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Baiju Bhatt

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29
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2016-04-01
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2016-04-01
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  1. “I would like to see Robin Hood become an international financial services company. I would like to see us scale like internet company scale, not like financial services companies. I would love to be live across all of Europe. I would love to be doing business in most of Asia, South America. Think of five years. It'll be really interesting if we're talking about how can we let people in places like Africa start saving their money in the US stock market. I mean, that kind of gets at the heart of the point of what Robinhood is. Robinhood is a really cool app and it lets people trade stocks for free, which is also really cool. But when we start thinking about Robinhood as a company that connects people's savings account from around the world, we think that the really broader mission of Robin Hood is to act.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. There's definitely gears that are in motion to make that happen. I would like to be able to say, ah, yes, on such and such date we will be doing that, but realistically in every new market we enter, there's The regulatory challenges, there's just a lot of procedural stuff. So we're starting our processes and we hope to be able to do business there at some point pretty soon.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I wanted to be either a physicist or an astronaut. I've been looking at this for a long time and I plan on being the other one someday.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I'd say three things slack, pretty awesome tool. The notes app by Apple, also quite awesome. And I tend to also really like paper and a pen.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “That stuff was all cool, but that day that basically was leaked on Reddit and 100,000 people signed up over the next couple of weeks, that one day that it leaked and all of a sudden all those people signed up, that's when we were like, holy shit, we have product market fit. Definitely one of the most exciting days of my life.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, for sure, for sure. I think I really like hanging out with all those people and I think it gives us some cool perspective on what it means to do things that a lot of people care about. Getting a shout out from Snoop and Jared Leto on Twitter. Every now and again, and it's definitely like.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The way we met most of our investors was from pitching them and pitching them and pitching them and pitching them. Having a few of them saying yes, we'll get you a little bit of money to play around with. Yeah, we're very fortunate to have some world-class investors. It's really great having the team at Index. They've been with us for a very long time. I think their domain expertise and financial services is very helpful day-to-day kind of surprises with just how useful they can be. We've had a lot of celebrities join as investors in Robin Hood, which I think frankly it very squarely falls into the category of holy shit, this is really cool.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Whenever something happens that's unexpected, that's nonlinear, that's usually a good sign of there being product market fit. And I think an example of that with Robin Hood is Robin Hood Instant has, I think, very strong product market fit. In the first 12 hours after we announced it, we had about 100,000 people that had signed it to use it. So that was like, holy shit, for founders, entrepreneurs, first timers, newcomers. Look for things that have unexpected growth because that's usually a really good sign. If something's growing faster than you expect, then there's something special there.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, that's a really tough one. I think it's a really tough question to answer. And it falls into the categories of there's so many different ways of quantifying it or qualifying it or saying, well, this happens and that happens. But the fact of the matter is it's this product market fit is there when the product in its early days grows at a pace that was unexpected, right? If there is unexpectedly fast growth, people are sticking around. That's a really good indication that there's product market fit. So that's kind of the thing that I look for even as we continue to build new things. Is there something here that's growing much faster than we thought it was going to? Even if we plan for quote-unquote fast growth”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It's a challenge. I mean, day to day, it's a challenge. I think that we're fortunate that we have a critical mass of really, really smart people. We hire a lot of engineering talent from places like Stanford and Google and Facebook. So that helps us a lot. I like to be very involved in all the different things that we do and make sure that I'm not too far removed from our engineering, or I'm not too far removed from our product development, or I'm not too far removed from our customer support so that as I'm watching these teams grow around me, I try to keep my finger on the pulse of what the day-to-day work is. That's my way of, that's my way of staying very in touch with what's happening as our companies.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, I think that the challenge of actually building a company is one that's new to us and one that we're really excited to do, but just building a world-class team and keeping a very high quality of people that join the company as we grow from. I think a year ago we were 15, 17. Today we're 45, 50, a year from now we might be 750.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “described it a couple of times to people is that when a consumer when somebody's using Robinhood and say they have 500 bucks or a thousand bucks in their Robinhood account we look at some of the worst case scenarios which is that their stocks just nosedive and they lose money so it's how much money are they really losing in this situation well even if you assume like they lose all of their money that's about as bad of an outcome as that same person dropping their iPhone in the toilet That's a shitty thing don't get me wrong. Like, I wouldn't want to drop my iPhone in the toilet, but that's a really, really different situation than saying I have $100,000 in the stock market. I just lost, say, 20, 30%. Like, now I might have to work another couple of years. So I think the fact that it's a much simpler and simpler commitment makes it so a lot more people are like,”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Our customers are on average twenty to thirty years younger than those consumers. Like the people that use Robin Hood are in their 20s. They're young people. They're people that are not thinking necessarily about retirement today. In fact, they probably aren't thinking about it much at all. And what they're thinking about is like, oh, the stock market is cool. I wanted to buy some stocks for a while. And this is a way that I can start saving a little money or making a little bit of money on the side. Which is a very different mindset. And I think it's one that it's a very different mindset than the mindset of like, I need to save, let's say, 50 or 100,000 dollars for retirement. And it's just a much simpler approach to it, right? It's like, oh, if I make a little bit of money, that's great. If I lose a little bit of money, I still have decades and decades of earning potential. So it matters much less. The way that I have...”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I think that in the US, if you look at the number of U.S. residents that have brokerage accounts, the number is like, I think $30 to $40 million in the U.S. So we're talking a solid 10 plus percent of the U.S. population. From that point of view, it's definitely a mass market phenomenon, as it pertains to demographics, the thing that our product and our design really change, Robinhood is used a lot by younger people, and that's really different from the rest of the industry. So if you look at the consumers that use products like Fidelity, e-trade, Scott Trade, a lot of our competitors,”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “and in turn communicates trustworthiness to our consumers. But if I told you that was the real reason that we did it, I would be lying to your face. The reason that we spent a lot of time on design and the reason that today, even today, when Robin is actually a much bigger company that I spend most of my time on design, is just because we love it. We just really, really like it. We care about it. So I might as well spend time on things we care about.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I would love to tell you that there's a big overarching thesis to design at Robin Hood. There is to a certain degree, I would say the dominant factor, though, is that it's just something that we as human beings that make Robinhood, it's one of the things that we just really love. It's like one of our, I hate to use this word, but it's one of our passions. Like we've always really liked the idea of building beautiful things. I think that there's a lot of ways that we have rationalized our love for just building really, really pretty things in the context of what Robin Hood does, having a very simple and elegant design, communicates a deliberation in the product that we make.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Speaks to a younger demographic that previously has felt a little disenchanted. So I would definitely say the biggest thing was that we delivered a 10x improvement on a very real part of the experience of what Rodman does.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, I think that's definitely a big part of it, but I think that the bigger thing is that it crossed Robinhood is one of the products that crosses the 10X better threshold, right? There's this magical idea that if a product, a new product is 10 times better than what's out there, then that's kind of the requisite for it to have real product market fit. We put all of our efforts into doing the one thing that we thought we could do so much better than what was out there would be impossible for a consumer in their right mind to say, we'll use something other than Robinhood. And that thing was the trading commissions, right? And it was just so easy to understand. It's like you could pay ten dollars with another brokerage, or you could get the same thing for Robin Hood for free. And by the way, it's a really nice design product. And by the way, it's called Robinhood. And it's a product that...”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “No, oh no, not at all like we were changing our logo at the time. That was like a week before we had the feather as our logo.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Somebody found that link to Robinhood Free Stock Trading, posted it on Reddit. This was like a Friday night, and then all of a sudden we're like, man, we're getting a lot of traffic. Where is this coming from? So we'd actually hooked up Google Analytics, which thankfully we had, and we started looking and we're like, wow, there's a lot, there's like a thousand, there's like a couple of thousand people on our website right now. And all these referral links are coming from Reddit. So we go and we check on Reddit and we're at the top of every finance subreddit and we're like, oh God, I guess we're launching on a Friday at like 10 o'clock at night”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Was just live. Nobody knew about it, we thought we were wrong. Somebody had found our website because previously we'd released another financial app called Robin Hood, which was kind of in the beginning of 2013.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, well, we had no idea that was going to happen. I actually remember when we first announced that waitlist, which I think was about a month or two later at the end of 2013, the weekend before we put our website live, we were having these conversations of like maybe we should have a waitlist that shows people where they are online if they want to join the product. We were having these conversations. We're like, well, what happens if there's like 100 people on this list? Should we just not show it if it's less than 5,000? We were kind of trying to over engineer this problem. It's like, well, if it's under 5,000, we'll just tell people they're on a list. And if it's over 5,000, then maybe we'll show their spot. And like, maybe we should change it to 20,000. So we were kind of like pondering these issues. And a couple of days later, one of our engineers was just like, well, let me toss it up on the web because we need to make sure that the domain works and stuff like that.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, we've got our approval from the regulators. Believe that was in October of twenty thirteen in Raleigh. All right, we can finally do this thing.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “To kind of just bite our tongue and wait until we got our licenses and hope we did at the time because it was definitely a question mark and had to convince a lot of people that the idea was good even though we had no traction and the reason we didn't have traction was because we couldn't talk about it not because it was bad at the end.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “It was horrible. It was a lot of wading through the darkness because we knew we wanted to be able to offer a free stock brokerage, the ability for consumers to trade stocks for free. That was the thing that we thought was going to be technologically capable and be something that a lot of people would really like. In order to do that, we had to first be a broker dealer. We had to get a lot of things in place. And that process of getting the green light from the regulators to be able to do business in the United States takes at least about a year and a lot of money. And during that period of time, it's a really bad idea to speak publicly about the things that we were planning on doing because if we had done so, we would have basically been soliciting customers for financial services product without the requisite licenses. So that's a big no-no from the regulator. So we had to be”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Growing up in this country and see if we can do something bigger and something better. And so that idea stayed with us, I would say, for about six months before the idea for what would be Robin first came out, which was actually over a phone call.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “What made me think? Yeah, so that motivation definitely came from the Occupy Wall Street boom, I would say. And there was a period of time where before we started Robin Hood, Vlad and I were living in New York, we were building another company called Kronos at the time, which was building technology for institutional broker dealers, hedge funds, trading firms. And here we were these fairly scrappy young gentlemen trying to start a business, and we kind of realized that what we were doing was actually in the crossfire of this much bigger thing, which was that a lot of younger people were very upset with the way the financial services industry operated. And that was the first time that it really got us thinking to ourselves, kind of what are we doing and why are we doing this? Shouldn't we be doing something bigger than this? Like, shouldn't we be taking all the things that we know about finance and the privilege that we've had getting great educations?”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “That program I met flat and I was like, well, that guy's hair kind of looks like Mick Jagger's hair. And at the time, I kind of had Mick Jagger thing going on too. And so we kind of bumped into each other a couple of times and quickly realized that we were going to be really good friends. We both grew up in Virginia. We were both only children. And our parents had both come to this country because our parents were doing PhD. So we had kind of a lot of similarities in our background. Kind of immediately became very good friends, went on to be roommates at Sanford, studied a lot of the same things. When we left school, we decided to work together and try some projects out. That's kind of how our friendship started. And by the time we were starting Robinhood, which was the idea for Robin Hood came sometime in the middle of 2012, I want to say.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Well, thank you. So I'll tell you a little bit about how my co-founder Vlad Ney first became what is now like 10 plus year collaborators and how a lot of things Robin had started. So our story started, I would say it's over 10 years ago now, is in the summer of 2005, Vlad and I were both students at Sanford at the time and we were a part of this summer research program through the physics department. We're basically about 15 kids or something like that, stayed around the summer to do research in the physics department. So just imagine all the kids that go to Stanford which is kind of some of the nerdier kids in the US and the world. And then you take those people and you narrow it down to the kids that are so nerdy that they want to stay for the summer and then you narrow that further to the kids that study physics, which proud to say were some of the nerdiest. So when I met when I was in that.”

    2016-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source