00:38:17 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:38:17] S0: Okay. What's an example? [00:38:20] S1: Oh my gosh. So get your failures out of the quickly. The the example of this that's the most obvious one to me is the story that led up to Robinhood. So a lot of people don't know that Robinhood, as you see it today was not the first app that we built. We built an app before that. So, Ryan, the story. There's a point in time where, you know, my co founder and I were starting Robinhood. We were not consumer tech people. We were like math and physics nerds that were doing computerized trading stuff. And we were reminded by a lot of VCs early on that we had no idea what the fuck we were doing and that we were probably not going to be terribly successful at building consumer products. And they were wrong. But... And so there was this there was this, like, question of, like, how do you go from not knowing how to make a consumer product to being good at it ideally? Like, how do you learn the thing? And one really sage piece of advice that I got early on was, like, get your failures out of the way quickly. And so what does that mean? It means like, don't be too precious with the idea. Just try it. Even if the idea is not perfect, you're gonna learn way more by going from like, by completing the loop. So from like idea to, like, finished version of it to did the finished version when released to the market work or not work. Right? It's [00:39:45] S0: like the the Brian r... Armstrong thing where he says action produces information. [00:39:49] S1: Action produces information? Yeah. That's a smart thing to say.
00:39:49 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[00:39:49] S1: Action produces information? Yeah. That's a smart thing to say. [00:39:53] S0: Yeah. [00:39:53] S1: Yeah. That's a that's a very succinct way of putting it up. My version of it is get your failures out of the way quickly. So in the example of Robinhood, we were, like, in the process of trying to get our broker dealer license so that we could release the thing that people use today. There was a period of time where we didn't have it, and we're like, but we still want to make a mobile app, so we can start to kind of build some of the functionality that's not the brokerage stuff, but, like, you know, maybe just news and content, like adjacent things. So we built this app called Analyst, which we then renamed to Robinhood. [00:40:29] S0: Why'd you name it Analyst? [00:40:32] S1: I don't know. [00:40:32] S0: Just a reason? Just random? [00:40:34] S1: It wasn't... [00:40:34] S0: Yeah. Thinking financial stocks Analysts. Analysts. [00:40:37] S1: Yeah. Again, like Okay. Get your failures out of the way quickly. We picked a name and then ended up realizing that there was a better name called Robinhood. But that app, we released it on the App Store, and this is out there. It was, like, 2013. It's publicly out there. And I remember where, like... It was, like, you know, I think we called it your stock market companion, if I'm remembering correctly. That was the tagline for it. We announce it, and we get some people to use it. And I remember seeing the usage of how many people are, like, continuing to use it after that first announcement just sort of
00:40:37 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[00:40:37] S1: Yeah. Again, like Okay. Get your failures out of the way quickly. We picked a name and then ended up realizing that there was a better name called Robinhood. But that app, we released it on the App Store, and this is out there. It was, like, 2013. It's publicly out there. And I remember where, like... It was, like, you know, I think we called it your stock market companion, if I'm remembering correctly. That was the tagline for it. We announce it, and we get some people to use it. And I remember seeing the usage of how many people are, like, continuing to use it after that first announcement just sort of [00:41:13] S0: asymptotes to zero [00:41:16] S1: asymptotes to a non to not to a non zero number. And we're like, that was wrong. What did we learn from that? We tried to build something that did everything. It's like, well, can read your news here and you can also like share your opinion on stocks. You can rate stocks. You can think how they're going to do. There's like a social component. Is the old this is the old analyst slash Robinhood app. And the learning from that was that's not really how people used mobile products back then. Right. And the mental model I kind of gleaned from that through trial and error was like actually the way people think about apps on their phones is they think about them as like functional buttons, right? Like this is the map button, this is the calculator button, this is the weather button. [00:42:09] S0: You get some distinct like, concrete understandable value by taking this action, opening this action.
00:42:09 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:42:09] S0: You get some distinct like, concrete understandable value by taking this action, opening this action. [00:42:14] S1: Yeah. Like, what does the button do? Right? And so the button was like, this is the stock market button. That's kind of the idea that we had, or this is the button that I press when I wanna buy stocks. This is the button I press when I wanna see my stocks. And so if that's what you're trying to do, just do that. And so we ended up the then you can look you can look up the earliest versions of Robinhood was this incredibly reductive take on what it was. It was your account value at the top, a sparkline, and a list of the stocks that you owned or that you were following. [00:42:48] S0: And Nothing else.
00:42:48 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:42:48] S0: And Nothing else. [00:42:49] S1: That was kind of the main thing. Right? We put a lot of the other functionality behind the sort of like hamburger button that, you know, the old design language of the hamburger button that leads to the basement. So that's where like the the the majority of the functionality was. But we kind of realized that if people were going to use this, they were going to use it as a stock market button, very different than where we started. And the first thing didn't work. So that was like a good mental model of like, if you... If you're doing something for the... This is what I say to myself, like, Baiju, if you're doing something for the first time, don't be too precious with the idea. Just, like, see the idea through to completion. And by doing so, you're so much more likely to figure out what the actual thing that has a really, really important impact is that you would have never gotten to if you didn't just like knucklehead your way through the first thing. [00:43:45] S0: I kind of like this. So you're basically saying as soon as you have an idea, you're just automatically saying, this is probably wrong, but I'm going to run with it. And I'm gonna go down like... I... The the way that I think about... I think I've kinda [00:43:56] S1: explained this. This is like this is not wrong. Yeah.
00:43:56 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[00:43:56] S1: explained this. This is like this is not wrong. Yeah. [00:43:58] S0: Yeah. The way that I've... The way that I think about it is I try to walk like three steps down the path and then see how I'm feeling. If I like the thing, that's great. If I don't, I just turn around, come back, walk another three steps in another direction, and keep on doing that until you basically find the right thing. It's honestly a little bit like a maze, kind of. Yep. Where you're basically running down one side, you're like, shit. Hit it at end. Walk back to where I came. Run down the next path. [00:44:22] S1: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's actually pretty pretty spot on. Like, you have this, like, big, thorny problem that you have to unravel and, like, make sense of. How are you gonna do that? Are you gonna do it by, like, just thinking about it and, like, looking at it and being like, well, that's [00:44:37] S0: It'd be like it'd be like you're at the start of a maze, you're just trying to think through all the different paths, but you haven't actually had any contact with the enemy. Like, you haven't seen which are... Which places are the dead end. [00:44:46] S1: Start getting the new place.