Entrepreneurs Wanted — Part 3
It’s a long note ( mostly because I can’t stop once I start — about 500 people in our company can vouch for that), but it’s a must-read if you are interested in working at Rebel Foods. This note outlines who we are and who we are looking for to join our ranks.
Over the years we wrote similar notes to get leaders on board. People who joined us as a result of those, today run this company. All our functions — food, ops, tech, marketing — are now run by the people who came on board subsequent to notes like this. Yup, we have a senior management, where everyone has been here for at least 7 years. That’s particularly telling for a 9 year old company. And then, another bunch of young rockstars joined us over the years, who manage our tech, cities, supply chain and brands. They are the true architects of probably the only scaled up (320+ cloud kitchen locations across India, South East Asia and Middle East) multi-brand (12 brands / virtual restaurants) Food on Internet company in the world. They are the true founders of our growing little company, while Kallol (my cofounder) and I focus more and more on intangible stuff like writing notes like this. As a couple of lazy Bengalis it comes naturally to us.
Before going into who we are looking for to fuel our next stage of growth, I wanted to take a few minutes to describe our company — as many of you may not know what brewed at Rebel, behind the scenes in the last few years.
We believe, at Rebel, we are probably attacking the last frontier of consumer internet — Food Service. Not food delivery, but actually running F&B businesses. If you think about it, in almost all consumer service sectors, world’s most valuable companies are Internet companies: Retail: Amazon, Travel: Priceline, Commute: Uber, Hospitality: Airbnb ( probably just shy of Marriott at 35 BN USD), Home entertainment: Netflix, Food / grocery Delivery: Meituan. However, the only consumer sector, where the world’s top 500 most valuable companies are still the offline giants, is Food Service. McDonalds alone is worth USD 160 BN. We believe, in the next decade or so, this will change. F&B behemoths shall be built on the cloud — making delicious food optimized for delivery at your doorstep, operating at a fundamentally altered economic structure.
Now, people may say, if this revolution happens, it will happen first in the US ( or China). Who are we to build something original out of India? However, I think India is the perfect market for this particular disruption. India is different, and one way it is different from China /US is the Food Service market is 95% unorganized (100 BN+ market growing at 15–20% CAGR). In spite of the fact that there are several categories that are worth USD 10 BN+, such as Indian Meals, Biryani, Chinese, Desserts etc , there are very few organized, national level play in India beyond pizzas and burgers.
The primary reason for this is very poor infrastructural supply for food outlets. There are very few high street locations that make sense for an offline food play from an infra point of view and hence everyone is going after the same spots, making rent / sales ratio unsustainable for most businesses (highest in the world). 65% + restaurant businesses close in India in year 1 because of this economic issue as a result of scarcity of good
locations.
This is what we are solving for. Building multiple restaurant brands in largest categories on the internet, using our kitchens, a pan-India supply chain and a home-grown end-to-end technology developed solely for managing this unique business — from inventory to customer experience. On top of this, we have built a significant level of robotics led automation in our kitchens — we fondly call this team of chefs, robotics engineers, industrial designers and software developers TRANSFORMERS, because they have fundamentally altered the way fresh cooking is done in a kitchen. We are not dependent on high street costly locations. We can operate from our designed-for-delivery cloud kitchens with a totally altered cost structure of running an F&B business. Remember mobile leapfrogging expansion of landline telephony in India?
The last 36 months have been transformative for us, as we have scaled up brand after brand from the same network of kitchens and supply chain and in the process discovered how powerful and disruptive this can be. And now the stage is set for us to spread our wings and build a national and global F&B business — purely on the internet.
Sorry for the long preamble. Now coming to the main point of this note, we are now looking for the next set of “entrepreneurs” to join us and solve problems that relate to a much larger scale than today — spreading to every corner of India, putting 1000 locations across the country, opening new markets internationally, launching new brands and use cases, building world class tech solutions (for example, a personal virtual butler). You will be part of our LeadR program — a program built for creating our next set of leaders. You will go through the following program:
a. 3 months of training across functions including a one month kitchen stint.
b. A 24 month “Area CEO” role managing 5–10 Kitchens, 100–150 people, and an annual PNL of INR 25–75 Cr . You can think of this as a leadership development program at the frontline of national armed forces. It will be thoroughly immersive and life changing. This stint, we believe, will not only prepare you for a organizational leadership role at Rebel, but will also prepare you to become a CEO, a people leader, a motivator, an execution superstar, a coach and an entrepreneur. Because, in this role you will have to acquire and demonstrate all the above skills to deliver superlative performance.
c. Post this stint, you will take up a larger role within Operations, Marketing, Brand Management, Product Management, supply chain functions of the company. This may be anything from starting a new market / country to starting / building a fledgling brand to building a consumer facing channel. All roles will be primarily around building and delivering a PNL in its entirety.
However, a note of caution. The core of our company has been built through a solid display of Entrepreneurship by our employees — from our kitchen managers to city heads to product managers, engineers, brand managers, the execomm. As a result, we have become a rather “abnormal” company ( this is what we are most proud of — no one can say we have built a run of the mill enterprise, for good or for bad). And hence, it is not for everyone, especially not for people looking for a steady, well-paying ( ok, we pay fairly well in addition to a healthy chunk of stock, just in case you are shutting this note down), mildly political, blame-shifting, bell-curvy, five-boring-days-a-week job. Here is a snapshot of what our company looks like from inside. Please go through it, if you are seriously considering us as your next destination.
So, if you are “hungry for action” type, entrepreneurial, mildly crazy (not schizophrenic, if you don’t mind), 20 something and always looking for good food, then do get back to Isha ( Isha@rebelfoods.com ) . We prefer (only prefer) post graduate / MBAs from Tier I B School/ Premier Colleges, not because they are some life changing education, but because, if you have already done it, then chances are you are done with your studies and the life is now real for you (and we don’t have to subsidize your GMAT / CAT / GRE). We also prefer 1 / 2 years of experience post education, not because experience is important to succeed here, but because, if you have worked for a “corporate” type company after your studies — either selling soda/soap/sim card or making slides for a mildly disinterested client — then you know for sure how mind-numbing these things are. That’s the clarity we look for.
One last thing — No CVs, no videos, no bulky attachment please, when you write to us. The email should cover a) who you are as a person and what experiences made you so, b) why you want to come to this “abnormal” company (preferably including your hidden agendas — because they are usually the real ones) and c) one thing that you have discovered in life yourself, using first principle. You can send the writeup to Isha@rebelfoods.com.
Jaydeep
(CEO and CoFounder, Rebel Foods)
Pls note: to qualify for the interview process write up is a must.
