'Zerodha hired only 5 employees for its tech team in 4 years', says CTO Kailash Nadh

Zerodha recently reported a 21% increase in revenue, reaching Rs 8,320 crore, alongside a 62% jump in profits in FY24. 

The company has experienced double-digit growth since the COVID-19 pandemic, driven by the mass participation of retail investors in the stock market. Despite this impressive growth, the company employs only around 1,150 people, a stark contrast to other unicorn startups with similar revenue. 

Zerodha’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Kailash Nadh, revealed in an interview with Moneycontrol that the company’s hiring strategy is highly selective.

"We’ve hired about five people in the tech team in the last four years in total, with three in the last year. The total strength is now 35 members in the tech team," Nadh shared.

He also mentioned that only two members of Zerodha’s tech team have left in the past 10 years, reflecting the stability within the group.

"It is a group of people who hang out with each other, who have the right philosophies, who gel well with each other," Nadh explained.

Nadh said that companies start hiring “like crazy” because that becomes a de facto growth metric but “software teams used to be lean 10-15 years ago. Startups did not have the tendency to hire hundreds of programmers."

He went on to challenge the common belief that a tech or engineering team must scale in proportion to a company’s financial transactions, user base, or revenue.

"I think it is a misconception that the number of people in a tech or engineering team scales linearly with the organisation in terms of financial transactions or the number of users or revenue. It is absolutely possible for a really small team to build massive systems that scale to really massive numbers. For me, if an engineering team grows exponentially as the company and its business grows, that is a bit of an anomaly," he added.