2026 seems to be the year when the spotlight is on Deepinder Goyal. His resignation as the CEO of Eternal shook the internet for a week. The next week, it was about calling back ex-Zomato employees to work for the company, and now, for the third week running, Deepinder Goyal continues to make headlines. He created another storm across the internet, asking former employees to connect via WhatsApp.
Deepinder Goyal, founder and vice chairman of Eternal, has asked former colleagues to reach out to him directly on WhatsApp after an unexpectedly massive response to the company’s alumni outreach programme.
In a post on X on Wednesday, Goyal said the company received more than 8,000 emails over the past week on back@eternal.com—an address created to invite former employees to return to the company’s expanding portfolio of businesses. The scale of the response, he indicated, has created an unusual bottleneck for the founder.
An inbox full of history
Goyal said roughly half the emails came from people who were once part of the Eternal-Zomato journey, while the rest were from people who had never worked at the company but wanted to.
“Over the last week, we received over 8,000 emails. About 4,000 people have been part of the Eternal journey at some point. Rest from people who haven’t worked here but want to. Thank you so much for this. I didn’t expect this at all,” he wrote.
“Most of these emails are stories and are full of emotions and honesty. There’s a lot of context and history in them,” he said.
Why Goyal says only he can respond
He noted that many of the people writing in were part of Eternal’s early chapters, and their stories span a decade or more. That creates a context gap between those who once worked at the company and the teams currently running it.
“There’s a lot of context and history in them. And a lot of our current team has no context on people who left five, ten, fifteen years ago,” he wrote. “Eternal is in its late teens right now. The only person who can truly read these emails and know who to respond to is me,” he said.
The scale problem
Even for a founder known for direct engagement, 8,000 emails is not manageable at speed. “And it is not humanly possible for me to read through 8,000 emails and pick and choose the right ones to respond to, quickly,” Goyal said. “We are still going through every single one. It will take time,” he wrote.
‘Find my number and WhatsApp me’
To cut through the backlog, Goyal asked former colleagues who worked directly with him and are awaiting a reply to bypass the email channel altogether. “But if you worked with me directly, and you wrote in, and you are waiting for a reply, here is what will work quickly: find my number and WhatsApp me. Looking forward to reconnect :)” he wrote.
Looking at the comments on the post, it is safe to say that the internet has its own quirk. While some users rushed to tag Grok and attempted to make X’s AI assistant find Goyal’s number, others joked about Goyal’s public persona, with one calling him “DG the fitness influencer :p”. Some also pointed out that the plethora of positive messages in the comment section might just be a PR strategy.
A wider ‘come back’ campaign
Earlier this month, Goyal had publicly invited former employees to return, framing the outreach as a second-chance conversation rather than a recruitment pitch. The call also came at a time when Eternal has widened its footprint beyond Zomato into Blinkit, Hyperpure, District, Nugget, Feeding India, and newer bets such as Blinkit Ambulances.
In that earlier post, Goyal had argued that returning employees bring something that lateral hires often don’t: an instinct for what the company expects and what “good” looks like inside its systems.
The latest update suggests the message landed, perhaps more deeply than even the founder anticipated.