Can Zerodha's 'nice place to work' culture become its real moat? Here's what Nithin Kamath says

Zerodha founder Nithin Kamath has said the broking firm’s culture is not an accident, but the result of deliberate choices made over 16 years, including staying small, avoiding revenue targets, giving employees room to make mistakes and refusing to push customers to trade.

In a long post shared publicly after first writing it for Zerodha’s internal employee forum, Kamath said a recent conversation with a new team member made him realise that some recent hires may not fully understand what makes the company different. The employee knew Zerodha does not incite customers to trade, but did not know much beyond that.

Kamath said this exposed an onboarding gap that the company needs to fix.


“Zerodha only exists in its current form because of the culture, mission, and philosophy at the top,” he said. He added that lakhs of people follow the company, read what it writes and believe in what it stands for. If people inside the company do not carry that context, Zerodha risks losing what made it different, he said.

The post gives a rare look into how one of India’s most profitable fintech companies thinks about growth, people and incentives. Zerodha has often stood apart in the broking industry because it does not push users to trade more frequently, even though more trading activity can mean more revenue for brokers.

Kamath said the same thinking extends to employees. A “nice place to work” does not happen by chance, he said, and is not just a perk. In his words, it is “a business model in itself.”

One of the biggest changes came after he realised that the company could not continue with the pace of its early years. Kamath said that until around 2019, he would send and respond to emails at odd hours, stay late in office and sometimes work weekends. But as the company grew, he began to worry about burnout.

He said it takes at least 1.5 to two years for someone to start contributing meaningfully to the business. If people leave after two years, the company loses that compounding benefit. This pushed Zerodha to slow down deliberately.

Kamath said he changed his own behaviour first because employees follow the person leading the business. He started going home early and stopped sending late-night emails. Instead, he began writing thoughts in Google Keep and sharing them later.

This also explains why Zerodha has remained a team of about 1,000 people despite its scale. Kamath said staying small has been critical to the company’s success. People who stay longer compound their contribution over time.

He credited Zerodha’s chief technology officer Kailash Nadh for shaping this approach. Kamath said he initially believed more people could solve more problems, but later realised more people could also create more inefficiency. The way the tech team was built from 2014 convinced him that Zerodha could grow while remaining small.

That thinking also shaped Zerodha’s investments in companies such as smallcase, Zerodha AMC, Tijori, Sensibull, Ditto, Streak, Financialist and Pensionbox. Instead of building everything in-house, Zerodha chose to work with partners in adjacent areas so that the core business stayed focused.

Kamath also wrote about patience and the absence of fear inside the company. He said employees should not be afraid to admit mistakes. Hidden mistakes, unless they involve ethical lapses, are more dangerous than the mistakes themselves.

“This is a big part of how we maintain quality — not through threats, but giving people the space to own up to their mistakes and correct them,” he said.