People, panels and one hell of a party: Zero1 fest 2.0

Zero1 has been busy building IPs and adding channels to its Network the last year. But one thing we’ve been quite bullish about are ‘offline IPs’. New age media is content + community and meeting our audience in the real world makes all the difference.

So, we hosted 3,000 people in the 2nd edition of the Zero1 fest last week. We’ve been called the ‘Lollapalooza for finance nerds’ and I guess we’ll take that as a compliment. We didn’t want to do a boring finance conference so we turned it into a celebration.

Zero1’s aim is to make ‘money & wealth’ conversations a part of pop culture.

How People Got The Passes

The fest is essentially free. But the passes must be earned by downloading the Zero1 app and completing a mission. This year 22,000 people downloaded the app, around 13,000 entries were accepted and we gave away 1,600 passes (each pass allows a +1). This meant only true fans were let in. The quality of the audience matters and that’s why the vibe at the fest was great.

Panel talks and Entertainment

We had some amazing panels to learn from:

The Perfect Portfolio

• Nirupa Shankar, Joint MD- Brigade Group
• Ajinkya Kulkarni, Cofounder & CEO- Wint Wealth
• Deepak Shenoy, Founder & CEO – Capitalmind
• Abid Hassan, CEO & Cofounder- Sensibull

The stuff that makes a founder

• Paras Chopra, Founder- Wingify & LossFunk
• Tarun Mehta, Founder- Ather
• Dinesh Pai, Head of Rainmatter

Think like a Genius

• Nambi Narayanan, ISRO Scientist
• Ganeshprasad S, Co-founder – ThinkSchool

Increasing Healthspan

• Suniel Shetty, Actor & Investor
• Dilip Kumar, Investor at Rainmatter
• Swetha Subbiah, Co-Founder- Sisters in Sweat
• Revant Himatsingka aka Food Pharmer, Author

Decluttering D2C Brands

• Parul Gulati, Actress & Founder- Nish Hair
• Suhasini Sampath, Co-founder- Yogabar
• Rashmi Daga, Founder- Freshmenu
• Sonia Shenoy, Business Journalist

Did I Effup Up?

• Nithin Kamath, Founder & CEO- Zerodha
• Karthik Rangappa, Chief of Education- Zerodha
• Prateek Singh, Founder & CEO- Zero1byZerodha, LearnApp
• Kenny Sebastian, Comedian

AMA: Kamath Brothers

• Nithin Kamath, Founder & CEO- Zerodha
• Nikhil Kamath, Co-founder- Zerodha
• Kunal Shah, Founder- Cred

We also had some amazing music by Taba Chake & Madboy/Mink along with comedy acts by Kenny Sebastian, Abhishek Upmany & Urooj Ashfaq.

And of-course the headliners Lisa Mishra and Raftaar.

Experience Zones

We had 10 games (experience zones) themed around money and health. Attendees played to earn bolt coins and exchange them for cool Merch at the vault : )

One group of friends pooled the bolt coins together to get the ‘Mega Mystery Box’. Luckily it contained the entire collection of merch + Rs. 10,000 worth Zerodha Nifty 100 ETFs gifted by Nithin Kamath himself!

What we tried to do better this year

More sustainable: Each attendee got a reusable cup, there were no plastic bottles allowed. We had water refilling stations everywhere. Most of our merch and the packaging used by our vendors was sustainable. And our friends at Hasiru Dala made sure that the waste management was done right.

Subsidised food: Concerts are notorious for high priced food. So we invited food vendors at 0 fee and asked them to pass on the savings to the user. Each item was below MRP for the attendees.

Zero1byZerodha is a new-age media network, which means our community is at the heart of everything we do. This fest was our honest, weird, quirky way of celebrating the beautiful, awesome nerds all of us are : )