Nithin Kamath & Nikhil Kamath on Cash-Flow Discipline

In a fifteen-year retrospective, Kamath reports that risks he had been flagging since 2021 finally materialised: an increase in securities transaction tax on options, the removal of exchange transaction-charge rebates, a reduction in weekly expiries, and a broad decline in market activity hit the firm together, contributing to an approximately forty-percent drop in broking revenues for the year.

Kamath began trading stocks at seventeen, initially handling his father's account, and through his twenties ran a proprietary book while moonlighting at a call centre to fund himself — a years-long apprenticeship in markets that preceded any formal company he would later build.

He frames Zerodha as perhaps the only broker in the world with the luxury of thinking long-term through such a cycle precisely because it carries no external investors — a direct argument that the bootstrapped structure is a structural resilience advantage, not merely a funding preference.

Despite the revenue decline, he insists he has never tracked quarterly or even annual growth, deliberately: the absence of investor pressure is what permits the firm to keep doing what is right for customers during periods of short-term business volatility, even where that means absorbing a real hit to top-line.

He frames VCs as agents of manufactured urgency: their incentive to push growth ahead of its natural timeline encourages startups to over-hire, over-spend and over-claim market size, while a bootstrapped firm — by being forced to stay self-sustaining — is ready to capture the upside only when the market actually arrives.

The Rainmatter model, he says, is partly a response to the realisation that an efficient business destroys jobs indirectly — a Zerodha of 1,100 people might have needed 11,000 at a less efficient competitor — so the founders set up the climate and livelihoods foundation, seeding it with roughly a thousand crores, as a deliberate counterweight to the labour displacement that automation creates.