India's largest stock broker has 30 devs (2020)
zerodha.tech
zerodha.tech
[1]: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-bytes/nikhil-...
This sounds like how a 12 year old would respond to getting caught
So he figured, I don't know any chess, but I'm playing against a GM on a simul, what hope do I have...oh wait this is online & no one can see me, let me use an engine against a GM.
Balls of steel right there.
GM resigns. Dude apology-tweets.
Danny Rensch terminates dude's chess.com account. Dude then tries to involve the GM's wife & drum up public sympathy. Rensch won't budge.
CEOs and even some CTOs don't understand how productivity can be lost by adding too many people too fast.
I've known of instances where managers have been pushed out because they didn't hire fast enough.
The amount of money wasted due to stupid things like this is incredible.
In defense of the public, if 10 devs out of 30 decide to leave and open a competing business, you're screwed. If 10 out of 1000 do that, nobody will notice.
The CTO of such a large company takes his time to make little projects for fun and OSS, says a lot about how good the company's dev culture is.
I also find it amusingly wholesome that his GitHub about says "Hobbyist Developer" before "CTO @Zerodha".
He also volunteers at 2 Indian non-profits. What an amazing person!
I've worked at insanely productive startups with ~10 devs. Once we received a round of funding and the "money boys" joined, it went wild.
Keep in mind that US based, VC funded companies are competing against other similar companies. You either move quickly or die, the competition is intense and so are the financial rewards. Engineer tenure averages 2-3 years. All of that factors in to the specific dynamics of the startup ecosystem.
That is changing rapidly with the huge inflow of VC money into the financial sector in the last 5 years with countless startups fueled by VC money and incumbents upping their offering had begun to capture / steel away their market.
They would be pressured into growing to compete with them sooner if not already.
"Thanks to social media, countless people are lured into the markets and have a rosy view of trading. But the reality is less than 1% of active traders earn more money than a bank fixed deposit over a 3-year period."
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/no-...
But it is a technical and business achievement what they have been able to do building up Zerodha.
There's one feature in their app - "Nudge" - that warns users about a myriad of things, one of which is if they are buying penny stocks or stocks with low liquidity under the influence of a sham marketing scheme.
It's not so much as people shouldn't use their product - it's more about people should use their product wisely and not fall into traps.
I used to have an ICICI direct account. I can vouch zerodha is infinitely better. No spam calls from my free investment consultant. Way better APP and UI.
And people say you have to go native to have fast apps. It's obviously doable with Flutter too.
It was one of two roles on my final shortlist, but I ended up going with the other option.
I still love the fact that there is an Indian tech team that is really mainstream with such a unique outlook on development methodology.
The older, more established “MNCs” (think Adobe, AMD, Intel, Goldman Sachs) are slightly more rigid but not too bad.
The worst offenders are the services companies—Accenture, Infosys, TCS, the likes. They’re the sweatshops: terrible working hours, terrible culture (or lack thereof), shit pay.
But yes, as another commenter says, there are exceptions to everything.
Anyway the amount of generalisation in both the question and your quite incorrect answer is pretty funny.
There is close to no 996 really. Most Indian tech startups are trying to emulate the FAANG style of work, both good and bad. So that means officially there is an 8 hour a day expectation, but in practice, there is a lot of cultural pressure to work more, stay at office longer, work on Saturdays etc. But even with that, I don't think I would compare that to 996.
My first job was a fairly early stage startup, and all of us were really young and rearing to go. So there was a group of us that did a 995 for about a year, but it was just a small group, and a lot of it was boardgames after 7pm.
My second one was a later stage startup. They were far more "professional". Nobody worked extra hours because no one cared enough to. So that got a little boring after a while.
Larger companies tend to have more sane working hours. But cultural pressures vary by the company.
My view on Zerodha itself, through the onsite visit I had, was that the hours would be fairly sane, maybe a few saturdays here and there. But there was also a huge social aspect that they highlighted, which was after-hours activities in the office premises, which comes with a certain amount of pressure to attend.
I know/accept that marketing folks can be a real asset and have a good purpose.
But boy does this sound like a wonderful thing.
it makes me think of a midwesterner who has swung every vote when the politician says "jobs!" over and over again, and now they're funded and are like "jobs for the sake of jobs! look how many jobs I made!"
what are the tertiary benefits of doing this, if any? do the growth capital VCs need to see that? would be counterintuitive if thats a thing
just feel like I'm missing something as the employee growth have no causation for profit growth. any correlation is because people just have been getting a bunch of them and only have them if they can afford them, some of which is from profits sometimes when companies had those.
I also want to be clear that my perspective is mostly that of a contributor. I have never founded a company or been involved with venture capital, or related forms of investing, in any professional capacity.
Personally I don't quite understand why a founder would want to take a huge pile of money and then burn it as fast as possible trying to hit some hyper-growth target, when they could instead take a small amount of money and set up a stable revenue-earning business. But then again, I'm so risk-averse that I haven't quit my job to start a business, so my opinion probably isn't worth that much.
That's pretty much it. The VCs, at the height of the bubble, were forcing startups to take far more funding than they needed. A startup company can't just sit on the cash and do nothing with it, the funding needs to be put to work ASAP in order for the VC companies to justify having provided the funding.
Most startups are software companies, so they have limited ability to spend those mountains of VC money on capital expenditures. They can't spend their VC funding on building a factory or something. The largest expense in a software company is human resources, so that's what they end up spending their funding on (even if it's not in the best interest of the founders, employees or customers).
> Personally I don't quite understand why a founder would want to take a huge pile of money and then burn it as fast as possible trying to hit some hyper-growth target, when they could instead take a small amount of money and set up a stable revenue-earning business
They don't have a choice. If they don't accept the huge pile of money, they get nothing. The VC business model isn't compatible with slowly building a stable revenue-earning business. From the private equity investor's point-of-view, if they wanted to invest in a stable revenue-earning business, they can just go and do a leveraged buy-out of a well-established, stable revenue-earning business (like a health care business, or an older enterprise SaaS business, etc.) and skip all the risks associated with the startup phase. They only want to invest in a startup if it's a hyper-growth moonshot, and they don't mind burning founders, employees, customers and their own money in the process because they only need 1 in 100 startups to succeed and the other 99 are just tax write-offs for them.
* tech team is 30 members (two mobile developers, two designers, two frontend developers, one test engineer, one devops engineer, and one department liaison, the rest fullstack developers). Nobody had any background in finance, and most had no prior work experience either. Everyone has been a hacker or a hobbyist straight out of college.
* became the largest stock broker in India in January 2019
* never raised external funding, have zero debt, and have been profitable YoY
* no marketing team, no advertising
* 15-20% of Indian retail trade and investment volumes
* ~1 million daily active users, $3 billion in volumes, busy day ~7 million trades
* broadcast ~16 million market ticks per second: careful byte-by-byte optimisations so bandwidth bills are negligible
Tech stack:
* Go. Python for non-realtime data-heavy backoffice systems, bit of C++ and Java for special cases
* VueJS
* Flutter (previously tried native Android/Java, Swift, and React Native). Edit: https://zerodha.tech/blog/from-native-to-react-native-to-flu...
* Postgres. Edit: https://zerodha.tech/blog/working-with-postgresql/
* Redis, Haproxy, Nginx, Kafka, Elk
* Dev: Self-hosted Gitlab, RunDeck, RocketChat, Metabase, Phabricator, Postal. Sentry, Grafana, and Prometheus. Edit: https://zerodha.tech/blog/infra-monitoring-at-zerodha/
* Servers: physical rack + AWS
* ERP: erpnext.com (open source)
Edit: Is very summary. Much information article is. Article read if confused are. (2020). https://zerodha.tech/blog/
Every company I've seen with more than that (startup or BigCo) is basically a salary slush fund ^.^