Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath's journey to becoming a successful establisher of one of India's best stock broker firms has had a lot of hard work and persistence.
Before becoming the entrepreneur that he is today, Kamath had to endure a fair bit of struggle and one of his earliest decisions that hugely impacted him was dropping out of school after Class 10 and not having a formal degree to his name.
The 37-year-old recently admitted that he felt "insecure" when he saw his friends go to college while he had dropped out of school.
"My friends didn’t drop out and I felt insecure about them going to college," Kamath said in an interview to The Print’s Editor-In-Chief Shekhar Gupta.
Kamath earned his first salary at the age of 17 when he worked at a call centre in Bengaluru and admitted to have felt happy with the money that he got by selling "accidental health insurance".
However, on the contrary, watching his friends graduate from college and secure their first jobs left a huge impact on Kamath.
"I feel the psychology behind that is very interesting. I used to earn Rs 8,000 in my first job at the call centre in Bengaluru, selling accidental health insurance for a company called Stone Bridge. So at the age of 17, I was feeling really good about myself as I could earn a bit of money. You start feeling unnerved when your friends graduate from college and get their first job."
"There is a societal stigma for a job and it could be any job. So when my friends graduated and became doctors or engineers, then it impacted me in a certain way," Kamath said.
The entrepreneur also said that he felt Bengaluru had the largest paper wealth, which only gave an appearance of wealth and added that those became rich via paper wealth did so by working at tech companies, who were cash crunched.
"It's not real money. "Bengaluru has the most paper wealth and very little expendable wealth. The paper rich from here made money in tech companies and tech companies have no cash.Paper money gives you the appearance of wealth," he said.
Kamath had earlier said that he had started trading when he was 17 years old and also revealed that he had a Share Khan account at that age.
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