Name: Entrepreneur Baiju Bhatt Got 70 "Nos" While Trying to Build Robinhood
Uploaded: 2026-06-24T15:50:00Z
Duration: 13 min 34 s
Description: Baiju Bhatt spent years leading Robinhood, turning a scrappy start-up into a powerhouse brokerage. The co-founder reflects on the journey to its IPO.

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Baiju Bhatt spent years leading Robinhood, turning a scrappy start-up into a powerhouse brokerage. The co-founder reflects on the journey to its IPO. Photo: Sean Havey

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260626/88a8ddfe-d8e0-4640-916e-61f1b39bbb45/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Baiju Bhatt spent years leading Robinhood, turning a scrappy start-up into a powerhouse brokerage. The co-founder reflects on the journey to its IPO.

Entrepreneur Baiju Bhatt Got 70 "Nos" While Trying to Build Robinhood

Narrator: I was taking a look at the market value of your Robinhood shares. What was it like to lose a billion dollars within just months?

Baiju: Gosh, kind of hard to look at that. I would say that it stung, but at the time, we had a lot of work to do. That was more of a pride hit, right? There was a lot of sort of climbing back up that we knew we had to do, and we kind of were in a position where we're like, "How do we do this?"

Narrator: Baiju Bhatt came into billions after co-founding Robinhood Markets with his college roommate, Vlad Tenev. But now he's starting over to chase a childhood dream in space. He recently launched Cowboy Space Corporation, which at the time of filming, went by Aetherflux. Bhatt invited us to his new headquarters in San Carlos, California to talk about how he manages his money, how he enjoys it, and why a billionaire would choose to become a beginner again. I mean, I've covered individual investing for years, and there have never been as many Americans invested in the stock market as there are today.

Baiju: No.

Narrator: And I think that's in part because of apps like Robinhood, right? You guys really kind of started that movement. Before that though, you had a few failed companies. Tell me about those.

Baiju: I did, yeah. I was working at a high frequency trading slash hedge fund, so I did, I worked there a little less than a year, and then quickly realized that I was a, not much of a corporate creature. It was either like gonna be an academic, or I was gonna start a company. Called up Vlad, I was like, "Hey, should we, do you wanna start a company with me?" And eventually he said, yes. We packed our bags and moved to New York. We had this like Maroon Infinity Q45 that we drove across the country, and that thing broke down on us big time on the way and.

Narrator: I love that.

Baiju: Led to the sort of like fun, you know, early twenties adventures and mishaps. There were some bumps along the way. The first companies didn't do so well.

Narrator: Yes.

Baiju: But you know, we stuck with it and eventually this like light bulb went off in our head where like, there's a real gap with retail participation. And this kind of happened around the Occupy Wall Street time. I remember like we were around New York when that was happening, and we kind of looked around at other people of our generation that were really frustrated with the financial system, thought the whole system was broken. Not enough people were participating in kind of the financial system. But the other answer that we kind of always saw was what if we could get more people to participate and we could have more people share in that upward economic mobility? I think it sometimes takes an outsider looking in with the perspective of like, no, actually participating in America's financial system is not a bad thing. It's like actually the, you know, very directly, it's the envy of the world. And our generation of young people, we should make tools that make it straightforward for them to be a part of the system and to Robinhood.

Narrator: Raising money for a new startup is hard. How many meetings did you guys take before you got any seed funding for Robinhood?

Baiju: Way too many.

Narrator: How many?

Baiju: I think 70 or 75.

Narrator: 75 meetings.

Baiju: Yeah. Might've been more, might've been less, but it was failure and rejection after failure and rejection. You know, we would get the feedback. It's like, you know, "You don't know how to build a consumer product. You know, you're a math guy, you're a physics guy, like young people never wanna invest. They don't wanna invest now. What makes you think that's gonna be different?" You can take that stuff and really let it set you back, or you can like assess it with like a sober set of eyes and be like, "What do we need to do differently?" Like, should we dig our heels in, or should we like take into consideration some of this feedback? But the through line was just like, I'm not gonna give up.

Narrator: I mean, like, what is the 60th meeting like?

Baiju: This is the thing is you don't always hear, "No." Most of the in-betweens were either no reply or.

Narrator: No, you were ghosted.

Baiju: Or my favorite one was, "We're gonna cheer you from the sidelines."

Narrator: Oh my god.

Baiju: And you're like, you know, it's a polite thing to say, but like on the 60th one, you're like, "I absolutely don't want to hear that. Just be like, I don't like your idea, and I'm passing because I don't like your idea."

Narrator: I'm sorry, that's really funny.

Baiju: And so then at some point, I remember there was like a little meme amongst our inner circles, where we'd be like, "Are you a big fan? How big of a fan? Like what kind of airflow is this fan producing?" These are the aspects of being an entrepreneur that most people don't see, right? Because until you're successful, frankly, nobody gives a damn.

Narrator: How do you psych yourself up to like take the next meeting, try to get that funding?

Baiju: The truth of the matter is that it gets very difficult and you kind of ask yourself like, "What am I doing wrong? Like, how, why is this not working? Like what's, what do I need to do differently here?" For Robinhood, the big thing that made it real was when we got our first sort of brokerage application approved to actually be able to do a broker dealer, which you know, was Robinhood and then the original wait list behind the product.

Narrator: Yeah, which really took off, right?

Baiju: Which really took off, yeah. There was a lot of, you know, very deliberate kind of like methodical approach to how do you figure out what people want? We would like scour things like Craigslist for people that would, if you give 'em like 30, 50 bucks, they'd come in and test your product. And we would try to line up four or five people on Friday afternoon to come in and just like use our product. So say I was putting an early version of Robinhood in front of you. Be like, "Okay, like what do you think of this?" You know, say it's like a piece of paper with like a description of the product on it and you read it. And a lot of the times, if you don't ask the right questions, people will be like, "That's nice." And you're like, "Well, what the heck does that mean?" And I think one of the ways that you get the insights is you ask targeted questions. Like you're like, "Well, what does this thing do?" Right?

Narrator: Yeah.

Baiju: How would you describe this to somebody that you know? If you put it in your own words, does it read or sound anything like what's on the prototype that we made, or are you just interpreting it totally differently? In that example, when you start to see the way people describe it get closer and closer to the way that you talk about it, you're like, okay, at a baseline, this is understandable and you can kind of go deeper and say, "Would you be likely to try something like this?" Or like, "Why would you try this?" Or, "What would be reasons why you wouldn't try this?"

Narrator: How did you think of doing that?

Baiju: There's a word for this like customer research or user research. And the original push to kind of think about this came from working with Google Ventures. Google Ventures was the one very early VC that we're like, "Yeah, let's bet on these two guys." And they're like, "Well, we have this portfolio of resources to help you build your company." And we're like, "Yeah, we'll use that for sure."

Narrator: So you learn that there is this product market fit. People wanna use your product, and things really take off from there, right? It gets easier for you to raise money?

Baiju: Yeah.

Narrator: Once you have that initial seed funding, and you guys started growing really quickly and then you hit some growing pains, right? You run into some regulatory troubles. Was there a moment during that growth period where you were like, "Hey, we really fumbled that. We should have known, we should have known better."

Baiju: It's impossible to not feel that way, right? And we had a lot of challenges as we were growing up as a company, very publicly documented a lot of the times. The mission of the company was to build a product that empowered a generation of Americans to be a part of the financial system. And to do that, to be honest to that mission, we had to do it in a way that earned the trust for our customers, regulators, the broader marketplace.

Narrator: Yeah.

Baiju: And I think that was the one part that was always really unifying. It's like, why do we exist? Like why do we do this?

Narrator: The COVID pandemic happens.

Baiju: Yeah.

Narrator: And that really becomes your moment.

Baiju: Yeah.

Narrator: People are stuck at home, they're turning to the financial markets. They have nothing to do but trade stocks, options, crypto.

Baiju: And "Tiger King."

Narrator: They turn to Robinhood. And that's really where your growth started to take off.

Baiju: Yep.

Narrator: And I found it really interesting that kind of shortly after that, you decided to step away from the CEO role. Tell me about that.

Baiju: Like I said, we started the company together. We were co-CEOs through the history of the company. And I think especially during that COVID time, it was a lot of like reflecting and soul searching and kind of asking the question like, "Where are my priorities gonna be going forward? Like what did I really care about?" I loved Robinhood, and I wanted to see Robinhood succeed.

Narrator: Yeah.

Baiju: There was also a part of me that wanted to have a little bit more time to spend with my family, right? Actually during that time, I think one of the real passion projects of mine was I built a car. And so.

Narrator: During COVID?

Baiju: Yeah.

Narrator: Okay.

Baiju: So kind of, you know, in the fix of leading Robinhood.

Narrator: Yeah.

Baiju: During that period of time, my sort of creative muse on the side was I was building a, like a race car in my garage. I felt like through a large part of my twenties, like a lot of my personal life was just put on the shelf to do work. Asked my co-founder if he wanted to take on the CEO role for the next chapter.

Narrator: And then Robinhood goes public.

Baiju: Yep. That's so cool. That's so cool.

Narrator: You know, you have shares in Robinhood. They haven't been liquid for a while. All of a sudden, I believe, they're worth some $2 billion. What was that like? Did you buy a new car?

Baiju: I did buy a car after IPO, I absolutely did.

Narrator: What car was that?

Baiju: I bought an F40, a Ferrari F40.

Narrator: Tell me about it.

Baiju: That's like the it car as a kid. It was the last car that Enzo Ferrari sort of was.

Narrator: Wow.

Baiju: Personally involved with. I believe it was, you know, first or second car to hit 200 miles an hour. It has this like fantastical presence and look to it.

Narrator: What color is it?

Baiju: It's red, obviously.

Narrator: Love it, love it.

Baiju: Bright red.

Narrator: And did it feel like you had kind of made it?

Baiju: Yeah, I did. I think also I thought about the journey through the course of my life. I think that's kind of maybe the biggest takeaway from going public, right, was the journey to get there. Because my parents were there. I'm an only child, and my family came to the US from India. My dad had this dream to study physics. We had a very loving household, but we were by no means like, you know, extraordinarily well to do. And looking back to their lives in India, right, like I remember hearing stories of like how my parents grew up.

Narrator: Same with my parents. They moved here in the eighties and yeah, they came here to pursue the American dream.

Baiju: Yeah.

Narrator: So that really resonates.

Baiju: I got to that point in life, and I remember looking back and being like, if my grandparents were here, like could they even imagine that their grandchild did this?

Narrator: Right.

Baiju: And also, my first son had been born at that point. And I remember thinking to myself, I'm like, "Look at how the arc of history has brought me to this point, right?"

Narrator: To put all this into context, Robinhood goes public and then a few years later, you decide to step back and stay as a board member.

Baiju: Correct.

Narrator: But step down from your duties at Robinhood. What led you to do that?

Baiju: I had had this dream of wanting to do space for a long time.

Narrator: Okay.

Baiju: And I remember I kind of got to the point where I'd been thinking about this idea of like, what are the next commercial opportunities in space? And is this the right time to kind of make it happen? I mean, here we stand with these big American murals in the background and off camera, you can hear some machinery squeaking in the back.

Narrator: We're in Aetherflux, of course. Yeah.

Baiju: Yeah, we're building solar powered AI data centers in space. And we're doing sort of design of the architecture and what that actually looks like. How do we scale this to the size that's really relevant for the, you know, almost insatiable needs of artificial intelligence?

Narrator: Right 'cause it takes up so much power.

Baiju: It does.

Narrator: And it's expanding so quickly, yeah.

Baiju: I started this company with the idea that collecting power in orbit was this untapped natural resource for humanity because of the abundance of space in space. And the fact that if you're in the right orbits, you can have solar panels. They're gonna be illuminated by the sun nearly continuously. And so you kind of address one of the major shortcomings with the way solar power works. Growing up around the space industry, one of the frustrating parts was I felt like the space race had been won, and our generation had lost because through all of our childhoods, space was not a part of the human consciousness or the American consciousness. And the way that I remember reading about it in the 1960s and thinking to myself like, "Gosh, if this ever happens again, I wanna be a part of it." Then, you know, 2015, onward, once SpaceX started being able to launch reasonable rockets, I was like, remember feeling like literal, like, you know, like my heart started beating like, "Is this gonna happen in my lifetime? And if it is, and if I'm not a part of this, like, man, I'm going to, that's gonna be a deep, deep regret later on in life."