CULTure at Zomato. How culture actually gets built.
Co-authored with Deepinder Goyal and Ashish Goel — an honest look at culture and leadership inside one of India's defining companies. Not the poster version. The version that holds, or doesn't, when a company is moving faster than anyone can fully control.
Culture, when it's load-bearing.
I spent over a decade inside Zomato — from content to Chief of Staff to the founder. CULTure at Zomato, written with Deepinder Goyal and Ashish Goel, comes out of that lived ground. It's a book about what culture is when it stops being a value painted on a wall and starts being the thing that decisions actually rest on.
Most writing about culture flattens it into slogans. This book sits with the harder questions underneath: how culture forms when nobody is consciously designing it, why it strains under hyper-growth, and what it takes to keep an organization coherent while it's scaling faster than its own structures. It draws on real decisions and real conviction rather than a tidy retrospective — the honest record of how a fast-moving company tried to stay itself.
The throughline is simple and uncomfortable: culture is either load-bearing or it's decoration, and you usually find out which under pressure. This is a book for people who'd rather understand that early than learn it the expensive way.
For people building culture while the company is still moving.
Founders and operators inside fast-scaling companies who want the unvarnished version, not the keynote. Leaders who sense their culture is straining under growth and want to understand the mechanics before it breaks. Anyone who has watched values written down stop meaning anything in practice — and wants to know why, and what to do differently.
If you're trying to build something that stays coherent while it grows, this is written from inside that exact problem.
Part of a larger field.
This book is one of three. Where Flatland is about seeing the dimension you've been missing and Systems of Grace is the inner work that makes the seeing possible, CULTure at Zomato is what all of it looks like inside a real, fast-moving company. Culture, clarity, and the system underneath — the same field I work in with founders, set down on the page.
"Culture is either load-bearing or it's decoration. You find out which under pressure."Naina Sahni
If the writing resonates and you'd rather do the work directly, that's what the coaching is for. I'm Naina Sahni — an executive coach to founders and CEOs at some of India's defining companies.
Beyond this book.
Where the same thinking shows up across the rest of the work.
All three books
Flatland, CULTure at Zomato, and Systems of Grace — what each is about and who it's for.
About Naina Sahni
Two decades inside hyper-growth and the credentials behind the work.
Ways to work
Coaching, transformation, and how to begin — including the free first session.