Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt on the top two problems start-ups face
Robinhood’s Baiju Bhatt’s said that the two biggest challenges he faces in running the investing start-up are maintaining talent and thinking long-term.
Speaking with JP Mangalindan at Yahoo Finance’s All Market Summit: Crypto in San Francisco on Thursday, the trading app’s co-founder and co-CEO said, “One of the biggest ones is obviously hiring and retaining really exceptional talent — that’s probably the singular challenge.”
Another top priority: Making sure the company is moving at a pace that’s quick yet sustainable and forward-looking.
“I think its very easy to try to launch things too quickly and do things too quickly and not pay attention to the details along the way,” he said.
“One of the things we say a lot internally is that we take money really seriously. While we should be moving very quickly and building great products for our consumers, it should never come at the expense of security, uptime, things like that.”
The company launched commission-free stock trading through an app three years ago, and in May, Robinhood told CNBC in an interview said that it had 4 million brokerage accounts on the platform, beating out rival E-Trade. In February, Bhatt launched Robinhood Crypto, which allows customers to buy and sell bitcoin and ether commission-free.
“When we first announced it, we had over a million people sign up to use Robinhood Crypto in the first couple of days,” said Bhatt.
What’s next? Over the past few months, Robinhood has launched cryptocurrency trading in 16 states (AZ, CA, CO, FL, IN, MA, MI, MS, MO, MT, NM, PA, TX, UT, VA, WI). Bhatt said the company is currently working with legislatures so that it can expand to other states as well.
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