The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Rick Yang: Robinhood spent two and a half years building tech before public launch
“This company spent two plus years prior to actually launching to the public of just building, just heads down building. And this was done during a time where Everybody was really adopting that lean startup mentality of like launch first and then build and iter…”
Robinhood had an 800,000-person waitlist during its closed beta
“We invested and led the series B and they were still in closed beta at the time, but there were some really Interesting signals at the time, right? They had built this amazing waiting list of over 800,000 people that wanted the product.”
Robinhood spent zero dollars on marketing for years after launching
“There were many, many years from the launch of this company where they didn't spend a dime on marketing and they just kept increasing that account number and engage customers.”
Early Robinhood user cohorts achieved 30% to 40% DAU/MAU ratios
“And they were showing, you know, DaoMao in those early cohorts of 30 to 40%, you know, certainly above the benchmark of the average typical consumer app.”
Rick Yang: Robinhood founders were natively meme-driven before it became mainstream
“Both Beju and Vlad had it from the very beginning. They understood the consumer. They were part of that piece of consumer culture, and they were very natively meme-driven before it was mainstream and before it was cool, right? And they continue to be.”
Robinhood founders built high-frequency trading software before Occupy Wall Street pivot
“So they had built software for high-frequency trading firms, and you saw sort of this shift in their founding story when they kind of realized that they were part of the problem that was starting to manifest itself at the time with Occupy Wall Street, really t…”
Rick Yang: Incumbent brokerages derived only 25% to 33% of revenue from trading fees
“You look at the incumbents and only about a quarter to a third of their top line revenue really came from these trading fees.”
Rick Yang: Early Robinhood users consistently increased deposits over time
“And we had already started seeing, even though it was starting from a smaller base than incumbents that yes, like the experience was superior enough that This demographic was still adding funds over time and deposits as they went on.”