From Robinhood To Rockets: Baiju Bhatt’s New Innovation Frontier

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[00:00:04]We're here at the birthplace of Silicon Valley, the HP garage where magic happened uh almost 100 years ago and we're here talking to many of the 250 greatest living innovators according to Forbes and we open a Bajuad founder of co-founder of Robin Hood and now a new you know cowboy space corp. So serial entrepreneur BJ thanks first thanks for joining us >> pleasure to be here >> why don't you you know give us again you're one of the younger members of the 250 congratulations but you you made a huge impact in a short period of time maybe give us your journey a little your innovator's journey and then we can get into some of the stuff you've been doing [music] >> yeah so started out my entrepreneurship journey after I graduated from Stanford actually >> you just walked on you know you just walked into this area >> literally did I actually I came out here originally because I was studying physics and math was not you know was not interested in starting a business back then. And I was pretty squarely focused on understanding the mysteries of the universe and then ended up graduating. Stayed for a little bit longer. Did my masters in math also at Stanford and uh within about a year or so I was like well had a job for a little while decided I want to start a company. Um >> it's in the water here.

[00:01:18]>> It it really is. and and teamed up with my college roommate and you know best friend through most of college uh Vlad to start a company which didn't do so well and started another one couple along the way that didn't do so great and then had the idea for Robin Hood >> and uh actually it's kind of interesting our one of our first offices was right down the street on on uh on High Street I believe and also was a garage >> y >> um which had I think slightly better HVAC than this but >> [laughter] >> So when you started Robin Hood, you guys were finance outsiders uh disrupting a multi-undred billion trillion dollar industry. What did you guys see? You know, you have tens of thousands of really smart people working in the industry. What did you guys see that they did it and how did you come up with that idea? It's >> a polite way of saying we didn't really have a good chance of succeeding.

[00:02:13][laughter] >> That too. And we were reminded of this early and often, like what is a couple of, you know, scragglyhaired college kids? Um, and at the time we were kind of like, you know, people kind of viewed us as programmers, right? What do you guys know about finance? What makes you think that you can build finance company that's going to be durable or have this really audacious goal of building a 100red-year brand? And I think that the insight that led to a lot of Robin Hood was fundamentally well it was a it was a viewpoint on this generation of now I guess 10 to 15 years ago young people then and on the relationship of the market with the capital markets with the people that live here. So a little more specific. So the backdrop when we had the idea for Robin Hood was Occupy Wall Street. And it was a time when a generation of young people kind of looked at the markets.

[00:03:07]They looked at the capital market system and they said this is broken. This is not for us and it favors the very few.

[00:03:15]And there was a sentiment around the time of literally occupying Wall Street.

[00:03:20]Tear the system down. Come up with something new.

[00:03:23]>> And I think they're all Ducatti Park and 2011, 2011, 2012. Right around >> 2011, 2012. Exactly. And I remember at the time the insight that the two of us had was fundamentally one of outsiders looking in because both for me and my co-founder our families moved to the US so that our fathers could pursue higher education and so that we would have you know at least the opportunity to have a better outcome and to be a part of the capitalist system in America. And this is kind of my viewpoint on this also is like as an outsider looking in this system is the envy of everybody in the world. And how could we be growing up in a generation where our peers fundamentally rejected this? It was kind of in dissonance with our lived experience where so many of our peers were not going to be part of the system, right?

[00:04:12]>> And we thought if they could be a part of the system and share in the outcomes whether good or bad would be another way of addressing the same frustrations that led to that sentiment.

[00:04:22]>> Lo and behold, the idea for Robin Hood started taking shape. And we viewed access to markets as kind of a microcosm of what people are frustrated about.

[00:04:31]Yes. So you know if if we thought you know if we as technologists with some insight into how this younger generation people feel could address even this problem around the cost and the accessibility of the markets then we could actually have a real impact on that feeling even if in a kind of smaller microcosm of what the bigger sentiment was. And I tell you, looking back on it now after all these years, this is the one insight that kind of rings true because the mission of the company has been around democratizing finance for all.

[00:05:07]>> Yes.

[00:05:08]>> Is if you look back at that generation, if you were to ask a young person, right, it's like how do you feel about your finances? Do you care about this? A lot of young people would have been like, oh man, that's not for me, you know? I don't care about that stuff.

[00:05:21]>> Which I think is ridiculous. Of course, >> right? It's like you should care about it because it's your own future.

[00:05:28]>> You need it. Of course.

[00:05:29]>> Right. It's not for anybody else. It's for you. Where I think if you look and you were to talk to an average young person today, they would say, "Oh, yeah.

[00:05:37]Of course I do." And I think if even if we played a small part in that sentiment change, then I think we did something impactful.

[00:05:45]>> Budget. Did you when you were kind of developing this, did you were was this did you get these ideas from talking to people? Was it more that you guys had the idea and again tried to go out and evangelize or were you listening on a listening tour and kind of sucked it all in and come came up with the thesis? Was it a top down or bottom up?

[00:06:04]>> A little bit of >> it was a little it's always a little bit of both and which one kind of was driving. So I'll tell you this is one thing that I think I I felt very strongly about and I think was one of the one of the differentiators at least in the early days of the company is we would spend an inordinate amount of time talking to our customers even before they were using the product even when it was kind of in development. we would actually come up with an idea for what the new thing we were working on was, whether we were introducing the product or working on some screen here or there in the app. And what we would do is we would take a small team, usually on the weekends, right down the street to the Stanford uh like coffee shop >> and it would usually be like couple of engineers, maybe a designer, maybe somebody on the compliance team or just random people within the company. And we'd go and recruit um we would go and recruit uh people that were just in school and be like, "Hey, look at our product. What do you think?" Right? Or if there was, you know, just it was a way of taking people throughout different different parts of our company and just being like, "Let's not guess how people are using our product. Let's actually have them >> look at it, tell it to us."

[00:07:16]>> And we learned so much in doing that.

[00:07:18]What was uh there must have been what was the biggest aha moment where kind of you had that Newton apple thing where either somebody said something or or is it you guys were programming you're like oh my god this is going to change everything you must have had something like that >> yeah I think it was the time the very first time we released the product into the wild and I remember we had originally had a weight >> and you don't know how the people are going to use it it's out there and you're just yeah here we go >> kind of assumed at some level cuz it's like well we'll put a weight list out there. People give us their email address and then we'll see what happens.

[00:07:51]Maybe we'll get a couple thousand people, maybe a couple hundred people.

[00:07:55]And we were shocked with the number of people that wanted early access to what would become Robin Hood. Um Yeah. And I think that was the first time in my life I'd ever seen product market fit.

[00:08:08]>> Yep.

[00:08:08]>> And um man, it left an impression on me cuz I was like, "Aha, like this is what it looks like." And I think one of the hallmarks of for at least for consumer product product market fit is that whatever you kind of expect to see in terms of people signing up if it does better than that. And the reason and this may be a little bit of a tangent but one of the reasons is that I think as humans it's really difficult to understand how a group of 100,000 people behaves. Like our our little brains are not wired >> Yes. you know, to to comprehend groups of people that big.

[00:08:45]>> Yes.

[00:08:45]>> And the first time when you see something that really resonates with people.

[00:08:49]>> Yes.

[00:08:50]>> Not a person that I've ever met or person that I've met has ever met, but people that are degrees and degrees of freedom removed and they see this idea and they're like, "Oh, I could see how that could fit into my life."

[00:09:01]>> A lot of what you're talking about is interesting and I wouldn't have thought of it is you're talking about again field testing and watching how people interact, the personal connection. How much were you kind of looking at, you know, different anecdotes or or or specific use cases versus the data?

[00:09:18]Because you also had a lot, you know, I'm sure you had a lot of numbers coming in. And how does an innovator [clears throat] balance that?

[00:09:22]>> I think it's quantitative and qualitative, right? They're they're two sides of the same coin. So, the simplest way is you you use or at least I we would use the qualitative side for hypothesis generation. We interviewed 10 people, >> one-on-one interviews, and we kept hearing this thing. Y >> and then you say, hey, maybe all of our maybe a large portion of our customers feel this way. So the the qualitative insights would often times be the place where you get a lot of the ideas and then use data to see if this is a phenomenon that a lot of people really care about. One final thing on this, I think the reason I think this was such a differentiator for our company was it was fundamentally about this generation of people, >> right? like young people when we started the company we felt were fundamentally underserved. Their finances were different than what the products that were out there were built for. You know, if you talk to somebody that's in their 20s, >> the legacy banks took it for granted that they'd have to use them and eventually it get interesting to them, but they weren't that interested in small little accounts or >> Yeah. Well, if you're in your 20s and you're you're talking about, you know, this is a product for somebody that's five years plus or minus from retirement, like those are just totally different needs. Right.

[00:10:36]>> Right. And the the thing there was we kind of believed it was important for people to start caring about their finances even if retirement was decades away.

[00:10:48]>> Because you got to you got to understand how this stuff works and you got to invest in yourself.

[00:10:52]>> Of course, the easiest way to retire is to start early. Start early and you're not going to have a problem. It's the people who start late that have a problem. How did you you mentioned a couple times you and the team and you know you guys are working late and how do you when you're an innovator and you're in early stages build a team of innovators. What are you looking for? I I think there's and like I I'm kind of living this again right now and it's it's interesting because the kind of people that thrive in those environments, they tend to be they tend to be kind of unusual characters, right?

[00:11:25]And um for example, in the early days of Robin Hood, there were several people that either that stopped out of school, they stopped out of college to for the first time, super early career, unproven folks that we that we saw grow become like great leaders, right? Very different from the corporate world. Like you don't see a, you know, college dropout being the head of anything, >> right? Right.

[00:11:47]>> Um and and I'm kind of living that again right now, uh with my new company, Cowboy Space Corporation.

[00:11:55]Um, yeah, the kind of people that that are innovative, that really thrive in that early environment, they've got a a certain sense of, as I think we as the entrepreneurs did, the sense of you don't know what you don't know and you're willing to try stuff, right?

[00:12:10]>> And you're willing to fail.

[00:12:11]>> You're willing to fail. Exactly.

[00:12:13]>> What about now? You guys attracted a lot of attention. There was controversy. I mean, you're you're dealing in a heavily regulated, you know, multi-trillion dollar, you know, a lot of the legacy companies were throwing money at you guys. How did you navigate that as an innovator?

[00:12:26]>> US controversy.

[00:12:28][laughter] >> What What are you talking about?

[00:12:31]>> Never heard it. Never never experienced that. I mean, look, it was it was one of the defining challenges of of the early days, right? It was a very disruptive company and we made we did the hard work. We did the investment in actually building the company out, making our systems reliable, staffing up with the, you know, the regulatory officials, appliance folks, all those sides of the business to make it the durable company that that it is, right? And it's it's work that we continue to invest in and view as very important. But yeah, as an early stage company, we had to we had to grow it pretty quickly. related question. You know, the famous, you know, move fast and break things, but yet you're in a field again where you're dealing with people's money, people's, you know, their trading, their their their life savings. How do you balance speed versus safety, especially in an area like yours that's not life and death like healthcare, but life it's life or death financially if you put everything you got into Robin Hood account.

[00:13:29]>> Yeah, it's really important, right? I mean, this is why we invested in >> But you got to move, you know, your company needs to move fast. So >> yeah, I mean moving fast is just a byproduct of the company culture, right?

[00:13:38]I think the the emphasis on moving with safety, making that one of our core values was something that we invested in pretty substantially throughout the history of the company. And look, there were times that we obviously could have done better, but we continue to improve on on all the stuff that we could have.

[00:13:56]Um it is it is very tricky as a small company because a lot of the times you know the the size of the company kind of always felt a little too small for what you're trying to do.

[00:14:06]>> Sure.

[00:14:06]>> And you have this like catch-up game of hiring people building the company as it's getting bigger.

[00:14:11]>> Yeah. You need to build a company as big as the reputation of the company that you're building into.

[00:14:16]>> Um tell me about let's talk a little bit about about cowboy space.

[00:14:22]what lessons and again I think it's really interesting for uh entrepreneurs serial entrepreneurs that's any entrepreneur should be a serial entrepreneur because things aren't like how many startups did you say you went through before you started Robin Hood >> couple >> yeah it happens and now you've got a new one how do you take the lessons and apply them so you make new mistakes but not be too burdened by the success you had and think that it's automatic in your company >> yeah I mean I think this is different enough that I >> tell us about the company first and then I'll >> Absolutely. So, new company I started um about two years ago. Uh recently renamed it to the Cowboy Space Corporation. Yes.

[00:14:59]>> Is on a mission.

[00:15:00]>> What was the original name?

[00:15:00]>> It's called Aether Flux.

[00:15:02]>> See, just like Robin Hood, sometimes a simple name Yeah.

[00:15:05]>> can be very That tells you exactly what it's about can work. So, Dway Space Corp. Got it.

[00:15:09]>> Exactly. Started out we we're we're on a mission now to power humanity from the high frontier. So, what does that mean?

[00:15:16]We're actually building, we're solving the biggest, we think one of the biggest problems for scaling AI, which is access to energy infrastructure. And the way that we think that this problem is going to be solved is not on Earth. We think that space is kind of an inevitable destination for powering the growing and growing needs of AI. And so we're building both a fully integrated rocket launch program. We're going to be launching our own satellites to space along with a novel architecture for this concept of data centers in space where the simplest version of it is rather than having the upper stage of the rocket filled with satellites in our case we actually use the full volume and mass of the upper stage as the satellite.

[00:15:58]>> So the upper stage of the rocket unfolds and the actual fairing of the rocket becomes a giant radiator in space. you have large solar panels that deploy out to power u what will be you know a megawatt class data center satellite in space >> right >> and like I said we're doing the fully vertically integrated solution so a bold and ambitious uh goal I guess some would even say fitting of a name like Cowboy Space Corporation >> yes yes I'd say so >> um but yeah we're trailblazing our own path to the to outer space >> so how does a lesson leson from your first success translate to cowboy.

[00:16:39]>> Yeah. Uh it's a very different thing from the substance of it. Right. And first chapter of my life was building mobile products on uh sorry finance products on mobile phones. Now I'm building >> rockets and satellites for outer space.

[00:16:52]So what could possibly be related between the two of these? I think in both cases my journey at least individually as an entrepreneur was a novice to both fields coming in with uh some would say even an outlandish goal of trying to change them and revolutionize them.

[00:17:10]>> Yes. So I think in in both cases there's the there's the the way of approaching it where you're a learner as as you're building along the way >> things that translate over building teams raising capital having a mission that drives people towards doing great excellent work. Um having a constant eye towards kind of the stuff you don't know and constantly trying to derisk it or trying to address the problem. So kind of a lot of these are even lessons that I feel like I'm relearning as I'm going through the motions. But one of the hallmarks I think is like whatever the problem is at hand at a startup. You you've got so many different things to solve simultaneously. It's like pick the most important one, have an algorithm to figure out the most important one is.

[00:17:58]Try to address it. Try to address it relatively quickly and then move on to the next one. Move on to the next one.

[00:18:03]Move on to the next one. just a series of problems to be solved and next thing you know you got a unicorn. What um I think there's one more similarity in that you started Robin Hood right as kind of the mobile first >> wave was taking off and now you're right in the middle of this AI revolution. So both times you kind of were riding the you were riding a wave >> a platform. Yeah.

[00:18:25]>> In a in a transformation in a technology shift >> correct. What how do you to translate the lessons of the last technology shift to this AI revolution we're having right now?

[00:18:35]>> Yeah, I mean I got to say this one is it feels incredibly competitive. Um and I I >> and the wave feels bigger too and that last wave was big, but this thing is a monster.

[00:18:44]>> Yeah. I mean I I don't think that in the last wave there was talks of nation states being as deeply involved to just power the technology to make it happen, right? It kind of speaks to the scale of this being a lot bigger. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think in both cases these were I mean I think as much as it is an AI revolution that we're a part of, it's also the space revolution, right? And and my thesis was that space was going to be a natural place for commerce and that there were verticals of the economy that were going to natively exist on this new platform, in this case lower orbit. And my thesis has been from the beginning of the company that energy would be one of those next industries and that there would be a company built that would be an energy grid for humanity and outer space.

[00:19:28]>> Yep.

[00:19:28]>> So again sort of emerging platform and looking for how verticals the economy natively exist on this new platform.

[00:19:37]Now, that's actually pretty similar to, you know, our original thesis for Robin Hood, which is mobile is this emerging platform. And our viewpoint at the time was that there wasn't a finance product on that platform that was truly natively built, at least in the brokerage space.

[00:19:54]>> And so that was kind of, you know, again, thesis have have a little rhyme to them. Well, both times also you had the wind at your back and that you had a thesis and thesis the thesis the thesises thesisi yeah were more fundable because you're in an area where people are looking to put money so that's also probably a good lesson. Uh last question uh because I know we're running on running short on time. Uh young founder, you know, young multiple founder. I think you know you and Vlad I think we're 30 into 30. What are the lessons that young, you know, that a young innovator no matter when they're watching this can take out of trying to lean into the fact I mean it had you know I'm guessing you had a lot of disadvantages but a lot of advantages of being a young entrepreneur and you're still relatively young given the area you're playing in. What what's the takeaway in terms of somebody young watching this and the lessons they can take out of their youth?

[00:20:43]>> Yeah, don't wait. I think this is the thing that I oftentimes get approached by people that want to be entrepreneurs and they like, well, I've thought about it, you know, and like whatever the the idea is. Well, I've been tinkering on it and I think this is the right idea and I'm just waiting for the right time to do it and I just want to be like it's never going to be easier than it is literally right now. like like stop talking to me and go work on your idea like like right now go do it.

[00:21:10]>> Stop talking to me. Ask me for a seed check and go do it right now. And I I think there's a couple of things there.

[00:21:17]one is is I fundamentally think that it's never easier like the as a young person right you have the advantage of having youth and the sort of energy to run down corridors that may not be the right one in order to find the right one right so use that to your advantage number one number two the idea as you formulate it in the beginning probably is not the idea that you're going to end up with >> and and you should approach it as such like people approach entrepreneurship as like >> as um what am I saying that there's one way of doing it right like once you have the idea then you move on to execution and I find that often times the right idea comes along the way >> right could be a byproduct >> yeah so I actually have a a mental algorithm where I try to get to failure as quickly as possible and it's usually >> ideal that you don't fail But it's usually when you take the first idea and run it to its logical conclusion that maybe 80% along the way you're like you know what I don't know if this is the right idea but I'm pretty sure that after doing this like this is the real insight and you would never get there unless you just stop the conversation and literally go work on it right now.

[00:22:41]>> Love it. Well, pleasure brought. Great way to end. Young a young innovator here in the place that house of the original young innovators. Appreciate your time.

[00:22:50]Cheers. Thank you.