but Nikhil Kamath liked it way before it was cool.

Chess teaches you how to work  under a structure, in a system,  

but yet try and be creative within that system.

So much so, that he dropped out of high  school at 14 to play chess full-time. 

I don't think I was the best student.

That was the starting move that eventually led  to his trading start-up for retail investors,  

which has been dubbed India's answer  to trading platform Robinhood. 

We started, actually, maybe  five years before they did.

34-year-old Nikhil is the billionaire  co-founder and chief investment officer  

of Zerodha, India's largest trading brokerage.

Today, more than 15% of India's retail  trades are done through its platform  

as ordinary investors flocked  to stocks during the pandemic.

But the school dropout only discovered  his passion for investing after playing  

competitive chess at national and  international levels for two years.

No one was going to hire me  without a college degree,  

so I mean I had to do something  which didn't require one.

Inspired by his elder brother, Nithin,  he took to trading when he was 17,  

teaching himself on the go.

It went well and soon, the pair was  investing for family and friends.

Along the way, they felt that the  investment process was too complex.

The problem back in the day, I'm talking about  

11 or 12 years ago, is cost was very high.  Brokerage fees were incredibly high in India.

And for a full-time trader there  were many barricades or barriers  

one had to cross before he could actually be  profitable in any consistent kind of manner.

So the Bangalore-born brothers set to  work, using their savings to build a  

simple and affordable brokerage  platform for everyday investors.

In 2010, Zerodha, a combination of zero and  rodha, the Sanskrit word for barriers, was born.  

Unlike most startups, the company  hasn't taken on any external investment.

We've been different in a way from other  companies as in we've never taken on  

investors or debt or never  really raised any capital.

Our ethos from the very beginning  was build a better product,  

and word of mouth will bring clientele to you.

In the decade since, Zerodha has grown through  word of mouth as appetite for investments beyond  

gold and property grew in India. But in  2020, all that changed under the pandemic.

At the height of lockdowns, the company  doubled its registered users to over 4 million.

The pandemic has been good to us,  which is a strange thing to say.

People had a lot more time, people  were at home and, unfortunately,  

in many cases, they were in a position where an  alternate income could have been very useful.

Shailesh Lakhani, managing director at venture  capital firm Sequoia India, told me more.

In India in the last year what we saw was that  brokerage account openings doubled over 2019. I  

think we had 10 million brokerage accounts opened  in 2020 versus just under 5 million in 2019.

And I think It's driven by a few different  factors. One, that it's just become  

a lot easier with the financial services  infrastructure to open a brokerage account. 

Second, mutual funds in the past several  years have tended to underperform  

the equity indices or their benchmarks.

And as we've had rising markets aside from the  coronavirus, that fear in March, April, May,  

the markets have been pretty easy  to make money in for a lot of folks.

In 2020, the average age of a Zerodha investor  fell from 32 to 30. That has drawn parallels  

with U.S. trading platform Robinhood, which saw a  similar surge in millennials during the pandemic.

Nikhil says that could pave the way  for a future expansion into the U.S. 

Regulation in India around broking is  a lot higher than it is in America.

But that being said, the end-user  experience, the technology of it all,  

is something that we could both compete on.

So we would look at approaching  their market at some point and seeing  

if there are ways in which our products can  integrate with what is available in America.

Even as the financial technology  space gets increasingly competitive,  

Zerodha has no plans to raise more  capital, unlike its competitor Robinhood.

That hasn't prevented talk of the  entrepreneur's growing fortune, however.

In October 2020, the Kamath brothers joined  Forbes India Rich List with a combined  

wealth of around $1.6 billion, as 34-year-old  Nikhil was named India's youngest billionaire.

For a while now, I don't think  financial motives have been the  

focus. I don't think it has been the most  important thing and that's set to continue.

But I think more access to capital gives you  

the room and the courage to go  out there and try new stuff.

And that's exactly what he did. After struggling  to find a cost-effective way to manage their  

growing wealth, Nikhil and Nithin once again  set out to disrupt the investment industry,  

this time for high-net-worth individuals, or  people with around $1 million in financial assets.

In 2019, the brothers launched True Beacon as  an asset management firm for wealthy clients.

What I realized are there are  many inefficiencies in the model.  

The fund manager or the fund house and  the client are never aligned in a way.

Unlike traditional funds, which charge  clients a fee for managing assets,  

set up costs and annual fees, True Beacon only  charges clients a performance fee on gains made.

Nikhil says that 10% cut drives  the firm to achieve better returns. 

If the client doesn't do well for  any reason over a five-year period,  

we have no revenue as a company.

So we're really putting our necks  out there and saying we will create  

something which is different, which  is totally client-aligned and very,  

very transparent. I guess time  will tell as to how that goes.

True Beacon's India-focused flagship  fund aims to outperform the Nifty 50,  

the country's benchmark stock index, by 6-8%.

In its first year, True Beacon claimed that  its fund beat the Nifty benchmark by over 26%.

Meanwhile, client volumes grew as much as  20% month-on-month as wealthy international  

investors sought refuge in Indian  stocks amid rising US-China tensions.

Nikhil is now hoping the company could hit a  billion-dollar valuation within the coming years.

It will probably be a few years before word gets  around and people actually compare like to like.  

But when it does and it scales, I  think it will be a company that will  

definitely bring in some revenue. We hope it will.

Like Zerodha, that could position  True Beacon as one of the many  

billion-dollar unicorns in India's  rapidly growing start-up ecosystem.

India is currently home to 21 unicorns  with a combined valuation of $73.2 billion.  

By 2025, that number is estimated to hit 100.

We see a start-up ecosystem really fundamentally  underpinned by a couple of aspects.  

One being the number of engineers,  the amount of people writing software.

In India, depends on how you count, but it's among  

the highest number of engineers that are  writing software anywhere in the world.

Second being an interesting consumer  market. India's probably the largest market  

that will grow the fastest over the  course of the rest of our lifetimes.

Even though his days as a  full-time chess player are over,  

Nikhil has applied the lessons he learned  from the game to grow his companies.

I think right now I'm kind of  like totally occupied. I don't see  

myself having the bandwidth to do  something new in the very near future.

So over the next six months or 12 months, I think  Zerodha and True Beacon are going to be the focus.