Mukesh Ambani isn’t known for dabbling in stocks—but according to Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath, he might just be the only man in the room who knows what tomorrow holds. “I don’t know how much Mukesh bhai is into stock markets,” Kamath quipped at the Dhirubhai Ambani International School’s 2025 convocation. “But if anyone here knows what will happen tomorrow, it’s probably him.”
As the crowd chuckled, cameras caught Nita Ambani smiling and shaking her head—confirming what many suspected: India’s richest man doesn’t trade stocks, but he doesn’t need to.
Kamath’s remarks came during an unusually candid address to the school’s graduating class, where he reflected on dropping out at 15, selling phones to neighborhood kids, and eventually finding his calling in trading. “There’s hypocrisy in me giving you a lecture on your convocation when I never had one,” he admitted.
He recalled his first job at 17, working nights at a Bangalore call center selling health insurance to unsuspecting British customers. The upside? Free mornings, which he spent glued to the stock markets—a habit that became a career. “The markets were like a relationship,” Kamath said. “They start off great, get bad, and if you stick around, maybe they get better again.”
He credited his success not to relentless hustle, but to pattern recognition, emotional stability, and the people around him. “Being stable, not reacting, being objective in chaos—that’s probably the biggest skill to succeed,” he said.
Kamath challenged the room to rethink effort itself. “Hard work is not that important,” he declared. Recounting a moment with his leadership team, he confessed that everyone in the room was pretending to work because they thought the others were. “Hard work becomes a defense mechanism when the ego asks why you didn’t make it,” he said.
For Kamath, it all comes down to who’s in the room with you. “The people you surround yourself with will have the most disproportionate impact on your life,” he told the class of 2025, leaving them with a final lesson that no textbook could teach.
