Building Rocketfood: Our Core Values And Why You Should Have Them for Your Startup [Part V]

Abhineet Kumar 
Abhineet Kumar is the founder of rocketfood.co and is passionate about public speaking, entrepreneurship and community-building.

We are building a new kind of food company. From day one, Anurag and I have known that we wanted to disrupt the status quo and change the way India eats. Our startup has to be built on values which would allow us to not just scale faster, but help our team perform their best to give back through food and love.

These 5 core values keep us aligned with our vision of building a Fast x Crazy Good x Indian food brand and shape our business actions from hiring the right people to cooking food the healthy way:

We like working with vendors and people who possess the above values and have made it the most important criteria while hiring our kitchen team. So before even testing people for their technical skills, we make sure they are compatible with us in terms of these values. Then only we can attack our goals faster, and together change the way India eats.

We are not here to build just another startup, or to build a money-making machine, or a business for an IPO.

We are here to engineer a socially-responsible community around food. 

While the term core value might sound phony and part of business jargon, I’d like to elaborate on the true essence of the concept of core values in a startup:

A startup’s core values mean nothing unless each individual working behind the scenes live by them. Only then can they together define the DNA of the startup! At rocketfood, we take this very seriously — and why shouldn’t we? After all, look at all great teams there have been — Google, SpaceX, the Indian team which won the Natwest Tropy in 2002, or the heroic Permian High Panthers from the movie Friday Night Lights — they did not rely on just one icon, nor were they made of just highly-skilled members, but each one of these champions’ glorious victories are based on a collective of individuals who were not just good at what they did but also possessed moral fiber.

So as Matthew from The Girl Next Door put across moral fiber as:

Now I think moral fiber’s about finding that one thing you really care about. That one special thing that means more to you than anything else in the world. And when you find her, you fight for her. 

For us at rocketfood, that moral fiber is our passion towards healthy-cooked Indian food, our quest to make the world more beautiful through our values of sustainable living and empathy for others, and a here-to-win approach when it comes to changing the world in our own small ways — working together with our suppliers, customers and our community to create a difference around us.

We believe that rocketfood’s core values will help us:

• Hire the best fit — people who don’t just come to do a job, but are passionate about good food and building a community around it.
• Change existing behavioural patterns of blue collar workers in the food sector. For eg: At Gap, they don’t ask their employees: “Why are you late?”. Instead, they say: “Being late is unprofessional and professionalism is very important to us here. What can you do tomorrow to fix this?” Such beahvioural pattern changes are required much more in the food sector for better efficiency and we’d like to use our core values to be at the heart of this turnaround.
• Build the right DNA for rocketfood — so that it is not a one-off startup but aims at being a company built to last.

Now, when you are starting up your own venture, we would definitely urge you to thing big and different when tackling problems — but at the same we’d like to inspire you to build your company on values which would do much more than just make money: create actual impact! Go change the world as people will sit back and take notice of your work.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.