Nikhil Kamath and Nitin, both brothers, started a brokerage business. Their initial journey was different from others. Nitin completed his engineering, but his younger brother was a college drop out. As they came from a middle-class family and had no money in their pockets.
Both brothers started working in a call center for just 8,000 rupees at the age of 18 years old. The journey was never easy. Eventually, they started doing trading along with a call center job in the daytime.
In 2010, they decided to open a platform for managing others' portfolios in stock markets as a brokerage firm. They started it without any funds. They used Yahoo and door-to-door campaigns for Zerodha. Initially, it was a tough task, as they were experiencing technical glitches with their platform. They had minimal resources and fewer employees. After such challenges, their user base increased from 1 lakh to 14 lakhs and eventually 1 crore. As the company’s potential was increasing day by day, they were only focusing on daytime traders. The day arrived when Zerodha charged 20 rupees. They made it to zero brokerage, which shook the brokerage firms and made zerodha the most trusted and people started relying on Zerodha for trading.
90% of zerodha staff work from home. They have not invested a lot of wealth in office infrastructure. It was purely self-funded, where it involved good bold decisions. Zero brokerage was unique at that time.
1.6 crore users and with 6 lakh crore investment. Zerodha has a valuation of 30,000 crores.
Few motivational points from kamath Brothers
* Long time planning with small steps being invested continuously would show results over time.
*Don't borrow to invest and don't invest emotionally.
* Balancing health with wealth.
* Spreading money across many areas including mutual funds, equity and gold. Instead of investing in one bet.
* Build skills before chasing money.
* Stay humble as markets punish overconfidence while investing. Proper research-based investments work effectively.
