India Fintech Conclave | Nithin Kamath and Kailash Nadh on Zerodha ideas, business model

At Moneycontrol's inaugural India Fintech Conclave (IFC), Zerodha’s CEO Nithin Kamath and CTO Kailash Nadh discussed how Zerodha stays true to its name, with zero loss, zero funding, zero debt, and most importantly, a zero brokerage investment platform.

In conversation with Kamath and Nadh, Chandra Srikanth, Editor- Tech, Startups & New Economy, Moneycontrol, had an interesting anecdote- that zero is the favourite word at Zerodha, given the company’s debt-free, bootstrapped and profitable status.

On being asked how the company could achieve this, Kamath reminisced that there was no big ambition while starting the business.

The founders Nithin and Nikhil Kamath chose not to spend any money on advertising to acquire customers and instead focus on the quality of the trading platform and let the word of mouth flow through. This ideology of not spending on anything without a clear vision on how to recover the costs led Zerodha to profitability only in the third year of operations.

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Acknowledging Nadh’s contribution to the company as massive, Kamath said that in 2015, when under the guidance of Nadh, Zerodha launched its in-house trading platform and garnered overwhelming reception from users, it was the “Aha moment” when he realised that Zerodha is here to stay.

This was also the year Zerodha decided to eliminate brokerage fees from equity investments made through their platform, thus attracting even more accolades.

Speaking about the principles that he leveraged while building Zerodha’s tech, Nadh said that one of the first rules was “keeping things really simple, and having the conviction to avoid FOMO.”

“I think a lot of organisations end up building way too many things, chasing short-term growth metrics. We always had a simple and singular conviction of building things that are meaningful to our customers, so we’ve never really rushed to release new features arbitrarily,” said Nadh.

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Nadh said that he is quite satisfied with the fact that Zerodha truly owns its technology stack.

Although SEBI keeps cracking down on India’s fintech regularly, Nadh is not worried about it. "I know the approach is really conservative at Zerodha rooted in the principles of regulation... It is an integral part of the product development philosophy... It has really become a cultural thing for us to think ahead of regulations," he explained.

Throwing light on their IPO plans, Kamath said that there is still time for that to happen. “If one day we hope that we have built enough products and dependency on capital market goes up we will think of an IPO," he said.