Nikhil Kamath on running Zerodha with brother Nithin: ‘Egos come into play…’

Nikhil Kamath, who co-founded Zerodha with his brother Nithin Kamath, reflected about how they run the online brokerage platform together. Attributing the success of Zerodha to the fact that it is run by brothers, Nikhil Kamath said that 65 per cent of startups are shut down due to fights among founders.
“We have an added advantage of being brothers and we do completely different things. All my time is spent doing stock market-related stuff, all his time is spent on people and broking-related stuff so we don’t get into each other’s way. We just happen to compliment each other, but that being said, there are times when egos come into play. There are times when misunderstandings happen. Luckily for us, things that really helped was that from the very beginning we had everything on paper,” Nikhil Kamath said.
Reflecting on how the company is run, he said that there were several ups and downs but the one thing he and his brother never had is “anyone outside”. He said, “We have not had investors, we have not had debt, we have run it like an old school shop in the farce of a modern company. That helped, but still, there will be misunderstandings and neither of us generally agree whenever there is a misunderstanding but if it’s anything to do with stock market, investing, trading-related stuff, I take the final call. If it’s his part of the business — anything related to people, product, broking all of that, he takes the call.”
Earlier Nithin Kamath had said, “I quickly realised that Nikhil is a better trader than I am because at that point of time we were trading money and I was also doing this side hustle of broking business. In 2008-09, I said if he is better at trading than me then why not he continue trading and maybe I can go to broking permanently.”