The following is the full transcript of Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath’s speech at The 21st DAIS (Dhirubhai Ambani International School) Graduation Ceremony which was held on May 28, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
NIKHIL KAMATH: If I were to remember when I was as old as you guys, if someone were to ask me what I want, the answer would likely be money. Maybe you guys are thinking it, but you told me different things in the room some time ago. When I think as to why I said money, many things play out in that, maybe something to do with my childhood, maybe what I looked at around me growing up. I quite don’t know the answer as to why money.
Early Beginnings: From School Dropout to Entrepreneur
So I was fairly precocious as a kid. I stopped studying formally when I was about 15 years old. There’s also hypocrisy in the fact that I’m here giving you a lecture on your convocation ceremony when I never had one.
So cell phones were where it started for me. I sold them when I was about 15 to kids around my neighborhood. Surprisingly, it was a good business. I had enough inventory. By the time it all ended, I think I had about 10 or 20 phones and I had a lot of fun doing it.
When I was about 17, I went about trying to achieve the money problem we spoke about and got my first full-time job at a call center. Bangalore back then in 2004 was very different to what you hear in the news today. There was no traffic. It was really green and for a 17-year-old boy working the 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift selling accidental health insurance to unsuspecting British folk to the place many of you guys will go to college for was a lot of fun. It didn’t pay a lot. I think my first salary was something like 8,000 rupees but we were also talking 21 years ago.
Introduction to the Stock Market
I had a lot of fun in this career. The one great thing about the call center life for me was I was free in the morning. I had the morning, the afternoon largely free because I had to work at night. This is when I first got introduced to the stock market. Back then markets used to open at 10 a.m. Now they open at 9 a.m. I don’t know how much Mukesh Bhai is into stock markets but if anyone here knows what will happen tomorrow it’s probably him.
So my relationship with the stock market started then. For the last 21 years I have largely had one job that of a trader, investor. Everything else has come second to that be it broking or lending or asset management, all of what Mr. Basu said.
The thing with trading is it’s as a 17-year-old boy, picture me in Bangalore starting trading for the first time. A realization I had early is the stock market, the relationship with stock is much a relationship in real life. When you start dating someone initially, I that you guys are smiling. I think things are great when you begin. Then they get bad. Then if you stay the course, maybe they get better again. I am no expert at this. I think some people in this room are, you guys. But you have to stay the course.
Whenever you enter the markets, you make a lot of money initially. Beginner’s luck really is a thing. When the bad times come, if you are willing to cope with them and keep up with it, I think eventually things start to get better. You do one thing a million times, you kind of figure out one or two things about that job. I suspect that happened to me.
Being stable, not reacting or being objective in chaos, I have figured today is probably one of the biggest skill sets to succeed both in the stock market and in real life.
The Importance of Surrounding Yourself with the Right People
Through my little work life, the two decades, the 21 years that I’ve been working, if I’ve been lucky, I’ve been lucky in one thing that I have been surrounded by really driven, grounded people I can trust with very strong moral values.
You guys leaving school today, I don’t know how to articulate this for you, but who you surround yourself with, whichever college you go to, I feel that will have the most disproportionate impact on life compared to anything else you might have voluntarily chosen to do.
I’m still in a long term relationship with trading. If you were to find me today on holiday in Maldives and it’s 11 a.m. in the morning, rest assured, I would have a couple of computers around me and I would be chatting with my trading team.
What I Wish I Knew: Key Life Lessons
So today is about telling you guys what I wish I knew when I was as old as you guys, starting off in my career. I love that this is not a media interview. I think everything gets misconstrued nowadays. I haven’t done a media interview in a year or two. It’s much easier to ask people questions than to answer them. So I’ll try and say what I can’t usually say and hopefully it’s candid enough for somebody to use.
Lesson 1: Hard Work Is Not That Important
The first thing I learned today, hard work is not that important. Take a second to think about that. I’ve kind of thought about this a lot. When I look back at my 21 years, I know for a fact, I’m not talking for everyone, but for the fairly affluent group sitting in this room, for most of us, for every four hours spent working, for me, three went pretending.
I had this interesting conversation in my office a few years ago.
I sat with my management team, my brother, my CEO and different O’s. My brother sat to the right of me. I looked up to him and I said, “Nitin, I’m pretending to work and I’m in this meeting that I had no value because I think you are working and I feel insecure that you’re working and I’m not.” So to which Nitin looks back at me and says that I’m actually doing the exact same thing.
So we went around my office in that meeting. It had maybe seven or eight people in that room. Every single one of them said the same thing. It’s also funny when you think about this, the higher you’re in the hierarchy of your organization, it’s easier to admit this. While that room could admit it, I don’t know if the rest of the organization can.
So this is a thing I wrote down. Someone said this. “Hard work is a great excuse for our mind when the ego comes attacking, asking why you didn’t make it. Hard work gives us the ammunition that I tried. I didn’t sit on the couch. So I’m okay.”
In the capitalistic world that you are walking into, I don’t know if there is a direct correlation between the amount of time you put into work and how well you do. Today, from my own learnings, I work much lesser. I’m happier. And I have the opportunity to be a lot more first principles about life and think of what I should be doing almost as much as the time I spend doing it. So that’s one thing I’ve learned.
Lesson 2: Right and Wrong, and the Gray Areas of Life
The second thing, there is a right and a wrong, and there is no right and no wrong. Where we live, how we live, society, religion, morality, politics, it teaches us all to be good robots in a way. There is a right and wrong that society tells you is right and wrong. And there is a right and wrong that comes to you from the life that you live, from the experiences of life, from living life.
I got a tattoo on my arm recently, which says, “Don’t do unto others as you wouldn’t have others do unto you.” That to me is the most simplistic way of gauging morality in my own lens.
We live a life which is riddled with contradictions. The world is not black. The world is not white. Most things we do, the most experiences we have in life will be gray. The second suggestion, if I may give you guys, is the key is not to figure out the contradiction. The key is not to figure out if A is right, B is right, whose advice you should take, whose advice you should not take, but somehow to make peace with that contradiction and to be able to live with it, to accept it.
Lesson 3: Anxiety Can Be Good
Third lesson, anxiety, which we all have now, I think social media has played a fair amount of a part in that. I believed it was bad. Today, I believe anxiety is good. Someone said we have an education system that indoctrinates us to think alike, mass media that ensures we fear alike, an advertising industry that tells us to the exact same thing, and a social media that makes it easy to shame all those who step too far out of line. As a result, we are all conformists. Repressing disagreeable thoughts in our own mind, in my own mind, created a vacuum for anxiety. I think I grew up like that, insecure, anxious. I am even today.
The problem with anxiety, I believe, is when it leads you into inaction. If you feel anxious and you overcompensate by doing something about it, a hack that works really well for me is reading, reading anything. It could be going to the gym for you, it could be coding for someone else. As long as anxiety is leading us into action, I think it’s a super tool to use in the real world of capitalism that you’re walking into.
If I could add one or two other things, when you change your mind about a certain thing, society today tells you it’s a bad thing. People call you a hypocrite. Hypocrisy, I again believe, is good. With new information, with new data, with new insights, if you are able to change your mind and change it quickly, has served me well and might serve many of you guys well as well.
Don’t Measure Life by Capitalism Alone
So while I say all of this, I am not, for a second, suggesting a cynical view of life. I feel like for every one of you, I spoke to today in person. The ambition of Columbia and Yale and all of these colleges, I feel like that’s the joy of life. I feel like that’s the joy of life. You know, you have to live that capitalistic pursuit.
If there is one thing I have learned in all this is, just don’t measure your life by that one scale alone. There is no winner in the capitalistic pursuit. You will always find somebody who has more. However, the key here might be not to win the game of capitalism, but to play and have a lot of fun while you are playing.
Living with Gratitude
Today, I live a life which is filled, not fully, but in some parts with gratitude. I spend a lot of time in Goa, as much as 10 days a month. So when I wake up in the morning, I just came back into Mumbai. When I wake up in the morning now, there are some things I am thinking about and some things I am not, but largely, I have gratitude for life.
I am thankful for a brother who had a stroke a year ago, recovering. My biggest worry are things like my sister-in-law is cancer-free or my dad, who passed away recently, did so peacefully. I am thankful for the dogs Anant gave me. Those two Labradors are adorable. I have named them Chase and Grace. You have to see them still.
And I am not sat there worrying about what happened in social media or what happened to the next successful businessman. What deal did he crack in feeling insecure about life?
Final Message to the Graduating Class
So if there is one thing I can leave this class, the graduating class with, is go out, kill, be tigers, try and win, but don’t measure any of your lives with that one tiny lens of capitalism alone. Thank you guys for having me. Best of luck.
