“Don't know how much Mukesh bhai is into stock markets,” Nikhil Kamath chuckles while Nita Ambani shakes head

Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath, while speaking at the Dhirubhai Ambani International School’s 2025 convocation, said that Mukesh Ambani might just be the only man in the room who knows what tomorrow holds.

Nikhil Kamath at Dhirubhai Ambani International School’s 2025 convocation

“I don’t know how much Mukesh bhai is into stock markets,” Kamath said. “But if anyone here knows what will happen tomorrow, it’s probably him.”

As the crowd chuckled, cameras caught Nita Ambani smiling and shaking her head, confirming that India’s richest man doesn’t trade stocks.

While addressing the school’s graduating class, Nikhil Kamath recollected dropping out at 15, selling phones to neighbourhood kids, and eventually finding his calling in trading. “There’s hypocrisy in me giving you a lecture on your convocation when I never had one,” he admitted.

The Bengaluru-based entrepreneur shared that at only 17, he did night shifts for his first job at a call centre selling health insurance to unsuspecting British customers. 

The free mornings and afternoons provided ample opportunity to young Kamath for a side hustle. So, he casually took to the stock markets—a habit that became a career.

“The markets are like dating in a relationship,” Kamath said. “They start off great, get bad, and if you stick around, maybe they get better again.”

Kamath added that success does not come from relentless hard work, but from pattern recognition, emotional stability, and the people around.

“Being stable, not reacting, being objective in chaos—that’s probably the biggest skill to succeed,” he said.

“Hard work is not that important,” the Zerodha boss opined. 

Recounting a moment with his leadership team, Kamath confessed that everyone in the room was pretending to work because they thought the others were. “Hard work becomes a defence mechanism when the ego asks why you didn’t make it,” he said.

For the Zerodha co-founder, it all comes down to who’s in the room with you. “The people you surround yourself with will have the most disproportionate impact on your life,” he told the class of 2025, leaving them with a practical lesson he picked from life.

Also read: 'A tiny startup in Bangalore...': TinyOwl's Shubham Bansal says they “joked” about acquiring Swiggy (startuppedia.in)