Nithin Kamath reveals Zerodha's leadership secret: Why the broker rarely hires outsiders for top jobs

Zerodha founder and CEO Nithin Kamath has shed light on the brokerage's approach to building its leadership team, saying the company has largely relied on employees who have grown within the organisation rather than hiring senior executives from outside.

"Almost everyone in leadership today has grown from within the organisation," Kamath said in a post on X, adding that Zerodha has "rarely hired anyone from outside for leadership roles."

According to Kamath, most people in the company's leadership team joined Zerodha as early-career employees. "For most people here, Zerodha was their first or second job," he said.


He also pointed to the educational backgrounds of the company's leaders, saying, "we don't really have anyone with a pedigree education either."

Kamath cited Shoaib as an example of Zerodha's approach to developing talent internally. He said Shoaib "started as a support agent, went on to head account opening, and eventually became our head of HR."

For Kamath, the value of having leaders rise through the organisation lies in their familiarity with its culture and way of working.

"Having leaders who come from within the organisation is valuable because they understand the culture instinctively," he said.

According to Kamath, internally developed leaders do not need extensive explanations about the company's approach to decision-making and values.

"You don't have to put in effort to explain how we think, what we value, or how we make decisions," he said.

Kamath also linked leadership closely with the evolution of an organisation's culture.

"Ultimately, the people at the top end up shaping an organisation's culture to a large degree," he said. "So having people who have imbibed that culture for years makes running the business so much easier."

From leadership to CSR, Kamath's focus on long-term thinking

Kamath's comments on Zerodha's internal leadership model come just a day after he raised another question about how companies think about long-term value creation—this time in the context of corporate social responsibility.

In a September 29 post, Kamath questioned whether India's mandatory 2% CSR spending requirement is "really necessary" and whether it is the best way to create social impact.

At Zerodha, he said, the company has allocated around 10% of its profits towards what it calls "investing for the future", largely through Rainmatter.

"The keyword for me is investing," Kamath said.

His concern with mandatory CSR, he said, is that businesses may not always have the "bandwidth or expertise" to determine which projects can create the greatest impact.

Kamath argued that companies may find it easier to select projects in the regions where they operate, a pattern he said could contribute to CSR spending being concentrated in states such as Maharashtra, Gujarat and Delhi, while states that arguably need more resources receive less.

He also questioned how companies measure the success of CSR initiatives.

"Planting X lakh trees makes for a great CSR target," Kamath said. But, he added, what matters is whether the trees are native species and whether they survive for 10 years.

Similarly, he said, building a school may be easy to measure, but the more important outcome is whether children are actually learning.

Kamath said setting a fixed spending percentage could create incentives to optimise for the wrong metric.

"When you tell businesses to spend X%, you run the risk of incentivising CSR spending to optimise for the wrong things," he said.

He also flagged governance and leakage risks, arguing that the greater the focus on deploying a predetermined budget rather than solving a problem, the greater the risk that money could be "wasted or misused."

Kamath did not present a definitive alternative. "I don't know what the right solution is," he said.

As one possibility, he suggested that corporate tax could be 27% instead of 25%, with the government allocating the additional revenue.

"In theory, this could spread resources more evenly across the country rather than concentrating them wherever profitable companies happen to be," he said, while also raising the counter-question: "would the government allocate it any better?"

Kamath also highlighted what he described as an unintended consequence of the 2% figure: "anchoring".

Once companies are told that CSR spending should be 2% of profits, he said, the number can become a target rather than simply a minimum.

"When times are good, businesses hit 2%. When times are bad, spending naturally falls along with profits," Kamath said.

As a result, companies that might otherwise have chosen to spend 5%, 10% or more could end up anchoring themselves to the 2% figure, he argued.

For Kamath, the broader issue is not simply how much money companies allocate, but what that money achieves over the long term.

"Maybe the real question shouldn't be how much companies spend on CSR. It should be how much long-term impact the money creates," he said.

"Spending for the sake of spending and investing for the future are two very different things."

Disclosure: This article has been written by Kumar Gaurav, who is not a SEBI-registered Research Analyst or an Investment Adviser. Gaurav and their ‘relative(s)’ (as defined under Section 2(77) of the Companies Act, 2013) do not hold any financial interest in the companies mentioned in this article as of the date of publication. The views/recommendations mentioned in this article, wherever applicable, are those of the respective SEBI-registered Research Analyst/brokerage and have been reproduced/reported with due attribution. They should not be construed as the views or recommendations of The Economic Times Digital or the journalist. Readers are advised to consider the original research report and make their investment decisions based on their own assessment. Brokerage disclosures here.