Nikhil Kamath on running Zerodha with brother Nithin: 'There are times when egos come into play'

Nikhil Kamath, who co-founded Zerodha with his elder brother Nithin Kamath, opened up about how they run the country's largest online brokerage platform together. In an episode of his podcast, WTF is the Next Gen Thinking? Kamath claimed that 65 percent of startups shut down due to fights among founders, but he attributed a major part of Zerodha's success to the fact that it was run by brothers.

"We have an added advantage of being brothers and we do completely different things," Nikhil Kamath said. "All my time is spent doing stock market-related stuff, all his time is spent on people and broking-related stuff so we don't get into each other's way. We just happen to compliment each other, but that being said, there are times when egos come into play. There are times when misunderstandings happen. Luckily for us, things that really helped was that from the very beginning we had everything on paper."

Elaborating on how they run the company, the younger Kamath brother revealed that they have had several ups and downs but the one thing he and his brother never had is "anyone outside". "We have not had investors, we have not had debt, we have run it like an old school shop in the farce of a modern company. That helped, but still, there will be misunderstandings and neither of us generally agree whenever there is a misunderstanding but if it's anything to do with stock market, investing, trading-related stuff, I take the final call. If it's his part of the business -- anything related to people, product, broking all of that, he takes the call," Nikhil Kamath said.

For his part, elder brother Nithin Kamath had shared in one of the older episodes of the podcast that he had realised during the initial days of trading that Nikhil was a better trader.

“I quickly realised that Nikhil is a better trader than I am because at that point of time we were trading money and I was also doing this side hustle of broking business. In 2008-09, I said if he is better at trading than me then why not he continue trading and maybe I can go to broking permanently," Nithin Kamath said in the episode of WTF is Health?
The Zerodha CEO had reinforced the same message in a LinkedIn post where he highlighted how they could build the company thanks to his younger brother's profits from trade."Nikhil Kamath is a much better trader than me. When we started, the idea was he would trade and I attempted to build Zerodha. If it didn't work, I'd get back to trading. It did and Nikhil continues trading full-time. His trading profits in the first two years is how we could build without VCs," Nithin Kamath wrote.