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Journalism of Courage
Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath recently opened up about his first paycheck and how humble his beginnings were compared to investor-author Ruchir Sharma’s meteoric start. Appearing together on the WTF podcast, the two compared notes on their early careers, and the difference was striking.
Kamath recalled taking night shifts at a Bengaluru call centre in the early 2000s, where he earned just $1,000 a year, about Rs 88,000 now. He described it as a “modest but formative” experience that taught him discipline before he ventured into entrepreneurship. “Five years after that I was earning $1,000 a year at a call center in Bangalore called 24 bar 7,” he told Sharma, who was intrigued.
Sharma’s start could hardly have been more different. At 22, fresh out of college, he joined Morgan Stanley in Mumbai in 1996 on an annual package of $100,000, a sum worth close to Rs 88 lakh today. “I was all set to pursue a PhD,” Sharma said on the podcast. “But they asked me, ‘Do you want to study or make money?’ I chose money.” That offer put him on a fast track in global finance, eventually leading to a senior strategist role in New York and later to his current position at Rockefeller Capital Management, as well as a string of bestselling books including Breakout Nations.
Kamath listened with admiration as Sharma recounted his trajectory. Sharma, in turn, was surprised at Kamath’s beginnings: “You started in the call center world? Fascinating!”
While Sharma climbed the corporate ladder of a global bank, Kamath painstakingly built his own path. Alongside his brother Nithin Kamath, he co-founded Zerodha, which went on to shake up India’s brokerage business, and made him one of the country’s youngest billionaires.
The conversation then shifted from personal stories to global markets. Sharma, known for his macro-economic insights, didn’t mince words about the US market in 2025. “The only reason for investing in the US today is AI,” he said, adding that beyond the tech boom, most American sectors look either overpriced or under pressure. “Over the next five to ten years, I think the rest of the world outperforms the US,” he told Kamath, crediting the current resilience of U.S. stocks almost entirely to AI-linked companies.
