company is worth 100 crore rupees so that person becomes worth 50 crores automatic that's right but what you have in your savings account or your current account or your own personal portfolio is different from that yeah so how do the two worlds meet like so i'll tell you in the startup world right uh typically when you start a company uh you raise funding to go ahead and you know spend on acquiring client or growing your company founders don't have secondary rounds by secondary i mean is when they personally take out money from the company for a long time typically when you do many series of funding uh there will be opportunities for a founder to get some liquidity uh sell a part of his equity and take out money then that equation comes into play but for the most part a company's value is a company's value and not very often is it that person's valuation yeah but do you think of it on a personal level because i know you're i mean again getting into the dirty details pretty early but


mean again getting into the dirty details pretty early but you are a spiritual like guy you have a spiritual inclination i feel like uh do you get conscious of it on a very personal level that why did life and and you're also really young man yeah like people don't associate the term billionaire with someone who's you know just in their 30s right early 30s at that right so do you kind of become existential on a personal level with that not yet uh i think luckily for both me and nathan we are surrounded by people who kind of like mock us at every turn like colleagues and family and stuff like that so uh they keep all of this at check kalash who we were talking about earlier he gives us a hard time each time you know that word is mentioned anyway by virtue of having these people in our life i think we do okay right now coming to your story yeah you you dropped out of school to become a chess player is that true like that was the


a chess player is that true like that was the intention uh partly true i think uh i was reasonably good at chess growing up started playing very early i think i must have been five or six when i started uh you know you play that you played the school level and you played the district the city the state and you play nationally and stuff like that all of that happened uh dropping out of school was a combination of many things not chess alone the fact that a i was not very good at school i don't think i was the best student to got the best marks uh there were also other things at play like i started doing some business on the side i used to sell mobile phones like old ones which use this uh ninth grade so this would be 2002 yeah some something like that a little bit earlier than that also i think yeah yeah and then i i got a job in a call center at 17 and i think the the drive to make money was there from the very beginning


drive to make money was there from the very beginning and i would say looking back at it i have more regrets about having dropped out when i did uh because you meet people you know you made friends in college and each time i meet people they talk about how the best friendships and the best times in their life happened when they were in college and i i have never had that experience and nor will i ever so you feel like you missed out on a certain experience in life that's that's specifically what you regret about dropping out that's the only thing i regret the rest of it i don't regret it yeah the career yeah yeah of course not i mean we got lucky like so many times in life right so definitely don't regret that but the whole experience of going to college which is in every movie and you see friends from college and it's reinstated you know all over uh every time you meet somebody from a group of people who went to college together that i miss yeah


people who went to college together that i miss yeah miss having that bro yeah messing around how did you get into trading and um you know actually you know before we actually get to talking about trading i heard you say something very interesting in one of your youtube videos um you said that chess creates a very good environment in your head because it allows you to be creative within a framework of pre-decided rules and you said the same rules somewhat apply to the stock market and finance yeah so chess is less about intelligence and more about the ability to remember every game which was played historically so you need to know all the openings that are out there you need to know middle game end game theory and there are a bunch of basic structural rules in chess you have to like try and control the center develop your pieces quickly castle as quickly as you can you have to follow those rules and then you can you know add the extra thing which makes you a differentiated chess player not just trading but i


a differentiated chess player not just trading but i think life is like that you can't not have any rules whatsoever a certain level of discipline i think goes a long way in making uh every success story happen like what kind of discipline if i were to equate it with trading i would say things like having a stop loss not taking too much leverage diversifying not touching penny stocks there are rules in trading there are rules in chess but what you do outside of these rules makes you different but you have to follow these rules got it um again referencing the podcast you did with your brother yeah we called it test cricket yes it's kind of like test cricket like you play a slow and steady game play ethically you play according to the classic definitions of things um so i just want to highlight something uh that you spoke about here you basically were talking about the concept of pattern recognition that okay you've seen past chess games you've learned from it yeah and then when you're


you've learned from it yeah and then when you're in a situation where you want to win a chess match you'll go back to one of your old patterns you say okay this is similar to that particular chess game i saw in 1997 or whatever um and that's the basic concept of how artificial intelligence works also when we when you talk about ai powered products or ai powered apps that's what's happening at a core level you're feeding in a lot of patterns right that system is learning it and then it's executing things based on uh you know what the old patterns were which also reminds me of an article i read about intuition human intuition you know people say that okay i have a good sixth sense i can read people right or i can read situations uh at its core it's basically pattern recognition i think we were discussing this yesterday yeah last night yes this morning i don't remember when yeah this morning uh but it's basically you you end up uh reading someone's eyebrow


you you end up uh reading someone's eyebrow movements the way their eyes move the way their lips uh get pursed up or whatever it's called uh in certain situations and then you're able to kind of go back to your own memory and highlight a moment from your past where you're like okay in that situation this person was thinking in this way therefore nikhil might be thinking like this and according to the context of this business scenario let me say this so let me take this decision which is a very strong uh it's a very important trait in the world of startups in in just the professional world uh but does intuition come into play in the stock market as well and is that why your brother calls you naturally gifted at this game i think it does yeah so i've been doing exactly the same job i do today for a long time ever since i've been 17 years old so it's been a good 17 years of watching the markets every day i don't think i have missed a single


day i don't think i have missed a single market day as if the markets have been open and i might be anywhere in the world but i'm in front of my terminals during market hours and looking at one thing for so many years every day i think gives you a sense of intuition i think it does and do you think it's the same logic that it's pattern recognition at the end it could be i think there is no structure to it if you go back in time like the very early traders there was something called reading the tape they would just look at stock prices changing and be able to discern trends in the market that has kind of like become pass a and is no longer true but i'm sure there is some level of innate you can call it feel you need to have a feel for what is going on in the market and that helps you decide uh whether you should go long shot or what you should do is it like gambling uh it could be like gambling it depends


gambling uh it could be like gambling it depends on if you're levered and you know if you have 100 rupees in your account and in a hurry to make money if you borrow 1900 rupees and buy something worth 2000 rupees it can very easily become gambling but if you follow rules and you're looking to make say 15 a year or 20 a year and you're in the market to garner value over the long term then it's not like gambling so you know movies like wolf of wall street or the scam 92 show can you highlight certain aspects of the stock market that they've shown which are not really true other than other than the lifestyle like specifically when it comes to the technicalities of finance yeah what have they shown that's probably not how it really is uh so scam 92 right i watched it a couple of months ago and a lot of what he did back then is no longer relevant or even possible because technology has come in and kind of streamlined the compliance around trading


in and kind of streamlined the compliance around trading right wolf of wall street another great movie that i love i think showed people in our industry in a very bad light but i think people in that era were able to drive up stock price and manipulate it to a certain extent for the lack of regulation and lack of penetration in the market not that many people access the markets at that time it would be very hard to do that today especially in large cap companies there is very little uh you know insider stuff or manipulation or any of that yeah now coming back to your story so you see your elder brother you know getting active in the stock market you learn it yourself like because there's a lot of teenagers young college students who kind of are fascinated by the stock market bunch of them step into themselves bunch of them don't because they're afraid to they think that no i don't want to play with money money is too real world thing so what was your mindset at whatever


real world thing so what was your mindset at whatever age you started at how old are you i think 17 i still remember because i had an account with share khan and yeah so i did nitin being in the trading world already made a big difference and it kind of maybe drew me towards trading but trading is one of those things that you can't really uh it's not a team sport i don't think two people can trade together it doesn't work like that there is a different style of trading for every person and the best teacher is probably experience you have to you have to try you have to lose money you have to make money and then lose money again when you go through that cycle many times you start to realize what you did wrong when you lost money and that becomes the the teaching from that time period yeah and initially you're playing with smaller amounts then once you become comfortable you play with like large yeah yeah so initially when i started i used to work in a call


when i started i used to work in a call center called 24 7. in bangalore early days of when call center started you know and i'd i'd do the night shift and i'd trade as well so the money which went in was savings from that salary and i used to get paid like 8 000 rupees a month or something so it was not a large amount of money at all but the thing with stock markets is it does not matter what your capital uh you bring into the market it is still a lot of fun outside of the money making aspect to watch something go up in value after you have bought it is very accelerating and addictive in a in a very weird manner like can you explain this further yeah very often when you buy something and it works out it is not because you did better research than anybody or it's not because you're smarter than someone else it's a factor of chance and you know uh many forces that people will not truly understand but i think the human mind


not truly understand but i think the human mind is wired in such a way that subconsciously you attribute the stock going up to something you think you have done correctly and when the opposite happens and a stock goes down the same thing happens again you think you have done something wrong so you start to evolve and actually start to become a trader when you come to the conclusion that nobody can predict stock prices you could have been doing this for 40 years you might have more information than anybody else but it is impossible to say stock is at price 100 and it will go up to 120 in three months nobody can make that call once you arrive at that spot then you focus less about predicting the future you worry more about uh covering risk in all market conditions so you think if the stock goes from 100 to 110 how can i have the best risk metrics in place if it goes from 100 to 90 the same 100 becomes 70 the same and then you arrive at a model


70 the same and then you arrive at a model portfolio which should do okay in all these some circumstances and then you know you just close your eyes and pray yeah but making predictions on stock prices impossible and i think people have to realize that very early again if you had to like you know signal out one particular skill would it probably be pattern recognition over anything else uh i would say more the ability to be able to objectively read sentiment at the end of the day stocks move uh not because of how the fundamentals have changed uh not because a pattern which happened in the past will replicate itself the entire premise of technical analysis if you watch tv you know people keep saying moving average crossover or head and shoulders and stuff like that it is based on the premise that the past will repeat itself i personally think market activity is random what happens tomorrow might have no resemblance to what happened in the past so i don't think that helps as much but being able to


think that helps as much but being able to read sentiment because stock price is more if more people want to buy and less people want to sell so to look at people around you and figure out uh if they are inclined to buy i think that really helps so understanding human psychology i think uh you would be surprised but equity trading is essentially just understanding psychology yeah understanding what investors are doing understanding what promoters are doing even to the extent that understanding what leaders and politicians are doing because that in turn has an effect on what happens to the underlying companies right for the young listeners could you explain what equity trading is yeah sure uh so each time a company needs to raise capital they either go to a bank or they go to you know a private equity firm which gives them money privately if they want to raise capital from the people of india the public they go to stock markets so i have a company x i make hundred rupees of profit i need 10 rupees


make hundred rupees of profit i need 10 rupees to grow my company so i will go to the stock markets i'll say i'll sell 10 of my company for 100 rupees you give me the money and then you become shareholders in my business that is essentially equity being created and then people buy and sell that equity constantly and that is equity trading and again speaking about human psychology yeah um so you understand human psychology on a mass scale because of trading in the stock market right does that also teach you human psychology on a very one-to-one level do you think you become a better reader of people as well uh a lot of people tell me i'm a terrible reader of people so i don't know but i enjoy psychology a lot it beat human or you know psychology around finance or even the behavioral psychology aspects of things i think it's the most interesting thing in the world to try and understand what somebody else is thinking and uh what is driving them to think in


thinking and uh what is driving them to think in a certain manner uh i find it fascinating yeah but if your brother called you one of the most gifted traders he knows um you know what goes on in the head of someone like that like like you like if you if i mean everyone knows that you're gifted you've kind of proven that with zero and everything you guys have done but what goes on in your head if you're actually born with that gift of being great at finance so on an everyday basis do you constantly think of the stock market are the numbers flashing in your head no nothing like that was happening i wish that were true uh so one thing the stock markets teach you is humility because you might have been doing it for 15 years you might have made a lot of money trading but the minute you let that get to you the 21st year will you know take everything away because every trade is like your beginning and the trade is not concerned by


your beginning and the trade is not concerned by who is placing that trade so it's a very uh it's an ecosystem which is very leveling because you might have x amount of capital and someone else might have 100 rupees but when you buy yourself to the market you're exactly the same but outside of you know being able to read sentiment and having uh having a lot of experience in trading and stuff like that i don't think i'm doing anything special uh the only thing i've learned with time is uh the rules that i have in my trading systems and these are not fancy or these are not things which are difficult to replicate you know very simple stuff as long as you do the simple stuff correctly and you don't have ridiculous expectations you can't go into the market thinking i'll make 30 40 percent every year if the risk-free rate of a certain country is let's say five percent and inflation is around that if you're making nine ten percent a year uh i think it's an


nine ten percent a year uh i think it's an incredibly good return if you're trying to achieve that i think uh stock markets are a great place uh the one thing people forget when you compare stock market with other investments like real estate or bank fixed deposits and everything else that is available in india is the liquid nature of stock markets you can sell it at any point of time and you can take out money uh and that makes this product uh a lot better than other products which don't have that aspect of liquidity we all talk about why so many people are coming into the markets today i personally think that place that has a huge factor to play in all this uh people in the pandemic realize they might have a plot of land somewhere or they might have a home somewhere but if things go crazy and they need to take out that money tomorrow it's not easy but in the stock markets it is and i i foresee that more money will come in by virtue of this reason as


money will come in by virtue of this reason as well uh yesterday we were talking about how generational gaps are reducing which basically means that nikhil born in 1986 and when we are born in 1993 are one generation someone born 1997 is a second generation yeah so on one 1999 is a third generation so the generational gap is reducing which means the world is getting filled up with newer fresher more advanced and more rapidly advancing mindsets than ever before which is why i feel that there's a huge burst in the world of uh personal finance asset management all these domains where you know your average person on the road is also concerned with uh how do i multiply my money right be it through mutual funds be it through you know the stock market right or whatever you have um in in this whole ecosystem that the countries kind of entered uh i think zerodha was a very right moment app but you guys began as with the intention of just starting a portfolio management service in its heart


of just starting a portfolio management service in its heart and then something happened along the way and you all figured out no no wait let's now build product yeah so my question is what happened along the way because if you you guys are great traders i'm sure you all would have done a great job as portfolio managers for hnis or you know just people who invested with you but why did you all go down this road of creating a tech startup through you know the world of finance because it's given a lot of inspiration to a lot of entrepreneurs from other domains for example myself in content after speaking in nitin i really started thinking about how i can incorporate tech into what i'm doing right uh so i'm sure y'all also had some kind of an inspirational moment like that and that's my question so when we began at the very beginning we wanted to do broking because we were traders and everything which was available out there was horrible right it was very expensive very clunky


was horrible right it was very expensive very clunky uh so when we started cost was our unique usb and people came to us because we were charging a flat 20 rupees and everybody else was charging half a percent which is maybe 10 times as expensive as us uh the shift from cost being the usp uh to technology i think uh to be fair i think the credit goes to kellage and nitin maybe because when we hired uh or when kailash joined us i think that's when we actually became a tech player and all of the tech products and everything around technology has largely you know been his uh or his doing yeah so i think all the all the credit there to him and uh on a larger scale i mean the only way for us to reach you know millions of people across the country is to have better tech products than other people and reach them online i don't think the brick-and-mortar way of doing things works anymore in fact bombay this weekend i've been meeting a lot of


bombay this weekend i've been meeting a lot of people who are in the brick and mortar industries so even these guys are now exactly what we are talking about right now they realize how important technology is and they want to adopt it but i think uh i think it's very hard for someone who has done stuff a certain way for like 20 years to suddenly change and become a different kind of company i think often in every company's life cycle when a company does well right uh everybody associated with that company like i was talking about trading earlier uh is naturally surrounded by people who are treating them uh like they have some superior ability or they're gifted in some way by virtue of what happened to the company many times how well a company does is a factor of timing luck and where who was at what point of time i think it's very important for people running companies to not forget that but more importantly i think you have to understand when you're becoming less relevant in


have to understand when you're becoming less relevant in every industry and be able to replace yourself with people who are smarter from a newer generation like you were adhering to earlier yeah do you see my generation being for lack of a better word more gifted than like the previous generation probably i would say so i think uh like i'm 34 now and i'm sure in four five six years i will become less relevant than i am today and a new 25 year old will be better equipped to do what i'm doing but i think i have to be smart about that and i have to make sure i find those people today and not wait for me to you know become less competent in a way and then do it that that keeps companies going for much longer yeah and it's also about the guy uh who started it all staying humble and taking feedback man like this is something i've seen that even if you recruit younger people to join your team sometimes you're too arrogant to like listen


your team sometimes you're too arrogant to like listen to them right so uh have you heard of filter copy dice media uh there are you must have seen filter copies videos this is a strategy i picked up from them right someone asked them how do you keep your content relevant considering the amount of content you're putting up how do you keep topics uh you know popping in your head and they said that we just hire younger writers every year you've hired all the 93 born people no higher than 95 born people now hi all the 97 every year you just keep hiring younger at the same time take feedback right from the bottom i think i think we are there i think uh in a couple of years i mean nobody remains the largest forever right like we have gotten lucky and we're the largest broker and like we were talking about asset management we're coming back into asset management in a way with true beacon and uh focused in the ultra hni space but in a couple of years like


hni space but in a couple of years like everybody who is you know me or nitin or anybody else who's play playing a role of leadership has been doing what we're doing for 10 years 11 years or longer in many cases so we will have to bring new blood in and allow for that new blood to take roles of leadership because the older people will become less relevant yeah speaking about new blood i've got to take you back to the time you were 15 yeah and i don't know what your mindset was then dude because you seem like a very calm collected human being who's doing his own thing but was there any kind of fire to prove yourself after dropping out see what happens is once you stop going to school you feel very insecure your friends your classmates of the time go on to you know colleges and they have a certain trajectory so you read a lot to overcompensate i think i went through that phase like self-study self-study you read whatever you find


like self-study self-study you read whatever you find interesting but while you're reading you're not actually reading because you're interested in what the book has to offer a part of it is you're interested but a large part is you kind of like dealing with your own insecurity of not going to college right because you feel like a child i didn't go to college all my friends did but at least i'm you know reading and i'm learning and i'm not being left behind do you think that's a more valuable education uh in some cases yeah but in most cases no i would say because i i don't think i i would ever recommend dropping out to people because we got lucky but not necessarily 100 people who drop out you'll have more than 10 or 20 or get lucky so for the vast majority to have that formal education structure behind them prepares them for so many other things in life which dropping out not right i mean and i know that you're going to highlight luck as a big part of


you're going to highlight luck as a big part of this whole process but other than that on a very like human level yeah what did you do right from a mentality perspective or from a an execution-based perspective not from a business perspective the guy nikhil what did that 18 year old 19 year old think correct what were you willing to do that you know set you up for the rest of your life yeah see when we began broking in 2009 2010 uh we were coming off the financial crisis which happened in 2008. uh stock markets were not cool broking was definitely not cool there was very little innovation and money being spent on doing new things in stock markets so we started at a point where there was a vacuum in a way for anybody to do anything new in stock markets and we took advantage of that if we were to try and replicate exactly what we did back then in any other time maybe in 2020 if we try it i don't think it would work so that played


it i don't think it would work so that played a huge part and and personally i think in in my entire career of trading or broking or asset management uh the one thing uh i think i have the one thing which has been a little bit of a differentiator is all the time and hours spent on the stock market i'm sticking to my niche i'm not trying to build something where i have to start learning from the basics this is something i've been doing all my life and i'm attempting to do new things in the same industry they're essentially the same job but with different skins you know i think that makes a huge difference right um you know i mean and i got to highlight something for you because i just feel you're too humble a guy so you may not highlight this yourself um if you you spoke about sticking to your niche but in its essence that's preparation for your moment so maybe the 2008 crash was your moment but you had spent from you know 1999 to


moment but you had spent from you know 1999 to say 2007 just keeping at it again the luck factor could be that you found your vibe early in life you found something that you enjoy something that comes naturally to you but you kept at it and i'm sure that even once you all began zero there were all those learnings of seven eight years of work but just came into play right place right now yeah would you agree i would agree and i think uh what you mentioned there is very important uh the fact that i liked this job the fact that i like the stock stock markets i think that's the biggest differentiator like after 17 years like five years down the line if i were to not make any money i still think i would be sitting and trading even if i were to be losing money because i enjoyed that much i think that was the real differentiator i mean they say that success happens when preparation meets opportunity i also feel it you should add another masala which is called the


it you should add another masala which is called the masala fun i really see joy in you when you speak about the stock market or just finance in general man so now after zero has been established the obvious question is what what next like you guys i mean there's a lot of people who would probably stop doing their job after they've reached a point like which the karma brothers have reached but you guys are planning further yeah and you all are like you know hiring more building teams yeah what's the thought process well uh so right now i'm spending a lot of time on true beacon which is the asset management company what okay hold up i need you to explain to the young listeners what asset management is sure so if you want to invest your money in equity markets to get a return you can either do it yourself or do it through a fund manager asset management has three uh kind of licenses in india you can be a mutual fund uh you can take any amount of capital you


fund uh you can take any amount of capital you can't really hedge too much hedging is covering for risk by taking a position on the short side you've got to break that down yeah sure so hedging is say i want to buy an alliance tikka i want to hold 100 shares of reliance but if reliance falls 50 i want some kind of an insurance so i will buy a hundred shares of reliance and then i will also add to that instrument for which i pay say two rupees on my 100 rupee investment on reliance to cover the off possibility that the stock falls 30 so if the stock falls 30 percent that two rupees will become 20 bucks and i'll have i'll have kind of like curtailed a part of the risk you're cushioning your loss yeah yeah but that two rupees is coming off my upside so if the stock goes from 100 to 110 i make 108 got it yeah so that is essentially hedging and uh where was i mutual funds so mutual


and uh where was i mutual funds so mutual funds can't do any hedging you can take in 500 rupees thousand rupee investment they're a pooled investment vehicle where 100 investors put money all of it gets collected and aggregated and then invested into the stock market the fund manager will typically charge you a two percent management fee a year and a hundred percent on the money you make two percent on the money you invest on the money you invest okay it is expensive uh it used to be a lot higher and there were distributors and all kind of leakages in place the regulator has cleaned it up to a large extent but still a lot of work needs to be done the second mode of asset management in india is a pms where you need to have a minimum of 25 lakhs you give your money to a fund manager again and he manages it for you the third way is a category 3 alternate investment fund which is what truebeacon is here you have the ability to hedge up to


is here you have the ability to hedge up to 100 percent so you don't have to necessarily bet on the markets alongside or you don't have to bet on a company going up you can bet on a company going up versus a company going down and gain from the relative arbitrage which is available there let me give you an example in a mutual fund if you want exposure in the id space you will buy infosys and tcs in a category three aif you can buy a infosys if the price has gone down and you can short sell a tcs at the same time short selling is whenever you bet on a stocks price going down so if something is at 100 and i short sell it when it goes to 90 i make 10 rupees of profit so in a cat 3 aif if i think infosys is relatively better as a company than tcs i can do that transaction and make money out of that buying infosys and selling tcs what this allows for you to do is not be so dependent


allows for you to do is not be so dependent on market cycles you don't need the markets to go up 10 or you know gradually go up every year you can just bet cross bet in companies in the same sector in different sectors that's what we do at truebeacon what does it mean for the consumer for the consumer you have a stable return profile and a much lower volatility profile than buying a vanilla mutual fund uh so say for example if you buy a mutual fund and the markets go up 10 you make 10 if it goes down 10 you lose ten percent but here you can create a risk profile when if the markets go up ten percent you make six seven percent when the markets go down ten percent you only lose three four percent it gives you differentiated uh differentiated risk profile which is very attractive to many large investors so let me just get this straight without getting into the details of the finance and the technicalities of it you're basically creating a system for your consumer where a really rich


creating a system for your consumer where a really rich person can come and say i want to get a profit from this money no matter what so i will park my money with you i will invest in uh your company yeah you can handle my money and you're telling them okay it's very likely that you will make so and so amount of money which is higher than what you'd make by allowing your money to just be back parked in the bank exactly okay yeah it becomes very attractive now because interest rate cycles are down and your bank fd which is to give you eight nine percent or seven percent now gives you like four five percent so people like it i mean what's the minimum is it like you said uh ultra hnis right yeah it's about a million dollars is minimum and uh typically seven growers yeah so typically people start there but scale it significantly beyond that uh the other thing which is wrong with the asset management world today is say ranveer wants to invest one lakh rupees into a wealth


wants to invest one lakh rupees into a wealth product when you go to say a private bank or a wealth advisor the guy who is going to sell you the fund will charge you one or two rupees so you paid 1000 or 2000 already then the fund manager will charge you another 2 000 rupees a year if you make money if you don't make money he will charge you that and then there will be a lock-in period you can't take out your money for two years and the whole uh experience is not very transparent so we're trying to change all of that we have said we won't have any middlemen so no distributors when you invest 100 all 100 goes into the fund uh we have said no management fee so if uh the 2000 rupees you're paying with your normal fund here we don't charge any of that we go to the extent where we don't charge brokerage uh clearing fees custody accounting dmat all of this is zero the only thing we charge is if the hundred becomes


only thing we charge is if the hundred becomes a hundred and ten at the end of the financial year we charge 10 of profit as a fee so we will take one so what we are trying to do is become more client aligned and only make money if the client makes money but still charge him much much lower than any other fund manager out there often people do not realize but if you pay two percent in fees a year in 20 years compounded that's half your principal oh it it makes a huge tent in the return profile you receive after 20 years and we felt like asset management in india and across the world had not changed for a long time so true beacon is our attempt to make it democratize it in a way and make it a lot more transparent remove a lot of the leakages and a lot more efficient richard who you met last night is the ceo of that company who i hope to bring on the podcast you've got a former royal air force pilot yeah who's like


a former royal air force pilot yeah who's like worked in the corporate world as your ceo yeah that's crazy but from from what you say uh firstly do you think that you said that things haven't changed in the last 20 years yeah um so the the the nerds of the finance world sort of know this like they know that okay this is what happens uh and that's the business model they've adopted so you're applying zero the logic here again let's disrupt everything yeah let's throw in something new yeah god but okay the next next question is these ultra hnis they're your customers yeah how do you find them in the first place so this is your own personal network firstly uh it used to be personal network but uh we've been doing this for about 18 months now so we kind of like finished the personal network very quickly and now we get a lot of referral referrals and uh there is a a little bit of press which is going around and that gets people interested and typically people seek


around and that gets people interested and typically people seek us out for performance and transparency so these ultra hnis would reach out to us on their own uh and they'll ask us about you know how is it how does it work how do we get involved and stuff like that so with zeros are you basically tackling your everyday consumer which is your young college kids who have five thousand rupees to spend yeah and then with this other part of your ecosystem you're tackling your yeah business owners of the world and your ceos of the world yeah it's very interesting though i find it uh so for a long time in my life i did not really meet people or pitch or do the whole sales kind of thing right so these people a they're very very rich but b they're also very interesting because you know everybody is has a story everybody has a story everybody has an ego and everybody has a perspective they're very opinionated and the fact that i did not meet that many people for so long


i did not meet that many people for so long and now suddenly in the last 18 months i'm like approaching these new relationships and meeting so many people uh it's uh so whenever it doesn't matter who you are or what you've done when you go to somebody and you're asking them to invest their savings with you he's going to look upon you from a certain length uh so you have to like sell the product every time and i think you'll learn a lot from that even now like after you guys have zero to your credit yeah so let me get this straight again like maybe a ultra hnis of the 90s or 80s would take those seven crores and probably put it in property operate you know in something else and you've created a new option for the ultra agendas my question is what do the ultra hnis of india today think like can you can you generalize can you i can okay yeah so the problem in india is they all do real estate heavy a and they don't have


all do real estate heavy a and they don't have enough diversification and a lot of money stays in their holding companies their main businesses and they don't like to invest in things outside of that what's the logic protection like i want to protect myself no i think it's a general distrust of people outside of their own holding companies i think in large part fund managers mutual funds banks private banks are to blame because a lot of these institutions have ripped off people over the last few decades and now these large promoters are like instead of going to them we'll just invest in our business less hassle less leakage all of that we're trying to change that at the end of the day any business in finance is a business of credibility right uh so the way to build it in my opinion is being very very transparent but it takes time so we have started now and uh i don't know how long it will take but it looks good so far in the last two years the company has


so far in the last two years the company has come a long way so again speaking about these ultra hnis and i'm assuming that you've embraced the sales role recently much more than you did earlier am i right yeah yeah uh what are you learning about sales because sales is a concept you can learn as a billionaire founder at 34 yeah and you can also learn it as a 21 year old yeah yeah concepts are the same it's it's very humbling it so you still now i have started again going to like you know a lot of meetings in person many times they will make you wait for half an hour or an hour and in your mind you're like uh being a bit candid here you're thinking like you know why am i putting myself through this but after the meeting is done and after i have seen what the company is capable of doing i think there is a need for a product like this and i think this company will go beyond just asset management to have a network of say


beyond just asset management to have a network of say billionaires from across the world say you have a nigerian a south korean american or indian to put them all on a platform and help them connect with each other in a in a manner which is better than what a private bank or old-school merchant bank has done up until now i think will be extremely interesting think of it like because there are no bridges between these geographies a nigerian oil refining guy would never have thought in his wildest dreams to approach an indian cement maker to export cement to that country but if we can build that bridge on this platform beyond asset management i think that will be a great ultimate goal for this company and uh and information at the end of the day and knowledge is something i really like gaining and this gives you differentiated perspective because you're talking to people in so many different sectors on an everyday basis outside of what you can read in the news this is the best kind of knowledge


in the news this is the best kind of knowledge you can get i'd rather learn about what is happening to cement price by being a part of this transaction then just read about cement price in the news and i think that in turn makes me a better investor and a trader yeah yeah um there's this saying uh i think from the us military they say that the leader on the field is always right which basically means that if you're in the middle of things you have the best opinion on a subject so news might report something but you will only know the truth when you're living through it and i also strongly believe that your greatest learnings in life come from learning through people yeah and if you're a podcast host even better because i get to do this on a bi-weekly system it would make such a big difference i did a whole like hundreds of zoom meetings with clients and stuff during the pandemic but uh what you learn from physically meeting someone and talking about whatever it could


physically meeting someone and talking about whatever it could be about the industry uh you can never replicate that on a zoom call yeah which is why you dropping out may not have been bad for you i mean again i hear you i hear what you're saying about not everyone should drop out but as long as you have that urge to learn and as long as you ask the right questions there's nothing that can stop you from a well-rounded education in life an education is not just limited to college degrees in books yeah education is about your own hunger and your willingness and your humility to learn yeah yeah i think if if i had to like say one thing i just thought of it like right now when we were talking uh which makes me a a little bit better trader than others is my ability to deal with things logically when hits the roof you know like when there is chaos and things are going bad i think i'm able to compartmentalize a little bit better and remain calm and rational and make


bit better and remain calm and rational and make the logical decision versus the emotional one i think that's important in investing bar trading uh as with any youtube podcast i've got to make the self obsession about myself now yeah so uh i'm i'm in a pretty chaotic mode in life that's why i asked you the question yesterday yesterday i asked you what were you like at 27 yeah possibly to understand a reference point for myself uh was there a lot of chaos in your 20s when you guys were building zeros yeah i mean trading is always cures uh it's by design because things happen like this pandemic forget 27 uh in march was chaos right like markets fell but why was it was for you guys if okay with with the markets falling yeah but with your with when you'll have a tech product things are just different man uh even for a tech product say uh we are say typically used to a day where the market either goes up half a percent or one percent


market either goes up half a percent or one percent and down half a percent and one percent and that in turn leads to say x million transactions a day on a day when the markets fall 10 or 15 the number of transactions will be like five-fold and everything changes right like how you service each transaction the amount of time the load on everything so it gets very chaotic and the flip side of scale is if we have like a minutes down time now like you know uh so relative to every other broker out there all of our peers if you were to like put the amount of down time each one has had we would definitely be on top we've probably had the least amount of down time but even then if you have one minute things like spiral out of control now you know every journalist will start calling you they'll start talking about it in cnbc and i'm talking about like one minute so the market volatility in turn leads to all kinds of volatility right wow when when you select a finance career you're


right wow when when you select a finance career you're at the mercy of the market whatever's happening in it will have yeah totally effect on your whole organization right to the bottom yeah that's insane um but again like what happened through the pandemic did you guys know what y'all are involved because the pandemic is where zeros are honestly really exploded it was always there it was always growing but the pandemic is where things just went through the roof yeah so um i think we we kind of like can factor two or three big reasons as to why so many more people started trading you know people were at home they had more time at hand uh always wanted to trade didn't have the time now they have it interest rate cycles coming down uh largely plateauing real estate sector for a long time like in india right residential real estate if you rent a home if you buy a home and rent it you probably get about two and a half three percent and the capital appreciation which


a half three percent and the capital appreciation which happened in the 90s and early 2000s we have not seen in a long time so people are coming to terms with the fact that when i invest money in residential real estate a the odds of it increasing in value ten percent a year is no longer true and two three percent is not really a return which even matches inflation so they have to like look outside of real estate and bank fds to retain wealth against inflation not even make more money so that definitely played a part in why all these people are coming into the stock markets but uh i think outside of all of that like volatility it it gets translated into news and noise news and noise in turn uh translate to more people you know hearing that there is something going on in the stock market and i think subconsciously you are attracted towards it yeah which is what is happening with crypto yeah i have to ask you a little bit about crypto before we get to the crypto question um


about crypto before we get to the crypto question um the precursor question to that is a 22 year old after a 23 year old of today that guy has an intention of being rich for lack of a better word what should his financial decisions right now be accordingly and considering that not everyone is drawn to the stock market as much as you were yeah yeah uh 22 year old let's say earning 50 000 rupees a month maybe less so 20 000 30 20 000 rupees a month and you're saving say about 15 right you're earning 20 and saving 15. you're only 30. i'm saving 15. i mean you'd have to be a very frugal 22 year old i doubt or very many are doing that or you take advantage of remote work and just work from where you are yeah work on your skill set and probably save money by staying at home yeah i think i think at 22 your appetite for risk should be larger so i think spend money on yourself this is one thing i have


money on yourself this is one thing i have realized with time and my experiences in my personal life take that 15 000 and spend it towards learning a skill or training yourself to be better that's probably the best way with the highest odds of getting rich because once you've accumulated that many skills and probably when you're 28 or 29 yeah you'll be so much more desirable and a lot more people will pay you a lot more i would in fact say if you're earning 20 000 and you can save 5000 rupees a month in a bank that 5000 is probably better spent learning that skill so you can move from 20 000 to 50 000 yeah i think that's why i and you know what the issue with at least and this this wasn't really an issue with 22 year olds when i was 22. uh i feel like all of us had that little bit of patience and like long-sightedness i feel 20 to 20 years of today are not patient yeah and i'm i'm saying that like some dadashi


and i'm i'm saying that like some dadashi dude i'm just like five years older but uh i feel like they're a different generation they think different they're very smarter but that smartness is flip side is a serious lack of patience they want everything now without understanding that you have to prove yourself you have to earn your stripes you have to start at the bottom you have to learn a lot yeah and then there'll be an explosion later but keep at it man yeah i think i think one big advice to 20 to 23 year olds especially in the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem is spend as much time as you would on you know trying to like figure out what problem you want to solve on p on picking which industry you want that problem to be in you never want to be swimming against the tide so pick a sector and an industry that is a growing and looks like it will continue to grow in the next 10 years like i'd give you an example i think people who are doing


give you an example i think people who are doing anything in fintech or broking or finance right now probably are in the right place because in the population of india only about two three percent of our country has direct or indirect access to financial markets while that number is maybe 95 in america or something like that so this population will grow uh so definitely spend a lot of time picking the right sector uh like if you're in the if you're a young 22 year old boy trying to start something in the mobile wallet space it's no longer relevant because you know that industry is on its way down really yeah like what like what's this logic i think upi killed the use case for mobile wallets structurally and okay uh crypto we gotta talk about this this is one of the most common questions we get yeah after this section we'll take some of the twitter questions that came in for you and there was a bunch yeah uh like sort of a rapid fire yeah but uh let's talk about crypto a little


fire yeah but uh let's talk about crypto a little bit like what is your someone who studies money and the behavior of money inside out what is crypto uh for you i'm not asking you the technical definition of it do you see it as an opportunity to grow your money as a consumer like would you put your own money into crypto yeah um so let me preface and say i'm i'm no real expert on crypto uh i personally do not have any i don't have any of the popular cryptocurrencies available out there uh so when you think of currency right what is currency essentially is government at um explain it in terms of nikhil gave runway 10 rupees okay uh so when i give you 10 rupees what that note denotes is if you take that note to the reserve bank in our country they will give you something of a certain value that notional value is that 10 rupees now uh government debt and let's leave rupee out of it and let's talk about the dollar because in many ways that


talk about the dollar because in many ways that kind of is the currency of the world and that in turn kind of makes rupee be worth x and the euro be worthwhile so back in the day when you took a dollar to the federal reserve in america they would give you the amount of gold and that gold gave value to the dollar the gold standard got removed at a certain point i think it was richard nixon who removed it and then we had another system the bretton wood system where every other global currency was pegged to the dollar so they said we will no longer give you gold and if the dollar is at 50 rupees you can go down to as low as 45 you can go up as high as 55 but you will trade in that range relative to the dollar that changed and uh now we are in an ecosystem where the american government has been printing a lot of money so if you were to look at the average amount of money they print i might not be exactly


amount of money they print i might not be exactly right here but it used to be something like half a trillion dollars a year over the last decade it became a trillion dollars a year i think now it's something like five trillion uh that's the amount of money they have printed in the last one year logically uh if there is more supply of something the value of that should go down but the value of the us dollar is not going down because a lot of the countries outside of america hold a lot of american debt and the value of that debt would come down if the value of the dollar were to go down so basically other countries have a hoard of dollars which they've kept themselves yeah okay yeah so there are many use cases as to why the u.s dollar is relevant and we all benefit like taking india for example where we we export a lot of services right if the dollar depreciates by a lot our i.t companies will no longer remain relevant so there are


companies will no longer remain relevant so there are many many like you know tiny equations here and it makes sense for the world to have the us dollar be where it is right now and it's working for everybody now if they continue to print money in the manner that they are at some point in the future it would be logical and plausible to think that they will be you know many people who will question why is the us dollar still holding this much value when there is so much of it available in the world when that happens cryptos will become a lot more relevant because people will stop trusting governments with the currency that the government is providing them uh i see crypto to have a used coin at that point which is how far according to you when do you very very hard to call but i would say much sooner than 20 years uh and on the flip side the problem with crypto is it's not good for governments uh we had that silk road issue where they were selling all kind


that silk road issue where they were selling all kind of stuff online and and the fact that a currency which is not really regulated in any manner is attempting to challenge the global currencies we have today will not be looked upon fondly by governments everywhere because you're taking away control from the government to a large extent and governments i think will make it harder for bitcoin or any of these cryptocurrencies to grow all this being said uh a currency which is that volatile uh is not essentially a currency if i told you the 10 rupee note you were talking about earlier bought you uh apple today tomorrow you could go buy a card with that same 10 rupees day after tomorrow you can't even buy a chocolate with that 10 rupees you would not want to hold that 10 rupee right and not not hold it in the sense that you would not want your entire wealth to be sitting there so it'll be interesting to watch what happens with cryptos going forward but i think it'll


with cryptos going forward but i think it'll be a fight which the government will fight against crypto across the world but they will be weakened in that fight if they continue to print money the way they are today um got it um would you invest money in crypto in the next two or three years because that's the trend right now especially the world of twitter is overtaken by cryptocurrency in general bitcoin in general ethereum in general are you intrigued would you put some money just and park it and leave it if i had to go back in time and buy one thing i think it would be crypto just because of how much it has appreciated but will i buy today probably not i think for the reasons i mentioned earlier i think it is not just fairly but maybe overpriced considering all that is happening in the world today and that it can drop at any point you can yeah totally i think uh the indian government i don't know when it was just 2018 they put out the regulation that


was just 2018 they put out the regulation that banks can't do business with banks can't do anything with crypto right and then all the local exchanges we had here had to shut down and stuff like that i think they've gotten a stay from the supreme court high court against that mandate but the government has still not kind of said people in india should do crypto but if this happens in something like america we don't know what the new government thinks about crypto because they've only been in office a short while but if they come and they go against crypto uh i think it could fall fifty percent in a day you know wow yeah so it depends a lot on these factors which are completely out of your control yeah um uh you know your brother recommended sapiens to me yeah i was reading the third book by ul at that point and sapiens taught me a lot about the concept of fictions around us uh which basic and then again you all know harare is a big character on this


you all know harare is a big character on this podcast though i spent the whole year reading all his books just opened up my mind right uh anyway coming back to fiction he basically said that that 10 rupee note is a fiction um you owning your house yeah and signing a document is a fiction who decided that a document a piece of paper can decide that nikhil owns a particular house or then he owns a particular house who decided that um the jacket you're wearing should be priced at so much so we are in a world surrounded by fictions then he goes on to say that the concept of patriotism is also possibly a fiction yeah whenever you want to control a very large group of people you create a story around something which will inspire them or create an emotion within them yeah and therefore who decided that governments should control the country i mean this is like a very anarchist style completely agree with you i uh i don't know how uh i don't know who


i don't know how uh i don't know who the audience is and i don't know how this will be taken but uh patriotism in its truest sense has lost a lot of relevance in today's world because because of globalization because of globalization because of nuclear weapons because uh a full war between two large countries is no longer relevant and i think the world would financially and economically be a lot better if not for patriotism like we sell patriotis uh patriotism in india but we are not as bad as the americans if you go to america you'll find a flag in front of every third house you know if the world were not to have borders uh if it were not to have distinction based on you know all the stupid things we distinguish people based on i think the quality of life of the entire world the access to resources would go up like the world today produces maybe seven times how much food as the world requires today but we still have people dying of


world requires today but we still have people dying of starvation and we have climate change issues we have so many things uh that will be helped by a less patriotic world but and you know the thing is because patriarchism as a concept has been around for so long and i believe it's very good to love your own culture like if you've been born in a particular culture embrace it embrace everything that your country's culture stands for but if uh patriotism is something that can get you to hit someone else or to attack someone else in any way emotionally yeah writer hate comment under posts then you gotta ask questions to yourself i totally agree i agree with embrace your culture uh i don't think you should fight for your culture if something is dying a natural death or if something is progressing or transgressing into something else naturally because the world is moving in that direction i think we as humans are too small and i think it would be very bigoted in a way to think that we


be very bigoted in a way to think that we can change that and retain something which is naturally fading away i think we have to be more accepting to change not just in religion politics even in companies right things change all the time the sooner you're willing to adapt the sooner you're willing to embrace change i think the most the more relevant you stay for longer as a company does sport add anything to your business career i don't think so i mean uh to be physically fit is very relevant because uh if you walk into work not feeling physically fit it it affects you mentally but outside of that uh i think i used to be competitive at some point i think with time i have become more and more like uh less inclined to be you know very competitive and stuff like that did the stoicism kind of yeah yeah i think i'm in a very chilled out face right now well you know when you realize this like new year's happened this year right and i was like what


happened this year right and i was like what is the goal for next year to me i had like simple things like sleep for eight hours a day and stuff like that that i think genuinely means i'm becoming less competitive and uh yeah it'll be interesting though i hope it's cyclical you know you become less competitive and then you wake up one day and get drive and when you've got to sign all those ultra hnis oh my god get get competitive about yet yeah yeah okay so we are i won't say near the end of the podcast because knowing the chemistry i have with you i think i'm gonna take you to many more places but i've decided to include two sections uh in every podcast one of which is the rapid fire from twitter where uh listeners of the podcast send in questions for you and the second one is uh possibly a few deeper conversations on life in general so i asked twitter janta that if you had to ask one of india's youngest billionaires nikhil


ask one of india's youngest billionaires nikhil karma of zerodha any kind of question what would you ask him firstly ramesh mishra asks ask if he can fund my startup i need to start dairy farm and organic farming in my hometown where my lands of my forefathers are lying idle and here i'm struggling to make ends meet in many cases a business can be started without external funding and if it's farming i'm guessing you can get that capital locally you know because you're in the world of finance you have to study multiple kinds of industries what is the future of agriculture in general because i hear so many mixed opinions from people who've actually been in it they say that there's a lot of potential i speak to a business coach like vivek bindra and he says that no the margins in that industry are not that happy what's your perspective i'm no expert here but if i had to wager a guess i would say aggregation is the way forward uh a lot


would say aggregation is the way forward uh a lot of what the government is doing also seems to be hinting at that so we might uh we might have a world where we have fewer farms but much larger and a lot more organized that'll create all new problem what the farmers of today will do and we'll have to as a government i think preempt it right and make sure they're taken care of and they have some other avenue yeah i think you asked me my goal yeah uh in about why i'm doing this yeah and i said 20 000 jobs i for some reason something in my heart says that i have to do something for the agriculture world i've discussed it with one of my guys as well who's had a past in agriculture i have an opinion here i think there's no taxation on farm income right i think beyond a cap it is it has been misutilized so much in our history if a farmer is earning more than a crore a year i think they should


more than a crore a year i think they should be income tax i think they should be taxed like other people in the country the small form farmers of course have to be protected and i think that change will bring a bring a lot of clarity in this ecosystem cool uh next one's a little more personal yeah mr hariharan asks uh it's great seeing you doing a podcast with mr nikhil ask him how he takes his success after the lockdown and how he's handling it right now uh why why don't you when you expand on the concept of success i knowing you i don't even think you believe you're successful yet no i don't think so i think uh i'm still an insecure person in many ways and that's that's all of us yeah i think i think surrounding yourself with the right people is the most important thing here i think to have people who criticize contradict are skeptical about everything you're doing and uh valuing their opinion is uh important i think you stay level-headed


opinion is uh important i think you stay level-headed as long as you do that um the next question from the same person is what made you guys believe that your idea of starting zerodha would result in success when you're always starting out what was your initial hunch uh again it was very organic i i don't think i'm a big fan of planning also because i've planned many things in life and they've never really worked out so it was very organic we had a hunch that we would be successful because everybody wants to be but outside of that there was no like intelligence there or anything like that uh and mr hariharan's final question books and people that inspired you i was reading a book which i just finished fear of death fear of mortality i think it's very very interesting who's it by the denial of death ernest becker got it yeah so he talks about how we as humans forget that we are creatures we have a certain amount of time here and the way we live life


amount of time here and the way we live life often is like we think we're going to be here perpetually so why is it important for me as a 34 year old guy to know that average lifespan is 70 and i have 35 years left and live my life according to that versus thinking i'm going to live on for you know hundreds of years in perpetuity it's a very subconscious thing i think we live like that and we don't realize it but when you put a finite number there i think you become a better human being in many ways you become socially relevant the amount of greed you have goes down and all of that yeah i mean i don't know why i'm referencing this but i went to an icsc school where we had some fantastic poetry taught to us uh and there was this poem about a greek goddess who falls in love with a really good looking human being and she's just like enchanted by his raw sexuality and all that and all that's in


raw sexuality and all that and all that's in a poem for kids she blesses him with the blessing of immortality but she doesn't bless him with the blessing of immortal youth so this dude becomes old wrinkly his body parts start falling off and the whole poem is very dark about how possibly being immortal is one of the biggest curses you can go through in life yeah teaching of 14 year old this changes 14 year old perspectives man you kind of echoed that thought in many ways um okay mr anket asks as a founder of india's biggest trading platform what are the changes you guys are bringing in to pull in the youth of the country because even nitin echoed this thought that the youth is the big customer yeah i think education is the only way i think our system of pedagogy in india we teach kids for 15 years how to make money but we don't teach them how to manage that money i think something is missing there and it would be


i think something is missing there and it would be prudent for the government to add you know financial literacy early like middle school i think that structurally will change things got it puna masks resources for learning stocks and finance for a beginner and she also asks a very interesting second question how much finance knowledge is enough for you to begin investing in stocks okay the first one is varsity we have a platform which is great for beginners to the second one uh i don't think there is a finite amount of knowledge that you can actually define because i don't think i have enough knowledge yet but uh as long as you know the rules i think probably more important than knowledge yeah uh a bunch of people i'm gonna highlight oman kelani's question but a bunch of people have asked this same question nitin has got a lot of fanboys and fan girls by the way after her interview people love his rahul dravidness of life how do you guys complement each other and i know you've answered this in past


each other and i know you've answered this in past interviews but are there no ego clashes because both of you are such calm souls man like i can't imagine there being no ego clashes at all in like a 13 14 year career so my direct question is what's your solution to that and how do you all gel together as a team i think we have clear demarcations of what we do and i don't mess with what he does and we kind of like don't interfere in each other's roles that helps but at the end of the day you know it's one life and your brothers if uh if you don't have each other's backs forever who does right we remember that so even if there's a slight clash where you know last for like five minutes or something you know i've cried in front of my co-founders yeah that's how like intense have you had like those emotional kind of ones that cried with breakdowns not breakdowns i i don't think we've had any


breakdowns i i don't think we've had any large fights especially not about like i mean uh not by breakdowns i mean on a more personal level like you're going through something traumatic not just maybe in your professional life yeah in your personal life but some of your co-founders become as good as family i mean your co-founders higher family so it's a little awkward but yeah i know it does happen i have this issue where i tend to keep things within and i don't communicate where i should so my interpersonal skills are not up to par they're very bad nithya on the hand is much better he's uh he has great eq and he's very good at resolving conflict with his personal relationships so yeah uh oh just sharma asks how do you keep yourself motivated now uh the markets it's i don't know if it's motivation or addiction but one of the two is at play and they keep me motivated and what's your opinion on breaks because again when people are seeing this bootstrap


on breaks because again when people are seeing this bootstrap monster called no one thinks that okay it's run by two human beings who probably get tired and go to the maldives or wherever you all go but yeah so we don't really miss market days i haven't missed a market day in like over a decade how do you blow off steam weekends okay yeah like we did last night yes a memorable night man um that's that's why you know i mean and on a very personal level dude that's such a gift of the podcast because yeah even in real life scenarios when do you have the opportunity to go this deep with another human being yeah so the podcast has helped me make friends yeah which then open up my mind that's all smart friends are making because if you're on the podcast you have something to share big big blessing of my life and just like spending time with you and your friends yesterday was just incredibly stimulating okay this is an interesting question prayag varma asks what


this is an interesting question prayag varma asks what was the pressure like in the early days of starting zero though when apparently you guys were getting threatening calls from other brokers because y'all had like disrupted that whole part of the finance world actually it was not that bad uh i think it's overstated with time but uh even at the very beginning the people we worked with were our closest friends uh like there were people who lived in the same apartment where we played cricket growing up and they were people who were friends first and then colleagues so we had a lot of fun with it we were not making a lot of money but we were definitely having a lot of fun we would play counter-strike for five hours a day to blow off steam like five hours a day do you think that builds that builds a sense of teamwork uh i don't know about that but it was a lot of fun i don't know i feel football builds such a strong sense of teamwork and team spirit uh


such a strong sense of teamwork and team spirit uh like i force my guys to play football with me gotta play football after this guys uh okay uh interesting question again prasant medicarla asks what if every person in india learns to trade on the stock market theoretically what will happen it will be good uh i think there are there is precedent there are countries in which 70 80 percent of the population has like direct or indirect exposure i would say not trade but even in the u.s your 401k has some kind of equity component in it i think it will become competitive it will become a larger market and will become a great place for companies to raise capital at the end of the day is abhishek prasad asks what is thinking of rural area development and actually i would also love to know this do you see rural parts of india getting into fintech at all or just personal finance as a concept i think i think yeah i think there's a trend which will emerge from


i think there's a trend which will emerge from all that has happened where urbanization will slow down to a large extent and tier two and tier three towns will start picking up it'll be interesting to watch what happens and how much uh financial exposure those towns gain again okay this is not a question just want to highlight there are a lot of questions about true beacon coming in which is your brainchild so and these are like young kids these are college kids who are asking these questions um yeah and i think almost all the other questions have been answered through the course of uh this podcast but i will ask you one last question from this rapid fire round so dhanva asks what's the role of newspapers and current affairs in your financial game so i think she's asking about trading stocks do you think newspapers play a massive role no how do you keep up with current affairs uh you do read the news but i think what what have you replaced i don't think i would call financial


you replaced i don't think i would call financial earning as news often they are not reported i think reading a company's balance sheet and actually seeing how revenues are changing and margins are changing makes a much more seminal impact than reading news which is being publicized because typically that's just for you know readership and everything is exaggerated right uh and because we've reached the end of the podcast you asked me yesterday man what are you planning for this show and i said that dude i want to ask you a really deep question i feel like you're a low-key deep guy and kunal chad tweeted about this once he said that the big gift of entrepreneurship other than the obvious ones like money fame power is that you you go through a journey of self-discovery when you're an entrepreneur which is so true right you get to see the most naked parts of your own mind your own insecurities uh you get to know yourself way deeper i also believe meditation does the same because


deeper i also believe meditation does the same because you're sitting in silence for so long you're going within uh but speaking about business are you happy now and do you have a sense of spirituality with everything that's happening around you well to be honest i have not understood spirituality i have many friends who talk about it and how much it has changed them but i asked them what is spirituality for you each one has a different definition i think it means a different thing to everybody in terms of happiness i think again it's a very relative concept relative to any other time in my own life i am happier today for sure i feel less insecure about many things that i felt more insecure about historically can i can i rudely ask you about some of those insecurities like from when you were younger yeah i've had insecurities about feeling less important than i actually was about relationships about financial goals about money a lot of things like what age did it fade all through yeah ever since 14


age did it fade all through yeah ever since 14 15 16 it has been there at different points a different insecurity has you know played a more important role maybe in the last couple of years it has been more around relationships feeling insecure there and the people you care for if they don't care for you and things often you know we all have relationships right like all kind of relationships we have friendships we have parents we have romantic relationships all of that uh i have felt insecure in all of those relationships yeah yeah i mean that's again that's many of us because you've lived through your late 20s and early 30s what's that like and i'll give you context to this question i feel like your early 20s about finding your feet and understanding where do i belong in this world just finding some sense of purpose i won't even say finding your purpose but just finding something to do your mid-20s are about probably solidification and learning right learning beyond college and academic academics uh i'm curious to know what


and academic academics uh i'm curious to know what your late twenties are because my reading of it as a 27 year old is that now you found your feet you've solidified it now it's about getting your weapons polished up for your thirties i would agree with you i think late 20s become about consolidation uh where you start it's different for different people i'm guessing but you start achieving scale and you become not an expert at what you're doing but you become a lot more proficient i mean i've i'm only going by my experience but i think 30s and mid 30s is the time especially if you have don't have dependents if you don't have kids or you're not doing a in order to be able to do b if you're alone uh you kind of have to like uh you arrive at a point where you start questioning the purpose of everything a lot more existentialism yeah yeah i think midlife crisis which used to happen in 50s is now happening in 30s because


in 50s is now happening in 30s because of social media could be could be thanks to well you guys are welcome because i mean if you are dealing with a midlife crisis early uh you're probably solving it early also through this podcast through this particular episode with nick hill um is it scary turning 30 for a man for an indian guy we are told all your life that is is it because because indian guys do go through that dude that's that's one stark form of sexism that indian guys face right we are told since you're a little kid that unless you earn money you won't earn any respect in this society which doesn't really matter when you when you when you think about wealth games and all that but you're scared when you're a kid so when you actually hit that 30 years mark what was your mindset like and what happens to people around you um i think in many cases you start thinking i wanted to do abc by the time i was 30 i


to do abc by the time i was 30 i have not done c or i have not done a you think about that but i think you change a lot more at 25 25 is a bigger birthday than 30 because up until i was 25 i used to enjoy my birthdays you know yes i'm 25. now i'm like damn i'm 34 now i'm gonna be 35 yeah i mean that's the only like finite commodity in the world right time and expending one year becomes less a cost for celebration and more you know like i have 100 i spent one yeah did are there other negatives associated with aging for a guy of course i know that for girls this is something i spotted with some of my media friends they get very conscious of their skin and wrinkles and aging and i'm just like yo you know i mean even older women are attractive why have you had this idea that wrinkles are not good for a guy what happens what do you think i think you slow down i'll tell


do you think i think you slow down i'll tell you like the changes you'll notice first if you go out and have a drink for example right uh you would be hung over for like half an hour 27 probably for five hours at 34. it does start to change your body takes longer to recover if you want to work two three days in a row and you manage to get two three hours of sleep only it will hit you the fourth day you will fall sick maybe at 25 did not happen uh socially you're judged a bit more than you were when you're 25 for example if you're a single man like i'm guessing you are like am i though i don't know dude um honestly okay i'll answer this after you finish your answer tell us i mean i think this is something everybody would want to know more than the other questions we spoke about tonight so i mean because i'm a youtuber and i put my life out there that much uh i had like a very serious relationship till


much uh i had like a very serious relationship till about a couple of years ago that ended in a very rough patch and um that just like it it kind of uh put me deeper into my work too like whether it was productivity whether it was the scale of my own vision right everything became more motivated you know that there's this thing have you seen the ranbir kapoor movie rockstar i have yeah yeah so i feel like i'm in that zone where they say they'll say yeah i don't remember the dialogue but the the logic of it is that if if you've gone through a rough time and it doesn't just have to be through a broken relationship yeah it can just be through any kind of heartache which could be failing in life maybe a particular business collapses yeah whatever uh it pushes you into like an extreme drive mode and i definitely feel i've been in that for the last two years which means that i am a little bit emotionally unavailable because my team needs that emotional love and


unavailable because my team needs that emotional love and care it's kind of cliche but i feel like they're my kids yeah and i direct the love there rather than to a stable relationship which means on the flip side that i've had a bunch of not so serious relationships they've been relationships i've not been messing around not been sleeping around and all that but i you know it's not been as serious as what my older serious relationship was great attempt at deflecting and not answering talking about my relationships uh never in my life did i think that nikhil karmas would ask me this but cool um the short answer is i'm like single right now man um and i've also strong it's a good way to promote the fact that you're single right on a podcast my mom has started pitching the concept of arranged marriage to me yeah i'm like cool it's prob it's just tinder for adults and you know a girl who has agreed for a range marriage is probably in the same mindset as


range marriage is probably in the same mindset as a guy who's agreed for age marriage which is that why not yeah and i think you can have fun with it you don't have to go the traditional way right you can go on a lot of dates which your mom sets you up that's that's the plan man um honestly also i have dated a lot and i've had my fair share of fun we were just talking about travel there are these moments you have on travel where you're looking at mountains with snow peaks on top and you're looking at lakes you're you're floating in these boats and you're just like yo i paid for this myself and that's the real joy of life probably i'm at that age where i've started appreciating um just your own self experiences what you see through your own eyes even more than love right and i know that you're you're beyond this age and you're back to appreciating relationships and i also strongly feel when it comes to happiness you have to


feel when it comes to happiness you have to define happiness subjectively like what do you want at this stage of your life yeah or what experience in your recent past really caused you to be happy yeah yeah i i had this notion that a relationship should be all encompassing like you should get everything from that one person uh that has now changed to it you shouldn't put that much pressure on one thing so you know you have like a 100 people in your life you get something from a friend you get something from a colleague you get something from a brother and all the love together makes you feel fulfilled i think that helps a lot when you're getting into a relationship do you feel that um do you believe in destiny at all [Music] if i do i don't understand it yet i think often in life i have thought of something to be destiny but then something else has happened along the way and my version of destiny keeps changing so i don't know [Music] i asked nitin


so i don't know [Music] i asked nitin a lot about spirituality in his podcast and he kind of boiled it down to just being a good person and i see i see that in you as well like the way i treat people is way nicer than people in my industry treat other human beings but other than that like uh and i also see a lot of men in their 30s probably once their careers are set or at least careers have strong direction they search for deeper answers they search for spirituality men's specifically yeah i think i'm going through that now i think the biggest differentiator i think for me is the fact that i don't have any dependents i don't have anybody to look after so everything i do in my life unless the situation changes uh there is no end goal to it there is no okay i i didn't have a now i have a i want b what do you do with the b i have not figured out yet but i feel if the situation does


out yet but i feel if the situation does not change and i don't have any dependence you would probably end up becoming more socially responsible and do more for others because at the end of the day it's it comes down to that right and coming back to love i feel like in your heart you're a romantic dude man like the little bit that i've interacted can i tell you the truth i have had four relationships in my life and every single one i have been dumped and i've been on the receiving end of it i feel it i feel and the reason has been i am uh emotionally unavailable and a bit like a robot that's because of your stoicism could be that that's where a professional weapon ends up slicing you in your pocket in your personal life exactly that is so true i think what works at work does not work outside of work yeah and to remember that in practice that is very difficult yeah i remember my first co-founder where i just two years younger than i am so


where i just two years younger than i am so i had that two-year head start he's way ahead of me mentally now right like after spending four years in the real world but back then um i had to teach him to be a little heartless and tough i had to kill the kid inside him and that did affect his personal life as well and somewhere you've got to draw your own system as a man you've got to come back and just learn to switch off and still be your child with your mom still be a romantic romeo with the person you're dating yeah yeah i think what was the show i was watching on tv on netflix bridgeton or something like that it kind of made me think about how much time we waste uh wondering how we are being perceived and what people think of what we are doing in our personal lives you know i think if he paid less attention and we did what we truly want we'd all be happier both persons you know both of the


be happier both persons you know both of the parties in a relationship would be happier you spoke about perceptions yeah um dude this is a rude question man yeah but um you know the billionaire tag does carry a sense of status with it do you see people treating you different after you you know you were publicly acknowledged as a billionaire and you also feel women started treating you differently um people uh are probably a bit nicer to you than they were before i mean i would be kidding myself if i didn't think that uh women on the other hand maybe but i have not experienced it yet yeah but like the people aspect like what happens do people suck up a little bit maybe but uh are you able to spot it yeah i think so i think so what what happens see i the biggest thing i'm trying to change is kind of like be a bit more inaccessible i was the kind of person who would be friends with absolutely everybody and it puts you in


friends with absolutely everybody and it puts you in an uncomfortable position with new people the old people who are friends for like you know 10 years and 20 years they remain the same they don't give a rat's ass what is happening or your family and all of that they'll be like you know they will bring you down to the ground very very quickly but uh it becomes harder to have objective new friendships because you don't know what the agenda is yeah do you feel that now you feel a little bit there's always an agenda a little bit maybe a little bit it's not gotten that bad it's not uh it's not too bad but a little bit yeah another rude observation when i was with you yesterday i felt like that energy in the room was positive like the people you chose to surround yourself with were positive yeah these are the little ups and downs in their own personal world but generally it was positive so yeah what does someone in your position keep in mind when you're cutting off


your position keep in mind when you're cutting off slash accepting people into your world into your world is it that intention of okay can this person help me discover myself better does this person make me feel comfortable uh i i don't even think i think that much i think there are two kind of people one who kind of are negative about a lot of things pessimistic people who are generally complaining about something that has happened in life typically takers and not givers and there is another set of people who are uh warm sharing giving and are optimistic in adversity in many ways we all have adversity right [Music] everybody has issues something like money does not definitely eliminate them if anything the scale of issues become larger but when you find those people i think the attempt will be to hold them closer in the past i have not done the best job with my relationships not just a certain kind but all kind of relationships because you had that warrior thing with your work uh i think more


that warrior thing with your work uh i think more because i was more insecure than i should have been yeah i i would walk into a friendship or a relationship thinking what could go wrong versus focusing on the good that it was giving me at that point that's your 34 year old speaking up yeah like and dude probably is that that is that something that switches when you hit that 30 years mark that you you you are able to notice weaknesses in your own character or yeah weaknesses for me it's happening now because uh this the general way to you know what i would do is when someone said something about me i did not like i would be like you know very defensive about it uh without thinking about it now also i'm defensive about it but maybe i think about it before i'm defensive yeah and with with the relationship what's your goal to do okay and i'm gonna be like pretty open here but sometimes if if i'm even dating someone not not very seriously but i am in


dating someone not not very seriously but i am in a relationship with someone if i'm holding that girl's hand that's probably my best moment of the day even after the most successful or most traumatic professional experience that i've had on that particular day that's what i feel love does for the human experience man yeah yeah i agree i think for me relationship goals are much less the person has to be a b c or d but i'm somebody who values uh the ability to forgive for giving people a lot because we all screw up right like i'll screw up she'll screw up uh so to find a person who's very forgiving and values peace of mind as much as you i think would be the most important thing you know a lot of women have this assumption that most men can't stay loyal and i kind of disagree yeah there are romantic guys out there who want to like you know have like a long term have you seen the pixar movie up it's got that old woman and an old


movie up it's got that old woman and an old guy basically shows their love story from the time they were kids till the time they became old and the lady passes away the i still loves and the whole movie is about what he does after her death yeah he does something to fulfill one of her wishes there are guys like that out there yeah i also i think all of these norms which we associate with the relationship are very subjective to every relationship the key here might be to communicate what you're willing to do and what you're not willing to do and what you're hoping to get from the relationship and i feel like as long as that communication is okay you're fine in the relationship i've done a terrible job of communicating in the past so i should not be uh any kind of a protagonist to kind of like explain or talk about this no but dude that's the nature of entrepreneurship in general if you have up somewhere behind you you're like i'm not gonna


somewhere behind you you're like i'm not gonna do that again yeah learn from my mistake because that's what my business grow this is what will help my personal life business grow um final question we gotta make this selfish and about me man because self-obsessed youtuber uh how come you opened up so much like on this show what do you think i'm doing right so that i can add or polish one of my weapons i think you did it last night by sitting and chatting with us till five in the morning so it does not feel awkward now and uh i think you have this uh you look very genuine and you feel like you're asking a question not because it has to be asked but more because you actually want to know and there is that sense of curiosity which is very endearing yeah a friend of mine ankur varekko is also a youtuber he's from the startup community he had answered one of my questions during the lockdown and i was having an existential crisis i


lockdown and i was having an existential crisis i asked him what's the meaning of like why am i working so hard he said that you'll never find happiness unless you define your own version of happiness and he said that his version of happiness happens when he satisfies his curiosity he says that keep your curiosity alive and try answering it and therefore your happiness will automatically be alive yeah and i had this unique position as a 27 year old to get access to you or brettly or glenn mcgrath just such a varied buffet of people right um that i can live your lives in an hour of talking right so that's very enriching for me man more than the money numbers whatever the podcast is not as much for the growth of my business as it is for my own mind so that's probably what you pick up but i hope you enjoyed being on the runway i did thank you so much for having me thank you for opening up so much uh i'm sure we


you for opening up so much uh i'm sure we will have you again on the show i'm looking forward to seeing you in bombay again uh there were some topics we missed out in this but i want to leave it that way because i feel like there's more conversations in here thank you brother god bless you and i i hope you find everything that you're looking for because i i strongly sense you're still in the search for things um and knowing the person that you are and just the way you treat people i think that those things will find you before you even go out searching so good luck with that super thank you thank you brother [Music]


many indians consider major vivek jacob to be one of the most legendary modern day figures of the indian army he's a veteran of the indian para sf the indian para sf itself is considered to be the most advanced part of the indian army and on a worldwide scale the indian para sf is looked at as one of the most respected regiments of any army anywhere in the world and the experiences he's had the stories of combat the intensity of combat the extreme combat situations that he has seen are something that will stay with you forever this is part one of our episode with major vivek jacob so many stories so many experiences so many mentality pieces to share with you we couldn't even encapsulate all of it into two parts of this chat with major vivek jacob this is just part one about his tenure with the indian army part two is about what he's doing now with his organization claw but here's part one his past everything he learned some