In short
Baiju Bhatt, Robinhood co-founder (with Vlad Tenev), discusses life lessons from building in unfamiliar industries, early Robinhood rejection, and how they found product-market fit. Topic includes: iterating via “gradient descent” on ideas, why seed-stage success depends on relentless people, and communicating a consumer product with “transitivity” so the message survives word-of-mouth.
Key claims
they knew product-market fit on the day the first website launched; early growth came from organic sharing; co-CEO success came from mutual trust/respect and assigning areas to the person most passionate; the hardest test was GameStop; democratizing investing shifted youth culture from “don’t care” to “I know what I’m doing.”
Notable examples
VC criticisms (young people won’t invest; no business plan; no finance/tech pedigree), waitlist/countdown launch, and Mailbox’s “line position” waitlist concept.
Guests
Baiju Bhatt; interviewer not identified in transcript.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Origin Story of Robinhood
0:46 to 1:30
Baiju shares the early days of Robinhood and the concept behind the 'Chalkboard of Destiny'.
“We're both, you know, only children, both children of immigrants, Both grew up in Virginia.”
Facing Rejection from VCs
1:31 to 2:30
Baiju recounts the numerous rejections from venture capitalists along with their criticisms.
“So I read that 75 VCs rejected you guys.”
The Entrepreneurial Mindset
2:31 to 3:46
Discussion on what makes a good entrepreneur and the importance of adaptability.
“So what, like, why don't you just go and build a photo sharing app?”
Navigating Product Market Fit
3:47 to 4:50
Baiju explains the concept of product-market fit and its significance in the early stages.
“Are they going to be relentless in figuring out how to get to success?”
Innovative Marketing Strategies
4:51 to 7:18
Exploration of Robinhood’s creative website launch and marketing tactics to attract users.
“Okay, we're going to try and get a little tactical here for some of the entrepreneurs listening.”
Changing Perspectives on Finance
7:19 to 8:46
Baiju discusses his vision of democratizing finance for younger generations and the impact of societal movements.
“A lot of people didn't, like, that's not necessarily something people were looking for.”
User Growth and Engagement
8:47 to 10:40
Insight into Robinhood's user growth strategies and the role of organic growth.
“By extension, the majority of people that use these products were of that age range.”
Understanding Customer Needs
10:41 to 13:16
Importance of customer research in product development and messaging.
“That was kind of the bread and butter in the early days.”
Lessons from Product Development
13:17 to 14:01
Baiju shares insights on building products that resonate with users through simplicity.
“It sounds so easy, but it's actually very hard to do this, right?”
The Importance of Simplicity in Products
14:01 to 14:59
Learn why simplicity is crucial for product acceptance and success.
“Like, the human nature dictates that you are not going to get much attention from people.”
Show all 17 chapters
The Dynamics of Co-CEO Collaboration
15:00 to 16:12
Discover the secrets behind a successful co-CEO partnership.
“we would generally not like co-CEO models because you kind of want one person to be the tiebreaker when things are tough.”
Facing the GameStop Challenge
16:13 to 16:41
Hear about the challenging moments during the GameStop incident at Robinhood.
“from a friendship or with the Collinsons being brothers, right?”
The Impact of Robinhood on Investing
16:42 to 17:55
Understand how Robinhood changed the landscape of investing for the masses.
“I said hard work, grit, tenacity, and not giving up.”
Cultural Shifts in Financial Responsibility
17:56 to 19:55
Explore how societal attitudes towards financial literacy have evolved.
“different people have different views what's your take on all of that i think it's been an incredibly disruptive technology.”
The Positive and Negative Effects of Prediction Markets
19:56 to 20:58
Learn about the disruptive technology of prediction markets and their implications.
“Where, again, the mission and the genesis of this thing is we wanted to, we as people wanted to live in a world where our peers were invested in the outcomes of our capital system.”
Personal Reflections through Photographs
20:59 to 23:29
Listen as the guest shares meaningful life moments defined by three photographs.
“I'm going to finish off with some personal questions.”
The Key to Success: Tenacity and Learning from Failure
23:30 to 25:56
Understand the mindset needed for success and the importance of perseverance.
“yeah yeah must be proud of you yeah and last question um you can't be humble on this one which typically isn't a problem with Americans, but you know, we got, we got, we got, we got to ask.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Baiju Bhatt:I've been professionally operating in industries where I don't know what I'm doing. I didn't know finance when I started it. Didn't understand aerospace when I started this, right? It's usually in the process of failing an idea that I'm like, this is the actual idea.
0:16Cameron:We're back. Last week, we looked forward to a very futuristic vision that you are building, Aetherflux, data centers in space, solar panels in space. Now we're going to take a little bit of a walk down memory lane. I think maybe we start again with what we have here in the office. I think it's called the Chalkboard of Destiny, where you originally scoped out the idea for Robin Hood. Tell us a bit about that.
0:35Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, this Chalkboard has been with me and with my co-founder for many, many years. It was originally in our – we lived together off campus at Stanford.
0:44Cameron:You guys, like, super close to Stanford?
0:46Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, we were besties at Stanford. We took all the same classes together. We're both, you know, only children, both children of immigrants, Both grew up in Virginia. Families both moved to the US because our parents were pursuing higher educations here. Both had some variation of this haircut when we met. And we were both studying physics and math and took a lot of the same classes together, became very good friends. Coincidentally, one of our very good math friends is a fellow by the name of Andrew Yarmola, who happens to be heading up engineering here, which you're thinking might be right around the corner.
1:23Cameron:So it's a new thing, but a continuation, I guess, too. Yeah. Very cool. Because chalkboard has a lot of good... Juju. Yeah. That's the word. Love it. So I read that 75 VCs rejected you guys. That's it? Was it more? Hundreds? I mean... In the seed round to take us back. What was the idea? I can't remember. What did they miss? Thinking about that many notes.
1:43Baiju Bhatt:Those damn VCs. Yeah. What was it like back in the day getting rejected by a lot of people?
1:49Cameron:And what did they miss, I guess? Well, I remember.
1:53Baiju Bhatt:it quite well. So let me tell you the criticisms. Number one, young people will never invest in stock market. Number two, you'll never figure out how to build a business here. There's no, what's the business going to be? How are you ever going to build a business? Number three, you have no idea how to do this. You're a math kid. So is your co-founder. I don't see Google on your resume anywhere. I don't see any of the big tech companies. You don't know how to build consumer products. Also, you'll never get any of the capital to do this because we're rejecting you amongst other reasons.
2:25Cameron:Those top three were pretty. That one's a bit self-referential, the last one, but yeah. Isn't that how that works? So what, like, why don't you
2:33Baiju Bhatt:just go and build a photo sharing app? Oh, no way. Like, just why are you doing this? Just go build a photo sharing app, go build a social network. That's where all the interesting stuff is happening. This finance thing, it's not going to work. Don't work. Don't worry.
2:47Cameron:Don't work on it. What would you look for now? If you were on the other side trying to find the next Baiju and Vlad, what would you be looking for to not miss it? The people. The people.
2:56Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, I think this is the thing. At the seed stage, the early stage, whatever you're working on then, it's probably going to change. And if it doesn't change, then you're a bad entrepreneur. Because as a good entrepreneur, you have to be aware of the circumstances and be willing to iterate on ideas, right? Like I actually think kind of one of the hallmarks of being a good entrepreneur is being a person that changes their mind a lot. What does that mean? It means you're testing your ideas out. You drive your dredge stake in the ground. This is what I think it is. And you sort of test the idea. And if you learn something new, you're not the dogmatic one that says, well, I'm going to stick to my original idea.
3:39Baiju Bhatt:You're like, no, I'm going to do the I'm going to like basically, you know, gradient descent my way to the thing that I think is going to work.
3:46Cameron:Yeah.
3:46Baiju Bhatt:So I think actually at the early stage, it is so much about the entrepreneur. Are they in it? Do they have that dog in them? Are they going to be relentless in figuring out how to get to success? And is the opportunity big and interesting, right? I think this is also kind of looking back much more clear. is if you think of the sliding scale of like easy ideas versus hard ideas, they're kind of all hard. Like building a company is just hard, hard.
4:23Cameron:Yeah.
4:24Baiju Bhatt:And if you start on something that looks easy to begin with, it might turn out to be hard in a different way. It's like it's easy to understand. Therefore, a lot of people understand it. Therefore, it's super crowded and competitive versus something that looks really hard and therefore nobody's working on it, if you have a strong first principle-based view on what the idea there is... Yes, and the people. And the people, you'll cut through. Rather than pattern matching too much.
4:52Cameron:Okay, we're going to try and get a little tactical here for some of the entrepreneurs listening. Let's do it. So, you've launched the product. When did you have a sense that it was working? When was the moment you were like, okay, we've got some product market fit here?
5:06Baiju Bhatt:Very early on. It was the day that we released the first version of the website. It's actually pretty startling. And I had not seen product market fit for a consumer product before this. I'd been looking for it. That was kind of the thing that I was very, very keenly interested in figuring out, which is how do you build something that millions of people that you've never met will find useful? How do you do that? What's the playbook on that? Give me the textbook. How do you do this? And it frankly seemed like magic when people would figure it out. And this is like the thing about finding product market fit with a consumer product is it's, you know it when you see it.
5:51Baiju Bhatt:And it's rather elusive. Yes. It's like catching lightning in a bottle.
5:55Cameron:Yes. It's very, very elusive. You guys had a super creative website launch, I remember at the time, like a countdown. A waitlist. Waitlist. It was pretty innovative.
6:03Baiju Bhatt:yeah it in in turn i think there was a lot of people that then kind of did the same thing afterwards yeah yeah not hating no no the idea imitation is the most sincere form of flattery there was a there was a a company back in the day um called mailbox do you remember that no it was an iphone app that was like an inbox app okay and i remember being like holy cow this is like the best design product i've ever seen before yeah i think they were then acquired i think they were i think they were acquired by dropbox if i remember correctly um and i think no longer exists but they had a a waitlist mechanism where when you signed up for it it showed you the number of people behind you in line to use their product yeah the number of people in front of you in line to use the product and i thought that was just super compelling and And so we ended up doing a variation of that with the first announcement.
7:03So it was, you know, zero commission stock trading.
7:07Baiju Bhatt:And if you typed in your email address, you would get early access and we'd show you where you were online.
7:12Cameron:And that value proposition was compelling enough that just loads, tons of people signed up basically. But that is the hard part.
7:19Baiju Bhatt:Yeah. To figure out what that was. What is that thing? A lot of people didn't, like, that's not necessarily something people were looking for. Yeah, yeah. You know? Yeah, yeah. So it's like, how do you communicate what the thing is and how does it fit into people's lives?
7:31Cameron:And did you already know how you would make money down the road when you guys were offering this thing for free? Or you're like, hey, let's just get loads of users on. We'll offer this thing for free and we'll figure it out in time. A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.
7:41Baiju Bhatt:I mean, I think that the approach was so different and like the way the business would operate would be so different that we knew how traditional online brokerages made money. Like we would look at the public filings and kind of try to infer what the business model could be. But it's so dependent on how many people use it, what kinds of people use it. Meaning, is it a bunch of wealthy people or is it, you know, what ended up being the core user base, which was, frankly, a lot of younger college age Americans.
8:11Cameron:Yeah.
8:11Baiju Bhatt:That was kind of the core bread and butter. It was young people that use it. Yeah.
8:15Cameron:It was such a cool inversion of the existing business model.
8:17Baiju Bhatt:Yeah. And I took real issue with the way that it operated. before. Because again, this is kind of my viewpoint and I'm paraphrasing here a little bit, but my view was like before Robinhood, before we created, the primary use case for investing in the stock market was for retirement age Americans, retirement age families. It was plus or minus a handful of years. This is a tool to help you with retirement. By extension, the majority of people that use these products were of that age range. And I remember that juxtaposed with the backdrop of Occupy. You remember that? Yeah. Where our generation was, I mean, they were angry.
9:06Baiju Bhatt:They were angry about the way the financial system worked.
9:09Cameron:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Occupy Wall Street.
9:11Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, Occupy Wall Street. They were angry about the way it worked. And I remember thinking to myself, this is kind of genesis of the company, there's another way here, right? There's one way in which what a lot of people are advocating for, which is you tear the system down, right? The system's broken. We've got to start over from scratch. At the same time, as a child of immigrants to this country, I'm like, what is going on here? Like, this does not make any sense. This financial system is the envy of the whole world. People literally give up their lives and relocate here because this is a land of opportunity.
9:53Baiju Bhatt:Right. Like I live this. My family did this. And to see a generation of young people be like, this thing's broken. It's not for us. Like tear it down. we're like there's another way here which is you can actually have more people be a part of the capital markets and more people share in the outcomes good or bad and not feel disconnected from it and therefore sort of feel like they're not participating in it and so the the other option was you get everybody a part of it i want to come back to that i want to come back to that
10:27Cameron:point um okay in terms of your did you have a north star metric when you guys did start growing that you were focused on? And what were the growth channels that worked best for you guys as you went from, I guess, zero users to now millions of users?
10:39Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, there was a lot of organic growth. There was people sharing links to using Robinhood on social media. That was kind of the bread and butter in the early days. Okay, okay. It was almost entirely word of mouth.
10:50Cameron:So just have an amazing insight and product that grows virally. That would be the best way. But did, was it, I mean,
Read the full transcript
10:57Baiju Bhatt:build something really useful for people. There you go. And if you do, people will use it. And communicate it in a way where we talked about this earlier. It's that property of transitivity. Like this is the, by the way, this is kind of the key. Can you, can you, can you elaborate on that? Yeah. This is, this is a math concept applied to building consumer products. Does the messaging that you have, have the property of transitivity? Meaning if I explain what the product is to you, and you explain it to somebody else, what is the version that you explain it to somebody else? Like if you play the game of telephone, like after three or four hops or people are like, oh yeah, it's a Chinese restaurant.
11:43Baiju Bhatt:And you're like, oh, we're online stock brokerage. You know, like what are we? It just totally got lost in translation. And so what I really focused on then was spending a lot of time with actual customers or I guess not even actual customers, hypothetical customers, people in the real world and being like, here's what we built. What is this? Like, how would you explain this to somebody? How would you explain this to a friend? How would you explain this to a family member? And through that very, very simple thing, you can learn more about why your product exists, why it will work, why it will fail than talking to any number of professionals in the industry.
12:31Baiju Bhatt:They just go directly to the primary research. How do you have an idea for the product? You've written it down on a website. It's an email. It's in marketing documents, whatever, right? Put it in front of people and be like, explain this. Like your job is now to explain this thing to a friend. Like, what are you going to say? I remember like looking for that to draw insights It'd be like, oh, I interviewed 10 people. Our team interviewed 10, 20 people, right? And we kept hearing this way of describing it. And it's really synced. I like the way it sounds. It's a very colloquial way of describing it.
13:12And we just take that and incorporate that into the messaging.
13:16Cameron:It's amazing. It sounds so easy, but it's actually very hard to do this, right? Because it requires such clarity of thought of what goes into the product. and I think saying no to so many things. So it sounds easy the way you're describing it. And I definitely think the focus on primary research is sensible. But having built quite a few products myself, it's much harder to deliver on it than in practice, which is why it's quite rare.
13:40Baiju Bhatt:Also coming back to Steve Jobs, I remember one of his famous interviews quotes is like around attention that people give. People don't give a shit. No. You do not give shit what you're working on.
13:52Cameron:Totally self-interested on whether it's...
13:53Baiju Bhatt:People are in their own little zones, right? 100%. So if you're going to make something and you want other people to find it useful, you don't have a lot. Like, the human nature dictates that you are not going to get much attention from people. Yes. So whatever you're doing, if it's too complicated, it's dead on arrival.
14:10Cameron:Yeah.
14:11Baiju Bhatt:So it's got to fit into people's lives. It's got to be simple, straightforward, and it has to, like, map to something that they cared about independently of your product. And you really capture that when you start talking to people that you've never met before. And I mean, I would go into a lot of this sort of customer research thing with our researchers and compliance people and engineers. I would take them all into the random parts of the U.S. and be like, let's go interview 30 people in hour-long back-to-backs over this week. And by the end, your face feels like it's going to fall off your head.
14:49Cameron:I think that's a good transition. I mean, you led product, right, at Robinhood? But you guys were co-CEOs, which is a pretty unusual setup. I would say as we typically look at teams to back, we would generally not like co-CEO models because you kind of want one person to be the tiebreaker when things are tough. But you guys had an incredibly successful collaboration doing that over a decade. What was the secret? Any tips?
15:18Baiju Bhatt:very high level of mutual trust or sorry high level of mutual trust and respect and admiration
15:24Cameron:okay that's the key i think that's i guess i guess zones of excellence my mental model for
15:30Baiju Bhatt:always was um whichever one of us feels passionately or strongly about a problem or an area of the business it's like let that person run okay right so defer to my co-founder whenever he felt passionately or strongly passionate and i guess very capable at well the the capable part comes from that mutual trust respect and admiration right like i fundamentally admired and trusted and respected his ability to solve problems sure i think the other part of it also was there was a friendship that was at the core of it i think that's so powerful i think that's so underrated
16:06Cameron:right sort of like basic things right these are basic human things and startups are hard if you don't have mutual trust, mutual respect from a friendship or with the Collinsons being brothers, right? I think that's a huge competitive advantage when it goes right. How do you maintain a friendship during all the tough times that come in a startup and what was the most dire nadir that you guys had at Robin Hood together?
16:31Baiju Bhatt:I think that particular moment has been pretty well documented. The little thing called GameStop. That was bad. That was really hard. super hard super challenging how'd you get through it uh like grit tenacity and not giving up okay right there i mean it it was yeah it was to this day it's like jesus that was a brings up brings up it's very challenging it's like definitely the most challenging professional experience that i've had it's also clarifying focusing builds a ton of character um and you kind of live through all the permutations of the hardest version of doing what you're doing. How do we get through it?
17:15Baiju Bhatt:I said hard work, grit, tenacity, and not giving up.
17:19Cameron:I think it's the most important thing. Fight another day. Yeah, fight another day. Robinhood, super impactful company. I think it's very much delivered on the mission that you guys set out with. It's democratized access to investing in a huge way.
17:34Baiju Bhatt:I remember we were talking about democratizing finance when democratized was not it was not a thing now it now it certainly is
17:41Cameron:but you guys did it um which is amazing to see and it's uh you know it's changed culture it's brought way more people into the financial systems but it hasn't been perfect right i think there's probably some interesting knock-on effects that you probably hadn't anticipated maybe when you started the company we now seen the emergence of prediction markets i don't know that's good or bad different people have different views what's your take on all of that i think it's been an
18:03Baiju Bhatt:incredibly disruptive technology. And I think that, you know, people use technologies and tools in lots of different ways across the board. I think the thing to me that is the most important thing and the thing that I kind of look back on with the most pride on is this, the thing that I talked about a couple of minutes ago, right, is when we started the company, young people across America, how to paraphrase it, not knowing what you were doing with your finances was kind of cool. Do you know what I mean? It's like, yeah, I don't care about that stuff. Like that sort of like counterculture thing where it's like, yeah, that stuff is lame.
18:46Baiju Bhatt:I'm just going to live my life and be cool and free. And you're like, I remember thinking to myself, like, that's not cool. Like not knowing about your money is not cool. That's not cool. That's self-destructive. Yeah, yeah. Right. And like our culture and our society, reinforcing people being uninformed about this stuff is not a good thing. And instead, we should live in a world, we should have a society where people understand it's a very important and powerful thing that they need to develop their own way of doing through the course of their lifetime. What is this thing? Like being a good steward of your own money and a steward of your own resources and taking a degree of personal agency over that for yourself.
19:33Baiju Bhatt:And when you fast forward the clock to a decade and a half almost now, there's a vibe shift, right? Where young people... It's almost the opposite. It's almost the opposite. It's a point of pride for people. It's like, yeah, I know what I'm doing. Like I'm investing. Like, you know, I figured this out. I'm researching stuff. I'm learning about stuff. And that's very, to me, that is like a hugely positive societal change. Yeah. Where, again, the mission and the genesis of this thing is we wanted to, we as people wanted to live in a world where our peers were invested in the outcomes of our capital system.
20:14Baiju Bhatt:And any other alternative was going to be really tumultuous and crappy. right so i think that's like there's a lot of huge there's a lot of phenomenon that emerges from it but fundamentally people care and i think that that's giving people choice giving people
20:31Cameron:the potential to participate yeah tools i think ultimately i think that's a really
20:37Baiju Bhatt:culturally relevant making them a part of people's day-to-day lives i do think prediction
20:41Cameron:markets is the one thing i i'm not yet sold on because i think it creates such a financialization of social reality in an interesting way that has very unknown knock-on effects. But I think democratizing the ability to invest, for me, that's just like, that's a net positive. I wish we had more of it in Europe and the UK, to be honest. I'm going to finish off with some personal questions. I've inverted this interview. We usually start the podcast with it. Well, we've inverted the clothing, too. That's a really nice cardigan, by the way.
21:07Baiju Bhatt:Thank you. Likewise. That's great on you.
21:09Cameron:If you had to choose three photos...
21:11Baiju Bhatt:Next time, we should switch pants, too.
21:14Cameron:I want the shoes. We can do that, too. and the necklace. This is a question we ask all our guests, but if you had to choose three photographs that define your life, what would they be? And what have you learned from them?
21:28Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, okay.
21:29Cameron:One of them has got to be the IPO. I'm putting it in your mouth now. No, that was immediately going to be one.
21:34Baiju Bhatt:I think,
21:37Baiju Bhatt:trying to think about what the third one would be. The first one is very obviously ringing the bell and having my eldest son on my shoulders. That's awesome. And I have a picture of that up at my desk at home.
21:54Cameron:And did things change for you after the IPO?
21:57Baiju Bhatt:I mean, mentally, emotionally?
21:59Cameron:Of course, right? Yeah.
22:01Baiju Bhatt:It's a different chapter. And it's, as an entrepreneur, in my humble opinion, that is one of the Mount Everest that you climb. Yes, clearly. That's absolutely one of them. I would say another one was visiting Caltech with my dad when I was in high school and my mom as well. I think that one is really interesting because you may not know this about me, but I lost like nearly a third of my body weight in high school from exercising. I grew up and I was very, very overweight kid. Wow. Very overweight kid. And that was like taken before I lost all that weight i look like a different person six months later what's the secret don't eat and
22:46Cameron:exercise or i guess eat a lot less than exercise that old formula yeah that old formula calories in calorie out yeah i would say the third one that comes to my mind is a picture i know my parents have this picture at home of me when my mom and my dad and i lived in alabama when i was
23:10Baiju Bhatt:little kid my dad would take me and he would put me up in this tree um right by our house and like it's like a very warm ah more when i think about that because like from that age i can't really remember any of it i can't remember what happened but i remembered the way it made me feel the feelings yeah it sounds like you're very close to your parents yeah and my son my boys as well
23:34Cameron:yeah yeah must be proud of you yeah and last question um you can't be humble on this one which typically isn't a problem with Americans, but you know, we got, we got, we got, we got to ask. So say it, um, what is it about you that's enabled you to be so successful?
23:50Baiju Bhatt:Yeah. Um, I really, when I put my mind to something, I do not give up and I have a mental rule for myself, which is, um, whatever I'm trying to do, that's new. Just rush to the finish line, like starting an idea, I've been professionally operating in industries where I don't know what I'm doing I didn't know finance when I started it didn't understand aerospace when I started this and my viewpoint on it is whenever I try something new try to fail as quickly as possible and don't be afraid of seeing an idea through to failure because I've found this pattern that it's usually in the process of failing an idea that I'm like, this is the actual idea.
24:48Cameron:Suddenly you're learning.
24:49Baiju Bhatt:Yeah. This is the actual idea. It's usually in the last 20 % of trying a new idea out that you're like, well, this was wrong, but it was, if I had not gotten to this place, I wouldn't have known that that was the idea. Yeah. So I think that that's like and the thing is like when i set my mind to something i do not give up and you're all in i am all in i'm also not a great multitasker like i do either few things and i just do them
25:16Cameron:i'm a big believer in periods of deep imbalance like when you're obsessed like you're all in and then i know you have this concept of kind of chapters in your life yeah i've already that really resonated with me because i think maybe you want a life of balance over the course of your life but they're going to be periods where you have to be very like imbalanced and to just achieve the goal and and get the joy of of going on something for a period yeah yeah yeah all right
25:40Baiju Bhatt:balance the balance becomes a thing when you're a parent it's a little different i think yeah you gotta have a bit of it yeah man this has been such a pleasure yeah it's been great awesome
25:48Cameron:really enjoyed it i love the cardigan too let's uh let's change clothes more often and uh great to see you yeah likewise
From the publisher
In this episode of Giant Ideas, Cameron sits down with the co‑founder of Robinhood to talk about where it all began, and what founders today can learn.
They discuss:
- The origin story & friendship of the co-founders of Robinhood: Growing up as children of immigrant and meeting at Stanford
- 75 VC rejections: Why investors said young people would never invest, and what those VCs fundamentally missed
- Founder mindset: Changing your mind as a superpower, “gradient descent” as a way to iterate on ideas, and why early-stage investing is really about the people.
- Finding product‑market fit & the viral launch
- Democratising finance: from Occupy Wall Street to a cultural shift where knowing your money is “cool"
- Surviving the GameStop crisis: the most challenging chapter at Robinhood and what grit, tenacity, and “buying another day” really looked like.
Plus, his 3 personal highlights of his life so far - from his childhood to the IPO bell...
Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.
Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.
Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.
