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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, I think one of the important tasks for any investment platform, especially one that's trying to initiate people new to investing, is to educate that class of consumer. And I think Robin Hood has some education in the app already, some safeguards in the app already. I'm just wondering dead ahead, do you think that explaining how the business model of Robin Hood works to users is important? And are there ways you can bring that into 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
“You have zero fees, and then you get discounts, you get actually money back to you because you're not paying for the commission, out of which we charge a tiny amount of money. And it is not taking it from the customers. That's the big point here. Stepping back, I think one of the questions that we do obviously think about is like, hey, how do we also have other businesses that are more diversified too? And that's why I think one of the areas we're excited about is this, I mean, for example, we have a subscription business where we say you can have much better margin rates, you can have like instant withdrawals called Robinhood Gold. It's small, but like it's growing.”
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 not access to data. We don't give any aggregate any access to data to the market makers. In fact, actually one of the things that's interesting is that Commissioned a study by MIT professors and said, hey, does this actually help customers? And it turns out like over the last two years alone, $8 billion in price execution, like just like price improvements from payment fraud or flow and just and commission free. I think the analogy is that's why are imperfect because I think it's nothing like the big tech. I think in this case we are saying to be able to like participate”
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 expensive for most people. The other reason is that, for example, like take a stock that is $3,000 or $4,000. Most people, like they may believe in the company, but they can't afford to buy parts of it. So that's why what we did with fracks, like fractional shares. And then the third is actually the intuitive experience. It's a bit underrated as a thing, but the number of people, like I saw it in Google too, like it's not so much that it's just for young people. It's for folks who've never had a laptop, which just like, you know, this is the primary computing device that they have. So building something that's intuitive and easy to navigate is a big plus.”
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, if you think about this, the notion is no different from if you buy something from a retailer and then the retailer buys from a wholesaler, the customer gets a benefit of like, let's say in 90 cents, we take a small percentage of that benefit when we are able to kind of like say, okay, we take 10 cents of it. Let's say we say you $1, 90 cents of it goes to the customer, 10 cents of it goes to Robin Hood. Like I'm giving obviously like numbers just as a symbolic thing. Payment for order flow is not new. But what is new is I think, and that's what Robin Hood pioneered is commission free. Previously, it was extraordinarily difficult for people to say, well, I'll just buy this stock because I believe in it because of two reasons. Well, three, actually, one is that every trade, if you're charged $10 to $35,”
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
“For example, or in some sense, there's every leg of the chain, there's an inefficiency built in. And how do you kind of compress that? So those are areas that we're absolutely interested in. Like how do you actually bridge between what we think of as the traditional finance to DeFi and crypto?”
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 thing I'm most excited about is that we can be a bridge, right? We are fundamentally a technology and product company that helps solve customers' financial problems. Now, it has to be based on use cases. It has to be based on what are the specific problems that can be made 10x better. That's the approach we took with trading and investing, which is why are there commissions or like, why is this so hard? Why is this like, you know, buying a stock like a Ruben Goldberg machine? And like, what's the mobile first experience? I think rooted in those use cases, there are specific areas where crypto can really help rebuild some of these experiences, right? People talk about this, these are not new, but like doing them right will take time. And doing them right includes like doing them safely, right? Safe, affordable, and intuitive, like cross-border payment.”
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. We actually, I mean, the company built I would think of it in three different buckets, right? There's the Fortran Cobal, like didn't change since the 90s, like banks, financial services companies. Then I think fintech, right, like folks who have actually been like mobile first, thinking about the interface, thinking about like the customer outside in, and then looking at more of the building blocks Lego up approach to at least more and more parts of the financial system. And then there is like kind of the rethink everything, rewrite everything, like DeFi as an alternative parallel to the TradFi system.”
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 talked to crypto folks a lot of the impetus for what they're building is the existing payment rails, the existing financial institutions are old and broken. They all run on COBOL code. We don't want to deal with it. We're just going to remake the financial system with modern code and crypto. Do you see that as a problem, right? Are there open APIs for clearinghouses? Is it built on a addressable tech stack that you can replace or is it all kind of tied into the existing infrastructure in a way that's inextricable?”
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
“How can you compress the settlement process so that you don't have to hold as much of a buffer in case the settlement kind of like goes in a different direction than you expect? But I'd say my time, truth be told, a lot of my time goes into two areas. One is the business that we have, an existing set of products. How can you make them better and how can you get more and more of the retail investors starting and growing with us, right? That's the other thing. Like you get started, but how do you actually increasingly control more and more of your financial freedom? And then the second area is the one minus investing, right? So yes, like investing is a great place to start for, say, 20 million people, 30 million people, but there are 100 million people who can today who are no line of sight to investing. How do you help them?”
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
“then go to the market makers and say, hey, here's the set of retail order flows here. And then you have counterparties that kind of like actually match the order. And then the trade gets executed. One of the things, at least that I didn't appreciate before coming in is, of course, the number of like steps in the value chain here and the kind of the execution chain, but also kind of the non-real timeless of it all. Like in tech, you're used to kind of saying, oh, yeah, I post this thing and it shows up on Instagram. And I think in this whole settlement process being two days, is I think one of the things that kind of like actually introduces like buffers in places that have all sorts of implications. And so one thing like Vlad actually educated me that my CEO is that actually this whole thing about like we should be pushing from T plus two, he actually made it like did a tweet storm around this and now SEC is actually looking at this which is”
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
“Good question. I think, I mean, there's like the again, like the analogy I sometimes think of as like the Google search, right? Like the interface is simple. It's a search box. Anyone can type and then be under the hood, there's like indexing, there's crawling, there's ranking, there's a whole bunch of machinery that needs to go into it. It's something similar if you look at a life of a trade. There's of course kind of the easy interface, but under the hood, there's a few things happening, right? First of all, you need to kind of make sure that you've interpreted the trade whether it's parameters there, limit order versus market, a whole bunch of things. And then of course there's more complex things when you come to things like options. And then there's within the walls of Robin Hood, there's actually like a trading platform that we've built over the years. And then the next set of things that happen is kind of the clearing platform. Think about this as the like it's it balances out the buy and the sell and kind of makes sure that we have a we have a net order that we can actually”
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
“Back end of that look like for you? How do you go about building that? Who do you talk to? Where does that trade get executed? How does that work? And how much of your time do you spend making 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
“Is why I asked this question every time. I think everyone's approach is different, and then the kind of practical application of the approach is always the same, which is, yeah, this is really hard, actually. And there's not one way of going about it. So I want to talk about how you use that framework for various things. And I absolutely want to talk about crypto and the card. But one of the things that is most fascinating about Robinhood is that when I look at kind of the array of companies that want to revolutionize finance, they're mostly either like all crypto or they're all traditional finance. Robin Hood cuts across both. The traditional finance part seems really hard to me. And I just want to spend a little bit of time on it. When you have an app like Robin Hood and you're like, okay, retail investors are going to show up, download an app from the app store. It's easy to use. You're going to push a button and execute a trade. What is the...”
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, exactly. And it became the foundation, but it took years because the presence, the footprint of mobile devices and the fact that NLP and speech recognition didn't get there fast enough. So there is the yes, no, and not now. And then the last thing I look at is like, what else? This is a trap. Typically like people come in with a particular problem frame and force them to say if we were not doing this, what else would we be doing? What's the opportunity cost? So as you can tell, this is not an easy, neat process with me. But I feel like that's the other thing. Decision making in real life versus in TV, on TV is messy and it's kind of nonlinear, but that's what you need to make right decisions.”
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
“Right the first time, like often, like it's a timing is a huge, huge thing, right? I mean, I worked on products that were like well before their time. I worked on something that eventually turned into Google Assistant, but at that time it was just the early mobile years.”
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
“That's right. Thank you for explaining this. But I do ask who's the pig. And so then you want that person to own the decision and kind of like come up with all the specific details that help make the decision. Then there's a when which is often like people think of yes or no, but there's a big third option, which is not now, right? And this is actually like I think I've found it in even in my past life.”
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
“Whose neck is on the line? Are you a pig? Who's the pig? Right? Like the pig is the saying that goes pig. The pig is committed, but the hen is involved in breakfast. Yeah. Yeah.”
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
“Exactly. Yeah. And I think the thing is there, the goal is to intentionally slow down and actually spend a lot of time on why because it's uncomfortable. It's like the thing that feels like navel gazing. But 10 out of 10 times I found that if you're embarking on something brand new, the more you can front load these questions, who are you building it for? Why do you think this problem is important? What's the outlier success look like? If it is ridiculously successful, does it matter? And the number of times the answer is like, actually may not be is amazing. The only trap there is that sometimes it's we're awful at predicting hyperlinear outcomes like humans are very linear. So sometimes your lack of imagination may show for the team and say they can't think of an outlier success. But that also forces people to say anyway.”
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 you say, okay, like, why do you need to do this? And the why is nuanced because I think one of the specific questions I ask is, what game are we playing? Is it a game of inches or is it a game of miles? What I mean by that, Eli, is like, there are problems that are optimization problems, right? Like if you think about, hey, if you have a core experience core product, there are features, there are things that customers want and you're cranking the wheel. Like it happens, you know, you take Facebook, you take Google, you take Robinhood, there's enough optimization problems that those are games of inches. And if it is a game of inches, I basically try to delegate this as much as possible because you can actually learn. And any one step doesn't actually like kind of, it's not a, you know, huge detour, right? But there are things that are games of miles, meaning if you set out the direction wrong, you've screwed it up.”
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
“Because they've just framed the problem and they've kind of come in and say, hey, do you think we should do X or Y? And I'm like, no, no, no, step back, pop one layer in the stack. Sorry, Technerd.”
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
“Frankly, I tell my team and I tell my leads, I think you're in the business. When you're in a senior operator in a company, the day-to-day currency is decision making. It's a contact sport and you do that like over years. I do have a framework now that I think about like kind of the acronym. There's probably I can think of it as the five W's, if you will, but like that's kind of how I think about it. So for example, I think often much to the annoyance of sometimes the team, I start with the why.”
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 do have both, right? So obviously there are folks who are kind of looking at it, as you said, like the whole overall app performance, for example, right? Like on Android and iOS, et cetera. Somebody has to kind of like look at it across the board regardless of specific entities. And that's it at the parent company level. But there are places where you say this is a crypto dedicated crypto team. This is a dedicated brokerage team that just is looking at specific features that people want. The other thing is I think the customers are also different in some of these cases. For example, on crypto, we have a lot more diverse set of users, both across compared to other platforms, but also over time. A lot more women, a lot more racially diverse in terms of like users and first-time investors in crypto.”
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
“Look, this is a muscle group that the company has to build and like it's building. What is interesting is I think we're able to translate, and I've been kind of like really impressed with the cross-functional team, like the legal team is actually very, very clear about, hey, what are customer benefits and where do the regulatory lines lie? And then the product team as well. So there's a very tight cross-functional team that just looks at, hey, for example, if we want to kind of provide this kind of customer benefit, what kind of disclosures do we need to make? so that the customers themselves are not confused about what's happening at the same time they get the 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
“Yeah, and the reason is that there's very, very clear regulatory requirements and boundaries for a broker dealer, for introducing brokerage like Robinhood that allows for equities. And then, as you know, I think there's like emerging discussions around regulation with multiple regulatory bodies on crypto. And we want to make sure that the customers are kept safe and there's clarity and transparency on what they're interacting with and what are the kind of the specific contracts, if you will.”
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 just want to drill on that for one more second. So when I click the button to buy and sell stocks on that screen in Robin Hood, that's one company. That has the risk and has the regulation, and then I click the tab and I go to buy and sell crypto. I'm now interacting with another company within 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 it's more about the regulatory entity, and we're pretty well organized in terms of having the controls in place as a public company to make sure that their decisions and that there's a clear risk committees, there's a board that is associated with each of these entities so that the committees make those decisions. And yes, you're right. All of it for the customer needs to be expressed in a single app. And that, I think, interestingly is actually one of the things I was going to say is that that's a departure from probably like a traditional consumer internet company. Like I think when you go into regulated spaces and like financial services one, you do have to make sure that Safety and access are both present. And I think that's one of the things that the company is doing a great job now”
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, because it's at the intersection of finance and tech, we have very clear separate regulatory entities. There's an overall parent company, Robin Hood Markets, and you have specific entities that focus on brokerage, specific entities focused on crypto, for example. And then, of course, there are functions that spike across them, like there's GNA, there's finance. But within the product organization, there's really three big areas. One is, of course, is core business, like the Google search of equivalent, right? Like the core business is investing in brokerage. Then there is crypto, which is, I think, growing much faster than even in the last few years. And then there's ideas around like this one minus investing. What are kind of like emerging products that we're building around, well, what's the step before investing? Like, how do we help people save and spend 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
“Those are big companies. And I think the thing is, like, you know, when you think about what I said, democratizing finance for all, like if you look at kind of like where the money goes, it's of course kind of like helping people to invest in their future. But then I think for a lot of people spending is where your day-to-day cash flows, like your spending is a big part of it. And today, most of the products just dig you deeper into the hole. And then there's loans, there's retirement. There's a whole bunch of places where I feel like it's been, the problem has been cast as a finance problem and not as a consumer problem. And those are all opportunities for a consumer tech company like Robin Hood to rethink and help.”
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 a few thousand people, but there's like a core product in engineering team, which is under thousand, and there's a lot of operational team as well, 3000 plus people. So it's not like it's not a startup, startup yet anymore.”
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 did have a foray into financial services because I was on the board of Capital One. That was my first foray into kind of like bridging these worlds of tech and finance. I think one thing that intrigues me, and I think it's a really big opportunity for core tech product builders to make a difference is if you think about it, like finance and health are kind of like the most important things that people have, finance is the money is the fuel for life. And yet I think that tech and just like this idea of consumer product thinking hasn't really, really like changed finance dramatically. So when I saw Robin Hood as like a prime example of what it can do to kind of make people more confident and give access to financial services like trading, like investing. That's one. But the second thing, honestly, is I think Google's a fantastic place. I cut my teeth in Google searched, like work done many, many different things. But the steel thread running through all of it is this idea of access.”
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 just said you were at Google for a long time. You had many roles at Google at one point you were technical advisor to the CEO at Google. Google's a large company. It's very stable. Robinhead's a startup. What led you to jump from Google to startup world?”
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 thing that got me into the company and just really excited is this pole mission of democratizing finance for all. And that means, I think a singular, like a key operative word here is access. And traditionally, there's a whole bunch of things. I think it started with trading, but there's a whole bunch of financial services that are just for the ultra-wealthy and like they're walls all over the place. And I think that the first place that the company started, Robin Hood 1.0, has been about starting with trading and investing and saying, how can you get started with as little as a dollar? How can you get on a fraction of a stock that you admire, the company that you believe in, and then go from there? And how can you actually do that in an intuitive mobile first way? which wasn't happening before.”
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
“A lot of questions, there's a lot of news. I want to talk about crypto. You have a new card that I want to talk about, but it's decoder, so we're going to start at the beginning. I think a lot of people are familiar with Robin Hood as a trading app, right? And it kind of burst into the mainstream consciousness last year with meme stocks and all of that. But the ambition for Robin Hood is to be more than just buy and sell stocks, right? How would you describe 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
“This point, I think we do the live vlogs mostly for the executives of the company. I get a lot of that feedback, but it's good. It's a good time. But you're Robin Hood now. You've been there almost exactly a year. You joined the company before it was public. You've gone through the now republic company process. I have yet to say welcome to Decoder. Welcome to Decoder.”
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
“Indeed, one of the favorite parts of my gig was, especially after Google, IO coast, Google, I.O., just going through the hilarious live blog on Verge, just like with a cup of coffee next day. That was one of the favorite parts.”
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
“A product for that world, where she sees the real promise in crypto and what she thinks is just hype, and whether she thinks Robinhood is part of Web3 or not. I'll tell you, she had a little spicy in that one. This one goes a little long, but I think it's worth the time. Okay, Upper Nautapragata, the chief product officer of Robinhood. Here we go. You're the chief product officer at Robin Hood after a long and sterling career at Google where you are actually all over the Verge.com from your time at Google.”
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
“Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Apatel, editor in chief of the Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas, other problems. Today I'm talking to Upperna Chenna Pragada. She's the chief product officer at Robin Hood. That's the popular stock and crypto trading app. And we've got some news to discuss. Robin Hood is launching a new cash card today that allows people to spend money directly out of their Robinhood account and set up various plans to automatically invest by rounding up purchase amounts to the nearest dollar and putting the difference in various investments. Now UpperNet has a fascinating background. She was at Google for a long time where she ran product teams for search and shopping and served as technical advisor to the CEO. She's actually all over the Verge. We've talked to her a lot about various Google product launches over the years. So first I wanted to know why she left a big company like Google for a startup, especially one like Robin Hood that works in a complicated and”
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