Zerodha founder Nithin Kamath, while speaking about the platform’s bullishness on content, talked about that one time he made almost the entire office cry with his prank! Kamath sent fake police officers to raid the Zerodha office and accuse founders, Nithin and Nikhil of forgery.
Speaking at the ‘OnePlus Open Conversations’, hosted by CEO and founder of Avalon Labs, Varun Mayya, Nithin Kamath said, “I ran a prank in the office. I got these Kannada actors to raid our office as cops. We captured this whole thing…I knew back then that this was the place to be. I had these random ideas…no one would have ever thought that a stock broker would run a prank video of cops raiding saying that ‘your founder is a cheat and has run away’...I mean the reaction in that video was just crazy… I mean half our office was crying that day.”
The video, uploaded in 2014, begins with a message from Nithin Kamath: “We carried out a fake police raid in our office to see how the team reacts to extreme stress and to have some fun, of course.” In the video, technicians can be seen putting up cameras. Then the actors walk in with a fake high court order and start rounding up the employees and disrupting work. They are met with some resistance by the employees who are seen trying to understand what the entire raid is for. Many of them look obviously stressed. Finally, Nithin and Nikhil Kamath walk in and reveal the prank.
One of the employees who was present in the prank commented on the video, “It's nice to sit back and laugh at this now. I wasn't laughing when it was happening.”
Kamath, speaking in the podcast, said that he always knew YouTube was the place to be even when he was late to the social media scene. “I was really late to the social media scene. I started in LinkedIn in 2018, Twitter around 2019…but until then I used to be the person managing Zerodha’s social media.I also realised that if something came from the business handles, the platforms started throttling the reach of sorts. But like YouTube, I knew really early that this was the place to be.”
The Zerodha founder spoke about how the company always had a focus on content, and are not only pushing for it now. Kamath said that they started blogging right from Day 1 of Zerodha.
“Right from Day 1 when we started Zerodha, we started blogging and we knew that the superpower we had as a business was transparency. Generally financial services are very opaque about the way they work. Then Karthik (Rangappa) started Varsity in 2013. But it was all in text,” he said, recalling their journey. He said that from 2011 to 2017/18, he used to spend some 2 hours every day talking to journalists.
“As a business of money, you are trying to build trust and credibility. So, you have to build your own content,” he said, adding that from 2016 onwards the efforts that they put on content started having a draining result. “I think people stopped consuming traditional content. The viewership of English business channels started dropping. People stopped picking newspapers and reading. So you started seeing that change,” he said, indicating a move to visual content.
Also read: Zerodha's Nithin Kamath warns banks of a big upcoming problem!
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