People know Zerodha. They know the brand, the product, the numbers. What they don’t know are the people who built it.<\/p>\n
A lot has already been said about how Zerodha started, why we chose a flat-fee model, and why we remained bootstrapped. Nithin has written and spoken openly about many of the questions people have through tweets, blog posts, interviews, and podcasts.<\/p>\n
But these answers are often spread across different places and tied to whatever was happening at the time. There is rarely enough room to connect the dots, explore the trade-offs, or understand how the people running different parts of Zerodha actually think.<\/p>\n
And beyond Nithin, there have been very few public conversations with the people who have shaped Zerodha over the years.<\/p>\n
That is what we are trying to do with The Back Office.<\/p>\n
It is a series of conversations with the people who built and continue to run Zerodha.<\/p>\n
Not just about what they built, but how they approach their work. How decisions are made when there is no obvious right answer. What goes wrong behind the scenes. Where people disagree. What changes as a company grows, and what they have deliberately tried not to change.<\/p>\n
We are starting with Nithin.<\/p>\n
We did not ask him to retell Zerodha\u2019s origin story or explain the flat-fee model again. Instead, we picked up questions he has touched on before and spent more time on what sits underneath them.<\/p>\n
How do you run a brokerage that earns when customers trade while also telling them that most people are better off trading less? How do you decide which growth opportunities to ignore? What risks become visible only when markets turn? How do regulation, technology, and market cycles shape decisions that may look straightforward from the outside?<\/p>\n
We also spoke about the parts of running Zerodha that are harder to capture in a tweet or a short interview: the doubts, disagreements, mistakes, and decisions whose consequences become clear only years later.<\/p>\n
Future episodes will feature others who have shaped Zerodha in very different ways: Kailash, our CTO, who leads technology across Zerodha\u2014from customer-facing products to the underlying infrastructure; Karthik, who built Varsity and leads our education initiatives; and Venu, who oversees the operations and compliance work that keeps the brokerage running every day.<\/p>\n
They have rarely spoken publicly about their work, even though it shapes much of what customers experience.<\/p>\n
The first episode of The Back Office, featuring Nithin, is now live on the Zerodha YouTube channel.<\/p>\n