Oh man. Nikhil Kamath is a founder of Zerodha and I thought his name sounded familiar--he cheated in a celebrity chess simul against Vishy Anand [1]. It really bothered me when I heard about it at the time. Afterwards, he tried to play it off like everyone knew that he was getting help from a computer, which, in my opinion, was a really arrogant and unfortunate way of admitting to cheating.
Dude was so clueless he got scholars mated in his previous game.
So he figured, I don't know any chess, but I'm playing against a GM on a simul, what hope do I have...oh wait this is online & no one can see me, let me use an engine against a GM.
Balls of steel right there.
GM resigns. Dude apology-tweets.
Danny Rensch terminates dude's chess.com account. Dude then tries to involve the GM's wife & drum up public sympathy. Rensch won't budge.
> Afterwards, he tried to play it off like everyone knew that he was getting help from a computer, which, in my opinion, was a really arrogant and unfortunate way of admitting to cheating
This sounds like how a 12 year old would respond to getting caught
Reading this article I laughed a bit. Why are people taking a chess.com match so seriously? I use Stockfish from time to time analyze the game from different angles, but I'd never use it in competitive play.
If someone went into basket weaving club and said "look at my basket" with something they bought from the store, everyone would be a bit annoyed, even if ultimately it doesn't matter.
“You can learn more about someone through an hour of play…”
Cheating for in a game suggests a poor character. Imagine how one might behave if the stakes were material.
You don't have to bend to every VCs demand. WhatsApp ran very lean and perhaps had 50 engineers tops. Every big tech company ran very lean until they hit scale Series D or so. So the headcount growth is not just a function of VC, but a function of people's desire to build empires. Even in many social gatherings managers boast of the number of engineers they are managing. So it's another flaunt metric for a bulk of founders and managers. Don't just blame the VCs.
Don't blame the VCs, blame the public. Extra headcount absolutely increases your perceived credibility at an IPO, so they are growing this metric.
In defense of the public, if 10 devs out of 30 decide to leave and open a competing business, you're screwed. If 10 out of 1000 do that, nobody will notice.
Even outside of VC companies. I worked briefly for a large, old tech giant you've heard of, and was told to hire two teams of contractors. I didn't have -work- for two teams of contractors; it was all green field development and I already had a team of devs champing at the bit for any requirement product (which was -extremely- slow) actually defined, and they were sitting idle half the time as it was, and I was basically told "the roadmap says we need these two extra teams starting in a month, so hire them". So I did, reiterating my caveats. Cue two months later when leadership was asking me why the contractors weren't doing anything; isn't there -something- they could be doing?
Small teams of good devs make sacrifices for simplicity because they can't build the complicated version. Make the teams bigger and they build complicated stuff and pay the price later.
For the people saying this would not be possible in the US VC centered startup ecosystem: the existence of this isn’t really telling us much about how other companies should be run.
Keep in mind that US based, VC funded companies are competing against other similar companies. You either move quickly or die, the competition is intense and so are the financial rewards. Engineer tenure averages 2-3 years. All of that factors in to the specific dynamics of the startup ecosystem.
Very much This. With the first-mover advantage, lack of VC interest in the Indian Fi space, the compliance load for any upstarts has led Zerodha to enjoy a competitive free landscape of the "Commission free mutual funds" and "Low cost stock trading".
That is changing rapidly with the huge inflow of VC money into the financial sector in the last 5 years with countless startups fueled by VC money and incumbents upping their offering had begun to capture / steel away their market.
They would be pressured into growing to compete with them sooner if not already.
Amusingly he admits most people shouldn't use his product that much.
"Thanks to social media, countless people are lured into the markets and have a rosy view of trading. But the reality is less than 1% of active traders earn more money than a bank fixed deposit over a 3-year period."
Their CEO (https://twitter.com/Nithin0dha) actively talks about the dangers of stock trading and attempts to educate their users at every step.
There's one feature in their app - "Nudge" - that warns users about a myriad of things, one of which is if they are buying penny stocks or stocks with low liquidity under the influence of a sham marketing scheme.
It's not so much as people shouldn't use their product - it's more about people should use their product wisely and not fall into traps.
I used to have an ICICI direct account. I can vouch zerodha is infinitely better. No spam calls from my free investment consultant. Way better APP and UI.
Zerodha's software quality (as a user) is exemplary. Clean UI, fast apps/websites, well-thought out UX, absolutely amazing. They even have a rich API the likes of which I haven't seen from any other broker.
I am using it for generating alerts to my Whatsapp but the thing is that the docs aren't the best, but when compared to the competition that doesn't even have any APIs, this is miles better.
I interviewed for Zerodha a few years ago. They really did have quite an easy going attitude. Their tech team is really well shielded from the rest of the organisation and the CEO and CTO both recognise the value of this.
It was one of two roles on my final shortlist, but I ended up going with the other option.
I still love the fact that there is an Indian tech team that is really mainstream with such a unique outlook on development methodology.
It’s bit of both. The newer companies (startups mostly) are quite like US/EU companies—if not better in some cases. Excellent pay, great benefits etc.
The older, more established “MNCs” (think Adobe, AMD, Intel, Goldman Sachs) are slightly more rigid but not too bad.
The worst offenders are the services companies—Accenture, Infosys, TCS, the likes. They’re the sweatshops: terrible working hours, terrible culture (or lack thereof), shit pay.
But yes, as another commenter says, there are exceptions to everything.
Calling TCS a sweatshop is pretty crazy. There are office politics you will run into if you are a high performer, or even working hard to rise through the ranks. Other than that it's a pretty chill place. Your mind will eventually rot with no relevant work experience though. So definitely not 996, but not a great place either.
Anyway the amount of generalisation in both the question and your quite incorrect answer is pretty funny.
It varies - usually product oriented companies have a good work life balance - comparable to that of US and EU. Service oriented companies are sweat shops through and through. There are exceptions on both sides.
I can only speak from personal experience (and second hand I guess).
There is close to no 996 really. Most Indian tech startups are trying to emulate the FAANG style of work, both good and bad. So that means officially there is an 8 hour a day expectation, but in practice, there is a lot of cultural pressure to work more, stay at office longer, work on Saturdays etc. But even with that, I don't think I would compare that to 996.
My first job was a fairly early stage startup, and all of us were really young and rearing to go. So there was a group of us that did a 995 for about a year, but it was just a small group, and a lot of it was boardgames after 7pm.
My second one was a later stage startup. They were far more "professional". Nobody worked extra hours because no one cared enough to. So that got a little boring after a while.
Larger companies tend to have more sane working hours. But cultural pressures vary by the company.
My view on Zerodha itself, through the onsite visit I had, was that the hours would be fairly sane, maybe a few saturdays here and there. But there was also a huge social aspect that they highlighted, which was after-hours activities in the office premises, which comes with a certain amount of pressure to attend.
I recall seeing this presentation a couple years back about their use of Flutter, back when that framework was barely in 1.0. Had no idea they're the largest stock broker in India. Very impressive.
> Today, the tech team is 30 members strong, and the rest of the company has grown to ~1200 people across various departments like sales, operations, support, and compliance. Stock broking, especially in India, is a complex and hard gig.
I've never understood having employees for the sake of having employees. who is that impressing?
it makes me think of a midwesterner who has swung every vote when the politician says "jobs!" over and over again, and now they're funded and are like "jobs for the sake of jobs! look how many jobs I made!"
what are the tertiary benefits of doing this, if any? do the growth capital VCs need to see that? would be counterintuitive if thats a thing
just feel like I'm missing something as the employee growth have no causation for profit growth. any correlation is because people just have been getting a bunch of them and only have them if they can afford them, some of which is from profits sometimes when companies had those.
My guess is that it's because you want to be able to show that something is growing. Revenue isn't growing and customer numbers aren't growing. But you can make the company itself grow!
I thought about this a bit more, and maybe a more charitable scenario is that you want to be able to show that the VC money is being put to good use, and quickly. If you are hiring a ton of employees, it's a signal that a lot of hard work is being done and that the funding is being used directly to make it possible to complete that hard work.
I also want to be clear that my perspective is mostly that of a contributor. I have never founded a company or been involved with venture capital, or related forms of investing, in any professional capacity.
Personally I don't quite understand why a founder would want to take a huge pile of money and then burn it as fast as possible trying to hit some hyper-growth target, when they could instead take a small amount of money and set up a stable revenue-earning business. But then again, I'm so risk-averse that I haven't quit my job to start a business, so my opinion probably isn't worth that much.
> you want to be able to show that the VC money is being put to good use, and quickly
That's pretty much it. The VCs, at the height of the bubble, were forcing startups to take far more funding than they needed. A startup company can't just sit on the cash and do nothing with it, the funding needs to be put to work ASAP in order for the VC companies to justify having provided the funding.
Most startups are software companies, so they have limited ability to spend those mountains of VC money on capital expenditures. They can't spend their VC funding on building a factory or something. The largest expense in a software company is human resources, so that's what they end up spending their funding on (even if it's not in the best interest of the founders, employees or customers).
> Personally I don't quite understand why a founder would want to take a huge pile of money and then burn it as fast as possible trying to hit some hyper-growth target, when they could instead take a small amount of money and set up a stable revenue-earning business
They don't have a choice. If they don't accept the huge pile of money, they get nothing. The VC business model isn't compatible with slowly building a stable revenue-earning business. From the private equity investor's point-of-view, if they wanted to invest in a stable revenue-earning business, they can just go and do a leveraged buy-out of a well-established, stable revenue-earning business (like a health care business, or an older enterprise SaaS business, etc.) and skip all the risks associated with the startup phase. They only want to invest in a startup if it's a hyper-growth moonshot, and they don't mind burning founders, employees, customers and their own money in the process because they only need 1 in 100 startups to succeed and the other 99 are just tax write-offs for them.
It spreads the wealth, I’m not complaining. Is it ideal? Probably not. Does it lead some companies to explode into other areas and capture markets? Yes.
Their APIs are amazing and stable, my trading boat is fully automated since last year and doubled my money till now and I haven’t need to change a line. Good stuff.
* tech team is 30 members (two mobile developers, two designers, two frontend developers, one test engineer, one devops engineer, and one department liaison, the rest fullstack developers). Nobody had any background in finance, and most had no prior work experience either. Everyone has been a hacker or a hobbyist straight out of college.
* became the largest stock broker in India in January 2019
* never raised external funding, have zero debt, and have been profitable YoY
* no marketing team, no advertising
* 15-20% of Indian retail trade and investment volumes
* ~1 million daily active users, $3 billion in volumes, busy day ~7 million trades
* broadcast ~16 million market ticks per second: careful byte-by-byte optimisations so bandwidth bills are negligible
Tech stack:
* Go. Python for non-realtime data-heavy backoffice systems, bit of C++ and Java for special cases
[1]: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-bytes/nikhil-...