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.
00:44:46 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[00:44:46] S1: Start getting the new place. [00:44:47] S0: Yeah. What paths are the most, like, distinct? So that's the that's the first one. You basically come in with this idea of we're gonna build the everything app for finance, kind of. You know, you're gonna get your finance news, you're gonna get your stocks, you're gonna get your information here, you're gonna be able to trade. And then you basically dial it back. And I like the whole simplicity. You figure out, like, what is the specific thing that my customers are gonna click on my app for? And we're just gonna do that really well. And then we'll hide everything that isn't that thing behind, you know, basically a bunch of buttons that you have to click, and it's not... It's kind of invisible at that point. [00:45:18] S1: It's it's all there. It's like it's it's it's not so much hiding as much as it is focusing. Right? Like, is what is the 80% use case? If that's the 80% use case, your form and function, right? The form should match that function, right? Now, if you take the 20% of use cases and you treat them like they're 80% use cases, you're not mapping to the way people actually will want to interact with it most of the time. Yeah. You still want the stuff there, and you still want it easily accessible. You wanna think through all that stuff, but, like, people are gonna have very specific usage patterns or in our case, like, they look at it and they put it down. Right?
00:45:18 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[00:45:18] S1: It's it's all there. It's like it's it's it's not so much hiding as much as it is focusing. Right? Like, is what is the 80% use case? If that's the 80% use case, your form and function, right? The form should match that function, right? Now, if you take the 20% of use cases and you treat them like they're 80% use cases, you're not mapping to the way people actually will want to interact with it most of the time. Yeah. You still want the stuff there, and you still want it easily accessible. You wanna think through all that stuff, but, like, people are gonna have very specific usage patterns or in our case, like, they look at it and they put it down. Right? [00:45:58] S0: What have been the other big moments where you just decided to take action, try things out, take shots on goal, go down that maze, and then realized it was just dead end and you needed to walk back? [00:46:09] S1: I mean, this feels a lot like that right now. I don't know that we're walking down a dead end to the maze, but like [00:46:14] S0: You're walking down some path and it's unclear. [00:46:16] S1: Yeah. Like, how are we gonna build an an energy grid in orbit? Well, it's like, well, the first idea... And I think this is kind of relevant. It's like the first idea is like, well, we're going to pattern match the way that things in space have done before through this, like, DOD and then a commercialization approach. And, like, is this necessarily the be all end all of what we're going to be doing in ten years? We'll have to figure it out.