Zerodha founder Nithin Kamath talks about the time when he played a joke that nearly brought the entire office to tears while discussing the platform's content bullishness on the ‘OnePlus Open Conversations’, hosted by CEO and founder of Avalon Lab- Varun Mayya. Kamath accused the founders of Zerodha, Nithin (himself) and Nikhil, of forgeries by sending fake police officials to raid their office.
He 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.”
Kamath posted the video on April 1, 2019, on the microblogging platform 'X' and wrote, "5 years back, when we were much smaller, a lot lesser issues to deal with and hence testosterone was still at play, had carefully executed this mega prank at our office. :) Happy fools day."
The incident took place in 2014 when Zerodha was a much smaller company than today.
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.”
By the time the video ended, half of the employees were inconsolable and several were crying. However, Nithin Kamath makes an appearance after everyone is ushered into a small room. The Zerodha CEO enters the room and exclaims, "Surprise," realizing that his staff have been pranked. Nine years ago, someone posted a video of the joke on YouTube, and it has since received 1.8 million views.
