20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product

Baiju Bhatt is the Co-Founder and CEO at RobinHood, the wildly successful stock market trading app with absolutely no commission fees. Since launching RobinHood there have been many amazing milestones including being awarded an Apple Design Award (first Finch company ever to achieve this), funding from the likes of Index, Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and even movie star Jared Leto. They were also nominated for best mobile app at The Crunchies by TechCrunch this year.

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Baiju made his way into the world of tech and came to found RobinHood?

2.) How did Baiju deal with the regulatory hurdles heading into the fintech and trading world?

3.) How did Baiju go about building the waitlist for RobinHood to 1m people? What were the defining strategies and channels that made the difference?

4.) What is the thesis behind the design of RobinHood? Will this design enable previously untouched markets to tap into the growing trading market?

5.) What are the biggest challenges for Baiju and RobinHood going forward? What keeps Baiju up at night? What is Baiju's biggest piece of advice to a founder scaling their startup?

6.) How can early stage founders really determine whether they have product market fit and what does this look like? What re the metrics required to suggest serious traction?

Items Mentioned In Today's Show:

Baiju's Fave Blog or Newsletter: TechCrunch

Baiju's Fave Productivity Tool: Slack

Baiju's Fave Book: The Case For Mars