Baiju Bhatt, Robinhood Co-Founder, On Democratizing Finance For The Masses

Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt has always believed in thinking big — but what most people don’t see is the grit and pain it took to get there. In this episode, Baiju shares his personal story: growing up as the son of Indian immigrants, watching his father’s health fail, and being an overweight kid who turned to running as a way to take control of his life. That mental toughness became the foundation for everything — from co-founding Robinhood and changing how millions interact with finance, to now launching a new company, Aetherflux, with a mission to build an energy grid in space. It sounds like science fiction, but Baiju is proving it’s possible. He and Kate talk about the pressure immigrant kids carry, how movement helps him stay grounded while building high-stakes companies, and why belief in your own ideas is the only way to survive as a founder. If you’ve ever doubted yourself, felt like the outsider, or dreamed something people said was impossible — this episode is for you.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
What is Up? Runner Gang, Welcome back to Post ran High.
Today's episode is with Baju Bot, the co founder of
robin Hood and someone who helped change the way an
entire generation thinks about money. If you're new here, this
podcast is all about inspiring conversations that start with movement,
because we believe movement opens people up and weighs nothing
else does. And today we kicked things off with a
run through the streets of New York before sitting down

(00:27):
to talk. And I have to mention that it was
one hundred and three degrees fahrenheit when we did our run,
so we were exhausted by the time we got to
this conversation. But I promise it's a good one. Baju's
story is one a vision, risk and reinvention. He co
founded Robinhood in twenty thirteen with a bold idea make
investing accessible to everyone, not just Wall Street insiders. Since then,

(00:47):
he's seen it all hypergrowth, cultural shifts, criticism, and countless
moments that help shape the modern fintech landscape. In this conversation,
we talk about where that original spark came from, what
it was like building through chaos, and how he's thinking
about purpose now. A few chapters later, we get into
his early life, his immigrant family roots, his friendship with
co founder Vlad, and what he's learned about leadership, humility

(01:10):
and doing the work that really matters. We have great
episodes coming up, so please make sure you follow the
show wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's get
our Post Run High going, baj you bought welcome to

(01:32):
Post Run High.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Thanks for having me and thanks for like actually challenging
me to do that. That was wild. That was super hot.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
One hundred and three degrees outside, guys, heat wave in
New York. We ran from fid Eye over the Brooklyn Bridge.
How are you feeling feel.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
A lot better now? I definitely dunked a whole thing
of water in my head, which I mean, you gotta
do what you gotta do.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
Right. Well, you look great now. We I always tell
people coming on, I'm like bringing out fit change because
you just never know. And honestly, with this weather, I'm
going to be strongly encouraging it because I'm so glad
you had a change of clothes because guys, we were
very sweaty.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
Not only did I bring a change of clothes, I
brought my Tupac shirt. So I brought the beef with me.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Yeah, yeah, you brought the energy.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
I feel like we're learning a lot about your personality.
You've got the cat ring, the Tupac. Sure, we've got
the man bun. I'm loving it.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yeah, nice and sweaty man bun.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
Well, let's talk a little bit about what movement looks
like in your life right now. I know we covered
it a bit on the Running Interview show, but let's
bring it back go a little deeper. What do you
love to do to work out?

Speaker 2 (02:37):
As pretty overweight as a kid. Actually, I kind of
got to mention that a little bit in the run,
but growing up as my family moved here from India
and my parents my dad eat a little bit of
meat in India, but my mom was vegetarian. And then
you kind of like this is like eighties and nineties.
You go from that to American food, which it kind

(02:57):
of shows. The reason I mentioned that is my parents
are pretty small, like five five to one.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Oh wow, they're small, you're tall.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Yeah, it's that American food. It made me really big.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
And do you think that that's a factor totally?

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, there's probably there's some genetics in there. My grandpa
is kind of tall. Both my grandparents were kind of tall.
Grandfathers were pretty tall, my grandmothers were very small. But no,
it's it's kind of cool to see me next to
my parents. I'm way taller than them. The flip side
of that was I was eating American food and I
was pretty heavy set as a kid, And so when

(03:32):
I got to high school, I kind of had this
moment where I, I'll be honest, I got teased, like
I had some people say some pretty like mean things
to me, and I was like, okay, I need to.
I took it kind of personally. I'm like, all right,
I need to. I can't. I can't live my life
like this. And there was a summer between tenth grade

(03:53):
and eleventh grade where I lost like almost seventy pounds.
So I went from like I just look like a
totally different person at the end. I also grew my
hair out for the first time then, and a lot
of that happened from running. And when you're that heavy, right,
it's like you're really pushing through and like the mental
toughness that you have to have to be like, no,

(04:16):
it really sucks right now, I'm not actually in shape.
I can't actually run, but if I don't do this,
I'm not going to get in shape, right, And you
kind of have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing.
So that's how I went from being big old kid
to being a little string bean by the time I
got to junior year of high school. And then after that,

(04:36):
it's kind of been this thing that's been a constant
in my life where for the first couple of years
after that, I felt like my body wanted to immediately
go back to its original weight, right, Like, if you
lose a bunch of weight, it's pretty hard to keep
it off.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
There's like a science to that, right.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yeah. I did not think about the science of it
at all. I just kind of lived it. But by
the time I got to call it, I was a runner.
Like I would run almost every day. I would run
five miles and then it takes some days off, but
I would like run five miles most days. And as

(05:12):
I've gotten older, it's like one of these things that
I keep coming back to that, Like if you ever
need to think about something or you're kind of stuck
on a problem, we're talking about this a little bit.
When you're running right, Going out for run is a
great way to just kind of reset the brain and
take all those thoughts that it's kind of like you
get to unpack them in front of you and be like, Okay,
these pieces fit together like this in your mind. Yeah.

(05:37):
So it's been a pretty common part of my life
since then.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
One of the main inspirations behind starting this sprunning interview
show and the podcast post run High was based on
the fact that there's so many inspiring and successful people
that run. You guys live such busy lives. I love
knowing that you fit in time to go for a
run because I think it is so important to have
kind of that escape when you're living a super hectic

(06:02):
life to ground yourself.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
It's also kind of like conquering your thoughts, right, It's
conquering like physical discomfort and in a like as an entrepreneur, right,
you're like trying to build this thing that you think
is going to have like this big impact on the world.
But if you can't control your own body, if you
can't control the way that you feel, there's like a

(06:25):
disconnect there, right, And I find being able to like
assert that level of sort of like discipline on your
body and say, even if it doesn't feel good, even
if it's one hundred and two degrees outside whatever, I'm
going to keep the discipline of doing this. And when
you get through doing a really hard physical thing kind
of puts the rest of the world in perspective.

Speaker 1 (06:47):
Right.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
It's not to say that like problems outside of that
are easy, but it just gives you perspective on the world.
And I think about this in the context of being
an entrepreneur because one of the things that I would
think about is I had done really hard things in life,
like I had done this thing that felt insurmountable, being
overweight like I was, and losing all that weight like

(07:09):
I I was probably like how old was I when
I was overweight? Probably like fourteen fifteen, but.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
Also an age that's very transformative for people.

Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, and I hadn't really seen myself not overweight before
I did that. And to be able to do that
right and you're like, Okay, there's a different version of
me that's in there. It gives you the confidence to
say you can change things right, You can change circumstances
in your world, especially with the backdrop of like living

(07:42):
with a you know, not being in the shape that
I wanted to be in as a kid.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
And you grew up as an only child, so it's
not like you had siblings around you that you know,
were showing you the ropes. Like you kind of had
to figure this all out on your own. Were your
parents in shape or like, was that a priority for
them or no?

Speaker 2 (08:02):
My mom was always in really good shape. My dad
had some health problems when I was a kid, and
that was a big backdrop of my childhood too. It
was tough. Parts of it were really tough. My parents
were super loving, but you know, my dad had a
bunch of health problems when I was a kid, like
right after he came to the US, which was you know,
it makes you kind of we talked about mental toughness, right,

(08:22):
like growing up in those circumstances.

Speaker 1 (08:26):
Do you mind sharing kind of like just to double
click into that, Like what types of health problems was
he struggling.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
With his kidney's failed? Oh wow, yeah, like pretty much
right when it came to the US. So a little
bit of background. My family moved to the US from
India because my dad had always wanted to study physics.
He had this lifelong dream. He's like, I'm going to
come to the US to study physics, and lo and behold,
after I don't know, like ten years of wanting to
do this, he finally gets into an academic program University

(08:56):
of Huntsville, Alabama to study physics. So that's how my
family moved to the US, and my mom is pregnant
when she gets on the plane. My dad had to
actually stop that and get a job to pay for
the medical bills because his kidneys had failed. So this
was like this is my life when I was like
four or five years old.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
So yeah, it's I haven't talked about this too much.
It's certainly not publicly, but it was a huge part
of my childhood. And so growing up my dad we
did a lot of science stuff together, right, It wasn't
he you know, there wasn't so much like, let's go
play football together. I'm sure my dad would have, but
he had some health problems and so I kind of

(09:38):
I feel like I kind of had to discover fitness
and working out on my own, and I've tried to
get them into it with some success.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
That's good. Do your parents live now in California? You guys, Okay,
that's awesome. So you grew up between Alabama and Virginia.
I love knowing that your dad came here because he
wanted to study physics. Yeah, he must love that you
in a lot of ways followed in his footsteps at
least academically, right, and you went on to study physics
at Stanford.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
My dad was very adamant when I was a kid.
He's like, look, I'm not going to tell you what
to do. It's like, just because I studied physics doesn't
mean that you should. Because he was like, well, my
grandfather in India, his dad was a medical doctor and
wanted all of his kids to be medical doctors. And
my dad always wanted to study physics. So he kind
of had grown up with this thing where he kind
of felt like he wanted to do something, but his

(10:30):
parents or his dad wanted him to be an eye doctor,
which is what they which is what my family was
in India. So he's like, you know, Biju, you have
to figure it out for yourself. I'm like, how is
this like the best way to convince me to do
physics because it's very effective. Yeah. And also, like I said,
growing up with my dad working at NASA, there's this
awe and wonder that you have for not only the

(10:54):
pursuit of like how does science and space work, but
the fantastical things that we build to study it.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
Right.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
I remember seeing these huge wind tunnels. I grew up
around Langley Air Force Base, these huge wind tunnels, and
that was where my dad worked, right, He worked in
these buildings with computers where he had like he's doing
computer stuff when I was a kid, which in the nineties,
like you know, there weren't a lot of people that
are doing computer stuff and kind of you kind of
like look forward, and that's kind of what I thought

(11:23):
I wanted to do. And moreover, I don't know if
you can tell this or not, but that like, I'm
starting to feel pretty good after that run. Yeah, a
couple of minutes, I was like, Ah.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
It's either a post run rot or a post run high.
And I feel like you and I both experienced.

Speaker 2 (11:40):
Both today, the highs and the lows of.

Speaker 1 (11:42):
The highs and the lows of the run.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
Yeah, was I saying, dad. Physics, Yeah really inspired me
to study physics. So I go on Stanford to study
physics and math, which is where I met my co
founder of robinhood Lad and we were actually roommates for
a while in college. We took a lot a lot
of the same classes together, and I think really had
a There's something very intoxicatingly cool about the pursuit of

(12:08):
how the universe works and the idea that you can
actually study something like that and it's not just stories, right,
there's an actual scientific discipline behind it, and that kind
of ties to what I'm doing now. So we haven't
talked about this yet, but this would be probably a
good time to talk about new company I'm starting called Etherfleux,

(12:29):
with a mission to deliver energy to planet Earth. So
what the heck does that mean? So we're building a
constellation of satellites that are going to take this idea
of space solar power and take it from this idea
that was originally like an Isaac Asimov story and then
very sci fi in its early days, of collecting solar

(12:52):
power in space and transmitting it around and taking it
from science fiction to science reality, and the idea that like,
there are these things that could exist right that people
have kind of thought systematically about but haven't been able
to make happen, and to take an understanding of physics
and technology to kind of breathe that into reality. That's

(13:15):
what I'm trying to do. And so what is this thing?
So the idea is that if you collect solar power
in space as opposed to on the surface of the Earth,
there's actually some really interesting benefits. Number One, it uses
way less land on the ground. Number Two, if you're
in the right orbits in space, you can actually have

(13:37):
access to solar power around the clock as opposed to
when the sun is out and space is abundant, right, Like,
you can put lots and lots of satellites in space
and get more and more solar power, whereas on Earth
you have to use land to do that. Right, And
kind of looking at where we are in the new

(14:00):
era that we're in right now, where for the first
time at least since in the last ten years, right,
we've kind of gone from the space race kind of
being over and we won, but we also kind of
lost because this is like society kind of gave up
on space as being like this frontier in the seventies

(14:23):
and eighties, and I would say even the nineties to
being at the forefront of what's happening again, and in
particular having access to these huge launch vehicles like Starship
are going to make building huge infrastructure in space something
that is actually going to happen in our lifetime. And
I think that this idea of building an energy infrastructure

(14:43):
in space, an energy grid like that we call it,
is going to be one of these novel applications to
space that makes life on Earth better. That's that's what
I'm doing.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
What types of infrastructures outside of what you guys are building,
do you for see happening and being built in space?
Like do you have certain predictions that you think within
our lifetime we.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
Will see within our lifetime is a really hard part,
but I think I do have some predictions. I think
things like asteroid mining or taking rare earth metals and
being able to bring them in from either from space
or places like the Moon. I think that is like
that is there's such an obvious use for that, in

(15:28):
my opinion. I think also manufacturing stuff on the Moon,
I think that is going to happen. It might not
happen in our lifetimes. It depends on how long we
live and kind of how fast that moves.

Speaker 1 (15:38):
Why do you think that would be like a value.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
Well, there's a lot of the raw ingredients on the
Moon that are on the Earth as well for manufacturing stuff,
so rare earth metals are also there. Also, the idea
of building stuff there and launching it off the surface
of the Moon versus launching it off the surface of
the Earth is going to take way less energy because
the gravitational pull of the Moon is a lot weaker.

(16:02):
And yeah, it's kind of cool. I think this is
like one of the ideas of Obviously, space commercialization is
a topic that I think is super interesting, and I
think that the Moon is going to play a pretty
interesting part in that. Obviously, I think Mars is also
going to happen. I actually think that's going to happen
in our lifetime. But in terms of infrastructure, there's going

(16:24):
to be a whole civilization if we actually occupy Mars
that's going to be built there, and I think some
of these pieces will be used from there, but I
think it's going to be human civilization and like human
infrastructure that's adapted for life on Mars.

Speaker 1 (16:37):
Well, I want to get in a little bit more
to what you're doing with your new company in a bit. First,
I want to take people kind of chronologically through what
you guys built with Robinhood. But I do have a
question on the topic of space that came to my mind,
and I don't want to forget to ask. Yeah, you
come from a family with Indian parents that immigrated here
from India gets a deeply spiritual place, right, and people

(16:58):
there are very religious. So how does knowing how the
world works kind of affect your spirituality?

Speaker 2 (17:05):
It kind of does, right, Because when I when I
first started studying physics, I I in this sort of
traditional way that we think about God as a being
with with thoughts that we as human beings can understand.
I didn't. I didn't believe that that was like, I know,
there's there's a lot of people that believe that, but

(17:27):
that never really resonated with me because I always kind
of looked at it through the lens of like, what
do the laws of physics say? Right? And you kind
of when you see the laws of physics and you
see the equations and stuff, and these are imperfect, right,
these are approximations of what happened in the physical world,
but they look like they are I mean, they look

(17:47):
like a set of rules that were created, right, And
it just never really resonated to me that it was
like a person or a thing that thought in some way,
shape or form, like a like a human. I guess
another way of saying that is that in many ways
I kind of ascribe that sort of to the science,
to the physics of it. But this is kind of

(18:09):
the interesting thing. As time has gone by and I
think about it, I kind of flip flop on it,
and I think the place that I've landed is that
I don't know, and I don't think it's a question
I know how to answer, So I just don't think
about it that much. Because, on the other hand, if
you think about this and you say, well, the universe
is a bunch of equations, right, that's awfully thoughtful, and

(18:36):
it might kind of you're like, well, how did it
take on such a simple and elegant form? It almost
feels like somebody thought it through, And then you end
up at the opposite side of the whether there's a
god or not. Right, So I would say I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
I just had to ask because it is, you know,
it is interesting specifically like that role. Let's talk about
you getting to Stanford. Yeah, what made you want to
go to Stanford?

Speaker 2 (19:15):
I had never been actually really, Yeah, so.

Speaker 1 (19:18):
You accepted without going and visiting.

Speaker 2 (19:20):
That's funny.

Speaker 1 (19:20):
Did you visit any other schools?

Speaker 2 (19:22):
I visited cal Tech?

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Okay, how many schools did you apply to?

Speaker 2 (19:27):
Applied to cal Tech, I applied to Stanford, applied to Harvard,
and I applied to MIT. I think those were the
four that I applied to and I didn't. I got
waitlisted at Harvard and Mit. Uh, and I think I
got into cal Tech and Stanford, and Stanford was the
one that was binding. So it was like, well, the

(19:50):
decision's kind of made for you, right, and I it
was the idea of moving out west, right growing up
in Virginia, like I wanted to I wanted to explore.
I wanted to see what California was like. Yeah, so
the decision was kind of made for me. And it
was cool because I applied to those four early and
I was like, well, if I don't get into any
of these, then I'm going to have to apply to

(20:10):
like a lot of schools. But luckily I got in
and I was like, I am done. Stanford is like
one of the top physics schools and math schools in
the US. When I went to Stanford, that was the
thing I cared about I wanted to study physics, physics, physics,
And it was one of those things where I kind
of thought that engineering or computer science or stuff like
that I could probably learn a little bit later in life,

(20:33):
but I kind of had I kind of put physics
on this pedestal where I wanted to learn it from
like the best people or the people that understood it
really deeply.

Speaker 1 (20:44):
So, would you say academics when you were growing up
like elementary school in high school? Was that kind of
your sport? Like did you love your studies.

Speaker 2 (20:55):
Much more when I got to high school? Yeah? It
was actually, I mean another part of this sort of
story of my dad being pretty sick, and I really
haven't talked about this very much before publicly, at least
when my dad was when I was in eighth grade,
my dad actually got really sick and was hospitalized for

(21:17):
a long time. And living through that was one of
the things that really woke up this sort of like
spirit animal inside of me where my dad was really sick,
and I was like, like, education is the one thing
that I can control my life, right, That's the one
thing that if I do a good job at it's

(21:38):
going to set my path forward. And it was the
one thing that my dad had always like been like education, education, education,
that's the way out. And so when I got to
high school, I kind of like flipped a switch and
I went from being a socio student to being super
fucking focused on academics. And yeah, again we talked a

(22:01):
lot about grit on the run, but it was a
pretty gritty childhood right between. Like, yeah, it was.

Speaker 1 (22:11):
I mean, getting into Stanford to study physics is no jokes.
So you have to lock in high school in order
to set yourself up like that. You know, we're talking
about your Stanford experience because that is kind of where
the not that where the sparks started for robinhood, but
where you and Vlad met. So let's talk a little
bit about your dynamic with Flad and kind of what

(22:31):
it was about the two of you that worked so
well together as a partnership.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
Yeah, we were great friends when we met in college.
We were We took a ton of the same classes together.
I'd say he was a little bit more into math
than physics when I met, and I think he really
inspired me to get into math too. But we would
take we take a lot of the same classes together.
We'd stay up super late working on problem sets together,

(22:58):
like most nights of the week for excited periods of time.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
What type of kid were you, Like, were you going
out in college or were you more studious?

Speaker 2 (23:09):
Both?

Speaker 1 (23:10):
Okay, I love that.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
So you had a little bit of fun, Yeah, I
definitely fee.

Speaker 1 (23:13):
Like I met my wife in college.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
Come on, yeah, I had a lot of fun to college.
But again, like I had a very studious childhood leading
up to it too. But we would take a lot
of the same classes together, we would do problem sets together,
we would work out together pretty regularly too, and over
the summers we would play a lot of chess together
in the evenings. I remember that. And we both had
a love of physics and math, and I think that

(23:36):
the friendship really started because when we met in college.
We both grew up in Virginia. We're both only children,
and our families both moved to the US because our
dads were pursuing higher education. So we kind of had
this like very interesting parallel and a lot of aspects
of our life. And on top of that, right, like

(24:00):
when you kind of when you kind of meet an
only child and you're an only child, there's a there's
a kind of special bond that happens because you don't
have a lot of family. Right. For me, it was me,
my mom and my dad in the US, and you know,
like for him it was and he's got some cousins
and some more family, but you know, you still have
a small family that's kind of like your core nucleus.

(24:21):
And I say this because I feel like, at least
for me, it put the importance of friendship kind of
in a different place. Yeah, So we took a lot
of the same classes together, and we would stay up
pretty late working on problem sets together with lots of
through a lot of college. The interesting thing from that
was I think that we learn how to learn new

(24:41):
things together. And this is kind of the thing about entrepreneurship, right,
is that when you when when you start out doing
something as an entrepreneur, a lot of the times you're
approaching the problem as a novice, right, and you kind
of have to learn how to learn new things and
learn how to learn new things at a pretty healthy clip.

(25:02):
And I thought we had a really good dynamic learning
math and physics together in college that set us up
for like learning new topics together as we after we graduated,
we started a couple of companies. We started a few
companies in New York actually before we started Robinhood.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
What would you say were the strengths that each of
you brought to the table as coworkers and co founders.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
Yeah, I think there was a lot of dividing and
conquering in the early days, right, And there were there
were times where we were kind of like, I think
the thing that we would do is we would like,
if one of us was more passionate about a problem,
I feel like we'd kind of let the other person
run with that problem, and we kind of ended up

(25:49):
solving for a lot of building Robinhood, right, I was
focused on design, user experience, kind of telling the story
of how the product worked. And Vlad was spent a
lot of his time on and these are very broad
strokes right on engineering, on the finance side, and a
lot of the business stuff. And so we kind of

(26:11):
would each work on different parts of the company, and
there was this very fluid way of operating together where
if one person was more passionate about a problem, we'd
kind of let that person run with it.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
As your relationship evolved, did you guys kind of always
know that you both had these entrepreneurial dreams and that
you wanted to start something together eventually, because I know
Vlad was a year younger than you write in college,
so you had graduated and then Vlad graduated the following year.
But you guys always stayed close friends and you always

(26:44):
kind of knew you wanted to start something together. How
did it all come to be?

Speaker 2 (26:47):
Yeah, like I said, I graduated a year ahead of him.
I got a job for a few months in finance,
and I remember Vlad was actually doing a PhD program
at UCLA, and I called him up and I asked
him if we want to start a company, And I
think says, we're both immigrant kids. There's something like very
entrepreneurial about being an immigrant kid, right where you kind

(27:09):
of like your whole life is kind of a startup
in some ways, and we like work together or those
first that first couple of summers, in those first couple
of years, and yeah, this sort of working relationship evolved
from that, like it transitioned from being students working on
problem sets together to students building stuff together. So that

(27:31):
makes sense.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
And you guys graduated around two thousand and.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
Eight year that was a big part of it.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
Huge part of it right now, all of a sudden,
I mean, I feel like growing up in an immigrant household.
You also have a certain understanding of finances that I
think differs from other people, right, because it is this
idea of making it here. Yeah, and then to graduate
college at such a hard time financially where so many
people were probably were struggling to get jobs, right, and

(27:58):
so many people were losing their job YEA. What was
that like for you and how did it kind of
eventually lead to you, guys founding your first couple of
businesses before starting Robinhood.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
I would say that that was the backdrop that actually
was pretty instrumental to Robinhood.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
Pronos Research, right, there was a company before Kronos Splayers.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah. Those were both like we were building technology for trading,
high frequency trading stuff like that. But kind of the
interesting thing was we were working on sort of computerized
trading technology. This is computerized trading technology now like ten
fifteen years ago. It probably feels ancient compared to the
stuff today, but markets had just gone electronic around that,

(28:40):
you know, the sort of five to ten years leading
up to it, that was like more of a cutting
edge thing at the time, and people were building sort
of networking hardware infrastructure and making it more and more
sort of low latency and fast, and getting it sort
of more and more sort of connected to the exchanges.
And we were working on the very like I would say,

(29:02):
rudimentary parts are sort of like the basic building blocks
of how you connect to the stock market, and I
feel like we had this like pretty clear view into
how that stuff worked. At the same time, there was
this backdrop of we talked about a little bit on
the way here of Occupy Wall Street, which from my perspective,

(29:25):
was the frustration of all the people that we went
to college with, right because we all entered the working
world in this two thousand and eight time period. A
lot of my friends went on to get PhDs because
they couldn't get jobs. Here were the two of us
were like without too much success to show for at
that point, several years of being an entrepreneur, where we

(29:47):
were like kind of struggling too. I feel like there
was a chorus of people that looked at the financial system.
I think that's also why the symbolism of that place
is so powerful. They're like, this thing doesn't work right,
this doesn't serve ordin people and maybe the thing to
do is to tear the whole thing down. Right. That
was kind of like the occupy part of Occupy Wall Street, right,

(30:13):
And I think from our perspective it was the immigrant
kid mentality of like this is it always seemed crazy
to me because you're like, no, this the financial system
in this country is actually the reason that so many
people want to be here. It's like this is the
land of opportunity. This is the place where you can

(30:34):
pull yourself up by your bootstrap. Right. It's rather than
trying to looking for a solution to this where you
tear the whole thing down, the other solution is is
that you just have way more people be a part
of it. And if the stock market is this thing
that's bifurcating outcomes between ordinary people, the haves and the
have nots, you can actually just have be way more

(30:56):
people be a part of the system. And the part
of the other part of this I'd kind of also
add is that from the perspective of being humans that
lived in the society, right, we wanted to do something
that we felt like was going to make We wanted
to do something that felt like we're going to have
a positive effect on things, right, And we didn't want

(31:17):
to grow up in a world where there was this
constant course of negativity towards the financial system. And I
think the way that you get that is you have
more people that have a shared outcome in the outcomes
of the markets. So, like, what's the emergent phenomenon of this.
I think that when we started doing it, there were
a lot of people that I mean, it's kind of

(31:39):
like the thing growing up, right, It's like not knowing
about your finances or like kind of being or not
not sort of focusing on it too much was in
vogue or it was kind of cool to be that way.
And I feel like we've I feel like that's completely
flipped where now if you're a young person and you

(31:59):
don't know what the hell you're doing with your finances,
like that's that's not cool.

Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, you got to be in control.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
You got to know, right, And I think that's like
a societal shift that was super that we wanted to
help create.

Speaker 1 (32:12):
Right. The tagline that we talked about, I said early
on when you were building Robinhood, was there a mantra
or ethos that always kept you going? And that was
the ethos of the brand and of Robinhood as a company,
which is democratizing finance for all. So can you break
that down for us what that meant to you guys

(32:33):
at the time when you started the business and how
it evolved over the years.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
Yeah, there were a few different versions of it. It
was at first it was democratized finance, you know, for
the world, and then some other variations of it, and
it landed on that very sort of like simplified version and.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
It kind of stayed the same all the way through.
It still is that to today?

Speaker 2 (32:53):
Yeah? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
You know what I find interesting too is with Kronos Research,
you guys were building tools for financial institutions at a
high level, is that correct to say? And then you
guys go on and you see an imbalance and access
and then you decide to flip the model and build
something for the masses. But what is it like going
from you guys, are you know, full time working Chronos Research,

(33:15):
and then all of a sudden you have this idea
to build Robinhood. But it's completely different than what you
guys are doing for Kronos Research. So when you guys
had the idea to build Robinhood, were you doing both
at the same time while getting robin Hood on its feet.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah, I think Kronos was kind of put on the
back burner. It was not, it was not. The trajectory
wasn't great.

Speaker 1 (33:37):
Okay, what was life like for you guys at the
start of robin Hood?

Speaker 2 (33:42):
We're broke? Good, dead broke?

Speaker 1 (33:45):
And where were you? Were you in New York at
the time.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
I was. I just moved back to California from New York.
So we lived in New York for a couple of
years and we just moved back.

Speaker 1 (33:58):
And shout out to your wife because she was with
you for this whole thing.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
Right, Yeah, Yeah, we actually my wife and I we
met in college and we got back together, broke up
a lot while, and we got back together actually, like
pretty few months before the sort of genesis of the
robin Hood idea. Yeah, those were pretty tough times. We
pitched a lot of investors. There was not a lot
of interest in what we were doing. There was this

(34:20):
idea of like, are young people ever going to invest
and like are people ever going to do this on
their mobile phones? And we're like yes, and yes, I
think these are kind of inevitable and lo and behold.

Speaker 1 (34:33):
Here we are, right, you have to be a little
bit delusional to start a business, right, Yes, this is
my favorite thing that founders say, especially when you're getting
hundreds of no's from investors. So what kept you guys going?

(34:58):
And you know, let's maybe give advice to founders out
there that keep hearing those aren't getting the answers that
they want, but they have this idea. They really believe
in it. Like what would you say to them?

Speaker 2 (35:08):
You have to believe in yourself. Like, I think that's
the biggest thing, is like the world is not going
to believe in you. It is on you to make
the world believe in you. And I think that's a
really really big deal because we live in a world
where so many people especially in the like the social

(35:28):
media era, which continues to be like the dominant thing
in how humans interact. Now there's this like there's like
there's mirrors all around you, right, there's there's other people's
perspectives on what you're doing, and.

Speaker 1 (35:41):
Made by Mark is on the street. He's asking you
what you do to work out?

Speaker 2 (35:45):
Yeah, yeah, that happened today, right, Like it's all around
it and it's kind of the dividing line of like
where does that stop and where do your own ideas begin?
And you have to believe in your own ideas because
if you don't, they're like no one's going to believe
in them more than you do. I think that's one
of the big ones. I think the other one is
dreaming big versus dreaming small. I mean, these are like

(36:08):
very pithy things to say, but I feel like when
you kind of see all the different variations of them,
you kind of land at these kinds of like simple truths.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
And I think it's like on that note too, it's
dreaming big and also knowing how to work small, right,
because it's like you have this big picture, and then
it's as a founder, you have to be willing to
put in the work.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
You have to work your ass off, you have to
outwork and outwork and outwork and outwork. But yeah, then
I think maybe that's the third one, right, But the
second one is dreaming big versus dreaming small, where if
you dream big, there's a chance that you might make
it happen, right, if you dream small, there's a chance

(36:51):
you might make it happen. But like, your outcomes are
like whatever your scale of ambition is like whatever the
thing that you're dreaming to do, if you're not dreaming big,
it's not going to happen, right, Like, if you're not
dreaming big, you're not going to have a big, crazy
outcome dreaming small. So if you're dreaming small, like you

(37:13):
should think about dreaming bigger because if you dream small,
your outcomes are not going to be huge. And also
I think there's something else here, which is that dreaming
really big and working on something really difficult versus working
on something where I don't want to say it's easy,
but like you can kind of see the next step,
next step, next step. Starting companies are hard, period, right,

(37:36):
And like these kinds of companies are hard, and the
really big dreaming ones are hard to they're just different
kinds of hard. So it's not like it's not it's
not going to be easier, right.

Speaker 1 (37:45):
What was it like getting those from investors that are
in the industry? Like was it disheartening at times and
so frustrating? Yeah? What was like the worst know that
you got that you were so excited to prove wrong?
Like do you kind of have a story around that?

Speaker 2 (38:02):
I mean I think all of them, right, Yeah, I
think this is one of the things that a lot
of successful people have. It's kind of like you have
to channel the setbacks and negativity into just like I'm
going to do it right. You have to like look
at that stuff and be like, this is fuel for
the fire. Yeah. So, I mean there were a lot

(38:25):
of no's. There are a lot of skeptics in the
early days, and I think it was there was a
lot of stuff, right, but it was a lot of
like the things that were in vogue then, which we're
building consumer apps and you know, like photo sharing stuff
like that when we were getting started with Robin Hood.
You know.

Speaker 1 (38:40):
I think it's a testament to this this show and
the running interview show into post ran high, it's all
about movement and the power of just continuing to keep going.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 1 (38:49):
And I think it's interesting how obviously there's physical movement
like the run we just did, but I think what's
so powerful about these types of conversation is movement translates
in so many different aspects of life, and I think
what you guys have built is such a testament of
the power of just putting your head down and keep
working and keep going.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
Yeah. And on the topic of like movement specifically. It actually,
I think has always been a yin and yang with
building companies for me because I would do this pretty
often through all of building robinhood and around lunchtime, I'd
go either to the gym or go for a run.
And my running route was to go around Stanford campus,

(39:29):
like campus sloop at Stanford. That was have you done
that before?

Speaker 1 (39:32):
No, when I wanted to ask you when we were
talking about Stanford and the fact that you ran in college,
that I wanted to ask you what your route was.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
Yeah. Two routes. Two routes that were very common. First
one is campus sloop and you actually will see me
doing that sometimes like you might just run into me
on the streets sometimes running campus sloop. My office is
the eighth or flux office is a little bit further now,
so it's not like literally right there, but that was
a very common one. The other one is it's called
this loop called the Dish. There's like a big observatory

(40:02):
dish on campus and it's kind of in the hills
behind campus. You have tons of ups and downs. That
one's way harder, so I do. I would do Campus
loop most of the time, and sometimes when I was
feeling really fit, I would do the dish loop.

Speaker 1 (40:14):
Yeah, like you wanted to challenge yourself. Campus loop seems
more up my alley.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
Yeah, they're both like three to four miles if I
remember correctly, kind of in that range.

Speaker 1 (40:22):
I've never been to Stanford's campus, but I've always wanted
to go. I had some friends growing up, some lacrossemate
friends that went on to play there. The hair is down,
the hair is down. We went into this and you
were like, the hair is going to be up, the
hair is going to be down. We're going to mix
it up.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, totally. I love the man bun though, Oh, it'll
probably come back.

Speaker 1 (40:44):
Robinhood had years of rocket ship growth and then in
twenty eighteen you kind of gave the reins to Vlad
to operate as the CEO. What made you decide to
have Lad be that kind of forward facing position at
the company.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
Yeah, end of twenty twenty, actually, oh, twenty twenty. Yeah,
we talked about it several times over the years before,
and there was a part of it where, I mean,
there were a lot of different factors, right, There was
a part of it where I didn't necessarily want to
be I didn't really necessarily want to spend that energy

(41:21):
on being a public company CEO because that comes with
a different set of responsibilities, and it was something that Yeah,
I think Vlada was very passionate about as well, and
I think that's yeah. I mean there were a lot
of different things, right. I think I had my starting
family around that time, and I kind of wanted to

(41:42):
think about what the next chapter of life was going
to be, and I didn't know what it was going
to be at the time. And also a lot of
that was like during the COVID era, where which I
think was like a huge period of change for a
lot of different people. And there was a part of
me that was curious about eventually being an entrepreneur again someday, right,

(42:04):
And I didn't know how or when that was going
to happen, but it was like kind of this thought
that was in the back of my head. And I'd
always been pretty keenly interested in the space industry.

Speaker 1 (42:14):
I mean, it makes sense your dad worked at NASA.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
Yeah. The other the thing that was that sort of
made me realize that at some point in my life
I wanted to work on the space industry was seeing
the Falcon launch and landing right Like that was a
moment where I was like, holy cow, this might actually
happen in my adult lifetime, Like the Space Race might

(42:39):
come back in my adult lifetime. And I didn't really
know how or why if that was ever going to
be something I wanted to do, but it was this
sort of thing that I was like, Man, I really
really would be interested in doing that someday.

Speaker 1 (42:51):
Did you take any time off in between launching your
company now and robin Hood?

Speaker 2 (42:58):
Not very much? Well, yeah, not very much.

Speaker 1 (43:01):
So you kind of went right back into building something
from the ground up.

Speaker 2 (43:03):
Yeah I did. Yeah, that's so almost almost none.

Speaker 1 (43:07):
What do you think is your favorite part about starting companies? Like?
Do I feel like a lot of the founders that
I talked to love the early stage.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
Yeah, the early stage is unquestionably fun. It's unquestioned by
my favorite part. There's a lot of really fun parts.
I think small teams are very fun. I think teams
like twenty thirty forty to fifty one hundred, one hundred
and fifty two hundred people like, they're really really fun
because it feels like a tribe of people where everybody
knows everybody else, right, which definitely changes when you get

(43:37):
to much bigger size, when you get to thousands of people.
But I would say that's not the main thing. I
think the main thing is the journey of figuring something
out right, the journey of like not knowing how to
do something, being and being of the mindset that I
really really want to figure out how to do this thing,

(43:59):
and right now out what that is is. I really
want to figure out how to build this constellation of satellites.
I want to get really good at understanding how to
do the manufacturing of stuff like this at scale. I
want to really demonstrate that, like the technology behind this
and our ideas, the physics and the lasers and all
these things work. And it's the not knowing and not

(44:21):
knowing if you will figure it out, that's the really
fun part, right because the unknown.

Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yeah, it's stressed me out a little bit, but yeah
it is.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
But when you get to the other side, if you
get to the other side, there's a sense of accomplishment
and the sense of like kind of conquering the intellectual space,
which is kind of you know, it's going to be
that high that I'm chasing, like over and over.

Speaker 1 (44:47):
Again, what stage are you guys at right now.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
We're getting ready to start assembling and manufacturing a lot
of the stuff for our satellite. So we have so
the idea of space lear Power. We talked about it
a little bit before, and we're actually putting two satellites
up next year, so it'll be about two years and
a half a little less since I left Robinhood full time.

(45:12):
That will have knock on wood, our first satellites going
up to space. First one is targeted for middle of
next year. The second one you know, targeting towards the
end of next year. And what that's going to do.
So we have to actually build the satellite, So that's
the next step that's coming up. A lot of the
work up until now has been kind of getting all

(45:33):
the pieces in place, sort of designing the hardware, buying
all the components, getting the launch sort of stuff figured out,
working with regulators, spending time in DC, sort of putting
all the foundational pieces and understanding what all the foundational
pieces are to build a space company because I don't

(45:55):
necessarily know how to do this right.

Speaker 1 (45:57):
Yeah, you're really starting from scratch. But what I think
is so cool though, is with Robinhood, correct me if
I'm wrong, but you didn't really use your physics degree
with Robinhood, right, really? No, So I mean I think
what's so cool about what you guys are doing now
is you're able to really put what you studied to work.

Speaker 2 (46:14):
In some ways. Yeah, I mean it's it's definitely a
physics problem in many ways, the actual sub fields that
are going to building what we're doing. I didn't necessarily
spend a bunch of time studying those in school, Like
I didn't study optics and I didn't take like a
bunch of optics classes, but that is a huge part
of what we're doing now, or material science. It's a

(46:35):
big part of what we're doing now and to be
bigger part of what we do in the future. Like
I I studied more like math and theoretical physics, So
it's kind of cool to learn that stuff.

Speaker 1 (46:47):
When Robinhood iPod and it was in twenty twenty one, correct, Yeah,
what was that day like for you when Robinhood iPod?
Like what are the emotions going on with you in
that day? Like are you so excited?

Speaker 2 (47:01):
Is it?

Speaker 1 (47:01):
You know? Like what is that next chapter?

Speaker 2 (47:03):
Kind of feel like weirdly enough, I don't think I
had that many emotions that day because I feel like
I'd kind of just run through all of them leading
up to that day. And also it's it's this thing where,
you know, we we founded the company, and kind of
it was you know, it was our accomplishment, but it
was also at that point there were thousands of people

(47:26):
that did it with us, right, and it was a
huge accomplishment for all those people too. So I would
say that's one of the parts that kind of stuck
with me, was like the chorus of people around me
that were like, holy cow, we actually did this in
the face of huge adversity, I would say, because covid
was very challenging for us, and all the time after

(47:49):
that was hugely challenging too.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
People say Robin hood gamified investing, making investing too easy,
fun and addicting. So how did you guys think about
user experience versus user responsibility when designing the platform?

Speaker 2 (48:16):
Yeah, so a couple of things there. The biggest thing
that I think we did was we spent a ton
of time talking to customers and that was like one
of the core mantras behind the company. And what does
that mean? We would actually interview customers like we had
this huge practice of going out and meeting customers and

(48:39):
actually interviewing them and you know you can. We would
do this thing from the beginning of the company, and
we kind of figured out that if you're trying to
build financial products, you kind of have to have really
deep intuition for how people live their actual lives with money, right,
and the way that people think about and manage their

(49:02):
own money. It's a very personal thing, and when people
talk about it a lot of times in society or
with their friends and stuff like that, it's not the
version of it that's going on in their own heads.
And so we actually we would spend a ton of
time going to places like Stanford campus and just like
giving students fifty bucks for example, and be like, hey,

(49:22):
can you sit down and like look at our product,
read through it, explain how it would fit into your life,
and like why would you use this or why would
you not use this? And you start to hear the
stories of how people think about their finances and how
they think about money and how they think about budgeting stuff,
and you just completely would miss that if you're like, well,

(49:45):
this is how I think about it, and everybody else
should think about it the way that I should think
about it.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
When I had Alex Lieberman on recently, he's the founder
of the Morning Brew, and he sold the Morning Brew
a few years ago, but now he's like a big
content creator and we were talking about the creator economy
and how a lot of creators and people in the
space are starting businesses and it's important to know your
audience when you're starting a business, and he was saying, like,
the easiest thing that you can do is literally like

(50:11):
put up on your story schedule time with me to talk.
Here's my calendly link, and let's find out kind of
like what you're liking about my content, what you want
to see more of, and really, you know, talk to
your users. And I feel like it is it's such
good advice for people out there building businesses, like really
talk to your consumers because you can learn so much
from them.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
Yeah, I mean, because we want to make something that
people will use. And the backdrop of what what we
created with Robinhood was that young people didn't invest in
the stock market, right, and so we're like, why what
about this is like not useful for young people that
we only see this phenomenon of investing before Robinhood. I
think it was much more an activity that was around retirement, right,

(50:53):
sort of plus or minus five or ten years of
retirement is when people really started thinking about like what
am I? How am I thinking about my finances? And
we're like, well, if you want to think about that, like,
why not start thinking about that at a much earlier
point in your career because if you do, you'll have
that many more years where you're like saving money, putting

(51:15):
money aside, you know, getting some exposure to the stock market,
et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
I just wanted to say, like robin Hood has what's
so cool about the platform is exactly what you just said,
Where now I have in automatic investments every single day
and it's cool knowing, you know, as somebody that is
in an in traditional finance job, and when I first
graduated college, I would have had no idea like what
to do with my money, and Robinhood does make it

(51:41):
really easy.

Speaker 2 (51:41):
And yeah, it's it's stuff like this that we built,
like just you know, recurring investments or fractional share investing,
where I feel like those are the kinds of products
that meet people very much where they are. And if
you ask the question like, why haven't people done this?
A lot of the times is that they don't know
or they don't know how much money they need to
do it, but they feel like they have to have

(52:02):
a lot saved up and kind of making it so
that you can get started without some of those some
of those barriers was you're not going to figure out
how to do that unless you actually hear people talk
about it. And as you as we built a company
to be bigger, I thought that this took on an
even more important light because if you have a bunch
of silicon value people working on building financial products, and

(52:24):
they're kind of well paid engineers for example, right, their
experience of the financial markets might be pretty different than
somebody that's working paycheck to paycheck, right, And you really
want to get that perspective. You want to understand it
so you can build products for all those kinds of people. Yeah,

(52:47):
and so we not only realize that that was such
an important part when we were building the first few products,
but we realized that actually institutionalizing that at the company
was a big deal too.

Speaker 1 (52:56):
With your new company, Atherflux, are there certain things that
you have been implementing that you kind of learned through
mistakes you guys made at Robinhood maybe with like building
a company that now you know. I think this is
good for people to learn because you learn so much
by doing and you have to make certain mistakes to
not make them again.

Speaker 2 (53:15):
At least in the early days of Robin did I remember,
it took us kind of a long time to get
to a critical massive engineers at the company. We had
an engineering team, but it was during a time where
there was so much competition for engineers that our engineering
and recruiting was like this constant bottleneck for what we're
trying to do. And I think this time around we

(53:36):
kind of just decided to well, I mean I think
this time around with ether Flex, we've kind of scaled
the engineering effort up pretty quickly in year one, and
I think that's one of the things that again it's
kind of hard to look for specific examples because one is.

Speaker 1 (53:52):
No, but that's a good example hiring the right.

Speaker 2 (53:54):
People, yeah, right, scaling engineering hiring a little bit more
sort of like aggressively in year one and year two.
It's something that we're doing this time around and remains
to be seen kind of how it plays out, but
that's one of the things where I'm like kind of
seeing a difference in the way that it played out
over the first couple of years, because Robin was always
very small until we got big, and then we got big.

(54:19):
I'm talking in terms of people.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
How big is Robinhood now, like how many people work
at the company?

Speaker 2 (54:24):
Thousands of people?

Speaker 1 (54:25):
Wow? And how big is Atherflex We're about twenty five people?

Speaker 2 (54:29):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (54:29):
Wow?

Speaker 2 (54:29):
Is that wild? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (54:31):
Yeah, I mean it's great. Yeah, you're not working with
lot anymore.

Speaker 2 (54:34):
I still serve on the board of directors of Robin Hood, but.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
He's not involved with this next business.

Speaker 2 (54:39):
He's an angel best director.

Speaker 1 (54:40):
Okay, that's great.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
Yeah, so actually that yeah, that's actually the reason I'm
here is for Robin at board meeting.

Speaker 1 (54:44):
Ah, I didn't realize that. What do you think is
one thing people often get wrong when they hear space
solar power, that it's that far out. Really, how far
out is it?

Speaker 2 (54:55):
I think we're gonna I mean, we're trying to demonstrate
it next year, right, and we want to build a
constellation of these things in the next five years, Like
we want our vision for this thing is that there
will actually be an energy grid and orbit where in
the same way that you well, not in the same way,
but like kind of analogous to how you can connect

(55:16):
to starlink or if you have a starlink terminal, you
can get Internet almost everywhere in the world because you
just connect to a satellite and it sends you down
the Internet. We want to do that with power right
where there's like a floating infrastructure of power available all
around the world and if you have one of the

(55:37):
receivers to be able to receive the power, that you
can instantly or nearly instantly, be able to start generating
power on the ground. Which seems like a pretty fantastical idea,
but I think there's it's actually the approach that we're taking.
We're going to be able to show the real parts
of it in the next two to three years. I
say this because space solar power is an idea that's

(55:59):
been since the nineteen seventies and it's been relegated to
like the realm of research papers and simulations, and it
hasn't taken on a physical format, and so I think
that's the thing that we want to really demonstrate not
only is this possible, but it's possible with today's technology.

Speaker 1 (56:19):
So you're the first company that's trying to tackle this.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
There are a few others that are doing it right now.
Oh well, yeah, there's been a little renaissance in it,
but we aim to be the one that's break around
on this.

Speaker 1 (56:30):
You've talked about how this could advance America's energy independence
and global leadership, right, That's been kind of one of
the things that I was reading about what could success
look like for Atherflex, not just like for the company,
but for the country.

Speaker 2 (56:44):
Well, I think the core ideas around like commercialization of
space and making the technology of space available in the
sort of Western way right where I think that there's
something very like what's the word I'm looking looking for,
like almost like for all with the way that you
get access to Internet from things like starlink right or

(57:06):
starlink specifically, it's kind of it's it's the service that's
available to everyone with very little sort of like infrastructure.
You know, it's relatively inexpensive, And there's kind of that
idea of like if you believe that space solar power
is going to be one of these energy sources that

(57:28):
plays a bigger and bigger role in human society for
the next twenty thirty years. We want America and our
infrastructure to be the one that kind of like is
the default version of this right, so that it is
available to people around the world, and it is something
that is sort of ubiquitous and available and that just

(57:50):
generally helps people get access to energy, because access to
energy is the thing that drives economic progress. Like it's
like one of the found national elements that drives economic progress.
So said differently, I think the power of what we're
trying to do is in the fact that it's bringing

(58:12):
capitalism to this other use case in space, which I
think is like a very American way of thinking about things, right,
is that if you bring capitalism and the pursuit of
one's own self betterment and the economic sort of like
incentives around that to a field, that you'll actually see
a really rapid evolution, you'll see a rapid maturation. And

(58:36):
we kind of live that with Robinhood, right, because that
product gives the power of capitalism to the masses, and
the magnitude of change it created was pretty quick and
and sort of like the financial time.

Speaker 1 (58:49):
Skial eighth flex is a mouthful. What does the word mean?

Speaker 2 (59:03):
Yeah, it comes it actually comes from the ether theory.
Are you familiar with this? No? All right, So this
is a this is a theory in the nineteenth century,
So the eighteen hundreds of how light works? Right, because
like light was one of the most fascinating things in
the universe because it has a lot of special rules

(59:26):
that apply to it that don't really apply to anything else. Wait,
like what again? This might lead you to really questioning, Like,
one way of looking at this is like, there's definitely God.
The other way of looking at this is that there's
definitely not God. So you get to.

Speaker 1 (59:41):
Pick This is why I had to ask you the
question about spirituality.

Speaker 2 (59:46):
Yeah, the answer to that question is is a strong unsure.

Speaker 1 (59:52):
Okay, let's talk about light.

Speaker 2 (59:53):
Yeah about light? Okay, So eighth flex where does his
name come from? So it comes from this thing called
the ether theory, which was in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth century,
eighteen hundreds, there was a question of like how does
light work? And there was this idea that light is
a wave, right, And if it's a wave, much like

(01:00:17):
a sound wave, it's got to travel through something. It's
got to make something wave, right, and so sound waves
travel through air. That's how you hear it. That's why
there's no sound in space, right, or waves on the
surface of water, like they travel on the surface of
the water, right, And that's the medium. The water is
the medium that it's going through. Sound waves air is

(01:00:39):
the medium that is going through. So if light is
a wave, which it has a wave length looks an
awful lot like a wave, what's the medium that it's
going through. And we're like, well, we're not sure what
it is, so let's call it the ether. So there
is this theory called the ether theory where people are
trying to figure out how light moves through this medium.

(01:01:00):
And so one of the questions was what is the
speed of light? So there's this famous experiment done at
this actually the United States, called the Michaelson Morley experiment,
which aim to understand the speed of light. And here's
the kind of simple version of it is, you have
a light source, you have a mirror that splits it,
and it goes in this direction, it goes in that direction,

(01:01:23):
and it bounces back towards the center thing. And you
basically ask if this thing is on the surface of
the Earth and the Earth is rotating, it's rotating around
the sun. Sun is moving in the solar system, right,
you would imagine that light is going a slightly faster
speed in one of these two directions, right, Because it's
kind of like if you are on a moving train

(01:01:47):
going one hundred miles an hour and you throw a
ball in the direction of the train. If you're looking
at that ball from the ground and you throw it
ten miles an hour, you're going to see it going
by it one hundred and ten miles an hour, right,
because it's the speed of the train plus the speed
that you threw the thing. Kind Of the same concept here.
If the Earth is rotating and all these other things

(01:02:08):
are moving, the speed of light will be the speed
of light plus whatever the moving surface is moving at.
So they do this experiment in the eighteen hundreds, and
it was like the eighteen seventies, and it turns out
it's the exact same speed in both directions, and they're
just like, what the fuck, Like, what's going on here? Right,

(01:02:29):
because there's something funky going on here, because it shouldn't
be the same in both directions. And so there was
like thirty years or fifty years or like decades where
the scientific community like collectively was like, how does this
like what is going on here? And there were all
these different explanations of how the speed of light could

(01:02:52):
be the constant could be the same in both of
those different directions that had to do with like, well,
maybe it's something interesting about the medium that light is
traveling through. Maybe there's something about the ether medium where
it's actually like, you know, getting pushed around by the
Earth's movement, and all these other hypotheses. And then Einstein

(01:03:12):
comes around and he's like, all y'all are wrong. He's like, actually,
the speed of light is constant in every reference frame.
And it's not the speed of light that changes, but
it's literally time and space that distort to be able
to keep the speed of light constant in all reference frames.

(01:03:34):
So this is like the special theory of relativity. This is, like,
I one of Einstein's many big breakthroughs, but I think
was kind of his first one, which was explaining that
the speed of light is constant in every reference frame.
So if you've ever heard of the theory of relativity,
this is kind of like the core idea behind the
theory of relativity. Coming back to ether, it's this fictitious medium.

(01:03:59):
It doesn't like there's no such thing as the ether,
and colloquially that's kind of where it comes from, like
pulling something from the ether, right, And so ether flux
is kind of like the energy moving through the ether.
So it's literally like harvesting energy from the fictitious medium.

Speaker 1 (01:04:19):
Physics blows my mind. What do you have to say
to the students right now in physics maybe that are
setting physics like you did in college, that are having
a hard time with it because I feel like the
thing with physics is there's just so much to learn.

Speaker 2 (01:04:33):
There is and there isn't because it really comes down
to like a couple of equations at the end of
the day. There is an idea that there is a
theory of everything, and if that's the case, like that
that theory, like it's not going to be like a book.
It's going to be like a set of equations. So
you really don't have to know a lot of stuff,
which is kind of the wild part, but understanding it
really deeply opens the cornucopia of like things that you

(01:04:56):
could do with it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:58):
It must be incredible to think about the impact that
you've had on so many people on the industry in general,
and you know what you're continuing to do is pretty incredible.
If you could go back and give yourself one piece
of advice in your twenties or late teens, what would
it be.

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
I think it's probably like it's actually the same thing
I've said like two times already, or it's believe in
yourself and have confidence your own ideas. You're not always
going to be right, but you can always keep trying right.
And I think as an entrepreneur, like this sort of
self doubt of like is this the right thing? Is

(01:05:36):
this going to work?

Speaker 1 (01:05:36):
Like?

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):
W how do I figure out if this is going
to work or not? Especially when we didn't have am
to show for it. That was a big part of
it for me, right, Like there's a lot of self
doubt of like is this actually going to work? Like
what are we thinking about the right parts of this problem?
Like should we be thinking about these other things? And
all those are super valid concerns, but you have to

(01:05:57):
believe in yourself to make these things happen, and I
think we very much did. But I would just like
put an exclamation point on that.

Speaker 1 (01:06:05):
Yeah, it's so important. I mean I completely agree. I
think in whatever you're doing, if you don't believe in
your Like the believing in yourself is the first place
that you have to start. You have to trust yourself,
and then you have to do the work.

Speaker 2 (01:06:16):
Yeah, And I would say that's probably the other thing, right,
It's like, don't let off on the hard work. Like
it's just even if you're running into dead ends, keep going,
keep going, keep going.

Speaker 1 (01:06:27):
No, it's great advice.

Speaker 2 (01:06:29):
And I think also probably some version of like enjoy
the journey along the way, because the whole like looking
back on it, the journey was the fun part, right.
I just said a couple of minutes ago, like the IPO,
like what kind of emotions that I have on it?
And like, I don't. There was like it was almost

(01:06:50):
like an emotional overload where I don't I don't think
about that day and I'm like, oh, yeah, I was
really happy or I was like, oh I was really
stressed out. It was just like, oh, that day just happened.
And if you think about that, it's really not about
the destination. It's about the journey. And when I think
back on what was fun about doing it, or like

(01:07:11):
what's the thing that I'm chasing, it's the being deeply
steeped in the unknown and having this sort of goal
and not knowing how to figure it out, but be
working towards it and like kind of the idea that
if you figure it out, it's going to feel incredibly satisfying. Right. Yeah,

(01:07:34):
there was a a quote that my dad used to
tell me, and I think this is an Einstein quote.
I'm going to butcher this year. So it's something like
it's like the years of searching in the dark right
until you find like the little breakthrough. This I think
is sort of like working on something where you don't
know how. Translates a lot to academic research and academic

(01:07:56):
as well, because a lot of times you don't know
until you have the result. But that's like, that's where
a lot of the satisfaction, if you look back, comes from.

Speaker 1 (01:08:08):
I like that you quoted Einstein.

Speaker 2 (01:08:11):
Yeah, I'll have to look that quote up to see
if I if I if I hopefully I didn't butcher it
too much.

Speaker 1 (01:08:16):
Are there certain people like Einstein? Like, are there certain
great thought leaders that throughout your life have always been
your north star people that you've looked up.

Speaker 2 (01:08:27):
To who are Yes, very much so. Steve Jobs for sure,
deep deep admiration for Steve Jobs. And I regrettably never
got a chance to meet the guy. I think Steve
Jobs was the person that got me interested in wanting
to build consumer stuff or to build computer stuff in general.

(01:08:48):
Because remember I was like a physics student and I
was like, I thought I was on a path to
like doing academic math or physics my whole life. It
was using Apple products for the first time that really
inspired me, like this this sort of laser focus on
user design and experience, because I thought it was just
magical what they did. He's definitely tip the top of

(01:09:11):
the list. Another person I put on that list is
probably Richard Feynman, famous physicists that's responsible for like kind
of modern quantum field theory. There's this really great book
it's called Shirley, You're Joking Mister Feinneman, which is a
biography of kind of how he thought about physics and science,
and there was a playfulness to it and an intuitive

(01:09:34):
ness to his thinking that I don't know if I'm
ever going to achieve that, but I'm just like, it's
one of the greatest thinkers of all time. I think
I'll add a kind of unusual one to this mix. Ubuck, Yeah,
do you love music? I do I love music a
little On Tupac, I think the sort of like pure individuality.

(01:10:02):
They's just like something very beautiful about it. And he
had such a short life and left such a profound
impact on everyone around him because he was who he was,
like unabashedly to his core and all of his music. Right,
So yeah, I say those three I love it and

(01:10:22):
Steve Jobs, Richard Fiemon and Tupac Shakor.

Speaker 1 (01:10:25):
Hey, that's a power trio. If I've ever heard of one.
What's the best piece of advice you have received from
somebody that you vitalized.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
I got a chance to meet Kobe Bryant once before
he passed away. I say that, I don't know that
I've gotten advice from too many people that I admire
over the years. I think when vlad n I had
the chance to meet him once, he kind of he
kind of put an exclamation point on like the Mamba
mentality and kind of told us to like keep going

(01:10:56):
with the Mamba mentality and that kind of like ethos
of like super super dedication to your craft, right, like
hard work and a devotion to your craft that's maniacal. Right.
His life also got cut short way too soon.

Speaker 1 (01:11:16):
Yeah, he's so goaded.

Speaker 2 (01:11:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:11:19):
What's your advice for upcoming guests that do the running
interview show with me?

Speaker 2 (01:11:23):
Well, if it's in New York during the summer, bring
a towel in some cold water because you're gonna dust
yourself with it at the end. And a change of
clothes and a change of clothes. Yeah, yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 (01:11:33):
And if you have long hair, bring a hair tie.
Although I sometimes supply thank you guys so much for
tuning into today's episode. Your support means the world to
me and helps us continue bringing you inspiring conversations. If
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(01:11:54):
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We've got great conversations coming your way and you won't
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I hope you got your post run high going