WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

Nikhil Kamath
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Entrepreneurship

"WTF is" is a podcast series where Nikhil Kamath hosts friends and industry experts and holds casual yet intellectually stimulating conversations. The podcast covers a broad range of topics of particular current relevance, including technology, social media, renewable energy, electric vehicles, philosophy, gaming, psychology and more.

  1. 3d ago

    Will ChatGPT Book Your Next Holiday? | MakeMyTrip x Taj Hotels | WTF is Travel?

    Access the full data and references used in this episode below. Please open this alongside the episode while watching. Open Reference Document I put Rajesh Magow, the chartered accountant who co-founded MakeMyTrip on a team where almost nobody knew travel, and Puneet Chhatwal, the Delhi boy who spent twenty-eight years running hotels in Europe before coming home to pull IHCL out of a decade of losses, into one room to explain the business of Indian travel from scratch, and what came out was far bigger than a lesson, from why boutique hotels are better built by outsiders and how a fifty crore partnership between their companies became twelve hundred, to what a hotel actually pays to sit on MakeMyTrip and why booking direct still isn't cheaper, why ChatGPT can't scrape its way into the travel funnel and where voice bookings are taking tier-three India, why Puneet thinks the answer for a 25-year-old isn't another app but a small, clean hotel, why only ten million foreigners visit a country with more than forty UNESCO sites, what went wrong in Goa and where the next thirty Goas should be, why tourism being a state subject is the real bottleneck, and the full playbook both of them would run to take India from ten million tourists to a hundred million. Timestamp: 00:00 Introduction 07:03 Getting to Know the Guests 14:30 How MakeMyTrip’s Hotel Partnerships Work 21:45 Booking Direct vs Travel Apps 28:26 Puneet Chhatwal’s Journey from Delhi to Europe 35:01 Building Villa Stays & Solo Travel Businesses 41:43 Will AI Change How We Book Travel? 48:40 Customer Data vs Personal Hospitality 55:43 Can Robots Replace Hotel Staff? 1:03:05 Bringing Small-Town India into Online Travel 1:09:52 Should Hotels Cut Out the Middleman? 1:16:37 India’s Mid-Range Hotel Opportunity 1:23:51 Marketing India & Fixing Tourism Taxes 1:30:46 Mass Tourism vs Luxury Tourism in Goa 1:38:26 Can Luxury Trains Attract Premium Tourists? 1:44:44 Civic Sense & the Tourist Experience 1:51:24 Making India’s Attractions Discoverable & Bookable 1:58:44 Alibaug’s Potential & the Homestay Business 2:05:56 Why Celebrations Are Driving Villa Bookings 2:13:42 What Travel Business Should a 25-Year-Old Start? 2:19:43 Handling Bad Experiences & Building Trust 2:27:16 Nandan Nilekani & the Shift to Hotel Branding 2:34:40 What It Takes to Run an Asset-Light Hotel Brand 2:41:13 The Wellness Hotel Opportunity 2:48:44 Building Travel Businesses for Gen Z 2:56:16 Travel Education & New Business Ideas 3:02:19 Unlocking Unexplored India 3:08:42 Building New Destinations & Event Tourism 3:15:38 Private Jet Economics & Closing Thoughts Rajesh Magow, Co-Founder & Group CEO, MakeMyTrip Limited LinkedIn: Rajesh Magow Puneet Chhatwal, Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer, The Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL) LinkedIn: Puneet Chhatwal Nikhil Kamath — Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast Twitter: TwitterInstagram: InstagramLinkedIn: LinkedInFacebook: Facebook Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify Spotify #WTFiswithnikhilkamath #PeopleByWTF #WTFOnline

  2. Sep 3

    India Is A Great Country To Travel From, Not To | WTF is Travel? | Trailer

    I put the two companies most Indian holidays run through into one room, Rajesh Magow who co-founded MakeMyTrip and Puneet Chhatwal who runs IHCL, the company behind Taj, and what began as friendly needling over whose business is bigger and more profitable turned into the one question I couldn't let go of, why a country with this much coastline, culture and history gets barely ten million foreign visitors a year and what it would actually take to make that a hundred million, which pulled us through OYO's pivot, whether India's problem is marketing or the product itself, why tourism gets half a percent of GDP when every rupee spent on it comes back three times over, where the next Goa is, and the line that stayed with me, that India has become a great country to travel from and not the best country to travel to. Full episode drops soon. Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4nsm4ezn Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/yme92c59 Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th

  3. Aug 10

    The Battery Everyone Uses Is The One They'd Never Build | EnerVenue x HiNa | WTF are Batteries?

    I went to Dalian with a selfish question. I run a fund that invests in energy transition, and I've come to think energy isn't the problem moving it and storing it is. So I sat down with Henning Rath, who runs EnerVenue out of Silicon Valley and is building his first gigafactory in Changzhou, and Tang Kun, who runs HiNa Battery, a sodium-ion company spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that's now ten years old with 600 people and a gigawatt line. I told them I don't know anything about batteries and asked them to teach me. We started at what a cell even is, went through why the entire industry standardised on LFP and what a thermal runaway actually does, and then Henning told me something I hadn't heard: the world had over 14,000 LFP fires last year alone. I asked whether I should start an electric car company or a battery company when I get home. Both said battery and Henning was blunt about it: don't build anything that needs rare earth. Fifty million dollars to start. We got into nickel-hydrogen at 30,000 cycles, sodium carbonate at a tenth of what lithium carbonate costs, why solid state is still at level four out of nine, and the idea I keep coming back to that your car sits idle 98% of the time with a battery and a stack of chips doing nothing, and there's a version of this where every parked car is a micro data center. 00:00 Introduction 06:45 China's bet on chemistries beyond lithium 12:14 Cell chemistry and the trade-offs it forces 17:15 Thermal runaway and the limits of LFP 22:44 Production quality and how long a battery lasts 27:07 Why China won the electric car 33:54 Decoupling a battery business from lithium and rare earths 38:50 Sodium's cost advantage and its energy density ceiling 43:51 Recycling nickel and renting the metal 48:17 Where generation, storage and demand should sit 54:05 Decentralization and the car as a grid battery 1:00:19 Three super cycles and AI's power demand 1:05:30 Automation, jobs and China's social contract Footage Courtesy: World Economic Forum (WEF) CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Source: https://www.weforum.org/videos/amnc26_summer_davos_highlights/ Henning Rath, Chief Executive Officer at EnerVenue LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henning-rath/ Kun Tang, Executive Chairman of HiNa BatteryLinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kun-tang-52a52327/ Nikhil Kamath-Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcio?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_appFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamathcio/ Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4nsm4ezn Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/yme92c59 Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th #WTFareBatteries #EnerVenue #HiNaBattery #SummerDavos

  4. Aug 9

    Why The Next Battery Won't Need Lithium Or Rare Earth | Nikhil Kamath | WTF Is A Battery

    I went into this wanting one answer, if I were starting something today, should it be an electric car company or a battery company and what I got back was narrower and more useful than I expected: don't build the thing that needs rare earth. We got into why sodium carbonate sits at roughly a tenth of what the equivalent lithium inputs cost, what $50 million actually buys you if you're starting this from scratch, why the world saw over 14,000 LFP fires last year alone and what that says about the chemistry everyone standardised on, and the part I keep coming back to that your car is parked 98% of the time in front of your house, and there's a version of this where that's not a dead asset but a micro data center. Every car a token factory. I didn't see that coming. Henning Rath, Chief Executive Officer at EnerVenue LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henning-rath/Kun Tang, Executive Chairman of HiNa BatteryLinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kun-tang-52a52327/ Footage Source: BYD footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0oMa2jWXaM Tesla footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50PU-cQx7j0 Nikhil Kamath-Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcio?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_appFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamathcio/ Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4nsm4ezn Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/yme92c59 Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th #WTFareBatteries #EnerVenue #HiNaBattery #SummerDavos

  5. Jun 26

    Abundance vs Scarcity: We Built 20 Brands With 30 Strangers In 90 Days | The Foundery

    The street believes struggle makes the founder, so we removed the struggle — twenty-five strangers, a brand and four crores each, ninety days in one house in Alibaug and then sat down to ask the only question that scared us: does a head start make a founder, or unmake one? Nikhil Kamath, Kishore Biyani and Ronnie Screwvala audit the model, the equity split everyone questions, the two philosophies built into this house, and what the three of us will do if twenty brands don't sell. 00:00 Introduction 06:18 Is The Foundery a selfish bet? 12:29 Why building new beats the capitalist high 18:28 How the company-builder model formed 24:47 The new consumer categories driving the bets 30:41 What happens after Day 90 35:13 The equity split everyone questions: 25% vs 75% 43:11 Where the ideas come from, and how the gates work 50:56 Founder–idea fit and the flaws each founder owns 58:05 Why equity beats an endorsement fee 1:05:14 What happens if the brands fail 1:11:08 What actually drives Nikhil 1:17:46 Abundance vs scarcity in one house 1:23:54 Social mobility and India's bubbles 1:28:54 What the founders are unlearning 1:33:09 Twelve months out: what they'd change #NikhilKamath Co-Founder of Zerodha and Gruhas Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Twitter: @nikhilkamathcio on XInstagram: @nikhilkamathcio on InstagramLinkedIn: Nikhil Kamath LinkedInFacebook: Nikhil Kamath Facebook The Foundery is a venture builder that forges entrepreneurs into co-founders and builds companies with them from the ground up. Website: The FounderyYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCtJssM5FzLXSWIf5VWUmT2w Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jointhefoundery/?hl=en Kishore Biyani – Founder & CEO of Future Group Ronnie Screwvala – Co-Founder & Chairperson of upGrad, Founder of UTV Group LinkedIn: Ronnie Screwvala LinkedIn Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify WTF is Podcast on Spotify Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify People by WTF Podcast on Spotify Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify WTF Online on Spotify #WTFiswithnikhilkamath #PeopleByWTF #WTFOnline

  6. Jun 23

    We Gave 25 Strangers ₹4 Crore Each To Build 20 New Brands | The Foundery

    So we ran an experiment. We call it The Foundery. Sixty days ago, twenty-five people we'd never met moved into a house in Alibaug — each one handed a new-age consumer brand, four crores, and ninety days to build a real business with us. Not a college, not an accelerator: a place where we become your co-founders and build the company alongside you. In this first conversation, Nikhil Kamath, Kishore Biyani and Ronnie Screwvala get into why we built it, what we're risking, and what happens if none of it works. #nikhilkamath Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcioFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamathcio/ The Foundery is a venture builder that forges entrepreneurs into co-founders and builds companies with them from the ground up. Website: https://www.thefoundery.in/ Kishore Biyani – Founder & CEO of Future Group Ronnie Screwvala – Co-Founder & Chairperson of upGrad, Founder of UTV Group LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronniescrewvala/ Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4nsm4ezn Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/yme92c59 Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th #WTFiswithnikhilkamath #PeopleByWTF #WTFOnline

  7. Jun 17

    Why One New Drug Takes Ten Years To Make | Mankind x Dr. Reddy's | WTF is Pharma?

    I got two of the biggest names in Indian pharma into one room, Rajeev Juneja of Mankind and GV Prasad of Dr. Reddy's, who'd somehow never actually met before this, and what came out was part masterclass and part origin story, from why being relentlessly contrarian beat following the herd, to how a college dropout from Meerut turned everything he hated about a medical store into a pharma giant, to why a chemical engineer who says he owes his career to his marriage spent decades chasing one original molecule, and somewhere in between we got into why India makes the world's generics instead of discovering its own drugs, what it really takes in time and money to bring a single drug to market, why GV thinks the AI-will-cure-everything story is overstated, where GLP-1s go next, and the one thing they'd tell a 25-year-old trying to build in pharma. Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 04:27 Rajeev Juneja's path from medical-store apprentice to building Mankind 10:11 Mankind's contrarian OTC and bottom-up market strategy 16:23 G.V. Prasad on science and the Dr. Reddy's lineage 23:06 Segmenting the industry and how generic drugs are made 29:15 Why drug purity standards are shared but enforcement differs 36:40 Why India is the pharmacy of the world by volume, not revenue 41:00 How margins are split across the pharma value chain 45:17 Whether online pharmacy and consumer brands are real openings 53:15 Whether hospital roll-up valuations are justified 59:10 Tariffs, Jan Aushadhi and drug price controls 1:03:21 How China built a pharma-innovation ecosystem in a decade 1:10:02 Long-horizon governance and removing entrepreneurial fear 1:15:40 China's incentives, talent and leverage over the US 1:22:01 Why the Ayush and wellness market outgrows pharma 1:25:05 The evidence, quality and standardisation debate around Ayurveda 1:35:13 The sexual-wellness opportunity and the stigma problem 1:40:26 The fertility, IVF and egg-freezing opportunity 1:43:45 The API narrative debate and how a drug is synthesised 1:50:54 Biologics, monoclonal antibodies and vaccines explained 1:55:57 Stem cells and peptides, separating therapy from hype 2:00:06 The semaglutide story and how GLP-1 works 2:05:01 Mankind's ethical-selling philosophy on GLP-1 2:08:06 Why India leads in small molecules but lags in biologics 2:15:07 Where a young founder can enter the GLP-1 wave 2:23:38 The yin and yang of innovators and generics 2:29:05 Diagnostics, CDMO and the China-plus-one opportunity 2:37:18 Applying AI to pharma and the expired-medicine problem 2:43:01 Why founders should never copy a set formula 2:45:30 Succession, home diagnostics and the microfluidics frontier #nikhilkamath Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcio utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_appFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamathcio/ Rajeev Juneja-Vice Chairman & Managing Director at Mankind Pharma Ltd LinkedIN- https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajeev-juneja-27882a24b/ G.V Prasad Reddy-MD & Co-Chairman at Dr. Reddy's Linkedin-https://www.linkedin.com/in/gvprasadster/ Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4nsm4ezn Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/yme92c59 Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th #WTFiswithnikhilkamath #PeopleByWTF #WTFOnline

  8. Jun 11

    Generics, Ozempic & The Fear Holding India Back | WTF is Pharma? | Trailer

    I always assumed India was becoming the pharmacy of the world, until this conversation made me sit with the sharper truth that we're the generic pharmacy of the world, and from there we got into whether China really killed our API industry or whether Indians still quietly lead it, why a drug like semaglutide turns into a miracle and a problem the second everyone wants it, the side effects nobody wants to talk about, the ethics of running a prescription-driven business, whether the global enthusiasm around Indian hospitals is actually justified, and why fear might be the single biggest thing holding Indian entrepreneurship back. #nikhilkamath Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcioFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamathcio/ Rajeev Juneja-Vice Chairman & Managing Director at Mankind Pharma Ltd LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajeev-juneja-27882a24b/ G.V Prasad Reddy-MD & Co-Chairman at Dr. Reddy's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gvprasadster/ Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4nsm4ezn Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/yme92c59 Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th #WTFiswithnikhilkamath #PeopleByWTF #WTFOnline

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

"WTF is" is a podcast series where Nikhil Kamath hosts friends and industry experts and holds casual yet intellectually stimulating conversations. The podcast covers a broad range of topics of particular current relevance, including technology, social media, renewable energy, electric vehicles, philosophy, gaming, psychology and more.

Information

  • Creator
    Nikhil Kamath
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    55
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 Nikhil Kamath
  • Show Website
    WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

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