Intro Music

Tyler Finn

Welcome to a special episode of the abstract recording in Bangalore, India. Today on the podcast, I am joined by Viraj Joshi, a lawyer turned policy operator and now a key strategic leader at Zerodha, India's bootstrapped unicorn brokerage firm. Viraj works very closely with the founder, CEO, managing cross-functional strategic initiatives, overseeing regulatory and compliance matters across the business. And he also, which we're going to talk about, works on investments for Rainmatter, which is the corporate VC arm of Zerodha Viraj. Welcome to this episode of the abstract.

Viraj Joshi  

Thanks, Tyler, for having me. Great to be here.

Tyler Finn 

I'm really excited for this, this conversation, you know, I like to start with some of my guests in the in the early years, you trained as a lawyer, like a lot of folks, you spent some time in the US. We call big law, at least, you know, corporate law. What made big law the right starting point for you?

Viraj Joshi  

So I graduated from National Law School. Big law happened, sort of by accident, to be honest, not that I planned for it. Most of my, you know, law school life was around extracurriculars. I was part of the sports committee. I was sort of running a music festival, you know, whatever the cool kids did at the time, really, I had not thought deeply about what after law school, right? I was sort of in the flow. Now, you know, around the time law school ended, you know, everybody was sort of preparing for big law. I mean that that, you know, that's what most people wanted to do. So I went with the flow. I wouldn't say that I really knew what big law meant. The pay seemed great as a 22 year old, you know, finally, the idea of financial freedom seemed great, and that's really what the motivation was. I had not thought it through, to be really honest, but I went with the flow. Everybody else applied. I went along with it. I was lucky enough to get a job at khaytan, which was one of the big law firms in India, and that's really how big law happened for me. I mean, there's, I'd be lying if I said there was some grand plan behind it, really, even when I went in there, what attracted me to khatan specifically was back then they were running this rotation sort of program, which meant you could work with different teams for six months each before you sort of picked, you know, what you wanted to do going forward. So for someone like me, would not thought through this deeply, that firm in particular made a lot of sense. So I got to explore my curiosities, just figure my way around. And I mean, that's really how khatan happened for me.

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Tyler Finn  

That might have been the last sort of conventional move you made in your career. I think you ended up moving into doing some financial policy work, Policy Research, different parts of the Indian government. What was the single biggest reason you decided to leave big law and the more conventional path behind, and least in the early sort of policy work, as you were describing it to me, You were almost like a little bit of a policy entrepreneur, having to go and, like, find projects yourself and that sort of thing.

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Viraj Joshi  

So again, now, one of the courses that I really liked in law school was this course called Law and Public Policy. That's the only course in law school that I actually talked. That’s the only one that I did well in right? So that was always something at the back of my mind that, you know, this is something that I seem to like. At the same time, when I was in the law firm job, I sort of went down this rabbit hole of figuring out how to invest, how to save all of that, right? Because I had all this money coming in, I knew that it wasn't sustainable for me to continue in a big, large job for, you know, really long. So, I mean, I had to find a way in which, you know, that corpus keeps me afloat while I pursue my curiosities. So I went down that rabbit hole. That's when I, you know, discovered zerodha. In fact, that's the funny thing. I've been a customer for zerodha for like, five years earlier than I became an employee. So it's the opposite journey to what most people have. Yeah, no, but so I went down that rabbit hole. I taught myself a lot of finance, and there came a point where I was feeling that, you know, maybe I should discover something in finance. But back then, there was no real way in which someone with a law degree could just get up and do finance, especially in India. So, I mean, I wrote hundreds of cold emails, I would get maybe one or two responses. There was this standard set of questions around, you know, what do you really know about this world? And I had no answers. Now there, like, you know, again, I sort of got lucky. There was this side gig where, you know, the governments of Orissa and Punjab in India at time wanted to do these municipal law, municipal tax reforms, essentially property tax reforms, okay, now they had a budget constraint, but at the same time, I what this required was a little bit of knowledge of law, little bit of knowledge of finance and a little bit of knowledge of policy, right? So I was uniquely sort of positioned to do those things, because, say, someone who's an expert on any of these would not have sort of taken this up on that budget. Yeah, I was young. I was curious about each of these things. And, I mean, there I just got lucky. I found something that suited my interests to sort of go down that path. So I did that. I left my law firm job. I was doing this for about three, four months now, that ended up being a wedge to sort of get a full time job in the National Institute of Public Finance and policy, which is a research arm of the Ministry of Finance in India. So that side gig, side project that I did, really helped with that. Plus the idea for me, in the long run was just sort of figure my way around the finance. But at the same time, you know, how do I do that? I need some wedge where I can say that, you know, I have this demonstrable experience which will help me get there. So that was the idea. Again, I'll be lying if I say so, planned out. It is just an opportunity presented itself. I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time, and that's how that happened. So I mean, that really expanded my horizons and sort of helped me, you know, take that first footstep into the policy world and the finance world, both of which I'm sort of closely involved with even today.

 
Tyler Finn  

You mentioned to me that when you were at the Ministry of Finance doing this sort of work, you ended up having to, or having the opportunity to work with a whole bunch of different stakeholders. Like it's a very cross functional environment in a different way than a corporate setting, but still very cross functional. What were the sort of skills that you picked up working in an environment like that, as opposed to at a sort of more traditional law firm?

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Viraj Joshi  

Oh, it was completely different. In a law firm, we're working with a bunch of other lawyers. Everybody speakers the same lingo. I had a bit of a culture shock when I went across the aisle. Really, I was suddenly in a team, where I was the only lawyer working with an economist, a data scientist, someone with experience in urban policy so on. All of these people spoke a completely different language. That's one. The second thing really was I had to be accountable for what I was saying, which really matters when you're the only lawyer in a team, because people are going to take you at face value, and you have to sort of be sure about what you're saying. You don't have someone else who's going to correct you, if your understanding is, you know, not quite there. So that was a great sort of confidence booster in the long run, if you ask me, because, you know, I had to be accountable for what I said. I couldn't expect that someone had to correct the work that I did. In terms of so that really expanded my horizon, if you ask me, for one thing, one sort of skill set. I think it's a data-oriented way of thinking, right? All of these people had that data-oriented way of thinking, which is completely alien coming from a law firm context. Lawyers are good with words. Lawyers are not necessarily good with data. And you know, like, there'd be these questions where someone would ask me, Why do you think this way? Like huh, this is  how it works, but like the, you know, the idea that you have to go back give some data, you know, sort of position it that way was Indian that has also really helped, you know, I think that's something that most lawyers should sort of pick up over time. It really helps just express yourself better.

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Tyler Finn  

I think did this sort of experience working with, you know, folks who are experts on economic models, really good at working with data, policy experts who may have a slightly different lens than a lawyer brings to the table. I mean, did this start to expand your view of what a law adjacent career might look like, maybe, in retrospect, like, very helpful for taking on a more ambiguous role than just Zerodha’s lawyer.

Viraj Joshi  

Absolutely. Um, see what I realized around that time is that, you know, ultimately, a law degree is just a structured way of risk-reward thinking, and I mean, that has application pretty much everywhere, even in business, the business is thinking about risk versus reward. It's in government policy, everybody's thinking of risk versus reward. That's just something that law school gives to you on a platter. Now, the ecosystem had not evolved back then for you to sort of do something outside of a litigation job or a big law firm job, but that risk, reward thinking I really picked up over time, as you know, something that drives the world in general, and that's the one skill. So I keep saying this, most places need lawyers. They just don't need they don't know it yet.

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Tyler Finn  

Yeah, I think that's true. And you know, you had an inflection point in your career where you ended up, you know, finding your way to zerodha and being the lawyer that they needed. You moved back to Bangalore around the time that covid hit, a new type of sort of community started forming here. You actually met our CEO, Shashank in 2019 on on WhatsApp. Can you tell us about that? Can you tell us about how you started to, like, reintegrate yourself into the Bangalore community?

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Viraj Joshi  

Oh, that was, I mean, it's a really interesting story. Yeah, it was this Whatsapp group that came up around the same time, which is called lawyers, not lawyering, okay? Now, as the name says, it's essentially, you know, bunch of people with law degrees who wanted to do something outside the traditional litigation or law firm paths, as I said, back then, it wasn't so easy, right? So this was, this started off as, say, a support group of because everybody had explained what I was talking about around, say, you know, the cold emailing people, but not getting responses. This was a common theme. Everybody on that group had sort of experienced that where you have to fight against the grain, just to sort of prove that, you know, you're equal to somebody else working in the space. So Shashank, back then, had just started, you know, I think you guys are, like, a couple of years in all of us are kind of in the same boat where, you know, people who just look at us with a little bit of suspicion, yeah, you know the like, what are you guys bringing table time? So this was a, I'd say it was a lot more than a WhatsApp group. It was actually we did a bunch of events. We'd all come together, we talked to each other just, you know, help each other out. So let's say some of the younger folks like me who wanted to say, break into some space. There'd be people who are older who'd, yeah, you know, like, tell us how to go about it. What are the sort of things that you bring to the table? Who do you need to contact? All of that. It was a, like, a very nice support system for a bunch of people out there. Now, interestingly, that's where I met Som and that's how zerodha that happened for me eventually. Yeah, so I mean that community really went a long way back then.

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Tyler Finn  

What were the sort of like questions or conversations that people were having that made it really feel like a community, or made it different, or made you feel like you know you could lean into the fact that you had a slightly different background or wanted to have a slightly different career.

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Viraj Joshi 

I think that's because everybody there sort of knew what everybody else was facing. I mean, people were really involved. I could get on a call with someone I had never met before, and they'd be willing to give me 30-40, minutes of time just to explain how something worked. So this was in that time where I was trying to figure, you know, what next. So I must have spoken to five or seven people on that community. People were kind enough to give time, kind enough to sort of, you know. So I spoke to a bunch of people working in, say, the fun space. At the time, a couple of entrepreneurs, they tell you what the pros and cons were honestly unfiltered, which is really hard, you know, in general, because otherwise, people either tend to be on their guard or they're generally, I mean, they're not very helpful. That community was very different back then. Yeah, even now. So like earlier this year, I was able to get into touch with a really senior person at SEBI, which is India securities regulator, because he also happened to be on that group five years ago. So even today, like, you know, six, seven years down the line, it continues to sort of help out in its own way.

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Tyler Finn  

Do you feel like things have changed or evolved since then, over the past five years or so, where maybe slightly nontraditional path is more accepted than it once was.

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Viraj Joshi 

I think so. I think five, six years ago, the world, the job market, rather, was still a lot more credential based. The skills were secondary. Today, especially after AI, I think skills have become primary. When we are hiring, we're looking for, you know, what do you bring to the table? What problem are you solving for the business back then, the question was, what degree do you have? It's, I mean, I don't like the word, but it's democratized things quite a bit. Yeah, your skills matter. Now. I'll just give you an example. At zerodha, today we have a, you know, what we call recovering lawyers. The guy who writes our daily, you know, our daily newsletter is an ex-lawyer. The guy who leads our, you know, climate investments at the fund he's an ex-lawyer. All of these guys have benefited today from the fact that it's democratized a little bit, but it was a lot harder, say, five, seven years ago.

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Tyler Finn  

I think it's also, this is just my opinion. I think it's also great to hire people who come from slightly different backgrounds, because they've seen things from different perspectives, right? You have someone who comes in, who was a lawyer, who now is an investor. That person is going to have a great lens on risk. Presumably, they've gotten really good at also seeing opportunity, if they're able to be a really good investor, right? So you get people who end up, I think, being slightly more well-rounded, or able to see things from different perspectives,

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Viraj Joshi  

Absolutely. So this happened, in fact. So in India, the regulations around bamboo changed very recently, right? And this person, because he had that background, was able to spot it. The regulations have changed, and then we invested in a company that has really capitalized on that in the last couple of years. So, yeah, these things happen. I mean, it's, it's, it's quite phenomenal to see

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Tyler Finn 

A little bit of regulatory arbitrage. Tell us about how you, how you found your way to Zerodha, through, through this community, through this group.

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Viraj Joshi 

Yeah, it was so I was in touch with Som, who used to work with Nithin, the CEO and the management team. Okay, he was one of those five people I was talking about who had given me time back then. Now, around the time the pandemic happened, I think is when Zerodha business really shot up. Capital Markets became cool. Yeah, right. Now, more people were needed. I just happened to be, you know, I'd been speaking to the right guy for a while, so it was quite natural that I made my way there, really. So my job description, See, back then, Zerodha was much smaller than it is now. So my job description back then was, you know, just work with these like work with Nithin, the CEO and the management team and do whatever it takes. There was no, like, set job description, per se. It's like formalized quite a bit since then, but I mean that again, allowed me to explore my curiosities to bunch of random stuff. Some things stuck, other things I let go of, just so on, but that flexibility was really great.

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Tyler Finn 

I've heard and maybe this is just for my benefit as an American, I've heard Zerodha described as like the Robin Hood of India. Can you give us a sense for how much the business has grown over the past five or six years, or during your tenure, from when you started, to how big this sort of business is today?

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Viraj Joshi  

Yeah. So it's grown about 10x since I joined. Revenues wise, I'd say when I joined, was around in US dollars, about 50 million. Okay, now it's about 500 million. Wow, so completely bootstrapped. Yeah, I mean, it just with the business, you know, as Nithin keep saying, it was right place, right time, the Indian capital markets had this boom phase that happened around the time covid happened, and the road that was just, you know, like there already when that happened, so Right place, right time, but it's grown 10x we have about 10 million customers today, about 500 million odd in revenue annually.

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Tyler Finn  

Let's dive into your your current role. Share with our audience, like where you're at now, what's taking up most of your time. If you had to think about a few buckets that the work might fit into, what those would be.

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Viraj Joshi 

So I'm working with the again, I'm working with the management and the CEO broadly, if I were to categorize in terms of buckets today, I'd put it in three different buckets. So I manage the legal team at Zerodha. That involves contracts, that involve litigation, all of that. So we have a legal team, and we do whatever it takes to legal perspective. The other thing that I do is around the regulatory and policy work, which again, ties back to what I did earlier on in life. Yeah, in India now there's, over the last couple of years, there's been a focus on, you know, instead of having top-down regulation, regulators are now, you know, adopting a more consultative sort of process. So, they set up a bunch of working groups, or, say, industry standard forums, where the idea is that everybody gets together, all the stakeholders, you discuss the pros and cons. Ultimately, the call is still the regulators, but they're still giving you the platform where you know you can sort of present your views. Now this has come out in a big way. Now, SEBI, India securities regulator, has said that any new regulation has to go through this consultation process. So, there are multiple levels to that consultation process. There are high level committees where, you know, like when Nithin is the, you know, Nithin on those committees, those are the sort of, you know, CEOs of the market institutions, the exchanges, the regulator, and so on. So I help him out on those. Then there are, say, not so important committees where I get to be on the committee and sort of, you know, yeah, drive the work there, so that broadly, there's that that. So if I were to give you an example, over the last couple of years have been on like, four or five of these committees. I talk about the ones that I am on because, you know, that's that's more personal. So there was this one committee where, you know, the idea was that, say, brokers or financial institutions in general, need to be disclosing a lot more things. So the committee's job was to figure out what the things are that a retail customer should know about their broker, right? So, anything from network to, say, regulatory action to, you know, like number of arbitration, whatever, yet whatever information is required for you as a customer to figure out you know, that this is the right broker, and this is not so there was this committee that did this for a couple of years. There's another committee where the idea was to standardize all the data that flows between various intermediaries. So before the committee started, there were about 80 odd files that were uploaded from various places by, you know, different people in that market ecosystem. Over two years, you have brought that down to 12. Wow. It simplified it quite a bit. That's helped us also in our backend processes. So, for example, at the end of the day, when we gave you your trade file as a customer, which shows you know, these are the transactions you've taken that used to take about 40 minutes to generate earlier. Now it takes less than one minute. Wow. It simplified a lot of things for, you know, everyone in the ecosystem, so things like that. I mean, these are all non-controversial things that are good for the ecosystem. Sure, just needed a bunch of people to come together and work on it dedicatedly. So three or there's another committee where I was sort of helping out with standardization of bonds nomenclature in India, so on and so forth. Random stuff, but fun stuff.

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Tyler Finn 

Yeah, I would imagine that you have to really be in lockstep with, like, your product team, and work very closely with them as you think about this sort of standards making one if you were surfacing disclosures in a different way, I mean, that's one piece, right? But if you're talking about being able to generate new information for users in a different way than you did before, or you have to surface it to a clearing house in a different way than you did before. Talk to us a little bit about how you build those relationships and how you make sure your team works really well with product.

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Viraj Joshi 

See, that wasn't hard, in my case, at least, because all the product leaders were, you know, the same age, around the same time we were working. You know, back in 2020 when I joined, they were the friends that I would like spend time with on a daily basis. Yeah, now, everyone has their own teams. Everyone has their own structures. But ultimately, I mean, I'm talking to my friends. So depending on, you know, like, depending on what the use case is, we are able to bring in the relevant product teams as and when required. I don't know if that's scalable, so a little bit of luck. Also where, you know, all of us were in the same place, working together on a day-to-day basis. We'll have to see how that scales as the organization grows. But personally, I have not faced that problem.

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Tyler Finn 

I used to do some standards making similar to this, not in the financial space at all, but more in, well, first in like, you know, aviation and then in advertising technology, we worked with a lot of outside consultants or industry organizations, lobbyists, others who had A real lens on who all the different players were. Were able to advise us. Is it a similar sort of model for you, or are you doing most of this work in house, just with the team that you have and the relationships that you've built?

Viraj Joshi 

I think it's a mix of both. There are a lot of things that we don't have in house expertise on. There's no point trying to sort of force fit that. Yeah, if there is a need for external help, we'll bring them onboard. There are a lot of things where we do have internal expertise, where we sort of, you know, let the internal Team Drive. It really depends on context. Hard to generalize this, but you're right, Tyler. I mean, there are a lot of things where you do need external people to come in and give their insights. So just on this standardization thing, for example, we had swift come in give their inputs, because, like, you know, ISO standards and swift are sort of the pinnacle of this piece, right? So you need people who have done it before to sort of give you our inputs. Yeah. I mean, that's how it is.

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Tyler Finn 

I want to ask you about maybe a third bucket beyond legal, beyond policy and regulatory. You do a bit of investing work through Rainmatter. Tell us what Rainmatter is first, because I think it's corporate VC, maybe, but I don't know if that's the most elegant term for it. Tell us a little bit about what the mission is and what you're doing there.

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Viraj Joshi

So Rainmatter is the investing arm of Zerodha. The way it started was, you know, like zerodha as a financial services business, could not do everything right? They say insurance or say wealth advisory, are things that were not core to the team internally, then the idea was, you want to partner with somebody and, you know, sort of invest in them and integrate them into the platform. That's how it started. When it started, it was just balance sheet investments into things that were adjacent to the core business itself. Now, from there, it's grown quite a bit. Now, you know, like there was lucky enough that profits were sort of compounding over time. There was money being generated which could be deployed for other users. So from there it's now grown to a, you know, like a fund structure, where, you know, we are investing in FinTech, in health and climate. These are the broad buckets that we invest in. The idea, if you ask me, is, you know, how do we help Indians do better with their money? How do we help Indians do better with their health and all of that doesn't mean anything if we don't, you know, if the Earth is not a viable place to live, right? So broadly, these three buckets, we choose to be sector focused, because, you know, that's what the team identifies with. You know, that's, that's what we value as people. The idea is to be a long-term partner to people. So most traditional venture capitalists today have this five to seven year fund cycle, right? So they have pressure to exit within a certain number of years, which sometimes forces them to, sort of, you know, force founders to behave a certain way. The insight that we had was, it's valuable if the founder can build in the long run, partners like that are few and far between. Now, given that you know, this is, we don't have external LPs to answer to. This is a yeah, this is something that we can sort of choose to do

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Tyler Finn 

A luxurious position.

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Viraj Joshi 

Yes, absolutely, but still need to use it the right way. Yes. So yeah. I mean, from with that philosophy, we have about 130 odd investments at this point. Wow, even split to between the three sectors. The idea is to be a long-term partner. Because another insight that we have with the experience with Zerodha Nithin keep saying this is you can't really build a business in five to seven years in India. It can take a lot longer. Most successful businesses take, you know, 10 to 12 years, if not more. So the idea is to be around for the, you know, for that journey, for the founder. So, yeah, we have no like, you know, like you need to grow 5x in whatever amount of time and so on. We leave that flexibility to the founder, and that really helps the you know, that really helps in terms of our standing in the market as well. The idea is to be nicer people, longer term partners, support people in their journeys. And you know, hopefully the outcomes will show so even the fun term is 15 years, for example.

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Tyler Finn  

Oh, wow. What are you noticing in where these startups are coming from? Is it a lot of Bangalore, Mumbai? Is there a geographic diversity? Where are good ideas coming from in India today?

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Viraj Joshi  

I think good ideas are everywhere. People in Bangalore, in HSR, where we are, for example, tend to get supported, but someone in a tier three, tier four city does not get the support that, you know, they need. They don't get the money, they don't have the network. They don't have any of that. So if you ask me, the best ideas are coming out of there. It needs some amount of effort to, you know, go out and find them. You can't sit in your AC office in the south of Bangalore. And you know, hope to find a great investment. Ideas are everywhere. Opportunities are everywhere, more so in tier three, tier four cities. And I'd say the best opportunities today are beyond just software, right? That that's what Bangalore is famous for. But there's so much happening on the ground, you know, working in, say, manufacturing in which just does not get the support that it deserves, and which can really change outcome, like, say, just as an example, in this whole climate thing, I don't think another dashboard is going to solve the problem, but say someone working at the manufacturing level, working with industry to change their process in some way, that's where the real value add is. It's just that that's not say that's not a cool or sexy place to be. Yeah, it takes work. This is also realization we've had over the last couple of years or so. So, you know, spent a lot of time over the last couple of years, going to these tier three, tier four cities, just figuring how things work. But yeah, I mean, I think opportunities are everywhere, and the next set of opportunities are in these, outside the big cities, in these not so popular sectors. That's that's where we want to be.

Tyler Finn  

What was the learning curve for you? Like you're taking over legal you're stepping into zero to you're also sort of learning how to be an investor. Maybe you've done some of this in public markets on your own, but what was that learning curve for you? Like, you got up to speed and figured out what might make a good investment for Rainmatter.

Viraj Joshi 

Honestly, I think I'm still learning there.  You learn on the job. I don't think you know like there are so many things that I still don't understand about this. It's been all about learning on the job, right? And also like, see, when you're not sure you want to get into something new, you can always choose to position size a certain way. So the early checks back from that time were, you know, much smaller checks because we really didn't know what we were talking about. We thought that, you know, maybe this has potential. Let's get a seat at the table by doing a small check, and we can always double down. You know, once we build conviction, sure that was the that was the broad idea. So, we have a lot of investments back from 2021, 2022 which we are doubling on, doubling down on. Now I see, yeah, but it's been about learning on the job. There are like, new things that I'm still learning every day. I don't think I'm quite there yet, maybe in another five years. Yeah, broadly, that's the way I see it.

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Tyler Finn 

You work inside a founder led company with a sort of very strong founder presence. He's a he's a public figure here in India. What's that? What's that like? How do you feel like the executive team supports him and his vision?

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Viraj Joshi 

I think Nithin is phenomenal. I mean, honestly, if you ask me, I didn't really believe in the idea of like a role model or a mentor before I met Nithin. Yeah. But you know, everything he says, he walks the talk, he believes in it. He's not saying anything that he doesn't truly believe. You know all this, I was talking about Rainmatter being long term and so on that. That is how Nithin thinks he's like, you know, just to give you an example, inside the team, none of us have, say, sales targets, or, you know, short term growth targets, none of that, whatever. Let's say new accounts are open at Zarodha. All that money gets distributed to everybody on the team, with the implicit understanding being, there's not just sales guys who are, you know, bringing in business. Everybody needs to do their job for business to grow. He  has this focus on like, you know, do right for the customer, and the customer will do right for you in the long run. Don't pressurize your employees, your customers, to sort of do things in the short term. Don't optimize. Do the right thing, and in the long run, things will work out. right. So there's this whole philosophy that goes inside the team, which helps all of us, in a way, avoid any potential conflict of interest. We sleep soundly, is what I can really say. But yeah, I mean, just phenomenal. What the management team has done. Learnt a lot. Continue to learn every single day. More importantly, like, resonate with the philosophies and resonate with the, you know, values that they have. Because respect is one thing where, if you can't, sort of, you know, if it doesn't resonate with you, there's no real point.

Tyler Finn 

Yeah, how do you as a, you know, as a leader on that the executive team, but also sort of a manager. How do you take that sort of vision or clarity that you might be hearing or seeing from the founder and the leader and help translate that for the rest of the organization or for the teams that you're running?

Viraj Joshi  

So what the management team and Nithin do is they set guardrails for us essentially, you know that these are the things that are core to the organization, so the same things I was talking about, think long term, don't optimize in the short term. Do right for the customer, don't try to make a quick buck from them. As long as those guardrails are in place, we have complete flexibility to sort of experiment in whatever way we want, right? So we keep like, nobody's going to stop me tomorrow if I say I want to do this ABC thing, which has nothing to do with whatever my experience is. Yeah. So the idea is, it's sort of, we are all entrepreneurs in residence in a way, right? We do keep doing our own experiments. We have the flexibility to do that, as long as the business values are not compromised. There's nothing there's no bureaucracy that's stopping us. So we keep doing that. Every two, three months there's something new that comes up. Try it out. If it works, it works. If it doesn't work, that's okay. That's not a that's not a failure on my part, that the business is going to consider. So it's okay to fail. Also that that's one of the things that people don't talk about. Yeah, you know, in general, lot of people are scared to do things, because how will it look on me later on, it's okay to fail, and I think that's that's something that really sort of helps us function on a day-to-day basis.

Tyler Finn  

Maybe that's the answer. Do you think there are, there are core lessons that other startups or other businesses can learn from the success that zerodha has had, both from a growth and revenue perspective, but also from   a sort of cultural perspective?

Viraj Joshi 

I think culture in general, for Zerodha has been a mood, yeah, right. I don't know how scalable that is, or, you know, how replicable that is across businesses, because, see, in finance, the idea was you have to be a long-term customer like, you know, long term partner for your customer, because Trust is everything. You can't really advertise and get more customers. Customers come when they want to come when they have money to invest. So all that our advertising marketing doesn't really work. What Works is word of mouth you are going to invest when your friend or your parent or you know your sibling tells you that you know these guys are really good, why don't you open an account with them? So Trust is everything. That's what the understanding from day one has been at Zerodha and we sort of try to optimize for that, the assumption being that if you do the right thing, like revenue, profits, it all take care of themselves. Now I don't know how applicable that is in, say, consumer Right, right? Because, like, you have to put your product out there. I don't know how applicable that is in a bunch of other industries. So it's worked for us. It's this thing. But generally, if you ask me, I'd say, just do the right thing, hopefully results. Take care of themselves. There's no point trying to, you know, there's no point trying to make a quick buck. That doesn't work, especially in India.

Tyler Finn 

One of the things that I'm asking all of my guests about is a recent report that we did our 2025, contracting efficiency benchmarking report. You know, we've talked a lot about cross functional work today, in our survey of legal teams, we found that like 15% or so of folks say that they really feel like they're just being reactive. They're not able to be proactive, even though they want to automate, they want to leverage technology. How do you think that legal technology enables teams to work better, cross functionally and improve sort of contract turnaround times?

Viraj Joshi 

I think it's much needed. If you ask me, in general, legal teams tend to be at the very end of any tech adoption. Lawyers are taught to be risk covers. Lawyers don't want to change their processes once everybody else is sort of shifted. That's when legal teams tend to shift. There is a cultural aspect to it. I think that is one. The other thing that I've always thought about is just that legal teams are cost centers. Businesses are not like, you know, often not willing to invest in cost centers if you if you had, say, a similar product for a sales team. If you see the revenue going up, the incentives are there for the, you know, sort of business to sort of allocate to that. Legal teams. Lot of leaders see them as cost centers. They don't see the benefit of, you know, like, what if this function got better or faster? And that, I think, is a big gap. I don't know how to bridge that gap, but I've always thought of it that way. You know, there's always a, like, a bit of a bigger push needed. If you ask me to sort of get any tech changes enabled for legal team, it's just always there.

Tyler Finn  

Yeah. I mean, maybe legal is not a cost center, if it's able to really drive and accelerate revenue, sustainable revenue, with that in mind, one of the things that we found was that legal teams, like two thirds of them, are spending more than a week on closing their standard contracts, so not like complicated third party paper that's being negotiated. Do you feel like, given your experience, this is a process problem? Is it a technology problem? How do you accelerate those sorts of turnaround time?

Viraj Joshi 

I think it's both it is a process problem and it is a technology problem. I'll take the technology problem first, a lot of these documentation is not standardized, right? We still continue to see the agreements in those old photographs not machine-readable PDFs. What do you even do with that someone's going to sit and there is a data problem with a lot of the older agreements.  With the culture problem. I think it's, as I said, lawyers sort of see themselves as gatekeepers, as this, you know, like final approval layer before something goes out. I've also often found that legal teams just get stuck up on unnecessary things that don't necessarily matter. Like I keep seeing this because, yeah, because I have, I'm lucky enough to see both the business and legal things. I often find legal teams or counter parties who get stuck up on unnecessary points which don't solve the business objectives of their own businesses. But you know, that's, that's what the legal team sees as sort of adding value, adding value to whatever the transaction is. it's a cultural problem. I think it just needs businesses and legal teams to sort of work more closely with one another, to sort of understand, you know, what are the things that we can sort of speed up? What are the things that you know, we can let go of? What are the things that we need to really sort of double down on? That's that's the way I see it. One last thing, I think, in terms of technology solving this problem, I think a risk-based assessment can really help. There are so many small value, repetitive agreements that legal teams are doing today, right? Like, I don't know if an NDA really needs a legal team to be reviewing every single clause, sure. Or say, you know, generic services agreement or some kind these are things that can be automated, fairly straightforward, yes. At the same time, there are, say, complex agreements which do need input. So yeah, tech solutions like Spotdraft can really help in solving the first part of that problem, which will free up legal teams to sort of focus on the high risk, high value, customized agreements that really matter. That risk-based framework doesn't exist in most organizations today. It's okay if you standardize a lot of the low value recurring stuff. So we have been trying to do that internally at Zerodha. To free up people's time to focus on the things that really matter. That's that's broadly my view on legal tech.

Tyler Finn 

has Rainmatter invested in any legal tech companies?

Viraj Joshi 

Not yet. No.

Tyler Finn 

Maybe, maybe someday.

Viraj Joshi 

I think there's a question of being too close to the problem there. I don't know, being trained as a lawyer, yeah, I'm somehow, like, you know, naturally looking at the problems with each thing, instead of seeing the opportunity, which is probably not the right way to look at it, like we've talked about this internally, about, you know, how there are a bunch of lawyers on the team, but we don't have a legal tech investment. I think that's the problem. It's about being too close to the problem.

Tyler Finn 

That's funny. Okay, Viraj, I've got some some closing questions for you that I like to ask all of my guests. The first one is, if there was a piece of advice that helped really change your career, or a mentor that change changed your career, that you'd want to tell us about?

Viraj Joshi  

Yeah, I think it's about following your curiosities. If you ask me, I don't know my lot of people, just because they have a law degree, think they have to do law for the rest of their lives in that conventional path. Or similarly, when you're in a big law firm, you tend to think in a certain way. Why should you be bound by a decision you made at the age of 18 or 22. Human beings evolve. Your interests evolve. As your interests evolve, you sort of want to do new things. People tend to sort of, you know, let go of their curiosities and get stuck up on, you know, decisions that they made. In the past, I've been lucky enough to follow my curiosities wherever they led me, and I think that's something that everyone should sort of do, don't I have a lot of friends who are still in that big law path who don't enjoy their day to day life for whatever reason, but they're stuck up on the decision that they made. You know, 10-15, years ago, that I think, especially with AI, given that you can pick up skills really quickly. I think that's something that everyone should do.

Tyler Finn  

It's a great answer. What's your favorite part of your day-to-day work?

Viraj Joshi  

I think the investments at Rainmatter now. We have a full-fledged team who's doing this right? I still continue to do it in small part. The reason for this, again, is you have the smartest people in the country who are coming and telling you about their business. There is no better way to learn than to learn it from the horse mouth. Right? So it's, it's really cool that way. That's the part that I enjoy. That's not really core to my work day to day, if you ask me, but not something I'm willing to let go either.

Tyler Finn  

Yeah, maybe someday you'll be a full time investor. You never know. I think this is kind of a funny question. Do you have a professional pet peeve?

Viraj Joshi  

I talked about this, legal teams in general, getting caught up on unnecessary clauses. They matter as long as the business objective is being achieved, the legal team job is to cover for the risk while speeding up the process. Right? There are so many times where things get stuck up in unnecessary back and forth on clauses, which are, I mean, they're not going to change anything. If you ask me, this is something that I generally have felt about lawyers in general. You need a more like, you know, you need to be talking to the business more, understand it better, and, you know, not get stuck up on unnecessary things. That's that's something that irritates me fairly regularly.

Tyler Finn 

Is there a book that you would recommend to our listeners? And this could be something that's been important to your career, or it could just be something fun that you've read recently that you think others would enjoy.

Viraj Joshi 

I think the daily stoic by Ryan Holiday,

Tyler Finn  

yeah, I haven't listened I listened to podcasts about that. I haven't read the book. Yeah.

Viraj Joshi  

I mean, I don't know about career, but just as a way of thinking, right? It's something that really resonates with me, where you sort of do what you have to do, do the best while you're doing it, and don't worry too much about the outcomes. If you're doing a good job, the outcomes will take care of themselves. That's something I keep, sort of trying to tell myself on a regular basis, but yeah, that's something that resonates with me. It's a see stoicism in general can be a facility that's gets caught up in unnecessary like detail, right? What Ryan has done in the book is really simplified. It to one lesson a day. You read one page in a day. You have something to sort of think about, mull about, which helps you internalize the thought process. That's something that like I, anytime I'm stressed or not not feeling great about myself, I'll just go open the book, flip through a bunch of pages. That helps me personally.

Tyler Finn  

I like that. I might have to try that. Last question for you. Viraj, I like to ask this of all of my guests, it's if you could look back on your days as a young lawyer, maybe at the firm just getting started. You know now that you wish that you'd known back then.

Viraj Joshi  

I think the fact that everything would turn out okay. Back then, because I was going against that conventional path, people around me would, sort of, you know, keep asking me, Are you sure? Do you know what you're doing? Parents, friends, everyone, right? You have, like, a great job which pays you really well. Are you sure you want to leave it? There's a lot of uncertainty. And you know, in retrospect, if I sort of knew that things would be okay in the long run, I would maybe stress about it a little lesser, put lesser pressure on myself and like in general that led a better quality of life if that had happened. So I think just that in retrospect, knowing that things would be okay is something that would be very valuable.

Tyler Finn  

This has been a really great and interesting interview. Viraj, thank you so much for joining me.

Viraj Joshi  

Thanks Tyler for having me. It was great speaking with you.

Tyler Finn  

And to all of our listeners. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the abstract, and we hope to see you next time.

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