00:01:46 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:01:46] S0: Little bit Arnold Schwarzenegger voice. [00:01:48] S1: Little bit. Yeah. That's my French voice, I guess. So I... So working out with this guy, then COVID happens, right, which was wild. Wild. But our workouts, we keep working out, and we're, like, working out digitally. Right? So we're, like, we're doing a video chat with this guy over Zoom, and the two of us are, like, in our respective houses working out. And long story short, I was doing a workout. I was, like, basically doing bench press with free weights. Felt a little tickle in my nose. I kind of tried to go for one of these numbers, and the weight, it was this arm, starts falling backwards. And I stabilize it, but shoulder was fucked after that. And mind you, this is in COVID. And so what are you gonna do? Are you gonna go to the doctor? Like, no. So I just put my arm in a sling for a while. All this to say, like, that was kind of a bummer because I stopped being able to do push ups. Yeah. And all this started from the conversation around [00:02:44] S0: Yeah. So basically, Pavel Durov, who's the founder of Telegram, has a training regimen where he does a 100 push ups and a 100 sit ups every single day. And so before I can interview him, I am going to do a 100, you know, a 100 and a 100 every day for thirty days straight with no interruptions. Yeah. And right now we're on day five of that. [00:03:03] S1: Know? I didn't realize this was day five. You made it sound like this was day 45.
00:03:03 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[00:03:03] S1: Know? I didn't realize this was day five. You made it sound like this was day 45. [00:03:07] S0: So it's it's day, like, of getting up to the point where I can actually do a 100 a day. Okay. And now I'm doing a 100 a day, and I have for five days. So... Yeah. You... In a month, we'll be able to do this interview. Assuming I can lock in. Yeah. Do you have any other crazy stories like that? You said Jared Leto was the first... Like, one of the first investors in Robinhood? Yeah. [00:03:26] S1: Yeah. He's a he's a really he's a really, like, very intelligent human being. And also in the... In my experience, like like a modern renaissance man. He has thirty seconds to Mars. He's an actor. He's a very active tech investor. He's like a very cerebral dude. A little [00:03:44] S0: bit similar to the Chainsmokers where they just, like, started in music and want to now invest in a bunch of startups. [00:03:49] S1: Is that right? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. I guess kinda like that. But, anyways, all this to say, like, I ended up hurting my shoulder from that, and I was out of the game for a while. And after COVID, got some... Got my shoulder checked out, realized nothing was actually wrong with it. I just needed to work out more. And, I'm back in the same boat right now, actually, unfortunately. I started doing boxing, like, maybe a year and a half, two years ago, and it has wrecked my shoulders, man. Like, I can barely do push ups. It's a it's a big problem because when you're boxing, you're like you're like doing this kind of shit all the time.
00:03:49 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[00:03:49] S1: Is that right? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. I guess kinda like that. But, anyways, all this to say, like, I ended up hurting my shoulder from that, and I was out of the game for a while. And after COVID, got some... Got my shoulder checked out, realized nothing was actually wrong with it. I just needed to work out more. And, I'm back in the same boat right now, actually, unfortunately. I started doing boxing, like, maybe a year and a half, two years ago, and it has wrecked my shoulders, man. Like, I can barely do push ups. It's a it's a big problem because when you're boxing, you're like you're like doing this kind of shit all the time. [00:04:29] S0: Mhmm. [00:04:30] S1: And what you're actually doing is you're just Just torquing that. You're just... Yeah. You're just, like, compressing your shoulder the whole time. [00:04:36] S0: When I was doing, rock climbing, I started training a bunch of, what is it, like, crimping? [00:04:41] S1: Mhmm. [00:04:41] S0: And at one point, I decided that it would be smart for me to train two finger crimps because you have to do like pockets. [00:04:47] S1: Yeah. [00:04:48] S0: And of course, if you do this, you kind of can like basically put strain here. So I go do that and immediately just tear both my both my hands, like the muscles attaching those two things. [00:04:58] S1: Did you?
00:04:58 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[00:04:58] S1: Did you? [00:04:59] S0: And... And it was like, what was interesting is it takes so long for that to fully heal that I would wait, you know, I did this like three or four times where I waited a month. I completely chilled for an entire month. And then I tried something again, got a little too overconfident after thirty minutes of nothing happening, tore it again. And I did this like four or five times, and I finally healed it by just not rock climbing at all for like six months straight. [00:05:22] S1: It's because you're you're young blood, man. You heal all that stuff quickly. [00:05:26] S0: Six months, it feels like a long [00:05:28] S1: ass time. Yeah. I'm thinking about like what would happen if I rip hand muscles. I don't know if they'd ever heal at this point. Yeah. Be out of commission for, like, two years. Yeah. But I'm glad I'm glad they're healed. That's, like, that's a big deal. [00:05:39] S0: Yeah. That's one of those things where when it happens, you're kinda questioning, like, will it heal properly? [00:05:44] S1: Yeah. Yeah. [00:05:45] S0: But, yeah, Let's jump to like company culture and talk a little bit about that. Most of the people that I've interviewed have only been working on like a hard tech company. You've actually had like this full transition from starting a software, starting a fintech, building up that culture to, like, many thousands of people Yeah. And suddenly now you're jumping to a hardware startup. What's the difference? What have you learned?
00:06:05 · Baiju Bhatt
[00:06:05] S1: Yeah. I think the biggest thing is is that there's a lot more distinct disciplines here. Mhmm. Right? Because in building a software company, Robinhood, like, the the core kinds of people that you'd have there... That we had there were, you know, front end engineers to, like, mobile engineers. Right? So Android engineers, web engineers, iOS engineers, then back end software engineers. So database engineers, like people building the APIs, you know, DevOps, all that stuff. Then you have a whole bunch of compliance and regulatory people, legal people. And for us, a big focus was on design and product design. And so we had, like, a a small but mighty, like, design team, which was people doing visual design, brand design, but also research. Right? So people that are professional behavioral researchers because we spend a ton of time going out and interviewing customers. To me, that was always kind of the north star of, like, how you differentiate a good idea versus a bad idea. Because the north star there is like, is it something that's useful for customers? Right? So how do you know if something's useful for customers? You... When you talk to customers, I think... So this is kind of like the the culture there. And obviously, a lot of other functions, like tons of customer support people, operations people, finance people. Right? But on the engineering side, it's different here because there's more specialization. Right? Because there's embedded software engineering. There's, like, optomechanical engineering. There's a thermal engineer sitting right behind you. There's, like, a lot of there's a lot of, like, much more unrelated fields. Right? So you have, like, people that come from mechanical, you know Mechanical backgrounds. Yeah. Mechanical backgrounds, people from electrical backgrounds, people from computer science backgrounds. And then you have laser people. You have optics people, which are sometimes also mechanical people. So the the kind of engineering, there's a lot more different kinds of engineering. But that's kinda like some of the functional stuff. In terms of culture of how do you... Like, how does the company... What's the operating system for the company? One of the things that I found is, kind of universally true is when people are having fun, when people are, like, legitimately enjoying themselves, they will go above and beyond.
00:08:35 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
Right? And so that not only that though, but when people are having a good time and they're actually enjoying what they're doing, there's like, there's another really interesting benefit that comes from it, which is that people tend to be more creative in my experience. [00:08:53] S0: Yeah. I think I think there's been kind of some studies, on this where if you have... If you... If you're in, like, a... Even, like, a fear state, you... Your creativity shrinks way down. And if you're very calm and, like, comfortable and happy, you're much... Like, your mind flows in a whole bunch of different ways. [00:09:11] S1: It does. It's also... Like, one of the things I've kind of found related to that is when people are... They're they're having a good time, they're enjoying what they're doing, You tend to get more ideas out of people. Like, if people feel comfortable, like, actually that they enjoy what they're doing and they're working hard, you get the quiet people to speak up a little bit more. Right? And you get the people to, like, actually vocalize the halfway formed ideas. You know what I mean? And, like, those are ideas where it's like, I don't know if this is a good idea or not. [00:09:42] S0: Taking risk by sharing it, and it's like basically lowering the barrier for them to feel like they can. [00:09:47] S1: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And if you hear a good idea, you're like, no. That's a great idea, or that's the kernel of something that, like, could be a really interesting idea.