ZERODHA’S FOUNDER & CEO Nithin Kamath had no Plan B. “Had I been a student of an IIM or Harvard, I would have known that if this doesn’t work out, I’ll be able to find another job.” A B-school education is a parachute alright, but one that would have kept him from pursuing his dream, he says. Whatever success the bootstrapped and cashflow-positive online stock trading start-up has earned, he feels, is because of the 10-12 years he spent in the capital markets before co-founding the venture with brother Nikhil.
His firm, Zerodha, is among the 100-plus unicorns in the country today—a crowning glory for India’s start-up story as it now hosts the third largest start-up ecosystem in the world after the US and China—with more than 77,000 DPIIT-registered start-ups. “Ours is a country which needs hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs because of our varied customer base, geography and demography, and tonnes of very real problems,” says Padmaja Ruparel, Co-founder of Indian Angel Network and Founding Partner of IAN Fund. “But 90 per cent of Indian students are focussed on getting a high-paying job after completing their education. We are in a joboriented economy, not a start-up economy, yet,” says Rajeev Warrier, Executive Vice President at Wadhwani Foundation’s Wadhwani Entrepreneur. Their National Entrepreneurship Network programme enables institutes to set up an entrepreneurship programme to support aspiring student founders and
