Zerodha CEO remembers ‘biggest cheerleader’ father: ‘First customer whenever…’
Zerodha CEO Nithin Kamath, who founded the company with brother Nikhil, paid tribute to their father, who he said, was their ‘biggest cheerleader.’
In a long post on X (formerly Twitter), Kamath stated that their father was, in a way, their venture capitalist (VC), and the ‘first customer whenever we attempted something.’
‘Gave me the initial seed capital…’
Nithin recalled instances when their father was his first customer: when the former did multi-level marketing, and when he opened a sub-brokerage and portfolio management business, adding that the latter gave the initial seed capital when he (Nithin) decided to trade.
“He supported us in anything that we tried, no matter how foolish it seemed in hindsight. All of this with the limited resources he had access to,” the Zerodha CEO wrote.
‘…invited to speak at Canara Bank’
The entrepreneur then mentioned one of the ‘most emotional moments in my professional journey – being invited to speak at Canara Bank, where their father spent his entire career, retiring around 2013.
“He was in the audience and in tears when I gave the talk…gave his whole life to the bank helped many small businessmen without any expectations. He embodied the traditional Indian middle-class values that hopefully we both can stick with throughout our lives, even when he is no longer with us to guide us,” Kamath added.
Zerodha
Established on August 15, 2010, the company was named ‘Zerodha,’ a combination of ‘Zero’ and ‘Rodha’ (Sanskrit for barrier) and is based in Bengaluru. It is a retail stockbroker; it claims that ‘more than 1 crore clients place millions of orders every day through our platforms,’ contributing over 15% of all Indian retail trading volumes.
