Nithin Kamath & Nikhil Kamath on Governance

Venu Madhav, the COO, anchors operations and regulatory compliance with over a dozen financial-market certifications, while Seema Patil — Nithin's spouse — moved from leading the quality team to a director role, indicating how the firm has kept an unusually small, promoter-trusted executive core through its growth phase.

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.

By publicly posting a year of decline rather than dressing it up, Kamath models the under-promise-over-deliver posture he advocates for listed companies — a case of a founder running a private firm with the disclosure discipline of a public one.

To curb impulsivity on social media, he runs an internal three-person check: drafts go to colleagues who can veto a post before it goes live, and he sleeps on ideas overnight — a governance device designed to retain the storytelling advantage without the dopamine-driven downside of hot takes.

On IPOs, his view is contrarian: founders treat listing as an exit, but it is in fact the moment when obligations increase, because retail investors — lowest in the risk hierarchy — are now trusting the business, and the public-company posture should be to under-promise and over-deliver to avoid the volatility that destroys long-term decision-making.