Why do operators like Nithin Kamath and Sridhar Vembu refuse to buy growth?

The whole mental model in one short post: not measuring acquisition cost and lifetime value is the point, not an oversight, and he spells out what it buys him.

Why Zerodha doesn't advertise

From Z-Connect by Zerodha by Nithin Kamath About 3 min read

• Kamath's case for not advertising: no acquisition cost means no pressure to push customers into trades.
• It also lets them stay spam-free and skip selling things like life insurance as an investment.

The referral history, including the years incentives existed, the regulatory ban, and the striking observation that referrals stayed roughly flat once the incentives went away.

How Zerodha grew without Advertising

From nithinkamath.me by Nithin Kamath About 4 min read

• Zerodha ran a referral program from its 2010 start because it had no advertising budget.
• Regulation eventually stopped them paying referral incentives, causing a dip around 2018-19.
• With incentives now removed entirely, referrals have stayed roughly flat, which is the whole argument.
• The precondition is offering products customers would talk about unprompted.

The clearest statement of the tradeoff in his own words: venture capital pushes spend toward sales and marketing and away from R&D, and he names what that costs you later.

"If you don't invest in R&D, you won't have long term growth," says Zoho Corp's boss Sridhar Vembu

From Business Today by Sridhar Vembu About 8 min read

• Zoho crossed 1 billion dollars in revenue having never raised funding, and paid over 600 crore rupees in tax that fiscal year.
• India went from barely a top-ten market to Zoho's number three, and Vembu expects number two within three to five years.
• His stance against venture capital is specifically about the forced exit pressure it creates.
• He argues R&D spend has to come before sales and marketing spend, or there is no long-term growth.

The present day proof that this is a policy and not a phase, with Mani Vembu confirming R&D spend still exceeds marketing spend at a billion dollar company.

How Zoho is rewriting the rules of enterprise tech

From Forbes India by Naini Thaker About 7 min read

• Zoho serves over 100 million users in close to 150 countries with more than 55 products built over three decades.
• About 20 percent of Zoho Corp's talent comes from Zoho Schools rather than campus hiring.
• It spent 20 million dollars and used 256 NVIDIA GPUs to train its own Zia LLM in 1.3B, 2.6B and 7B sizes.
• Arattai sign-ups jumped from 3,000 to 330,000 a day in September 2025, and Zoho takes a 10 to 15 year view on it.

The written answer quotes Vembu from print. Here he takes open questions for an hour on running a company that was profitable from year one and spends on R&D instead of buying growth, which is the reasoning behind the quote.

Sridhar Vembu (Founder & CEO, Zoho) | Ask Me Anything Session | Inc42

On Inc42 by Sridhar Vembu 51 min