Silicon Valley adage of fail fast not feasible in fintech: Zerodha CTO

In a Q&A, Kailash Nadh dwells on the complexities of building fintech products and ensuring engineers fit in culturally

Online stockbroker Zerodha was reeling under tech outages in 2018 and 2019. But they receded when the pandemic struck in 2020 and millions of new users came to the platform. The company’s chief technology officer, Kailash Nadh, spoke with Deepsekhar Choudhury about the complexities of building fintech products, ensuring that engineers fit in culturally, and more. Edited excerpts:

Zerodha had quite a few outages before the pandemic. But they fizzled out in mid-2020, even as there was massive user growth. What went on behind the scenes?

Ironically, the issue reduced exponentially when we saw a massive user growth -- we