of a decade-long test of endurance, execution and relevance inside one of India’s most unforgiving businesses.

A relationship forged long before startups

The Dhindsa–Goyal story predates venture capital, valuations and quick commerce.

As chronicled in Unseen: The Untold Story of Deepinder Goyal and the Making of Zomato, the two first met as teenagers at a National Talent Search Examination (NTSE) camp in Chandigarh in the late 1990s. Dhindsa, from Patiala, and Goyal, from Muktsar, were among high-performing students suddenly stripped of hometown validation and thrown into a fiercely competitive environment.

From school mates to studying at the prestigious IIT Delhi, the duo had endured one tough lesson: progress would be incremental, and nothing would be guaranteed.

That shared grounding - competitive, bruising and formative - shaped a relationship built less on hierarchy and more on mutual testing under pressure, a dynamic that would resurface repeatedly in their professional lives.

The familiarity ran deeper than friendship alone. Dhindsa’s wife, Akriti Chopra, was among Zomato’s early co-founders, part of the core team during the company’s formative years. As a result, Dhindsa’s association with Zomato, and with Goyal, was never episodic or transactional, but rooted in shared institutional memory of building the company from scratch.

Those overlapping personal and professional ties meant that even as Dhindsa went on to chart his own path, the trust between the two founders was tested, strained and recalibrated, but never absent.

Different instincts, early on

Dhindsa’s professional path diverged early from the archetypal consumer-internet founder.

After IIT Delhi, he worked as a transportation analyst at URS Corporation and later as a senior associate at Cambridge Systematics, focusing on infrastructure planning, logistics modelling and network optimisation. He went on to earn an MBA from Columbia Business School, with a brief stint at UBS Investment Bank in New York, as per his LinkedIn profile.

The pattern was clear: Dhindsa gravitated toward systems, cost structures and execution, not visibility or evangelism.

In December 2011, he joined Zomato as head of international operations, working closely with Goyal during the company’s aggressive global expansion phase. By May 2014, he left to build Grofers.

Grofers and the long, uneven build

Grofers was never a linear success story.

Founded as a hyperlocal delivery platform, it cycled through multiple models — neighbourhood pick-ups, marketplace grocery, inventory-led commerce — often ahead of consumer adoption and ecosystem readiness. For much of its early life, Grofers struggled to find sustained product-market fit and viable unit economics.

Dhindsa raised capital, pivoted repeatedly and stayed largely out of the spotlight. Compared with peers, Grofers often looked perennially stuck.

The pandemic, and what followed, changed the trajectory.

Blinkit, Zomato — and the “Z factor”

In 2021, Grofers rebranded as Blinkit and made an aggressive bet on dark stores and ultra-fast delivery. Zomato soon followed with a stake purchase and then a full acquisition.

After Zomato bought a 10 percent stake in Blinkit in March 2022, Deepinder Goyal spent the next several months closely examining the company’s inner workings to assess whether it could realistically be turned around.

“Only after spending nearly six months diving deep into Blinkit’s operations did he get convinced that the business could be fixed. That’s when Zomato decided to go ahead with the acquisition,” an industry executive had told Moneycontrol earlier.

From being acquired for just $568 million in 2022 to now being worth a significant portion of Eternal’s $30 billion empire, Blinkit, being quick commerce’s market leader, is on a tear.

Executives familiar with the process say Goyal’s reputation for fast decision-making and aggressive cost control — already visible in Zomato’s own turnaround and run of profitability — shaped Blinkit’s operating reset. Zomato’s capital, data stack and the backing of Hyperpure, its wholesale arm, strengthened Blinkit’s inventory backbone at a critical juncture.

The perception hardened: Blinkit was improving, but many believed Zomato, and Goyal, were the decisive force.

The reckoning inside Blinkit

That belief was not confined to the outside.

In a recent podcast with Raj Shamani, Goyal said he had asked Dhindsa to step down as Blinkit CEO twice after the acquisition. The period, he said, marked “rock bottom”, and he doubted whether Dhindsa could operate within Zomato’s structure at the pace required.

Dhindsa agreed, according to Goyal, but did not leave. Instead, he stayed on and rebuilt.

The turnaround that changed the conversation

Over the next two years, Blinkit’s performance shifted materially.

The company tightened dark-store economics, improved inventory predictability, reduced stock-outs and built repeatable city-level density. By 2024, Blinkit had emerged as Eternal’s fastest-growing vertical and a central pillar of its investor narrative.

This was not a cosmetic turnaround. It required relentless execution across supply-chain design, operating cadence and cost discipline — areas Dhindsa had spent his career working in.

In his letter to shareholders announcing the leadership change, Goyal acknowledged this explicitly. Blinkit’s journey from acquisition to breakeven, he wrote, happened under Dhindsa’s leadership, crediting him with building the team, culture, supply chain and operating rhythm.

“He has the DNA of a battle-hardened founder and his ability to execute far exceeds mine,” Goyal said.

Blinkit at the centre of Eternal’s future

Well before the leadership transition, Goyal had publicly framed Blinkit as central to Eternal’s next phase.

Speaking at Startup Mahakumbh in March 2024, he described quick commerce as part of what he called “Zomato version 4”.

“Blinkit is a part of Zomato version 4, and in one year’s time, Blinkit would be bigger than Zomato. So, I don’t know for how long Zomato will have its relevance,” Goyal said.

That prediction came true.

The remark also underscored why a leader steeped in execution — not just strategy — would become indispensable to the group’s future.

A parallel shift in focus

The transition also reflects how Goyal’s focus has broadened in recent years.

Even as he remains vice chairman of Eternal, Goyal has invested $25 million from his personal wealth to Continue, his longevity-focused initiative, invested in and is raising $50 million for Temple, his wearable technology startup, and taken an active role in LAT Aerospace. He has also led or participated in funding rounds in deep-tech and space startups such as Pixxel, Moneycontrol had exclusively reported earlier.

In his shareholder letter, Goyal acknowledged that running a public company demands singular focus and risk discipline — constraints that sit uneasily with his appetite for experimentation.

Why Dhindsa, despite everything

Eternal today is no longer a single-product company. It is a public-market institution balancing mature cash flows with capital-intensive growth bets. The next phase is less about ideation and more about execution under scrutiny.

Dhindsa’s rise, then, is not accidental.

He was underestimated — by the market, by peers, and at one point, by the founder who would later appoint him Group CEO. He ran a company that looked stuck until the ecosystem caught up. He stayed through an acquisition that nearly ended his leadership role.

And then, he showed his execution chops.

In stepping into Eternal’s top job in a matter of a few days, Albinder Dhindsa is not replacing Deepinder Goyal so much as completing a cycle that began decades ago in a classroom in Chandigarh — two students navigating failure, pressure and ambition side by side.

The industry may still debate who the “brains” are. Eternal’s board has made its call on who runs the machine.