I met Karthik Rangappa sometime around 2005. I was trying to sell him an international investing account. I remember going to his office, and we hit it off almost instantly. Later, he helped us build our first website through a friend. This was back when we were called Kamath Associates.

He then came to work with us for a bit before going to France to pursue his master’s in finance. He came back and was working on financial education when, in 2013, I reached out and asked him to come build that piece for us.

The fact that Zerodha is known and respected for all our financial education wouldn’t have been possible without Karthik and Varsity. What’s crazy is that even after 13 years, he still responds to all the queries on Varsity. Over the last three years, he has found a way to step it up a notch and make Varsity much more impactful, with help from everyone on the team, through text, video, live sessions, and all the other offline initiatives.

By the way, we were both in the last batch at Bangalore University with the “all-carry” system. This meant you could keep carrying first-semester subjects without clearing them, all the way until the 8th semester and even later.

I basically had 45-odd subjects to write by the 8th semester, and I never wrote them. Karthik had something like 36 left, but unlike me, he went back and cleared all of them after the 8th semester. 🥶 Full respect for that. You don’t find many people who can do that.

Not once in all these years have our discussions been about how Zerodha benefits from Varsity. For example, we have millions of people whose email IDs are registered on Varsity, and we haven’t even bothered to check whether they are Zerodha customers.

I guess that fact that we have no agenda has been the secret to Varsity’s success.

Watch the full conversation on the Zerodha YouTube channel, here.

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