Nithin Kamath & Nikhil Kamath on VC vs Bootstrapping

The company describes itself as having pioneered the discount broking model in India and, by its own account, is today the country's largest stock broker, attributing scale to disruptive pricing and in-house technology rather than to advertising or outside capital.

The company's about page is deliberately understated — no growth-stage funding milestones, no valuation logos — reinforcing the founders' public position that the absence of external capital is itself a competitive choice that shaped how the firm could behave on pricing, product and storytelling.

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.

In 2010, the brothers launched Zerodha and introduced India to the discount-broking model: a flat twenty-rupee fee per executed trade, irrespective of size, replacing the percentage-based commissions that had long been the industry default and that disproportionately penalised active traders.

The flat-fee structure was central to how Zerodha scaled without meaningful advertising spend or venture funding, because the price point itself became the marketing channel and word-of-mouth among active traders did the rest.

By 2020, Zerodha had self-assessed its valuation at roughly one billion dollars during an ESOP buyback — an internally-derived unicorn status that did not require a priced venture round and underlined the firm's insistence on validating worth from cash flow rather than from external marks.

Nithin's stated reason for refusing venture capital was that taking money would have meant surrendering storytelling freedom: as a self-funded founder he could say things on markets, regulation and competitors that a VC-backed CEO simply cannot, which he treats as a long-term brand advantage.

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.