Zerodha recently reported a 21% rise in revenue, reaching Rs 8.32 billion, along with a 62% rise in profits in FY24.
The company has seen double-digit growth since the COVID-19 pandemic, driven by massive participation of retail investors in the stock market. Despite this impressive growth, the company employs only about 1,150 people, a stark contrast to other unicorn startups with similar revenues.
Zerodha’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Kailash Nadh, revealed in an interview with money control that the company’s hiring strategy is very selective.
“We have hired about five people in the technology team in the last four years in total, and three in the last year. The total strength is now 35 members in the technology team,” Nadh shared.
He also mentioned that only two members of Zerodha’s tech team have left in the last 10 years, reflecting stability within the group.
“It’s a group of people who relate to each other, who have the right philosophies and who get along with each other,” Nadh explained.
Nadh said companies start hiring “like crazy” because that becomes a de facto growth metric, but “software teams used to be lean 10 or 15 years ago. “Startups didn’t tend to hire hundreds of programmers.”
He continued to challenge the common belief that a technology or engineering team should scale in proportion to a company’s financial transactions, user base, or revenue.
“I think it’s a misconception that the number of people on a technology or engineering team grows linearly with the organization 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 huge numbers, to me, if an engineering team grows exponentially as the company and its business grows, that’s a bit anomalous,” he added.
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