Welcome to our founder lessons series. This week we have an exclusive interview with Deepinder Goyal; Founder and CEO of Zomato.

Deepinder is a Mathematics and Computing graduate from IIT Delhi. After graduation, he joined Bain and Company, a management consulting firm.  Zomato was conceived when he was working at Bain.

Zomato is an online restaurant guide providing information on home delivery, dine-out, cafés and nightlife in cities of India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

Deepinder shares how the company started and lessons learned in the process and he encourages new entrepreneurs to focus, persevere and follow through their dreams.

—Brief Summary about Zomato

Zomato is a search destination for restaurants across eight markets in the world. We operate in 35 cities across 11 countries worldwide, with plans to expand even further in the near future.

Our main aim is to provide our users with an easier way to find places to eat, and we offer a number of filters to help users highly specialise and customise these searches, based on location, price, popularity and more.

This is available on our  Restaurants Search as well as our awesome mobile app. Users can write reviews and provide ratings for restaurants and we regularly host contests on social media platforms.

Currently, Zomato gets over 15 million visits across its web and mobile platforms every month. More than half of Zomato’s traffic is seen on its mobile apps. It is also seeing robust monetisation trend with 500 per cent growth in monthly billings as compared to a year ago.

The company has raised a total of around $55 million funding to date. Zomato recorded $2 million in revenue at the end of its first fiscal year ending March 31, 2013.

—How Zomato was started

The idea came about during my time at Bain and Company. I observed that my colleagues wasted a lot of time each day by queuing up in the cafeteria to look at the menus which they weren’t allowed to take back to their desks.

To save everyone time and bother, I decided to scan the menus and put them up online. There were soon a substantial number of hits on the site. I was joined in the venture by Pankaj Chaddah and we eventually realised that this was a viable business idea, launching it in 2008.

–How does Zomato earn money?

Restaurant advertising accounts for 100% of our regular revenue. We have other one time revenue streams: NYE ticketing and print guide sales. We have shut our events section as well as consulting services.

—What are the biggest challenges and lessons after launch and how did you solve them

The biggest challenge has been making our database of restaurants as exhaustible as possible. We currently cover 181,300 restaurants worldwide, and we want to add to this number.

The solution to this challenge lies in hiring the right people. Ethos, respect, attitude and skill, in that order, are the qualities we look for in the people we bring in, and all this goes toward putting a great team together.

All of our data is collected by personally visiting the restaurants, so having the right people with the right attitude makes a huge difference. The feedback system we have in place has also been an excellent tool for expanding our database.

We encourage our users to let us know if there’s a particular restaurant we may have missed out on, as well as any other suggestions they may have on how we can improve our product.

—What advice do you have for entrepreneurs chasing the startup dream

Focus, perseverance and follow through – these are the three main pointers I would give to anyone looking to get started. Never begin work on a product with the sole purpose of selling it.

Focus on creating something that is solid and that will help as many people as possible, and success will follow of its own accord. Go one at a time if you must, but most importantly, get things done.

If you were too busy to keep up on all the best posts for entrepreneurs you should have read this week, never mind; we have put together some of the most shared and popular business posts around the web you may have missed.

Popular around the web this week includes how Brett Kopf’s learning disabilities taught him to be a successful entrepreneur, Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO of Mashable also shares 5 ways he makes the most of his weekends and Bill Gates’ plan to improve the world and how he wants you to help.

You can stay updated with some of the best and most shared business posts around the web every week with our Postantly weekly postletter.

Postanly is a weekly selection of actionable business insights, growth strategies and success stories from founders and creative business leaders across the world.

Save time by focusing on your work whilst our editorial team select some of the best business resources for you every week.

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3. Here’s The Secret Behind The Multibillion Dollar Success Of The Startup That Made Clash Of Clans

Finnish gaming company Supercell is a $3 billion company largely in part to the success of its games Hay Day and Clash of Clans. Read more

4. Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

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5. An Entrepreneur Who Manufactures Entrepreneurs

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6. 5 Ways I Use Weekends To Be a Better CEO (Pete Cashmore, Founder and CEO, Mashable)

When I first started Mashable in 2005, I had no work-life balance. Weekdays blended into weekends blended into weekdays. Read more

7. Kopo Kopo: Building the “Square of Africa” amid terrorism, monopolists, and huge opportunity

I’m guessing when Dylan Higgins was a child and people asked what he was going to be when he grew up, he never said,..read more

8. What I’ve Learned as an Entrepreneur (and Didn’t Know as a Corporate Exec)

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9. How to Deal With the Psychological Toll of Starting Up

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10. Bill Gates: Here’s My Plan to Improve Our World — And How You Can Help

I have known since my early thirties that I was going to give my wealth back to society. The success of Microsoft provided me..read more

Quando pensi di avviare un’attività? Hai già avviato un’attività? Qual è la b età avanzata per diventare un imprenditore? Se pensi di essere troppo vecchio per avviare un’attività, ripensaci. L’età non dovrebbe essere solo un fattore quando stai pensando di avviare un’attività.

Altre responsabilità come la famiglia potrebbero essere un motivo per cui potresti voler aderire al tuo lavoro perché il rischio di iniziare qualcosa di nuovo senza una fonte di reddito affidabile sarà maggiore.

In ogni caso, se vuoi provarci, non pensare che sei troppo vecchio per essere un imprenditore . Puoi realizzare i tuoi sogni se hai deciso di farlo e fai quel passo calcolato oggi. In quanto giovani imprenditori possono correre molti più rischi, gli imprenditori più anziani iniziano con maggiore maturità e molta esperienza.

In una ricerca della Fondazione Ewing Marion Kauffman, l’età media e media dei fondatori della tecnologia nata negli Stati Uniti era di 39 anni quando fondarono le loro aziende. Il doppio aveva più di 50 anni e meno di venticinque. Un’altra ricerca trova anche che le persone sono più innovative e produttive verso la fine degli anni ’30.

L’età è solo uno dei fattori tra molti per predire il successo degli imprenditori , e chiunque a qualsiasi età può iniziare qualcosa di nuovo e avere un impatto se mette le proprie idee a esso.

Questi sono 19 tra i fondatori di tecnologia di maggior successo che hanno iniziato grandi aziende quando avevano più di 35 anni. La maggior parte di questi fondatori svolge ancora ruoli chiave nelle loro aziende.

1. Mark Pincus aveva 41 anni quando iniziò Zynga.

2. Reid Hoffman aveva 36 anni quando fondò Linkedin.

3. Mitchell Baker ha fondato Mozilla a 35+

4. Katie Rae, ha fondato TechStars Boston a 42

5. Reed Hastings ha iniziato a noleggiare Netflix quando aveva 37 anni 19459004]

6. Jimmy Wales compie 35 anni l’anno in cui ha fondato Wikipedia e 38 l’anno in cui ha fondato Wikia.

7. Marc Benioff aveva 35 anni quando ha iniziato Salesforce.

8. Linda Avey ha cofondato 23andMe a 46

9. Rashmi Sinha, ha fondato Slideshare a 37

10. Om Malik ha avviato GigaOm (la società nel 2006) all’età di 39.

11. Robert Noyce ha avviato Intel a 41 anni con un 39enne Gordon Moore.

12. Robin Chase ha fondato Zipcar quando aveva 42 anni.

13. Michael Arrington ha iniziato TechCrunch quando aveva 35 anni.

14. Tim Westergren ha iniziato Pandora a 35 anni .

15. Yaron Samid ha iniziato a @BillGuard a 36 anni.

16. Craig Newmark ha iniziato a craigslist quando aveva 42 anni.

17. Evan Williams di Twitter (età 35 nel 2007)

18. Arianna Huffington dell’Huffington Post (54 anni nel 2005)

19. Irwin Jacobs aveva 52 anni e Andrew Viterbi aveva 50 anni quando fondarono Qualcomm.

Questo post è stato ispirato da questa domanda di Quora : Cosa pensano di fare le persone nella Silicon Valley dopo aver colpito 35 e sono ufficialmente sopra la collina? ” [19459004 ]