[Awesome Startup Employee] The master of all skills at Zovi: Vivek Goel

Meet our ‘Awesome Startup Employee’ Vivek Goel from Zovi. He has been nominated by the CEO and Founder of Zovi, Manish Chopra.

Vivek was one of the first Zovi employees to come on board. “He has done almost every kind of role at Zovi from the early days learning and building on each experience to make Zovi what it stands for today,” says Manish.

Vivek joined Zovi as a product manager in April 2011 back when it was just called Robemall Apparels Pvt Ltd. Vivek studied at ISB (Indian School of Business) in 2009-10. Around that time, he met Satish Mani who was setting up the initial team for Zovi. “Listening to the idea of creating the country’s biggest fashion brand online from the tech genius sounded crazy, but isn’t crazy a synonym of revolutionary,” says Vivek.

Vivek shares that his first task was to negotiate and get the four letter domain ‘zovi.com’. The initial two years at Zovi were extremely exciting for Vivek as he was part of each and every department of Zovi from time to time. “I loved taking up new challenges every second month be it sourcing, operations-logistics, customer service or marketing. Zovi has an extremely hands on culture and this helped us in creating a robust customer centric processes in all functions.”

A year ago, Manish asked Vivek to take up the lead in marketing. “This has been the best year of my working life. My daily task is to keep our marketing messages in sync with the company’s product and growth strategy.”In other words, Vivek, along with his team, needs to explore how to take Zovi to more and more new customers everyday while maintaining a consistent message to existing customers.

He further adds, “What I love the most is the marketing team that has worked tirelessly and ensured the exponential growth while creating one of the most loyal customer base for any fashion brand in India. Kudos to these guys and I hope I could get them a better work life balance.”

“His most amazing quality,” shares Manish, is that “he is the most sincere listener that I have met. He hears you always with a genuine desire to understand your point of view. That is why when he speaks we all listen to him because he is bang on with his advise.”

Manish says, “Genuine, open, respectful with sound and logical decision making ability and boundless enthusiasm for experimental innovations - Vivek lives and breathes these values everyday!”

Vivek is from Jaipur. He completed his graduation from IIT Delhi in 2004 and became a JAVA developer. While on the job, he got together with a couple of friends and started a company to build a community around stock markets. It was the era of social networks where Orkut was the in-thing and Facebook was just entering India.

“Our virtual stock market community khelostocks.com took off well and we had over 200,000 users. We did bootstrap the venture with services projects but unfortunately in need of raising funds we had to shelve the project after three years and the three of us went our separate ways to business schools,” he says, adding,  “I believe that joining Zovi has been a defining moment for me.”

The biggest challenge for him was when Manish asked him to lead marketing for Zovi. “Now that we cross a new milestone every month there is no dearth of happy moments. To pick one, packing and shipping out the first package of Zovi was the happiest moment for me,” he says.

The things he enjoys most at Zovi is all the ideas that thay come up with and execute on a day to day basis. Vivek says, “The whole innovate, experiment and scale approach is the most amazing part about working in Zovi. Once tested, the pace at which we scale our ideas is phenomenal.”

Manish recalls an anecdote that shows how “no challenge is too much for Vivek.” Once when Vivek was headed home to Jaipur for a short holiday, Manish had asked him to connect Zovi with some of his family contacts who were making women's kurtis. “We did not have that category yet. But Vivek dived into it with such enthusiasm that in a week’s time he uncovered multiple superb supply chain relationships for us in Jaipur that kick started our category.”Vivek highly recommends startups as the ideal places to work. “If you are the one who dreams big, loves to create things, gets a kick out of the results of your actions, then startup is the place for you to work,” he says.

He adds, “You should be aware that a startup environment is very demanding both mentally and physically, so if you are a 9 to 5 kind of person don’t join a startup. At startups, you will have to take decisions, execute them and own the success or failure while working at a very rapid pace. In a startup your work is life and life becomes work. You have to bring in some kind of discipline in life to make some personal time.”

He reveals that he is a big movie buff and has movie tickets booked in advance for almost every weekend. On weekdays, a nice post dinner stroll and 10-15 mins of reading helps him in getting a good night’s sleep.

Ask him about the bond he shares with his team and founders and he says, “There is a very open and friendly environment in the team. Manish and Satish are extremely hands on and connected with every member of the team. Over last three years they have inspired everyone to go that extra mile everyday. I feel if I talk more about both of them it would seem like flattery, but yes, Zovi could not have asked for better leaders. When you walk into the Zovi office it is buzzing with excitement. Our whatsapp groups and Zovi universe group in Facebook makes sure that every Zovi team member is having fun together.”

To his team he says, “Guys we are the most rocking team ever!”

To our readers his message is,“Dream big and start executing.”