Kailash Nadh on building Zerodha | Vishnu's Podcast

How do you build internet-scale financial systems without venture capital, ads, or growth-hacking? In this episode, Vishnu speaks with Kailash Nadh, CTO of Zerodha - one of the world’s largest trading platforms. They cover how Zerodha stays fully bootstrapped, remains highly profitable (USD 500 million+ in profit), and grows with zero ad spend. They dig into Zerodha’s engineering philosophy, self-hosting, open source, privacy, and why the internet feels increasingly broken. This is a grounded conversation on scale, incentives, pessimism, and building companies that last. Kailash: https://nadh.in/ Zerodha: https://zerodha.com/ FLOSS/Fund: https://floss.fund/ Ente: https://ente.io/ Chapters: 00:00 Start 00:16 FLOSS/fund 03:30 $500 million in profits 07:19 Company culture 13:04 Engineering problems 17:50 Childhood 26:36 Artificial Intelligence 28:36 Artificial General Intelligence 32:09 Venture Capital 41:21 Privacy 45:36 Climate Change 45:59 Next FOSS project 52:40 Inner peace 55:30 Learnings 1:01:20 Rapid fire 1:07:48 Social media 1:10:00 Optimism 👉 Subscribe for honest conversations with people quietly shaping the future of the internet.