We go on call with Indonesian F&B brand enabler Dishserve CEO and co-founder Rishabh Singhi. After sharing with us last year how a series of events led the former Reddoorz COO back to Jakarta to start a dark kitchen, last-mile distribution network for F&B brands, he returns for Season 4 to update us on how […]

S04 Call #25: Evolving from Dark Kitchen Network into Omnichannel F&B Brand Expansion Enabler for Indonesia with Dishserve CEO and Co-founder Rishabh Singhi

We go on call with Indonesian F&B brand enabler Dishserve CEO and co-founder Rishabh Singhi. After sharing with us last year how a series of events led the former Reddoorz COO back to Jakarta to start a dark kitchen, last-mile distribution network for F&B brands, he returns for Season 4 to update us on how Dishserve has evolved and grown over the past year, now shaping up to be an all-around, omnichannel enabler for F&B brands in Indonesia.

Highlights and Timestamps

(01:11) Re-introduction to Dishserve and CEO Rishabh; 

(01:41) Rundown of Dishserve’s growth the past year; “…we enable F&B brands to expand by providing them with services, such as menu curation, menu production, warehousing, midmile logistics, distribution network, both cloud kitchen and [offline] dining, and our discovery platform Dishserve.com.”

(03:08) Becoming an All-Around F&B Enabler; “That’s the beauty of our model that the business would pay for itself. And the expansion could fuel more expansion, because Dishserve created the whole supply chain. The brand just needs to come in use that supply chain, make revenue and invest it back into the business so that the business could grow…And that’s how we enable these small F&B brands, who do not have large pool of capital to kind of expand…So all the other brands benefit because of the economies of scale…the real winner here is the end consumer, because the customer gets food at a cheaper price.”

(14:01) Indonesia’s Evolving F&B and F&B Enabler Landscape; “I see pretty bright prospects of business we are building because of the resilience of [our] supply chain and number two, the customer behavior, which is more ordering in and so on and so forth.”

(19:21) Leadership at Dishserve; “We hire for skill, great skill, exceptional skill, and we also hire high energy folks. We don’t hire anybody in the middle…So we create a mix between energy and experience.”

(21:51) Mapping out Dishserve’s Scale Story; “…as the aspirational, middle class population increases, as the income levels of people go up, and as people would have more and more disposable income. I believe that there is a big opportunity for hundreds of new age food brands to come and thrive in the next five to 10 years. And Dishserve wants to enable those futuristic brands of tomorrow or those aspirational brands of tomorrow.” 

(24:04) Rapid Fire Round;

About our guest

In this episode, we have Rishabh Singhi, the CEO and co-founder of Dishserve. Prior to Dishserve, he was previously COO and Head of Products at Reddoorz. And prior to that, he had already been working in a couple of different technology-enabled and based companies, across different regions, starting from India all the way across APAC, and in various industries as well, in education, financial services, talent development, career development.

Transcript

Paulo: We’re here to talk about a different story entirely, and that’s how Dishserve has grown since our chat a year ago. So Rishabh can you give us the rundown — you know, in our pre-recording chat, Rishabh has been sharing a lot and excited for you guys to hear what Dishserve has been up to. So Rishabh, take it away.

Rishabh: Thank you. So Dishserve started with the idea of helping these F&Bs, small to medium F&B brands to expand. We’ve got a little bit of distance from the last time that we spoke on that journey. 

So as of today, we now have about 30 plus brands that work with us. We now have about 300 plus kitchens, all across Java…we enable F&B brands to expand by providing them with services, such as menu curation, menu production, warehousing, mid mile logistics, distribution network, both cloud kitchen and [offline] dining, and our discovery platform dishserve.com. So we’ve grown about 11x year on year. We have grown about 4x since January, and we have increased our margins from 5% to 26% in the last three months.

So business flies, things are going great. We’ve also launched our own private label brands. We now have five of our own private label brands, and we are launching three more brands this week. We are also moving ahead with creating more value add for customers by providing them with great taste, consistency, and price by launching our own Fulfilled by Dishserve brands.

So that’s a quick [update].

“…we enable F&B brands to expand by providing them with services, such as menu curation, menu production, warehousing, midmile logistics, distribution network, both cloud kitchen and [offline] dining, and our discovery platform dishserve.com.”

Becoming an All-Around F&B Enabler

Paulo: You mentioned you’re launching three new private label brands this week. So it must be a really, really busy time for you, and thanks so much for stopping by to give us that update. The last time that we talked you guys had already been from day one really an F&B enabler.

Only that last year, you were very much focused more on the product distribution side, last mile distribution, as you mentioned before, but now, you guys have clearly expanded that scope of enablement, including, you mentioned, discovery, even the scope of the types of SKUs and food that you work with and different types of brands that you work with.

So I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into each of these different developments. Specifically, I wanted to start with the private label. [Given] your whole portfolio of brands, what has been the thought process behind deciding to start private label brands apart from just working with all these different brands that you’re already working with, and what has been your approach to finding and prioritizing the best types of food [SKUs] to work with?

Rishabh: So when we go out in the market and we speak to brands and [tell] them that, “Hey, brands join Dishserve and we’ll help you expand.” [They] need case studies, right? So our private label brands, number one, act as the case studies that we can present to other brands. So there’s a lot of learning that our private label brands can give to our partner brands.

Need for Case Studies, Data-Backed Insights on Product-Market Opportunities, and End-to-End Supply Chain

That’s the first. The second one is that when we worked with other SME brands, we kind of identified, we had tons of data and we kind of figured out what’s the product market gap. And we were able to kind of figure out what’s the product market need in terms of the whole food canvas.

So we thought, “let’s get these brands out” because clearly there’s no SME brand in that segment that can grow, or that can become really big. So that [there] was a clear product-market gap and data-backed insights was another pushing point for us to kind of join or launch our own brand.

Third, we created this whole supply chain, right from menu curation to production. Menu production happens at our own central kitchen, which is like a fully automated food factory, which we recently started. And then we manage our own warehouse. We manage [a] mid-mile logistics fleet and then the whole distribution network, which is asset light on the home kitchen side, and also on the dining side.

So we [have] all of the supply chain and we felt that “Okay, to kind of better utilize the supply chain and plug gaps, we could also launch Dishserve’s own brands so that the supply chain can be better utilized and monetized.” So these were the three reasons why we started our own brands.

Increased ability to handle a wide range of SKUs for customer retention

I’ll give you a bit of more insight about the kind of brands that we have. We have a drink brand called Drinkling. We have chicken rice, kind of a brand called Uncle Tam. We have a burger brand called Baba burger. We have a fitness food or healthy food brand called Kit Fit, and we have a donut brand called CrypDonut.

We recently launched the three brands that I was talking about. The first one is a Japanese food brand which is called Love in Tokyo. Then we have a chicken popcorn kind of a brand called Chick-ass, something like kickass, right? And there’s a Thai food brand called Wan Tan. So interestingly, if you see, we are doing everything from a burger to a fried chicken, to sushi, to a rice bowl, to chicken popcorn to sticky rice. 

And the complexity of the SKUs that we can handle that has greatly improved in the last year. Our supply chain is able to kind of manage different kinds of SKUs. And our kitchen network is able to kind of handle different kinds of SKUs, so our product offering for the end customer has increased.

And if you look at brands these days or new age brands, these brands are basically small sections of the traditional restaurant menu. So let’s say if you go to a traditional restaurant that would have about 25-30 items on the menu, brands who launch with dark kitchens launch with the five items or six items, which I think is not great for customers [to] repeat, because if you only have five or six SKUs in your catalog or offering, maybe the customer would come, let’s say two or three times, and then [they’ve] tried everything and then [they are] already bored.

And then they don’t return back. So there have to be enough choices for the customer. So our Dishserve brands are like full fledged brands each have about eight to 10, 10 to 12 kind of SKUs. So we are building quality brands, brands that have a good number of SKUs, researched number of SKU. Each SKU could potentially be a hero product. So that’s the story about Dishserve’s own brands.

“The complexity of the SKUs that we can handle has greatly improved in the last year. Our supply chain is able to kind of manage different kinds of SKUs. And our kitchen network is able to kind of handle different kind of SKUs, so our product offering for the end customer has increased.” 

Paulo: Just to paint that picture you were talking about the private legal brands, but Disherve is also helping other brands outside of that as well. You guys are really running the gamut in terms of what can be made available or what can be discovered by end consumers through the Dishserve platform.

And you mentioned that a lot of this ability for you to be able to launch private label brands and be able to support more brands outside of that is hinged upon really the capabilities of your supply chain, which we talked a little bit about last year. 

But I wanted to also get an idea from you of how that has evolved, how that supply chain you talked about before has evolved to really cater to a lot of these different brands with different SKUs, which probably have different considerations when it comes to storage and things like that, while still maintaining also the financial aspect of the business, not running up costs too high and things like that. 

Rishabh: That’s a great question. When we started off, the idea was simple: that there are these bunch of brands who wanted to expand, but did not have the capital to expand and expansion is capital-intensive for any brand, because then the brand has to spend money on CAPEX. They would have to spend money on buying technology, marketing, creating a distribution network opportunity, either franchising the brand or creating their own outlets, and then also increasing their own central kitchen facilities and stuff like that.

So these are all capital-intensive activities. So the idea was very simple that, “Hey, listen, let’s try and help these brands to expand, by providing them with a network of kitchens so that they could just save money on either going to a traditional cloud kitchen company, where they have to pay a monthly rent or owning and operating or renting or operating their own [facilities].”

So our intention was to kind of provide a cheaper solution on the distribution side to begin with. And then when we started to help these brands on the distribution side of it, the brands became bigger and they started to grow, they realized that they would also need, let’s say warehousing because if they’re selling more, they would have to produce more as well, and if they’re producing more, then they would’ve to store more food. 

So if they’re storing more food, they do not have the storage space in their own outlets, and it [is] very inefficient. If every brand creates a storage space of its own, we decided that “Okay, let’s rent a warehouse and let’s operate it ourselves.”

So we rented a warehouse and we created a whole tech around that warehouse. We created the whole warehouse management, and then once the food [gets] stored, we realized that this food also needs to get shipped from the warehouse to the different partner kitchens where the food is being sold from.

So we also had to create a mid-mile logistics [operation]. So we rented a few trucks, and we figured out how the logistics should work, how the route planning should happen. And we created technology around route planning, delivery nodes, package lists, and so on and so forth.

So a lot of this tech was created so that it would facilitate warehousing logistics, the distribution side of things. And once these brands expanded more and more, they realized that their own central kitchen, which was a manual traditional central kitchen, was not enough to support their growth any further.

So these brands came to us and said, “Hey, we cannot increase the number of outlets even when the business is doing very well, just because we don’t have a big enough production.” So we decided, “Let’s start Dishserve’s own food factory, where the food could be produced using machines so that the production capacity is much higher. And the quality and consistency of the food is still maintained.”So we, we started our own, food factory, and so on and so forth. 

Let me give you an anecdotal story. There’s a brand called Foodstory. Foodstory is an F&B brand aggregator company that owns a few brands: ChickenPao, Bulgogi, Garam, et cetera.

So ChickenPao joined us in the month of October last year. And in the last six months, it has grown about 40x on the platform. without spending a single dollar on CAPEX. That’s the beauty of our model that the business would pay for itself. And the expansion could fuel more expansion, because Dishserve created the whole supply chain. 

The brand just needs to come in use that supply chain, make revenue and invest it back into the business so that the business could grow. So the business pay for itself. And that’s how we enable these small F&B brands, who do not have a large pool of capital to kind of expand. 

Paulo: And the cost isn’t like being passed on necessarily to Dishserve in a $1 to $1 basis. Because you’re able to cater with a single food factory multiple brands. And then that whole supply chain can cater to many different brands at scale.

Rishabh: Exactly. So all the other brands benefit because of the economies of scale. So for example, we rent one truck that goes through 20 kitchens. For example, in that one truck, we could have sent one branch’s stock, but we would also send 20 branches’ stock. So one truck gets better utilized.

The same happens with the factory; the same happens with the warehousing space. So instead of every brand creating its own warehouse space, if they use Dishserve’s warehouse space, it’s shared and everybody pays a cheaper price. So from that perspective, it’s way cheaper for brands to then operate.

But the real winner here is the end consumer because the customer gets food at a cheaper price. The brands who work with this are able to offer food to their customers at a much cheaper price as compared to their competitors who are expanding in their traditional way. That gives these food brands, a competitive advantage in the end.

So, that fuels more sales, more sales means they have more capital to expand. And then the cycle keeps continuing in the brands. Again, as I was saying, one of the brands expanded 40x…the gains are exponential. You have one outlet, you get some money, you open three outlets [then when] you have money with three outlets…you can open nine outlets the next month. And then the cycle continues and it’s really exponential.

“That’s the beauty of our model that the business would pay for itself. And the expansion could fuel more expansion, because Dishserve created the whole supply chain. The brand just needs to come in use that supply chain, make revenue and invest it back into the business so that the business could grow…And that’s how we enable these small F&B brands, who do not have large pool of capital to kind of expand…So all the other brands benefit because of the economies of scale…the real winner here is the end consumer, because the customer gets food at a cheaper price.”

Paulo: And I also wanted to ask about how this portfolio will eventually grow. And you talked a little bit from the private label side, but I also wanted to know how that impacts also your ability to work with other brands in the future. Is that also a consideration, say if you set up a private label brand now on a specific SKU, does that necessarily lock out other partnerships down the road? How does that work?

Rishabh: So with the food business, the best part is that there is no apple-to-apple comparison. There could be two kinds of food brands selling Japanese food, but either the SKUs could be completely different or even if the SKU are similar, the taste would be very different. Consumers, basically, they love variety.

So even if one of the F&B players is selling probably the best taste, the consumers would still want to try the other one, because taste is subjective, right? From our standpoint, there is no conflict of interest with any other brand wanting to partner with Dishserve. Even if Dishserve has a private level brand, because every brand has its own market and there will be consumers or customers who will be liking product A versus product B, product C versus product D. 

The second thing that I wanted to kind of point out here is that our ability to service different kind of brands has greatly improved in the last year, and again, with more efficiency so that the cost of the end product does not escalate, which has been a result of the tech that we have built the optimizations that we have done using tech interventions. 

So we are able to handle multiple kinds of products. The kinds of brands that we can now work with have largely increased. We are doing everything from sushi to a burger, to Korean food, to Japanese food, etc. 

“Our ability to service different kinds of brands has greatly improved in the last one year, and again, with more efficiency so that the cost of the end product does not escalate, which has been a result of the tech that we have built the optimizations that we have done using tech interventions.”

Indonesia’s Evolving F&B and F&B Enabler Landscape

Paulo: I wanted to zoom out a little bit and you talked about — we’re in a different landscape now than when you first started Dishserve, where people are traveling, people are going out. So how do you see this impacting FME enablers like Dishserve in the long term? 

Rishabh: In the whole supply chain distribution network, cloud kitchen or dining is just a very small part of the whole supply chain. So the supply chain starts with curating a menu at a small scale, then producing it at a mass scale and warehousing logistics, and then the distribution network, and then a discovery like dishserve.com, where the customers can come and discover the brand online. 

Supply Chain Resilience

So I believe that even if the world changes from online to offline or offline to online, the supply chain behind it remains the same. And that’s the reason why we started the company in the pandemic in October of 2020, and we have seen various different cycles of restrictions easing out, then there are more restrictions and there are various waves. 

What we were able to consistently deliver to our food brands was the fact that with lockdown, without lockdown, et cetera, the brands kept growing monthly. For example, if I were to touch upon this, when the Delta variant came, last year everybody was home. Our supply chain was resilient enough to make sure that the brands that work with us are discovered more and they’re able to supply more to the customers. And so the supply chain disruptions did not affect the business of [our] brands. 

And when the restrictions eased out, after Delta, we thought probably that Covid has gone, and then Omicron came and then again, there were supply chain disruptions for other brands, but for Dishserve the brands, we were able to kind of deliver the same seamless experience for them and without any supply chain disruptions. So that proves that, be it restrictions or not restrictions, the major part of our supply chain was working very well. 

Long-Term Consumer Behavior Shifts

Secondly, I think that even before Covid came in, the online deliveries business was on the rise. Covid had only catalyzed that process. It’s only very convenient for customers in big cities like Jakarta or Metro Manila, or for that example where traffic is notorious, if you can get food, fast, hygienic, quality, good packaging, great price delivered to your doorstep, you would not want to go out every time. 

And that has been the change in customer behavior in the last five to seven years already. So the customers are now getting used to getting a delivery every day and then probably going out once a week. That is what the customer behavior is. And I don’t think that is going back. Customers would probably go out instead of one time a week, they would go out two times a week, but they’re not gonna go back to going out all the time. That’s not gonna happen. 

I see pretty bright prospects for the business we are building because of the resilience of the supply chain and number two, the customer behavior, which is more ordering in and so on and so forth. 

Faster than Domino’s

I’ll give you another anecdote. With a hyper-localized distribution network like Dishserve’s, because we have about 300 kitchens in Jakarta, our average delivery time to the end consumer from placing the order to getting the order delivered is less than 25 minutes, which is better than Domino’s and Domino’s is 30 minutes or free, right?

So we are better than Domino’s in terms of our delivery times for the customers. It takes about eight to nine minutes for the food prep to happen at the kitchen level, and then another 10 to 12 minutes for the delivery rider to go to the customer and give it to them. So that way we are able to give convenience to more and more customers that say, “Hey, if I’m hungry right now,” just like us millennials who want everything right now, and [it has to come] from an aspirational brand and it [should be] pocket friendly, et cetera. 

This becomes a very viable option for brands who want to expand because then the customers would be able to order from a Dishserve kitchen or from the brand, and they would get the order in 25 minutes. That provides sheer availability and reliability to the customers, and they stick to you.

“I see pretty bright prospects for the business we are building because of the resilience of [our] supply chain and number two, the customer behavior, which is more ordering in and so on and so forth.”

Paulo: And so given the amount of enablers and given the scope that you have, how do you see this competitive landscape with, I guess not just F&B, but just SME, small brand, long tail enablement — how do you see Dishserve playing within that landscape and standing out? 

Rishabh: So there are three parts of the business. When we work with other brands, we help enterprise clients as well. We also help some of the large brands who want to expand even further or who want to make their expansion efficient. We help those brands as well. 

So we have an enterprise team that takes care only of enterprise clients, brands, or companies that have four to five brands or are big brands. So let’s say somebody has 15 outlets already and they want to go into neighborhoods of customers. They also use Dishserve’s services. 

And then there are these SMEs that are small brands that have one outlet, two outlets, and that want to expand with Dishserve, we help them. And then the third is Dishserve’s own private label brands, right? 

The strategy or the mix that we see going forward is that we have the following moats. These are the unique points about Dishserve. Number one is the technology in the supply chain that we have created using technology that gives us an edge. Number two are our own private label brands, which are doing very well and that give us a unique customer segment and that’s gonna stay. Number three is the traffic on dishserve.com, with customers ordering food directly on dishserve.com, and number four is the kitchen partner network that is exclusive to us.

So because of four of these things, it’s going to be extremely difficult for other players to kind of replicate what we are doing and in the supply chain kind of business, scale is also a moat or scale is also a unique point. So once Dishserve already has the scale at which this becomes very efficient, and as we continue to scale more and more, it’ll become increasingly difficult for other new players to kind of replicate similar kinds of pricings or similar kinds of offerings to the brands because it’s just so capital intensive.

“…we have the following moats…Number one is the technology in the supply chain that we have created using technology that gives us an edge. Number two are our own private label brands, which are doing very well and that give us a unique customer segment and that’s gonna stay. Number three is the traffic on dishserve.com, with customers ordering food directly on dishserve.com, and number four is the kitchen partner network that is exclusive to us.”

Leadership at Dishserve

Paulo: Let me get back to that scale story a little bit later, but I wanted to shift gears for a bit and talk about — in the first podcast that we did last year, you had this interesting story of how you brought together your co-founders, and really you were sort of at the center of that network, and then just bringing them in together to really focus on this mission and vision. How have you continued to grow that team, especially when it comes to bringing in more leaders who also share in that same passion for you to really help all these F&B brands?

Rishabh: We hire for skill, great skill, exceptional skill, and we also hire high energy folks. We don’t hire anybody in the middle. When we feel that this is something that we need to learn, we go ahead and hire exceptional people on that skill.

So for example, our head of the central kitchen, the person who manages our central kitchen factory. He was a head chef for many years at the Hilton, and he has a very big Instagram following. He has networks in the industry, in the community, everybody knows him. We remember a time where, on the Christmas dinners and Eid dinners, the Hilton used to be completely packed. People just loved his food and stuff like that. So with exceptional talent, we kind of roped him and he was very kind to come and help us on our mission.

So this is an example of a very high skill kind of person, and then places where we need feet on street, there are also, people like for example, my current chief of staff, who helped me with fundraising and strategy. We do hire everybody, who is either high skilled or high energy and there’s nothing in between. So we create a mix between energy and experience.

“We hire for skill, great skill, exceptional skill, and we also hire high energy folks. We don’t hire anybody in the middle…So we create a mix between energy and experience.”

Paulo: So it is very clear that, as you’ve shared over this podcast and in the previous one, how you’ve brought your past experience as an operator into this venture in really building this business. But I’m also curious to know, how has that business in turn influenced you as a leader and as a person? 

Rishabh: That’s a great question. And when I reflect back on the past year and a half, I kind of realized that Dishserve has moved from strength to strength. And personally, I have grown a lot in this new role. So in that previous role as a Chief Operating Officer at Reddoorz, and Reddoorz was huge, and we made it huge, but it was more on the operating side. 

But being a CEO is very different. You need to delegate a lot of work. You need to focus a lot more on fundraising. You have to look at macro kind of things and not really micromanage people. 

So personally there have been a lot of learnings getting into this new role for myself as well. At Dishserve we’re very lucky to have a great support system in terms of the kind of angels that we have on our cap table and mentors that we have who kind of keep me grounded and keep me always learning. So those are my learnings in the last year and a half. 

“In that previous role as a Chief Operating Officer at Reddoorz…it was more on the operating side. But being a CEO is very different. You need to delegate a lot of work. You need to focus a lot more on fundraising. You have to look at macro kind of things and not really micromanage people.” 

Mapping out Dishserve’s Scale Story

Paulo: And going back to that whole scale story a while ago,and how will that translate into the next five years — how do you see Dishserve building out its stack even further expanding even beyond urban areas, even beyond Jakarta to other places in Indonesia. How do you see that happening in the next five years? 

Rishabh: When we talk about the next five years, the current state of the market becomes insignificant because these are just cycles. So we’ve seen in the past that after every bear cycle, there’s also a bull run, and those peaks are often higher than the previously attained peaks. 

That being said, about Dishserve — so we believe that these Southeast Asian growing economies, developing economies, such as Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, et cetera, they have been showing very resilient growth. Even during this very difficult time, for example, the Indonesian currency is still in red, but it’s the least affected currency, or it’s the best performing currency in Asia.

So I have a very strong belief that Southeast Asia is going to be the driver of growth. There are going to be more and more millennials contributing to that growth and reaping the fruits of the economic growth that is about to come in that respect as the aspirational, middle-class population increases, as the income levels of people go up, and as people would have more and more disposable income. I believe that there is a big opportunity for hundreds of new age food brands to come and thrive in the next five to 10 years.

And Dishserve wants to enable those futuristic brands of tomorrow or those aspirational brands of tomorrow. There is going to be new brands that are going to be launched, and they would become extremely large, but there is also going to be existing brands that would have a better shot at becoming bigger because they’ve already cracked the taste formula or what works with the customer and stuff like that.

So for them to expand would be much easier as compared to starting a brand fresh and doing it exponentially. So we believe in that philosophy and hence we enable these brands to use our platform and expand exponentially, get access to the customers that they never had because of their geographical coverage or because of their small scale.

“…as the aspirational, middle class population increases, as the income levels of people go up, and as people would have more and more disposable income. I believe that there is a big opportunity for hundreds of new age food brands to come and thrive in the next five to 10 years. And Dishserve wants to enable those futuristic brands of tomorrow or those aspirational brands of tomorrow.” 

Rapid Fire Round

Top 3 traits of a great CEO? 

Rishabh: I’ll stick to the two that I mentioned before, perseverance and patience. And I would probably add in delegation. 

What digital technology/innovation excites you the most today? (apart from your work at Dishserve)

Rishabh: My core belief is that every single dollar of disposable income that I have, I believe that the maximum returns that I can get are by investing that into Dishserve. So that’s my core belief, but the kind of things that are happening these days, which excites me a lot is around renewable energy, especially solar and waste management. So as cities get really big, they produce a lot of waste. There’s a lot that we could do with the ways to process it back and convert it to energy. The way we consume energy is going to completely transform the next 10, 15, and 20 years, and I’m very excited about that. 

What’s your favorite go-to destination in Southeast Asia? / What trip are you most looking forward to taking in the region? 

Rishabh: Boracay is my favorite. I love Boracay. The last time I went to Boracay was in 2018, I guess, right before Boracay closed. So I went there before that. So it was all happening in [there]…it was really nice. I know the parties have gone away, but Boracay is just so beautiful.

How is Fiona? Apart from having an office pet, what are other ways you and your team de-stress and do self-care? 

Rishabh: Fiona now has a companion. So she is a small poodle. We got her when she was 10 days old and now she is 7 months already. So Fiona has a sister. We got two dogs now to de-stress. And for me personally, I recently got married, and that is exciting. 

And on the team perspective, what we have done is that we have focused our HR efforts on two specific things…the happiness ministry and the fitness ministry. So we formed an internal board or an internal team or a ministry. So the happiness ministry organizes things like movie night, potluck, contests, fashion shows, and all that stuff. 

And the fitness ministry organizes…competitions, late night running, early morning car-free days, and all that stuff. We are doing all that to kind of keep all of ourselves sane and physically fit at the same time.

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