There is plenty of advice on following your passion, but real money could be easier to make by staying away from people who follow their passion.
This counterintuitive perspective comes from Nikhil Kamath, the 38-year-old co-founder of Zerodha, India’s largest retail stockbroking platform. In a candid observation that challenges conventional startup wisdom, Kamath argues that financial success might have less to do with finding your passion and more to do with finding markets where passion is scarce. His thesis is simple yet provocative: boring businesses often make better money than exciting ones, precisely because they attract fewer competitors willing to work for love rather than profit.
“If your outcome is money, you will statistically do better at the industry where there are the least amount of passionate people,” Kamath explains. “The more boring your business, the likelihood of you making money is higher.”
His logic centers on competition dynamics. “Don’t go into an industry with a million passionate people who are doing it not for money and compete with them,” he warns. When entrepreneurs are driven primarily by passion rather than profit, they’re willing to accept lower margins, work longer hours, and persist through challenges that would cause purely profit-motivated competitors to exit. This creates an incredibly difficult competitive environment for anyone whose primary goal is financial return.
The implications of Kamath’s observation extend far beyond individual career choices—they reveal something fundamental about market dynamics in the modern economy. Consider the contrast between, say, enterprise software for supply chain management versus consumer social media apps. The former is decidedly unglamorous, often involving complex logistics problems and lengthy sales cycles. The latter attracts thousands of passionate founders who dream of building the next viral platform. Yet the boring enterprise software company might face a handful of serious competitors, while the social media space is littered with well-funded startups fighting for attention.
This dynamic has played out repeatedly in the Indian startup ecosystem. While sectors like fintech infrastructure, B2B SaaS, and industrial logistics have produced steady, profitable companies with less fanfare, consumer internet spaces like food delivery, edtech, and quick commerce have seen intense competition, massive cash burn, and consolidation. Zerodha itself, interestingly, operates in financial services—a sector many would consider more practical than passionate—and has remained bootstrapped and profitable while competitors raised billions in venture capital. The pattern suggests that Kamath isn’t just theorizing; he’s describing a strategy that has worked for his own venture, one that prioritized sustainable profitability in a relatively underserved market segment over chasing the excitement of hyper-growth at any cost.