Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath says '9 out of 10' promoters regret taking their companies public

Nikhil Kamath made the remark at a recent episode of his podcast WTF.

Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath has said in his podcast WTF that most promoters he has spoken to regret listing their companies. In a recent episode on the gaming industry, Kamath asked Nitish Mittersain, the founder of the gaming platform Nazara Technologies, if he regretted the decision too.

Interestingly, Kamath is an investor in the company that went public in 2021.

"I am an investor in Nitesh’s company... five percent investor. And we meet often... I bug him a lot because I want to understand this domain a bit more. Today is rooted from that same curiosity because so many people are telling me that gaming is this next big thing," the billionaire Zerodha co-founder said. "The young today are spending so much more time on gaming than traditional forms of entertainment, so I have a lot of curiosity around it . But most people who I have asked in person, not on camera, if they regret listing and becoming a public company say they do. Nine out of ten.”

While Mittersain said that did not regret taking his company public, Kamath's words found resonance in something Zoho co-founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu also shared on Thursday.

"Running a public company is a lot lot harder than running a private company; it is like being on the treadmill all the time," he wrote on X, highlighting why he would like Zoho to remain a private company.

Vembu said that as a private company, Zoho invests in long-term (research and development) and infrastructure without worrying about how quarterly numbers would look. "Personally, as a public company CEO, I won't be able to live in a remote village and work on my own deep tech projects along with the school, the farm and rural works -- the pressure to manage the stock price would be brutal and then I would have to transmit that pressure to everyone else in the company," he said.

The Zoho boss had in 2019 moved to Mathalamparai village, near Tenkasi town in Tamil Nadu from where he runs the company with more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

Adding that the relentless pressure that public companies experience leads to employee burnout and attrition, Vembu said, "We remain private because I want to work with our people long term on critical projects."