Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath’s first trip abroad was to the UK when he was a call centre employee in the early 2000s. In a new You Tube show ‘WTF is Bangalore’, Kamath said he didn’t own a passport before that trip.
“I was 18 or 19, they [the call centre] sent me to London to work with the client, the vendor Stonebridge. Stonebridge is part of a larger insurance company called Aegon. I didn’t have a passport, I had to make a passport. Went to London, along with five other colleagues of mine,” Kamath said.
“It was good fun. They used to pay us well. They’d give us an allowance of £50 a day, which for somebody who earns Rs 10,000-15,000 salary at that point, when I was 19, that’s Rs 4,000-5,000 bucks a day,” he said.
For the young Kamath, the trip was more than just about earning extra money. He said: “London meant even more because back then it was such a thing that it was much needed validation.”
This was also the time he started trading in stock market, a space he’d eventually build his career in and become a billionaire. “So, did call centre, started trading at the same time when I was 17. By trading I don’t mean some big thing. It’s like in Rs 8,000 rupees, you have Rs 2,000 that you can save. Take that money and buy something sell something. Share Khan used to be around back then, I still remember I had a Share Khan account,” Kamath said.
“So by the time I was 19, 20 [years old], salary had gone up to Rs 20,000-30,000, which felt like a lot back in the day. I would tell myself: ‘See, a doctor is only earning Rs 15,000, you’re in a call centre, you’re earning Rs 25,000 and feel very good about it’,” Kamath said in jest. “So, for a while I did both. I worked call centres in the night, I did trading in the morning.”
In the show, Kamath also mentioned that some of his friends, including Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, aim to make Bengaluru a ‘cooler’ place. They are working on planting 10,000 cherry-blossom trees, which are typically found in Japan, Kamath revealed.
“I have a group of friends, who are like total Bangaloreans. We all catch up once in a while and we figure out how to make Bangalore even cooler. There’s like seven, eight of us and we’re constantly working on projects to ‘how do we make Bangalore cooler in actual and cooler from a narrative standpoint?’ So, we are planning to plant 10,000 [cherry blossom] trees in Bangalore.”
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Also Read: ‘He supported us in anything we tried…’: Zerodha’s Nithin Kamath recalls father’s role in his professional journey
