At Intervue, we live in the trenches of hiring. Every day, we speak to founders, CHROs, and engineering leaders about one of the hardest problems in building a company: how to hire the right people, at the right time, without breaking the business.

When you scroll through startup news in India today, the spotlight often shines on billion-dollar fundraises, splashy ad campaigns, and hyper-scaling at breakneck speed. In that noisy universe, Zerodha’s story feels like a quiet rebellion.

That’s why Zerodha’s story has always fascinated us. In a decade when most Indian startups were raising mega rounds, burning millions on ads, and hiring armies of engineers, Zerodha chose to do the opposite. They stayed bootstrapped, hired lean, and built what is now India’s most trusted brokerage.

At Intervue, we admire founders who show that hiring lean isn’t about being cheap; it’s about being intentional. Zerodha proves that point better than almost anyone in Indian startup history.

When Nithin and Nikhil Kamath launched Zerodha in 2010, they didn’t have the cushion of VC money or the luxury of a fat hiring budget. What they did have was conviction: that India needed a transparent, low-cost brokerage.

We often tell founders we work with that constraint is the best filter for clarity. Zerodha’s constraints forced them to be ruthless about every early decision, especially about who they brought onto the team. In the beginning, they didn’t hire for headcount; they hired for leverage. One person might be coding during the day and answering support tickets at night.

It’s a philosophy we at Intervue deeply respect. When your first ten hires think like owners, you don’t just get work done; you set the culture for the next thousand.

Even today, with millions of customers and billions in revenue, Zerodha runs with a workforce of around 1,500 people. Compare that to traditional brokerages with tens of thousands of employees, and you see the magic of their model.

From our perspective, this wasn’t just thrift. It was a strategy. By investing in technology over manpower, Zerodha reduced dependency on large operational teams. Kite, Coin, Console, Varsity. Each product became a force multiplier, allowing them to scale customers without scaling headcount.

Zerodha’s strategic leverage mindset can be interpreted from this quote by Nithin Kamath: “Even before Covid‑19, there were around 1,100 people on the team. Today we are at 1,200–1,250 on the team, when the business has grown 10 times.”

This showcases that building ownership-minded hires who wear multiple hats is how Zerodha served millions without the giant payroll. At Intervue, we call this hiring for impact, not headcount.

We see many startups make the opposite mistake: hire aggressively before processes and platforms are ready. Zerodha casually flipped that script. They built platforms that automated repetitive work and then hired selectively, for roles that demanded human judgment and creativity.

Here’s what impresses us most: Zerodha grew into India’s largest brokerage without spending crores on marketing or celebrity endorsements. Instead, they built trust.

At Intervue, we know trust is the hardest currency in hiring, too. Just as Zerodha won customers by being transparent, zero brokerage on delivery trades, flat ₹20 intraday fees, companies win great employees when they offer clarity and authenticity. 

No hype, no hidden clauses, no bait-and-switch.

For Zerodha, word-of-mouth became their best acquisition channel. For companies, we believe the same principle applies: culture spreads faster through people than through PR campaigns.

One of the hardest parts of building a startup team is knowing when not to hire. There’s always pressure from investors, from advisors, even from your own sense of momentum.

Zerodha had none of that pressure. 

Being bootstrapped meant they didn’t have to justify headcount to anyone but themselves. And so they said “no” often. They didn’t hire because it looked good. They didn’t expand because the market expected it. They only brought in people when it was necessary, and when those people could make a disproportionate impact.

That discipline is what we at Intervue try to instill in every founder we work with. Hiring slowly, with intention, is almost always better than hiring fast with regret.

Zerodha also made a bold decision in 2014: instead of solving every adjacent fintech problem themselves (which would have meant hiring endlessly), they launched Rainmatter, an incubator that funds fintech startups.

Think about that choice from a hiring lens. Rather than swelling their org chart, they extended their ecosystem through partnerships. They scaled their influence without scaling their payroll.

It’s the same mindset we coach startups on: not every problem is yours to solve with a new team. Sometimes, partnerships and collaborations give you leverage without adding organizational complexity.

For anyone still doubting whether lean hiring works, the numbers do the talking. Zerodha closed FY24 with revenues of over ₹8,300 crore and profits of ₹4,700 crore—while staying debt-free and privately owned. They now serve over 7.5 million active customers.

And they achieved all this with about 1,500 employees. That’s not just lean. That’s world-class efficiency.

Nithin Kamath values the trust of 1000+ customers and matches it through Zerodha’s relentless consistency. We often say at Intervue that the cost of a bad hire isn’t just salary, it’s culture, speed, and momentum. 

Looking at Zerodha through our lens at Intervue, a few lessons stand out:

• Bootstrapping forces focus. Constraints make you prioritize, and prioritization makes your team sharper.
• Hire for leverage, not optics. A small, owner-minded team will outcompete a bloated org every time.
• Invest in systems, not just people. Technology and automation are the reasons Zerodha can run at this scale with so few hands.
• Trust travels faster than advertising. In hiring and in customer acquisition, authenticity wins in the long run.

These are principles we try to help companies live by every day. Zerodha didn’t just prove they work; they proved they scale.

At Intervue, we often ask founders: What kind of company are you really building? One that looks big on paper, or one that stays resilient in reality?

Zerodha’s journey shows us that bootstrapped doesn’t mean broken. It means disciplined, focused, and fiercely independent. They built India’s most successful brokerage not by hiring aggressively, but by hiring intentionally.

And for every founder wondering whether you can build something iconic with a lean team, Zerodha is your answer.

Bootstrapped. Not broken. And built to last.