YouSaid · the spoken record

Aparna Chennapragada

lines on the record: 88
first: 2022-03-22
most recent: 2022-03-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I use obviously like sparts of the product that I think need testing. But I would say the product that I'm most excited about recently has been the recurring investment where I can just basically say, hey, here's the amount of money, here's like the stocks that I really would like to invest in or the cryptocurrency. And before you know it, you're like, oh, this is a good deal. Instead of like spending it all on the cup of coffee.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have around like 5,000 public companies in the US ballpark, and we have like a few earning calls. We think that we are building out the team to be able to scale to that. But obviously that's something we'll watch.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Longer way further on Robin Hood. Because a trade is not a trade, it's not a trade, right? It's like these are the experiences. If you own stock on Robin Hood, you can actually participate in this in-app Q&A and get a lot more questions answered. And yes, there's moderation in terms of like, you know, offensive comments and so on. But I think so far the idea, like we have a content moderation team, but I think what's been interesting is like most of the questions are really on point”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a platform that works for Robin Hood as a broker dealer, but other brokers as well. I think this is one of the most amazing things that we can do in the space, which is connect the customers with the companies that they're investing in. This is, again, if you think about it, institutional investors, they get like, you know, the song and dance and like, you know, companies spend a bunch of time. They get to talk to the IR team. Retail shareholders, none of that, right? And so SEE has launched this shareholder Q&A and we have the in-app Q&A that we have launched, like take Coinbase, take Tesla, we have Q&A with all of these companies. And what's fascinating and like the thing that makes me really excited is the questions that people have, they're about the product roadmap, they're about corporate responsibility, they're about sustainability in a way that they just couldn't connect. That's why I always say your stocks go way.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Actually, the most recent feature that the team ship that I'm really proud of is a notification around price alerts, which actually has a really positive educational effect of saying, hey, here's kind of like the things that are happening. These are the price movements that are happening. And then there are other educational features too, saying like, did you know X, Y, and Z happened? With snacks, for example, we try to kind of in like very bite sized mobile first way, explain what's going on in the market. So that way, like it's, yes, it's like we're pushing information, but information that kind of makes you more familiar with the market and like removes the intimidation.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are lots of product features that do incentivize monetary behaviors like transactions. Do you have folks who think about what kinds of notifications you should send, or do you do tests to make sure you're not incentivizing the wrong kind of behavior?”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't think of our goal to be about increasing or encouraging trading per se. I think we want access to investing. And that mean often starts with, you know, like if you ask any of them how they got started, it's like, oh, yeah, I just started, I first bought this ABC stock. So that's often the first step. And that gives you courage to kind of like an interest to kind of go further. But that is why I think we have a product, for example, that helps you do recurring investments, right? Like you drip, drip, drip, you kind of like start to kind of like in almost dollar cost average into funds, into stocks, into crypto, et cetera. So I do feel like I think it's a matter of like taking a long-term view and not like looking for things about like specific short-term engagement.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have employer matches. So it's just like one of those things where you say, Of course, you get access to investing, but how do you grow, right? That's the next step here. Both with education, but also products that kind of extend the horizon in the long run.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think that's actually, I mean, in general, there are other volatile asset classes too. And I think that's one of the things where we are saying, look, first of all, access is the first step. I think the second is like agency. So that's where education comes in. And how do you kind of make sure that folks are not overreacting or underreacting based on the market conditions and so on? And then there's the third thing, which is how do you actually help them with new products that help them toward the longer term, right? I mean, retirement is something that it's top of mind for me, the product we talked about it even a few months ago that we're working on this. That's a great example where you're trying to extend the horizon of people's thinking. And that's really hard. Most people like we're all kind of like here and now. And so how do you kind of help and like surprisingly, retirement is something where very few people, Americans actually have like retirement accounts open and even fewer.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the thing that's interesting about NFTs is that it's a, like I think right now it's an end in itself in some cases, but I think the really fascinating opportunity is how is it a means to an end? And like, so it's access, for example, it's being able to a portable identity that you can carry around. Like say if you're moving from one product to another or one game to another and so on, I think it's going to be less and less specific as a purchase. At least that's my personal opinion, by the way. But I think as a team and a company, absolutely, we're like looking at the space and saying, how can we best participate, but also what are the customer problems that we can solve?”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I'm pretty sure Tim Cook thinks about that every day that he could take 30% off of every button on his phone. When you get to NFTs, right, now they represent, I don't know, outfits and games or JPEGs or whatever it is. And you could see both at platforms saying that's the same as a Kindle book or whatever it is. We want 30%. Do you think about that? Are you as you explore NFTs, as you explore expanding the range of digital goods in the app?”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason I ask about NFCs in particular is when you think about products on smartphones that allow you to transact where you push a button and spend some money and then digital goods move around, Robinhood is actually very unique in that it does not pay a 30% commission to either the smartphone platforms, even if you're buying Bitcoin, which is a digital good because it's money, right? Which is like a very philosophical, right? Like you're dancing on the head of a pin there that Apple has not said, I want 30%.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely think about NFTs. And I've been like fascinated by them. And like I think that the crypto team is excited. Look, we're always kind of looking at what makes sense here in terms of products to offer through Robin Hood. But absolutely. I think there's a lot of potential in the use of NFTs. Now, some of these are far-reaching. I mean, there's like two levels of indirection from the core business of Robin Hood, like things that are happening with in-game for NFTs and like what Axi is doing, et cetera. But it's, I mean, I think it kind of like affects the entire space.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Makes a lot of sense, right? Like if I look at Robin Hood and its like aperture is more around financial services, helping people with their financial lives, helping give them access to more of like investing, give them access to better spending. For me, I think cryptocurrency is like, yes, it's a strong asset class. And the second thing that's really interesting is this idea of embedded crypto, right? Like do the things that you need to do, but if crypto can make them significantly better, like whether it's sending payments, whether it's spending money and kind of in more efficient ways, getting more yield on your savings, that's kind of like the aperture that at least like we're putting on for Robin Hood, which is cryptocurrency as an asset class, as a financial, as an investing company, and then embedded crypto to kind of like rethink and help people”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know this whole Web 1, Web 2, Web3 thing is a little bit like post hoc. I mean, even Web2 was like, I remember living through those times. And like Web 2 was a little bit of a post hoc recognition of the fact that, oh, Ajax was used and like, you know, like Flickr. Remember those euros? I remember this guy who did the mashup of like, you know, Craigslist and Google Maps and like that was like the housing maps thing. And like to me, I think. Without shitting on any of those different conversations, I think what I would say is to me, I think cryptocurrency as an asset class.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You said earlier people had undifferentiated optimism. I would delineate that, right? There's the cryptocurrency world and there's the Web3 world, which is where you get the blockchain will solve everything or tokens in some way will solve everything. Do you think Robin Hood is part of Web3?”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a very well formed acid listing framework that we use and we've looked at first of all it's really important that like all of these are safe and are things that customers want and so that's been kind of our like guiding principle and is it something that we can provide on the on the platform you know with ease of use”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't believe that. I actually do believe in like there's actually multiple efforts going on there. The computer science part of it is solvable. And I think there's enough of a need for it. If you really want to kind of rethink parts of the traditional financial system, we will have to accelerate that. The reason I was pausing on it and kind of thinking aloud was I think there's also like a pull that will happen with one or two of these really important use cases. That's actually often how the scaling happens in the internet world and in the tech world. Like you'll have this like amazing use case that just like is crawling, right? And then you have a bunch of smart people start to kind of like say, okay, like how can we actually make this significantly faster so that it's usable?”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are starting to, and I think this is one where instead of like each of these companies trying to do this in their own silos, I think it has to, crypto fundamentally is such an open community and like there's a lot of pieces that are out developed in the public. Our thinking right now is it's much better to kind of like participate in that broader effort and like pitch in. We're starting to do that. I don't have anything specific that I can share yet, but it's on our minds, right? Like I think what you should hear is if we are ushering in kind of this new approach, we want to learn from like previous sets of like technology and platform shifts and say, how can we actually do that better?”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To do our part to do that, and then actually then say, okay, like, what are ways that we can adjust the product? The last thing I want to do is actually like tweak the product in a way that has unintended negative consequences for the long term.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My honest answer here is that I think it is not at the crypto level, it is at actually at specific coins and specific tech. I think if you look at like even within between like Bitcoin and other alternatives, there's a difference. We are constantly talking to our crypto leads and like myself, Vlad to see, we are actively talking to other folks. Like this is an emerging area, right? And we want to make sure that we understand the implications of it. And the long-term steady state implications, meaning that right now there may be a short-term window where it does probably, there are certain approaches or certain coins or certain tokens that do have that downside. But I think there's a lot of work going into figuring out the long-term implications. And meanwhile, don't underestimate the amount of work that's going in in the crypto community to actually solve precisely that problem.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fundamentally, I have to say I'm a crypto optimist, if that's a word. I bet on tech optimism. And I think even in the cases that where folks are like, oh, well, right click and save, I think NFDs, you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The bathwater may very well be like some specific JPEGs or what have you, like rug pulling that's happening. But I think the baby here is like this proof of access, you know, proof of engagement, proof of ownership to both digital assets that matter like access to events, access to things that you otherwise can't prove, even real assets, right? Real life assets and like fractional parts of it, et cetera. There's a lot there.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think that's exactly right. That's basically how I think about it. I'm skeptical, but I want to make sure it's an honest skepticism. And I can see some things that are exciting, and I can certainly see the enthusiasm.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The water will flow there, right? The energy will flow there, and then there's like the third thing around well, how do you kind of like make sure that you have again in the uncertainty that we are facing at the world level, how does inflation, fiat currency, how do those things intersect? And like, is there an alternative that is more stabilizing for people? So that's where yield and savings come. And that's where I like to play, which is like, what are the real use cases? And like, what do consumers really have? Like, what problems do they want solved? And then, of course, yeah, there's like certain things that blockchain will solve better and certain things that, you know, the scaling will happen and then the right things will happen. And certain other things where there's other ways to solve these problems.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I think the bridge again, I think, and that's the space that at least I see myself and the company saying, amidst all this enthusiasm, what fundamental invariance can you bet on, right? It's law of user physics. If it is much more easy to do something, that'll work out, right? It fits much more faster. Speed always wins. So if you're sending money and it takes like a second versus like seven days.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think it comes from a very good place. I think there's like three groups of people, like as I see, some that are just like, they're believers, right? And I think they're kind of like, it's a self-fulfilling thing in tech at least. Like the more a whole bunch of smart people actually go and say this must be, many of these things actually come to be. Like I've seen it, you've seen it with open source, you've seen it with the web, you've seen it with the entire internet for that matter. I think there's a second set of folks who are just like, like get off my lawn.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like you tap that and then you go render a page, HTML, nothing, right? So I think this for me, like just by analogy, like I feel like this whole space is in that era, like pre browser, pre-Netscape, right? And what does that mean? I think there's a lot of general undifferentiated enthusiasm. If I can get a bit spicy, I do think that there's a lot of undifferentiated enthusiasm around this.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, have the sound of click, and what parts are kind of like they can be done today and you're kind of like, you know, standing on your head just to say, hey, like some other new technology for the technology's sake. And this reminds me, and now I'm dating myself, Nilai, is that, you know, like I spent a bunch of time, early 90s, late 90s in like, I don't know, dial up and like modem and dropped out of a PhD in computer science in the late 90s because everybody was joining a dot-com startup. I mean, I remember the other day I was trying to explain to somebody that, yeah, yeah, before Netscape, there was this browser called Links. It was a command line browser. It was a text browser. You had to tab.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of all, I'm thinking a lot about this, like a number of hours. And like, you know, look, look, as things go, this is probably one of the most fascinating, interesting problems to be like, you know, like the product and computer scientist in me is like a big rolling in the mud, honestly. I mean, just think about the problems we are looking at, right? So on one hand, it's the consumer experience and the customer experience that you want to think about. And on the other hand, it's this finance and culture intersection, like as cheesy as it sounds, that like I think crypto is more as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a technical and a financial phenomenon. And then there's a third thing around what parts of it.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've talked a lot about the bridge between traditional finance and decentralized finance. This card seems like it's right on the bridge. Let's go all the way to crypto for a second. A lot of Robin Hood executives out, they say Robin Hood wants to be a crypto first company when they give interviews. It's a big part of the international expansion strategy, presumably because crypto is easier to move than regular money as you expand internationally. How are you thinking about, okay, we're the bridge? Do you think crypto is one day the entire future and the bridge is over? Do you think that the dollar has a future? I mean, this product will shape the future of both of these things. How are you thinking about that long-term future?”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very clear this is like a really important space where we want to kind of make sure that anything we do is safe, compliant, and has customer benefit.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I would reframe this more and say in some of these areas, the regulations are very clear, right? So I think like the bright red lines are clear. And like, you know, actually the goals are common, like a customer protection, like access to more financial inclusion, which the regulatory bodies also want. And education, we're actually like, you know, we've had many conversations with regulators where they see how we've done this in product and they're actually like that's how it should be done, right? Because it's not like sending them away to like this, you know, like boring seminar and lecture. So I think there are many, many things where actually things are super aligned. There are cases where we're all trying to figure out like what the regulation and what's the product space, how that evolves. Like a crypto is a good example where we have to do it together, right? And that's the way it has to be. We're talking about people's money. And for me,”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Working closely with them. You have competitors who just YOLO products out without talking regularly. You're saying that this is, you had the conversations. Is the head of product? Do you ever are there things you want to launch that you can't because regulators won't let you?”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Already have people who do direct deposit. We have a cash management license. We have state licenses in most states and we're working on the rest. And the idea here, again, is to have the licenses that are, it's a money transit, it's called a money transfer license. It's the same thing that like a classic cash card plus a spending account would have.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just push you on this. So, you think that there's going to be some set of users that direct deposit their entire paycheck to you, send some of it to investment, and then spend the rest on a debit card?”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think this is why it is a cash card in the sense that we have the standard insurance there, but this is not a bank, right? What we are trying to enable the customers to do is actually be able to spend the way they do. It's a spending account. And on top of it, yeah, of course, you can divert some of your spending account into some of these investing, potential investing areas. But the idea again is that like with the spending account, with the cash card, you don't really have to change your behavior because again, like people have their set ways, they know where they shop, they know what they need.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the idea here is you want people to use your debit cards more. You're going to hold their cash for them. You have any obligations when you hold their cash to be like more of a bank in that regard?”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My first observation is that a lot of these credit cards are, whether they're intentional or not predatory, right? So they're kind of like the loan rates, et cetera. But what is interesting, and the reason we actually focused on a debit card is that often all these rewards and like perks and points are reserved for credit cards. And people who are debit primary, which by the way is like increasing by the year, a lot more younger folks are debit primary. First of all, either because their credit score is not built up or the credit card companies, they see how kind of like they can get bogged down and they want to be more in control of their cash flows. There's more and more of America that's debit primary. So I think we, and we said, why shouldn't the debit card or a cash card have the same kind of rewards? And on top of it, actually put a line of sight to investing, which none of these products today enable you to do.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's an infinite amount of credit cards. Like, this is maybe the most competitive market, which is a crazy thing to say. But I mean, an infinite variety of credit cards, such that there's now, you know, a secondary ecosystem of businesses that just recommend credit cards to people. How are you going to compete in that extraordinarily crowded market?”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and they can choose too. That's the beauty of it, which is if you believe in a specific stock, that plus the combination of everything that works, which is the fractional shares, no commission, that's what makes it really interesting for folks to do that on Robin Hood.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the idea here is to say. I mean, by the way, this is we're starting with this because the customer research has been like really, really positive when they feel like we are in there with them versus like if all these other card products that they have where they have to pay to get these rewards, like they have to pay a monthly fee. Here we're saying no hidden fees, no ATM fees, over draft fees. So I think we're going to launch and learn here exactly what works and what doesn't, but that's the kind of the initial thing that we're starting with saying You do right for yourself, we'll pitch in.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Internally, I say saying you can get started for as little as $1, but now we're saying get started with as little as $0. You go about your business and then start to kind of put some money away for future.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some parts of the system we have had to build, but there are great partnerships with companies like Pizza, companies like MasterCard and figure out like, you know, what are the parts that they do well and just rely on their expertise as well in terms of payment processing and so on. I think what's interesting here is we are kind of like, as you probably noting, we're bridging the TradFire DeFi link here, which is a couple different ways. Like actually in the spending account, if you have your paycheck, you can split your paycheck. You can actually like kind of say, look, I think there's something interesting in terms of like crypto. I believe in some parts of it. I'm not going to spend all day, all night kind of like deeply embedded in Reddit and Discord learning all about like crypto. But if is there a way that I can kind of participate in this emerging ecosystem in a very, very small way, like in a way that I can afford? This is the same notion before, too. It was like...”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Cashcard, very Trad Fi idea, right? I mean, I'm assuming you have to be connected to various payment processors in those networks. How does that work? Is that we want to start this thing? We're going to call Visa and MasterCard and whoever and use their APIs and just be off to the races and build our own systems. What's the process there?”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we are going to do is make sure that you can have additional rewards, additional cash back from, say, merchants, right? You know, you shop at your favorite store. Can you get cash back for doing that? The third thing may seem like, oh, okay, that's fine. Like I've heard this before. But I think what's interesting and like kind of, I feel really passionate about it because right now, like I don't know if you see this in life, but every one of us is like the prices are on rise. Inflation is getting real and real. And I think this idea of how can you ease the pain both today and tomorrow, right? I think that's the goal here. With the Robin Hood cash card, of course, like help you get some cash back, some rewards back, both from merchants and from us, but also help you put that money towards investing. Because right now, like most of these people, most of us, we're so busy kind of caught up in this.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we are announcing Robin Hood cash card. It's a debit card and a spending account. And what it does is actually three things. One, you go about swiping your card or using it anywhere you go. It helps you round up the spare change that you can invest in crypto, in stocks, in, you know, or in cash, right? So that's one thing. The second thing is, and this is interesting because we said, how can we reward you for investing in yourself? So what we do is say, let's say you rounded up like, I don't know, a dollar, right? And we say, we'll match from 10% to 100% of that roundup. So like we're matching and we're kind of like giving your bonus in addition to that. And so that incentivizes folks to say, do the good thing more again, like that can be invested in cash, invested in crypto, invested in stocks, invested in like index funds and so on. And then the third thing over the next few months.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting. There are definitely some specific features that probably the really advanced power users demand with an intensity that like, say, like early investors or first time investors don't. One of my colleagues puts it, well, it's like, you know, when you're on a pavement, if you're walking, you see some few cracks in the pavement. But if you're running, you just see them faster, right? So if you have somebody who's using the product a lot, they're just like calling out the things that are actually broken even for probably or can be improved for even for early and first-time investors. So for example, like making the charts and making kind of like the product much more intuitive, every single time there's improvement there, it's like lifted all boards. Everybody else appreciates it too. But I think we have to do both. Like, look, that is no different from any consumer product like you rightly pointed out.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this is like the classic software conundrum. You're going to initiate a bunch of new users. You're going to make them use a product. They're going to get really good at using the product. And then they're going to want features for them. Well, you're still in the business of initiating new users and teaching them how to use a product. Have you experienced that split anywhere”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I am seeing that it bothered quantitatively, but I think qualitatively when we do customer research, they really like it. Experience barriers, right? Like you don't know how to do it. And I think there's the emotional barrier. Like for a lot of people, this just feels like a black box and they're intimidated. And so when you explain this in like very intuitive normal layman terms, it actually turns out it works. It helps people.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think one of the areas that we have been focused on is like news and learning and like just like this idea of being able to Have familiarity with what you're looking at, like simple things like PE ratio or just looking at the chart and saying, what is this? We have a dedicated team focused on it, and we've actually, one of the things we found is that, of course, we have learned.robinhood.com, lots of articles. But I think the most interesting thing has been actually doing product work to do these things in situ and in context and proportional to where people are in their journey. For example, like if you're starting out, like we see that, hey, you haven't like made a trade, but you're actually kind of trying to feel your way through it and then we'll actually show you more of the educational content around like proportional to again where you are in the journey. And that's actually been like, these are like, you know, products and features that we've shipped in the last few months.”
2022-03-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Robinhood is building the future of investing, with chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT