How do you build internet-scale financial systems without venture capital, ads, or growth-hacking?

In this episode, Vishnu speaks with Kailash Nadh, CTO of Zerodha - one of the world’s largest trading platforms. They cover how Zerodha stays fully bootstrapped, remains highly profitable (USD 500 million+ in profit), and grows with zero ad spend.

They dig into Zerodha’s engineering philosophy, self-hosting, open source, privacy, and why the internet feels increasingly broken. This is a grounded conversation on scale, incentives, pessimism, and building companies that last.

Kailash: https://nadh.in/

Zerodha: https://zerodha.com/

FLOSS/Fund: https://floss.fund/

Ente: https://ente.com/

Chapters:

00:00 Start

00:16 FLOSS/fund

03:30 $500 million in profits

07:19 Company culture

13:04 Engineering problems

17:50 Childhood

26:36 Artificial Intelligence

28:36 Artificial General Intelligence

32:09 Venture Capital

41:21 Privacy

45:36 Climate Change

45:59 Next FOSS project

52:40 Inner peace

55:30 Learnings

1:01:20 Rapid fire

1:07:48 Social media

1:10:00 Optimism

Mozilla announced Firefox would become an "AI browser" - and the internet lost it. Users called it tone-deaf. Reddit threads exploded. Mozilla promised a kill switch.

So I sat down with Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Mozilla) and John Dickerson (CEO, Mozilla.ai) to get answers. We talked about the AI backlash, Firefox's future, open source AI, Mozilla.ai's developer tools, small language models, on-device AI, Mozilla's $1.3 billion war chest, raising venture capital, and what their "rebel alliance" for open source actually means.

00:00 Intro

00:57 Raffi's story

03:27 John's story

06:27 Mozilla's structure

13:25 AI @ Mozilla

25:10 Firefox

28:56 Thunderbird & Mozilla VPN

30:28 Revenue models

33:55 Mozilla raising venture capital for AI

36:32 Rebel alliance

38:56 Criticism against Mozilla

41:30 "Rapid" fire

48:26 Optimism

52:08 Advice for founders

53:40 The End

Carl Dong, CEO of Obscura talks to Vishnu Mohandas, CEO of Ente on all things VPNs, Bitcoin, Privacy Tech, User Experience and a lot more.

Carl Dong - https://x.com/carl_dong

Obscura VPN - https://obscura.net/

Vishnu Mohandas - https://x.com/VishnuKVMD

Ente - https://ente.io/

Links mentioned in the video -

https://obscura.net/blog/bootstrapping-trust/

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf

https://reproducible-builds.org/