Deepinder Goyal, founder of Zomato and vice chairman of Eternal, has sparked a debate online after posting a hiring announcement on X for his health-tech startup, Temple.
In a post on X, Goyal on Friday announced that he was recruiting for various engineering roles, ranging from machine learning to neural decoding researchers. However, the condition was that only applicants with less than 16 per cent body fat for men and 26 per cent for women would be eligible to apply for the roles.
Soon after it was posted, the recruitment announcement became a point of discussion online. August Srivastava, co-founder and CTO of Ambra, slammed it, calling it "deeply illegal" and "discriminatory."
"I’m so tired of Indian startup circles. First Bhavish’s BS, now this. This is deeply illegal, if you’re being discriminatory don’t be stupid enough to publicly post it. A very Indian trait is this deep focus on optics, not product," he said.
He called the product "non-sensical" and from a team with no hardware background.
"This is based in Goyal’s personal woo-woo belief of gravity hypothesis. An Apple Watch will do just fine, not even a whoop. A Fitbit or Garmin is possibly better, but baseline is there’s proven technology that works, stop wasting money," he added.
Further slamming the product he said, "Put that 50m seed round into things India need - secular, scientific thinking, lack of which is resulting in inequality and protein deficiency. We don’t have enough doctors, or nurses, and now we’re wasting money on this nonsense."
One of the users came in support of Goyal and said,"His money, his choice. What have you done other than rant here? Create what you want. Who's stopping you?"
"Someone is making a product, someone is investing. How does that bother people," another user said.
Temple is building a wearable device that measures cerebral blood flow, a key indicator linked to brain performance and health.
