Part IThe Story
George Washington Crossing the Van Allen Belts
The mural covers one wall of an office at 1710 Industrial Road in San Carlos, California, a low commercial strip of the Peninsula where the money of Sand Hill Road thins into machine shops and logistics warehouses. Its subject is George Washington crossing the Delaware. "But I wanted to make it a little bit weirder," Baiju Bhatt explained to a pair of podcast hosts who had come to record in the building. So this Washington crosses the Van Allen belts, the bands of charged particles that cinch the planet, and he does it on a satellite. The brief Bhatt gave the artist was that the painting should be "a who's who of American presidents." To avoid politics, he added, they went back only to presidents no longer living. "The legends, not the living legends."
A reporter from Semafor who visited in 2025 catalogued the rest: bionic presidents, a bald eagle in a spacesuit, a giant American flag against a galactic backdrop. Madcap, retro-futurist. Painted, it should be said, for a company that at the time had never put anything in space.
Several facts sit uneasily beside one another here, and the discomfort is the point. The man who commissioned this painting is the son of a Gujarati optometrist who spent roughly a decade applying to American graduate physics programs before one let him in. He is the co-founder of Robinhood, the brokerage whose name appeared on protest signs outside its own headquarters in January 2021, which managed the rare trick of uniting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ted Cruz in condemnation, and whose business model — selling the flow of its customers' orders to Wall Street market makers — was described by its harshest critics as the precise opposite of what the name promised. He controls, as of the company's 2026 proxy statement, 32.0 percent of the voting power of a firm in the S&P 500, more than the chief executive who runs it. And he has spent the two and a half years since leaving that company's executive suite trying to build a power grid in orbit, an idea first sketched by Isaac Asimov in a short story in 1941 and abandoned, more or less, by NASA — where Bhatt's father worked his entire childhood.
Washington crossing the river was a painting about a desperate gamble that happened to work. The original was painted in Düsseldorf by a German émigré. Nobody in the San Carlos version seems to be worried about that.
What follows is an attempt to understand why a man who already won would paint himself a scene of the moment before winning. It moves in loops, not lines, because Bhatt's life does: the same refusal recurs, the same rice and beans, the same chalkboard, the same word — outsider — offered not as complaint but as qualification. He said it plainly to the Wall Street Journal in 2026, reaching for why two Stanford physics students had looked at Occupy Wall Street and seen not a system to tear down but a door to hold open. "I think it sometimes takes an outsider looking in with the perspective of like, no, actually participating in America's financial system is not a bad thing," he said. "It's like actually the, you know, very directly, it's the enviable world."
The enviable world. Hold onto that phrase. It explains the mural better than the mural does.
By the Numbers
From Poquoson to Low Earth Orbit
70–110Investors who rejected Robinhood's seed round, by Bhatt's various counts
$3MSeed round closed in December 2013, led by Index Ventures
$32BRobinhood's valuation at its July 29, 2021 IPO, priced at $38 a share
32.0%Bhatt's share of Robinhood voting power, versus 26.1% for CEO Vlad Tenev
$10MBhatt's own money committed to Aetherflux before outside investors arrived
$2BValuation of Cowboy Space Corporation at its $275M Series B, May 2026
20,000Satellites in the orbital data center constellation filed with the FCC
A Decade of Applications
Poquoson, Virginia, is a small town at the tip of a peninsula in the Hampton Roads region, surrounded on three sides by the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, a place of watermen and, improbably, rocket scientists, because a few miles up the road sits NASA's Langley Research Center. Praful Bhatt worked there. His son's first ideas about the universe came from that proximity.
The route to Langley was not direct. Praful had trained as an optometrist in India. By his son's account, given to a TechCrunch audience on Sand Hill Road in June 2025, he then spent roughly ten years applying to graduate physics programs in the United States before taking what Bhatt called "a hard left turn" and landing at NASA as a research scientist. Other tellings route the family first through Alabama, where Praful was admitted to a PhD program in Huntsville — the Indian press, working from a long interview Bhatt gave Shawn Ryan in 2025, has rendered the institution as "University of Huntsville Alabama." The sequence blurs in the retelling, as immigrant sequences do. What is unambiguous is the duration: a decade of applications, a decade of being told some version of not yet by institutions in a country he had not yet entered.
Then the body intervened. When Baiju was about five, his father was diagnosed with kidney failure. The doctoral studies were abandoned; Praful took employment to cover the medical bills. "We were not terribly well-to-do," Bhatt told Ryan. "My dad was on dialysis. I was just a little kid." The family stopped traveling home. Their last trip to India, Bhatt has said, came in 1997.
There were no siblings to share the weight. Bhatt has described himself in those years, without much sentiment, as an overweight, non-athletic only child, and has said that he often felt powerless as his father's health worsened. One account attributes to him a sharper version: that he felt "so unbelievably lost," with "no siblings, no backup," that life "felt rudderless." Whichever words he used on which day, the picture holds steady — a boy in a NASA town, in a house organized around a dialysis schedule, watching a brilliant man's ambitions contract to the size of a paycheck.
And still the father found a way to steer. This is the detail Bhatt returns to most, in podcast after podcast, and he tells it with the timing of someone who has worked out exactly where the laugh goes.
— Baiju Bhatt, at a TechCrunch StrictlyVC event, June 2025My dad worked at NASA through my whole childhood. He was very adamant: "When you grow up, I'm not going to tell you you should study physics." Which is a very effective way of convincing somebody to do exactly that.
It worked. Bhatt went to Stanford and took a bachelor's degree in physics, then stayed for a master's in mathematics, completed in 2008. He has told interviewers about high school fascinations with particle physics and quantum field theory, and about a youthful ambition to prove Einstein wrong — a phrase that appears, deadpan, in the timestamps of one 2025 podcast, as if it were a reasonable item on a teenager's to-do list. He can still talk about the Michelson–Morley experiment, the 1887 attempt to detect the luminiferous aether, with the warmth other men reserve for old girlfriends. Michelson and Morley failed to find the aether. Their failure became one of the most productive negative results in the history of science. Bhatt would later name a company after the thing they didn't find.
The arithmetic of the family's story deserves a moment. A father who applied for ten years. A son who would, at twenty-eight, be rejected by something between seventy and a hundred and ten venture capitalists. A father who reached NASA in early middle age. A son who, as TechCrunch noted in 2025, launched his own space company "at roughly the same age his father was when he joined NASA." The rhyme is too neat to have been engineered and too consistent to be coincidence. It is simply what happens when a temperament gets passed down along with a surname: a tolerance for being told no that most people would regard as a disorder.
The Chalkboard and the Infiniti
In the summer of 2005, Stanford ran a research program for undergraduates in the sciences. Among the participants were two physics students who, on paper, might have been the same person filed twice.
Bhatt has listed the overlaps so many times that the list has become a kind of liturgy. "We're both, you know, only children, both children of immigrants, both grew up in Virginia," he told the hosts of the Giant Ideas podcast in 2026. "Families both moved to the US because our parents were pursuing higher education here. Both had some variation of this haircut when we met. And we were both studying physics and math and took a lot of the same classes together." Vlad Tenev, in Bhatt's description for a 2017 Lifehacker column, was "a long-haired, string-bean kid with a quirky sense of humor and a penchant for late-night games of chess." Larry Guth, an MIT mathematician who taught Tenev, remembered him as "bright and extremely interested" but also "slightly disorganized," prone to bursts of progress punctuated by distractions. The two moved in together off campus. They were, in Bhatt's word, "besties."
In that off-campus house hung a chalkboard. It has followed them ever since — from Palo Alto to New York and back, through two failed companies and one wildly successful one, and now, according to the Giant Ideas hosts who recorded beside it, into the San Carlos office where the presidents cross the Van Allen belts. Someone, at some point, christened it "the chalkboard of destiny." It is where, Bhatt says, the two of them originally scoped out the idea for Robinhood. It is also, by its nature, an instrument of erasure. Most of what was ever written on it is gone.
After graduation Bhatt took a job at a high-frequency trading firm — "high frequency trading slash hedge fund," as he put it to the Journal — and lasted a little less than a year. "I was, uh, not much of a corporate creature," he said. He reasoned that he would either become an academic or start a company. He asked Tenev to start one with him. Eventually Tenev said yes.
They packed their bags into a maroon Infiniti Q45 and drove across the country to New York. The car "broke down on us big time on the way," Bhatt recalled, the breakdown leading to what he called "the sort of like fun, you know, early 20s adventures." It is the kind of detail that would be too on-the-nose in a novel: two sons of immigrants heading east in a luxury sedan that couldn't make the trip, toward the financial capital of the world, where they intended to sell its most sophisticated firms software those firms would supposedly be unable to live without.
The companies were called Celeris, founded in 2010 to do high-frequency trading, and Chronos Research, which replaced it in 2011 and sold low-latency trading software to banks and trading firms. Neither became anything. "We had been entrepreneurs for the better part of five years," Bhatt later said, "and didn't have a whole lot to show for it."
What they did have was a view. Building infrastructure for professional traders taught them something the public didn't know: that for a large Wall Street firm, the actual cost of executing a stock trade was effectively nothing — "fractions of a penny," as Tenev would later put it. Meanwhile, retail brokerages were charging ordinary customers $5 to $10 per trade and demanding account minimums of $500 to $5,000.
And then, in the fall of 2011, the park filled with tents.
Occupy Wall Street was a movement whose diagnosis Bhatt shared and whose prescription he did not. "We were in the center of a lot of the frustration around the financial system," he told the Wall Street Journal in February 2020. "A lot of people were feeling like it was fundamentally broken." But where the protesters saw a casino to be shut down, Bhatt and Tenev saw a party to which most people hadn't been invited. "The other answer that we kind of always saw," he said years later, "was what if we could get more people to participate and we could have more people share in that upward economic mobility."
It is worth pausing on how strange that answer is, and how particular to its authors. The children of men who had spent years petitioning American institutions for admission, they did not experience the system as an oppressor. They experienced it as a gate. The question was never whether the enviable world deserved to exist. The question was who got in.
They moved back to California. The company was incorporated in Delaware and is dated, officially, to April 18, 2013. They named it after an outlaw.
Seventy Nos and a Bag of Rice
The rejection count varies with the telling, which is itself a kind of tell. Seventy, in the Wall Street Journal's 2026 headline. Seventy-five, in a Giant Ideas episode. "Somewhere between 70 and 110," in the recollection Bhatt gave Turner Novak on The Peel in January 2025. When you have been turned down that many times, the exact number stops mattering. It becomes weather.
The reasons were consistent, and Bhatt can recite them like a catechism. "Number one, young people will never invest in stock market. Number two, you'll never figure out how to build a business here. Number three, you have no idea how to do this." Some investors offered career advice. "Go build a social network," one told them. "That's where all the interesting stuff is happening. This finance thing, it's not going to work." Others told them nobody wanted to trade stocks from a phone, that they didn't know how to build consumer products, that there were plenty of brokerages already. Some didn't reply. Some said, Bhatt recalled in a June 2026 podcast, "we're gonna cheer you from the sidelines."
"Until you are successful," he concluded, "frankly, nobody gives a damn."
The money ran low. There is a story, reported by the Financial Times in 2020, that Bhatt was walking barefoot around Palo Alto in 2013 when it dawned on him that the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Barefoot. The detail is too odd to be a later embellishment; it has the specificity of a thing that actually happened, and it tells you something about the man — that he was the kind of person who walked around Palo Alto without shoes, and that he was the kind of person who would mention it.
Then came Tim Draper.
— Tim Draper to Bhatt and Tenev, as recounted by BhattGreat idea, but it's never going to happen, and you guys are paying yourselves too much.
Draper's two objections were the regulatory one — he didn't believe two young founders could secure a broker-dealer license — and the personal one. The founders were paying themselves around $70,000 a year each. They left the meeting baffled. On that money, Bhatt said, they could barely make rent and cover their student loans. Then the obvious answer surfaced. "We'll tell him that we're not going to pay ourselves until we get this approval."
Draper said yes. The structure of that yes is the most instructive thing in the early history of Robinhood. The founders did not argue with the objection. They converted it into a term. Draper's doubt about the license became a condition the founders bore personally; his doubt about their salaries became the mechanism by which they'd prove the license. They bet their rent on the thing he didn't believe, and that, it turned out, was the only argument that could reach him.
In December 2013, Robinhood closed a $3 million seed round led by Index Ventures, with Andreessen Horowitz, Rothenberg Ventures, Draper, and Howard Lindzon participating.
What Bhatt did next he has described as the happiest kind of poverty.
"I began riding my bike to work and went to Whole Foods and bought a bunch of rice and beans, went into hibernation mode and it was one of the most creative moments of my life," he said in 2018. "I just stopped caring if I failed."
That last sentence is the hinge on which almost everything else in this story turns. I just stopped caring if I failed. It is not a statement of courage. It is a statement of release — the discovery that once the worst outcome has been fully priced, it no longer exerts pull. The boy who felt powerless watching dialysis, who had "no backup," had found in the bag of rice a strange freedom: if you have nothing, nothing is at risk. He would spend the next decade relearning how hard that freedom is to keep once you have something. And then, in 2024, he would deliberately go back and buy another bag.
The Interface Is the Argument
The regulatory silence was the hard part. Between the seed round and the license, Robinhood couldn't trade. So it did the only thing a brokerage without a brokerage can do: it collected names.
In April 2014 the founders presented the app at LA Hacks. By some accounts they launched their waitlist by accident, on a Friday afternoon — "Accidentally launching on a Friday afternoon" is how The Peel timestamped the story, the worst possible moment to announce anything and, as it turned out, irrelevant. By the time the product actually shipped, the list held about a million people, a number Harry Stebbings of 20VC repeated to his listeners with audible disbelief. Aaron Levie of Box, who would later invest in the Series A, helped them obtain the domain Robinhood.com. A beta appeared on the Apple App Store in December 2014. In September of that year the company raised a $13 million Series A from returning investors Index and Lindzon and new ones including Ribbit Capital, Levie, Dave Morin, Jared Leto, Snoop Dogg, and Nas.
It is a cap table that reads like a party guest list, and it was meant to. Robinhood was the first brokerage whose investors included rappers, which told you something about who it imagined its customers to be.
The app launched officially in March 2015. That year it won an Apple Design Award. As of January 2015, 80 percent of its customers were millennials, with an average age of 26.
Within the co-CEO arrangement, product and design fell to Bhatt. His method was almost aggressively unglamorous. He and members of the team would walk around Stanford's campus approaching students, asking them to look at new features and say what they thought. He has described his approach since as a deliberate marriage of qualitative and quantitative research — the hallway ambush alongside the dashboard — and has insisted that you know you have product-market fit not from a spreadsheet but from the way users behave. The behavior was not subtle. Half of Robinhood's trading users opened the app daily; ninety percent weekly.
Bhatt's design philosophy came from a specific saint. He has cited Steve Jobs repeatedly, paraphrasing the line that design is not only how something looks but how it works. In the Robinhood context this was not a platitude; it was the whole thesis. The traditional brokerage interface — dense, gray, suffused with the visual vocabulary of a Bloomberg terminal — was itself a form of gatekeeping. It told the twenty-six-year-old with $400 that this room was not for him. Robinhood's interface told him the opposite. The design was the argument about who belonged.
There is a principle Bhatt articulated much later that explains why this mattered so much: the value proposition, he said, has to survive "the telephone game." A product that spreads by word of mouth gets compressed with each retelling. Robinhood's compressed perfectly. Free stock trading on your phone. Five words, no asterisk visible to the naked eye.
The asterisk was there, of course.
By March 2016 the company had raised $66 million and had launched Robinhood Instant, a feature that fronted new users $1,000 so they didn't have to wait three days for trades to settle before placing a new one. In April 2017 it raised $110 million at a $1.3 billion valuation, led by Yuri Milner's DST Global with Greenoaks and Thrive. In December 2017 it launched commission-free options trading. In February 2018, cryptocurrency. That same month it announced it was leaving Palo Alto for the former headquarters of Sunset magazine in Menlo Park — a campus built to sell Western leisure to the American middle class, now repurposed to sell it equities. In May 2018 a $363 million Series D led by DST pushed the valuation to roughly $6 billion, and Bloomberg reported that Bhatt and Tenev had become billionaires "in a Silicon Valley minute."
On December 3, 2017, Bhatt was photographed at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony, an annual gala for scientists. It was held that year at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. A different NASA campus, on a different coast, three thousand miles from Langley. The son of the man who'd applied for a decade, in black tie, a guest.
Cowboys
On August 19, 2020, Forbes published a long investigation of the company under the headline "The Inside Story Of Robinhood's Billionaire Founders, Option Kid Cowboys And The Wall Street Sharks That Feed On Them."
The cowboys were the customers. Young, mostly male, newly flush with pandemic stimulus and lockdown boredom, trading options — leveraged bets on the direction of stock prices — through an interface that had been designed, beautifully, to remove friction. The sharks were the market makers who paid Robinhood for the right to fill those orders and profited on the spread. The billionaire founders were the men in the middle.
Here the story requires an accounting, because the beauty of the interface and the worst things that happened on it are not separable. They are the same object seen from different sides.
Robinhood's revenue came largely from payment for order flow: market makers such as Citadel Securities — whose automated systems, the Guardian reported, processed 39 percent of all U.S. listed share volume — paid Robinhood to route customer orders to them. This was legal. It was also, critics argued, a conflict sitting at the foundation of a company named for a man who robbed the rich. In December 2019, FINRA fined Robinhood $1.25 million for failing to determine whether its market makers were providing the best execution quality. A year later, in December 2020, the company paid $65 million to settle SEC allegations that it had failed to disclose payment for order flow, that some customers' orders had lost approximately $34.1 million in price improvement compared to other brokers, and that it had made misleading statements about execution quality. The same month, Massachusetts securities regulators filed a complaint accusing Robinhood of exploiting novice investors through "gamification." The company settled that case in February 2024 for $7.5 million and an agreement to overhaul its digital engagement practices.
In early 2020, as markets convulsed with the arrival of the pandemic, Robinhood's systems seized up during some of the most volatile trading days since the financial crisis, stranding users. FINRA later fined the firm $57 million for the outages and related failures and ordered restitution — the largest penalty the agency had ever issued. In the second quarter of 2020, trading volumes on Robinhood rose 139 percent over the first quarter, more than any other major brokerage.
And in June 2020, a twenty-year-old student at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln named Alex Kearns died by suicide after seeing a six-figure negative cash balance in his Robinhood account — a figure that reflected the interim state of an options position, not a final loss. His parents later sued. Robinhood subsequently added guidance, eligibility criteria, and education requirements for customers seeking to trade options.
None of this appears on the mural.
There is an earlier episode that, in retrospect, was a rehearsal. On a Thursday in December 2018, Robinhood announced checking and savings accounts paying 3 percent interest with no fees — billed internally as the biggest announcement in company history. The accounts were protected not by the FDIC but by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, which insures brokerage accounts. Nobody had called SIPC. Its president, Stephen Harbeck, a lawyer whose entire professional universe was bounded by the language of a single statute, learned of the product from the news. "I understand that people want to be innovative and things change," he told CNBC, "but I have to work within a certain statute." By Friday evening, the co-CEOs had published a blog post conceding the product "may have caused some confusion" and promising to rename and relaunch it. A UBS analyst called it "an epic fail." Harbeck offered the epitaph.
— Stephen Harbeck, president and CEO of SIPC, to CNBC, December 2018They've done the responsible thing. Next time they'll aim before they shoot.
Robinhood relaunched cash management, this time with FDIC insurance through partner banks, in December 2019. It learned to aim. But the lesson of 2018 cut deeper than regulatory etiquette. The founders had believed, with the sincerity of physicists, that if a thing was better and not forbidden, it should simply be done. What they discovered was that "not forbidden" is a different category from "permitted," and that the space between them is occupied by people like Stephen Harbeck — not villains, not gatekeepers exactly, but custodians of a statute written for a world where nobody imagined a twenty-six-year-old banking through a phone.
Bhatt would, years later, distill this into a rule he applies to space. "If you're not breaking the laws of man and you're not breaking the laws of physics," he said on a 2026 podcast, "there will be a path." The sentence sounds like bravado. Read it again and it is a confession: there are two kinds of law, and he once forgot one of them.
The Quiet Co-Founder
On November 20, 2020, Robinhood announced that Bhatt was stepping down as co-CEO. Tenev would run the company alone. Bhatt became chief creative officer.
The timing was read, correctly, as preparation for an IPO; public markets prefer one throat to choke. But there is a reason the arrangement had lasted seven years, and Bhatt has explained it in terms more emotional than structural. The co-CEO model, he said on Giant Ideas, worked because of "trust, friendship and zones of passion." His zone was product, design, the hallway interviews, the look and feel. Tenev's zone increasingly became the regulators, the capital markets, the cameras. The partition had always existed. The title change merely made it legible.
Nine weeks later, the cameras came.
On January 28, 2021, Robinhood Securities restricted purchases of GameStop and several other stocks that users of the r/wallstreetbets subreddit had driven to absurd heights in an attempt to punish hedge funds that had bet against them. The proximate cause was plumbing. Robinhood's clearing house, the National Securities Clearing Corporation, raised the firm's collateral requirement from $700 million to $3.7 billion overnight — later reduced to $1.4 billion. Fortune's headline on the episode referred to "that 4am call to put up $3 billion." Robinhood didn't have it. It restricted buying to survive.
To its customers, it looked like the opposite of survival. It looked like the outlaw had switched sides. Robinhood's investors included Sequoia, whose partner Andrew Reed had worked with the founders since 2018; Citadel Securities was its largest payer for order flow; and Citadel's affiliated hedge fund had just helped rescue Melvin Capital, one of the funds the Reddit crowd was trying to break. Citadel and Sequoia both denied applying any pressure, and a federal court later dismissed a class action alleging collusion, a decision an appeals court affirmed in 2024. None of that mattered in the moment. Protesters gathered outside the Menlo Park headquarters, at the SEC in Washington, and at the New York Stock Exchange. Ocasio-Cortez and Cruz agreed on something. On February 18, 2021, Tenev testified before the House Financial Services Committee.
Bhatt was not on the screen. "The most visible face since the story broke," wrote the Indian American publication American Kahani that week, "is co-founder and CEO Vladimir Tenev." Bhatt, it noted, was "away from the media attention." When Hollywood made a movie about the episode in 2023 — Dumb Money — Bhatt was a supporting character, played by Rushi Kota.
He has called the GameStop crisis the most challenging chapter of Robinhood's life, and described what getting through it required in a phrase that has the ring of something said at three in the morning: "buying another day." The company raised $3.4 billion that January — more than it had raised in its entire prior history — in a matter of days. It bought another day, and then another.
The documents filed that summer reveal something the cameras missed. On July 26, 2021, ahead of the IPO, Bhatt and Tenev signed a voting agreement as the company's two "Individual Founders." The agreement bound the founders and their affiliated entities to vote their high-vote Class B shares on director elections and removals "as is mutually agreed by the Individual Founders." In other words: whatever the titles said, the two men who met in a summer research program in 2005 had legally fused their control of the company. Neither could act on the board alone. On December 13, 2021, a joinder to that agreement was signed on behalf of Bhatt Family LLC by its manager, Adrienne Sussman — Bhatt's wife, whom he had married in 2015.
The quiet co-founder was not a minor shareholder. As of December 31, 2023, a Schedule 13G amendment shows him beneficially owning 75,459,852 shares, 9.3 percent of the Class A shares on an as-converted basis, through instruments with names like The Baiju Prafulkumar Bhatt Living Trust, dated 11/30/17, and The Baiju Prafulkumar Bhatt GRAT, dated 10/4/18. By the 2026 proxy, he held 6.8 percent of the company's equity and 32.0 percent of its voting power. Tenev, the CEO, held 5.4 percent and 26.1 percent.
It is a peculiar architecture: the founder with the most votes is the one who isn't running the company. One reads it as trust. One could also read it as insurance. Probably it is both, which is what trust usually is.
A Billion Dollars of Pride
Robinhood went public on the Nasdaq on July 29, 2021, under the ticker HOOD, at $38 a share, raising approximately $2.1 billion and valuing the company at about $32 billion. The stock fell 5 percent on its first day. Then it rose. Then it fell, at length.
The 2021 fiscal year ended with revenue of $1.8 billion and a net loss of $3.7 billion. In April 2022, Robinhood cut its workforce by 9 percent; in August, by another 23 percent, mostly in operations, marketing, and program management. That same month, New York's financial regulator fined its crypto unit $30 million over anti-money-laundering and cybersecurity failures — the department's first-ever cryptocurrency enforcement action. In November 2022, as FTX collapsed, the U.S. government seized a 7.6 percent stake in Robinhood that Sam Bankman-Fried's Alameda Research had acquired. Robinhood eventually bought it back for $605 million, or $10.96 a share. The shares had been sold to the public, sixteen months earlier, at $38.
In a 2026 interview with the Wall Street Journal's Gunjan Banerji, Bhatt was asked what it was like to lose roughly a billion dollars of paper wealth within months of the peak. He paused. "Gosh, kind of hard to look at that," he said. "I would say that it stung, but at the time we had a lot of work to do. That was more of a pride hit, right? There was a lot of sort of climbing back up that we knew we had to do."
A pride hit. It is the vocabulary of a man for whom money has always been a scoreboard more than a sustenance — or rather, for whom the sustenance phase ended so abruptly, in May 2018, that it never had time to become the point. The boy whose family couldn't afford a trip to India was, at thirty-three, a billionaire on paper; at thirty-seven, a billionaire who had watched a billion leave; at forty, according to the 2025 Forbes 400, worth $6 billion and one of the ten youngest people on the list, the only person of Indian origin among them. He has since admitted, in an interview reported by the Hindustan Times, that relationships changed as he got wealthier — "Sometimes I feel jealousy," he said. He has been filmed for a Forbes series on America's 250 greatest innovators inside the HP Garage in Palo Alto, the brick-and-wood shrine where the Valley tells its creation myth. He writes friend checks of up to $100,000 into other people's startups.
During the pandemic he built cars. He has talked at length about restoring a 1992 Porsche 911 — painted, by his description on one podcast, Tiffany blue — and about attending driving schools. "It's better to drive a slow car fast," he told Shawn Ryan, "than to drive a fast car slow." He also told Ryan why the cars mattered: "I want to try my hand at building stuff like actual stuff. So, I'm like, I know how to build technology, but I don't really feel like I know how to build mechanical material things." Among the investors in his next company would be François-Paul Journe, the independent watchmaker, a man who builds by hand the most intricate mechanical objects humans wear. Bhatt collects watches. It is hard not to read the Porsche as rehearsal.
Robinhood, meanwhile, climbed back. Revenue reached $2.95 billion in 2024 with $1.4 billion in net income; $4.47 billion in 2025 with $1.88 billion. It joined the S&P 500. By 2026 it reported more than 27 million funded customers and $307 billion in platform assets, and in June of that year its market capitalization was reported above $84 billion. The average customer, the Journal reported in 2025, was now 35 — the twenty-six-year-olds of 2015, a decade on, still there.
Bhatt was no longer there for most of it. In March 2024, he stepped down from his role as chief creative officer to pursue, the company said, "other entrepreneurial interests." He kept his board seat. He kept his votes. Through preset trading plans he has continued to sell shares — 43,373 of them in September 2026, about $4.68 million worth in July. The ledger of a man converting one bet into the next.
The Detour
In 2015 — the year the app launched, the year it won the Apple Design Award — Bhatt got married, and Jan Hammer of Index Ventures, the firm that had led Robinhood's seed round, was in the audience.
Hammer wrote about the moment a decade later, in a blog post announcing Index's investment in Bhatt's new company. About halfway through his speech, Bhatt looked out at the crowd and declared, "only half-joking," that his next company after Robinhood would be a space company. Then he found Hammer in the audience. "And you will fund it."
Everyone laughed. "But I knew there was truth to his words," Hammer wrote. "Space has never been a side project for Baiju; he has always talked about it as the ultimate market opportunity. If anything, you could say building Robinhood was the detour."
The detour. A $32 billion IPO, a congressional hearing, a Hollywood movie, a seat in the S&P 500 — the detour.
Nine years after the wedding, in May 2024, Hammer stopped by Bhatt's home for coffee on his way to an Index dinner in San Francisco. Bhatt had recently left Robinhood. "As he told me about his new venture," Hammer wrote, "thirty minutes turned into an hour turned into half a day. I was so late leaving, I almost missed the dinner." What struck the investor was not the ambition, which was obvious, but the method: how Bhatt broke the system down piece by piece — the physics, the optics, how the thing would assemble and launch and deliver power — until it was legible "even to a generalist investor like me."
The company was announced on October 9, 2024. It was called Aetherflux, after the aether that Michelson and Morley failed to find, and its premise was Asimov's: collect solar energy in orbit, where the sun barely sets, and send it down to Earth. It had about ten employees. It was based in San Carlos. Bhatt had committed roughly $10 million of his own money. It had purchased a satellite bus — the basic chassis of a spacecraft — from Apex, a company in which Bhatt was an investor. The next day it joined the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. Later that month, Dan Gallagher, Robinhood's chief legal officer — the same lawyer whose name appeared on the cover of the company's S-1 — announced he was joining as an adviser. "So happy to be on the team!" he posted. Rice and beans, again, but this time with a former SEC commissioner in the pantry.
The idea of space-based solar power had a long history of not working. Concepts from the 1970s called for enormous satellites in geostationary orbit, 36,000 kilometers up, with kilometer-scale arrays, beaming power down as microwaves. "Everything was too big," Bhatt said at StrictlyVC in June 2025, in a glass-lined building on Sand Hill Road. "The size of the array, the size of the spacecraft was the size of a small city. That's real science fiction stuff." Such projects were perpetually "20 years away."
— Baiju Bhatt, explaining Aetherflux's architecture, June 2025We take the solar power that we collect from the sun with solar panels, and we take that energy and put it into a set of diodes that turn it back into light. That light goes into a fiber where there's a laser, which then lets us point that down to the ground.
Aetherflux's inversion was the inversion Robinhood had performed on the brokerage: make it small. A constellation of modest satellites in low Earth orbit, not one cathedral in geostationary orbit. Infrared lasers, not microwaves. Ground receivers that would begin at "bigger than 10 meters" in diameter and could shrink, Bhatt said, to "five to 10 meters, potentially even smaller than that." And — this was the line that unlocked the money — no breakthroughs required. "Our approach from the beginning has been: How can we [develop] this capability with existing building blocks, without needing to have individual scientific breakthroughs?" he told Semafor. "Most, if not all, of the components for our demonstration mission are either commercially available or are modifications to things that are commercially available."
The first customer would be the one with no alternative. Delivering fuel to forward military bases is slow, expensive, and lethal; the Department of Defense's Operational Energy Capability Improvement Fund approved Aetherflux's program for funding to develop a proof of concept. "It allows the U.S. to have energy out in the battlefield," Bhatt said. The receivers would be "small enough and portable enough that you can literally bring them out into the battlefield," and "of little to no strategic value if captured by an adversary." It is an odd sentence for a man who once built an app for twenty-six-year-olds, and also exactly the same idea: find the user so badly served by the incumbent that he will try anything.
In April 2025 Aetherflux raised a $50 million Series A co-led by Index — Hammer, fulfilling the wedding toast — and Interlagos, a fund started by former SpaceX executives. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and NEA joined. So did Tenev. So did Gallagher. So did Jared Leto, who had invested in Robinhood's Series A eleven years earlier and whom Bhatt credits with inspiring a fitness regime he took up in midlife. So did Journe, the watchmaker. A Robinhood cap table, reassembled in orbit.
"I say pretty often that space is hard and space is expensive," Bhatt told Semafor. "And one of the fun parts about this is just being very open and direct about [the fact that] we're working on a very, very difficult problem. That being said, I've done this before." Putting his plan into action, he acknowledged, would take "hundreds of millions, if not billions."
The skeptics were not hard to find. Ashlee Vance, introducing Bhatt on his Core Memory podcast in March 2026, framed the whole enterprise as an attempt to "pull an Elon Musk" — fintech founder sells out, goes to space — and was candid about his uncertainty. "Will the space lasers work? I dunno. It's a lot." I don't know either. As of this writing, the demonstration satellite Bhatt described in 2025 — targeted first for early 2026, then for June of that year — is not, in the sources available to me, confirmed to have flown. Bhatt himself put the distinction precisely on Sand Hill Road. "Until you do stuff in space, if you happen to be an aerospace company, you're actually an aspiring space company," he said. "I would like to transition from 'aspiring space company' to 'space company' sooner."
Stampede
And then, before the lasers had proven anything, the company changed shape.
In December 2025, Aetherflux announced a project it called Galactic Brain: an orbital data center, powered by its space solar infrastructure, intended to reach commercial operation by the first quarter of 2027. The logic was the logic of the moment. Artificial intelligence was consuming electricity faster than the terrestrial grid could deliver it; in major U.S. markets, according to the company's own materials, grid connection lead times for new data centers could run five to seven years. If you could not bring power to the computers, perhaps you could bring the computers to the power.
Bhatt began saying things like this, on the Giant Ideas podcast in April 2026: "I think if a civilization were to look at the Earth, say in 500 or 1000 years, it looks a lot like Saturn." Rings of machines in dawn-dusk, sun-synchronous orbits, between 700 and 1,000 kilometers up, bathed in perpetual light. He offered a target metric more mundane than any ring: get the cost per GPU hour in orbit competitive with Earth. He thought there was a real path within five to seven years.
In May 2026, the company raised $275 million in a Series B at a $2 billion valuation — investors included NEA, IVP, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures — and announced it would build its own rockets, with upper stages designed to become one-megawatt data centers once they reach orbit. It filed with the FCC for a constellation of 20,000 satellites. It announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to fly Space-1 Vera Rubin modules, roughly 800 GPUs per satellite. It targeted a first launch before the end of 2028. It opened an office in Seattle. Its headcount, which had been around ten in October 2024, had reached about ninety-four, according to one tracker — thirteen hired from SpaceX, nine from Blue Origin, four from Robinhood. Joseph Yaffe became its chief operating officer and chief legal officer, one person holding both the operations and the law, which is perhaps the most Robinhood-shaped lesson of all.
And it got a new name. Aetherflux — the luminiferous aether, the beautiful thing that didn't exist — became Cowboy Space Corporation. The constellation was named Stampede.
I have not found Bhatt explaining the name in any of the material I've read. I can only note what sits beside it. In August 2020, Forbes had called Robinhood's customers "Option Kid Cowboys," and the phrase was not a compliment — it meant reckless young men, under-informed and over-leveraged, galloping through a market built by sharks. Six years later, the co-founder of the company that served them put the word on a rocket. Whether this is reclamation, irony, or simply a man who likes the frontier and doesn't read old headlines, the rebrand performs an astonishing piece of judo on a word. The cowboy is no longer the mark. The cowboy is the one who goes first, into territory with no infrastructure, carrying everything he needs.
The company's own description reads like a frontier ad: "Earth's energy grid can't run at the pace of AI. We can." IVP, explaining its investment, wrote of "a bold new layer of infrastructure." The Semafor reporter recorded Bhatt's belief that America's willingness to put risk capital behind a venture like his "sets America apart," and his hope to let more people "live out their dreams of the cosmos." Put the phrases together and you have something that is either the purest expression of the American frontier myth or a sophisticated pitch dressed in it. Possibly the distinction is not one Bhatt would recognize. The son of a man who spent ten years trying to get into American physics does not, it seems, experience American mythology as costume.
It would be easy, here, to say the pivot betrays a lack of focus — space solar for the battlefield in 2024, space solar for data centers in 2025, rockets in 2026. Bhatt has a different word for it. Founders, he told Giant Ideas, should change their minds constantly. "Whatever you're working on, then it's probably going to change. And if it doesn't change? Then you're a bad entrepreneur." He describes the process with a term from machine learning — gradient descent, the algorithm that finds the bottom of a valley by taking small steps in whichever direction slopes down. And he described its emotional texture in a sentence that may be the truest thing he has said about himself.
"I've been professionally operating in industries where I don't know what I'm doing. I didn't know finance when I started it, didn't understand aerospace when I started this, right? It's usually in the process of failing an idea that I'm like, this is the actual idea."
Failing an idea until it becomes the actual idea. Michelson and Morley looked for the aether, failed, and handed Einstein relativity. Praful Bhatt applied for a decade to physics programs, failed, and ended up at NASA. Two physics students built trading software for hedge funds, failed twice, and stumbled into the largest retail brokerage revolution in a generation. Aetherflux looked for a way to beam power down to Earth, and in the course of looking, found a reason to leave it up there.
In the San Carlos office, beneath the painting of Washington on his satellite, past the bionic presidents and the eagle in the spacesuit and the flag spread across the stars, stands an old blackboard. It came from a rented house near Stanford where two only children of immigrants, both from Virginia, both with the same bad haircut, once lived together and took the same classes. It went to New York in the years nothing worked. It came back to California for the years everything did. Someone named it the chalkboard of destiny, which is a joke, and also not.
It is a chalkboard. It holds whatever you write on it until you write the next thing.
Part IIThe Playbook
The principles below are drawn from the record of Bhatt's two companies and the long interval between them — the failures in New York, the seed round in Palo Alto, the near-death in Menlo Park, the second beginning in San Carlos. Several are counterintuitive; a few contradict each other, which is accurate to the man. What unites them is a single disposition: treating every refusal, regulatory constraint, and physical limit as information about where the actual path runs.
The principles
- 1.Be the outsider who believes in the system.
- 2.Convert the objection into a term.
- 3.Price the worst outcome until it stops pulling.
- 4.Shrink the cathedral.
- 5.Build only from parts that already exist.
- 6.Start with the customer who has no alternative.
- 7.Make the interface the argument.
- 8.Fail ideas on purpose until the real one appears.
- 9.Respect both kinds of law.
- 10.Partition the crown by zones of passion.
- 11.Announce the next company before the first one is done.
- 12.Say the hard part out loud.
Principle 1
Be the outsider who believes in the system
The founding insight of Robinhood was not technical. Zero-commission trading was possible for anyone who understood, as Bhatt and Tenev did from building low-latency software, that execution cost Wall Street firms "fractions of a penny." The insight was attitudinal. In 2011, surrounded by a generation that believed the financial system was "fundamentally broken," the two founders arrived at the opposite conclusion from the protesters: the system was not the problem, exclusion from it was.
That stance — "participating in America's financial system is not a bad thing," the "enviable world" — is unusual precisely because it combines an outsider's position with an insider's faith. Insiders take the system for granted and so cannot see its gates. Radical outsiders see the gates and want the whole edifice gone. The children of immigrants who had spent years petitioning for admission occupied a third position: they could see the gates clearly and still wanted in. That position generated the product, the name, the investor list, and the interface. It generates the mural, too.
The same stance animates Cowboy Space. Where much of the climate and energy world frames its mission as opposition to existing industry, Bhatt pitches orbital power as a way to extend American capitalism's reach — to the battlefield, to remote mines, to data centers that cannot wait seven years for a grid connection.
Tactic: Find the system your peers are angriest at, and ask not how to destroy it but who it currently excludes and what it would take to let them in.
Principle 2
Convert the objection into a term
Tim Draper's no came with two reasons: the broker-dealer license would never happen, and the founders paid themselves too much. Most founders would have argued the first point and ignored the second. Bhatt and Tenev did something structurally cleverer. They offered to stop paying themselves until the license came through.
The move turned the investor's skepticism into the founders' risk. Draper no longer had to believe the license was achievable; he only had to believe the founders believed it enough to forgo rent money. The objection became the mechanism of proof. Seventy-odd investors had offered reasons for saying no. Only one founder response turned a reason into a yes, and it worked because it cost the founders something real.
The pattern recurs at Aetherflux, where Bhatt put roughly $10 million of his own money into the company before raising a dollar from outside. The implicit message to investors was identical: whatever doubt you hold about this, I am holding it first, at my own expense.
Tactic: When an investor gives you a specific reason for passing, propose a concrete term in which you personally absorb the risk they are worried about.
Principle 3
Price the worst outcome until it stops pulling
"I just stopped caring if I failed." Bhatt has described his rice-and-beans period in 2013 — biking to work, going into "hibernation mode" — as one of the most creative moments of his life. The creativity was downstream of release. Once bankruptcy had been fully contemplated, from a barefoot walk around Palo Alto, it lost its power to distort decisions.
This is not the same as fearlessness, and it is worth being precise about the difference. Fear doesn't vanish; it gets priced. The worst case is named, its consequences accepted in advance, and what remains is the work. Bhatt's later language — "get your failures out of the way quickly," failing ideas until "this is the actual idea" — is an extension of the same accounting. Failure that has been budgeted for becomes information rather than catastrophe.
His departure from Robinhood in 2024 can be read as a deliberate return to the rice-and-beans state: a billionaire choosing, in the Wall Street Journal's phrase, "to become a beginner again." Comfort, for a certain kind of builder, is the more dangerous condition.
Tactic: Write down the specific worst outcome of your current bet, decide in advance that you can live with it, and then make every subsequent decision as though it has already happened.
Principle 4
Shrink the cathedral
Every space solar concept before Aetherflux failed for the same reason: it was too big. Geostationary orbit at 36,000 kilometers, kilometer-scale arrays, spacecraft "the size of a small city." Projects of that scale are always twenty years away because their first unit costs as much as their whole program.
Bhatt's move was to shrink the unit. Small satellites in low Earth orbit. Lasers instead of microwave antennas requiring precise phase coordination. Receivers of five to ten meters instead of vast rectennas. The architecture became something that could be built, launched, tested, and iterated — the defining property of anything that actually gets made.
Robinhood performed the same compression on the brokerage. The incumbent product was a desktop terminal with account minimums of $500 to $5,000. Robinhood made the minimum unit a phone, a $0 commission, and eventually a fractional share. Small units compound; cathedrals don't.
☀
Two Architectures for Space Solar Power
How Aetherflux reframed a fifty-year-old idea by shrinking it.
| Dimension | 1970s-era concepts | Aetherflux approach |
|---|---|---|
| Orbit | Geostationary, ~36,000 km | Low Earth orbit, dawn-dusk sun-synchronous |
| Spacecraft scale | "The size of a small city" | Small satellites on a commercial bus from Apex |
| Transmission | Microwaves requiring phase coordination | Infrared fiber lasers |
| Ground receiver | Massive antenna fields | Begins above 10 m; target 5–10 m or smaller |
| Breakthroughs needed | Many | "Most, if not all" components commercially available |
| First customer | National grids | U.S. military forward operations, remote sites |
| Timeline | Perpetually "20 years away" | Demonstration mission targeted within a year of Series A |
Tactic: Identify the smallest functioning unit of your idea that can be built and tested in one cycle, and redesign the whole system around repeating that unit.
Principle 5
Build only from parts that already exist
Bhatt's investor pitch for Aetherflux turned on a single disciplined constraint: no scientific breakthroughs required. "How can we [develop] this capability with existing building blocks?" Diodes, fiber lasers, solar panels, a satellite bus purchased from a company in his own portfolio. The novelty would be in the assembly, not the components.
This is a quietly radical choice for a deep-tech founder. The temptation in hard science is to invent, because invention is prestigious. But every invention adds a schedule risk that compounds with every other invention. A system built entirely from existing parts carries integration risk — real, but tractable — rather than discovery risk, which is not.
Robinhood followed the same rule. It invented no new financial instrument. It took the existing equity market, the existing practice of payment for order flow, the existing iPhone, and assembled them into something that felt new. The genius was arrangement.
Tactic: Audit your technical roadmap and mark every item that requires something no one has done before; then try to redesign until that list is empty or contains a single item.
Principle 6
Start with the customer who has no alternative
Robinhood's first customers were young people with a few hundred dollars and no tolerance for $500 minimums or $10 commissions — users for whom the incumbent product effectively did not exist. Aetherflux's first customer is a soldier at a forward base, where every gallon of fuel arrives by convoy at enormous cost and risk. In both cases, the initial market is defined by the absence of any acceptable alternative.
Such customers forgive imperfection. They will tolerate an app that crashes or a receiver the size of a tennis court because the comparison is not to a better product but to nothing. Bhatt's careful engineering of the military use case — receivers "of little to no strategic value if captured by an adversary" and portable enough to "bring them out into the battlefield" — shows how deliberately he shaped the product around a user with no other option.
The later markets — mass retail investing, orbital AI compute — are vastly larger. But they are reached through the beachhead, not around it.
Tactic: Define your first customer not by size of market but by the absence of any tolerable alternative, and build exclusively for them until they would be devastated to lose you.
Principle 7
Make the interface the argument
Bhatt led product and design at Robinhood, and he treated the interface not as decoration but as the company's central claim about who belonged in finance. The traditional brokerage screen, dense and gray, communicated exclusion. Robinhood's clean design — rewarded with an Apple Design Award in 2015 — communicated invitation. The design was the democratization.
His method was relentlessly direct: walking Stanford's campus, asking students what they thought, combining that qualitative texture with quantitative usage data. The results were visible in behavior: half of trading users opening the app every day. And the value proposition was simple enough to survive what Bhatt calls "the telephone game," compressing without distortion as it passed from user to user. A million people joined the waitlist before the product shipped.
The darker lesson is inseparable. An interface designed to remove friction removes it for everything, including leveraged options trades placed by twenty-year-olds who do not understand them. Massachusetts called it gamification; Robinhood eventually paid $7.5 million and agreed to change its engagement practices. Persuasive design is a lever with two ends.
Tactic: Ask what your interface tells a first-time user about whether they belong, then ask with equal seriousness what behaviors it makes too easy.
Principle 8
Fail ideas on purpose until the real one appears
"It's usually in the process of failing an idea that I'm like, this is the actual idea." Bhatt's career is a sequence of ideas that failed into better ones: Celeris into Chronos Research, Chronos into Robinhood, space solar for the grid into space solar for the battlefield, and that into orbital data centers launched on purpose-built rockets.
He insists this is not inconstancy but method — "gradient descent," small steps in whichever direction slopes down. "If it doesn't change? Then you're a bad entrepreneur." The founder's conviction attaches to the territory, not the specific plan. Bhatt has wanted to build a space company since at least his 2015 wedding; what kind of space company has been allowed to change repeatedly.
↻
The Iteration Record
Each step a failure, or partial failure, of the idea before it.
2010
Celeris, a high-frequency trading company, founded in New York.
2011
Celeris closed; Chronos Research sells low-latency trading software to banks and funds.
2013
Robinhood incorporated April 18; $3M seed closes in December after 70+ rejections.
2018
3% checking product announced and withdrawn within a day; relaunched with FDIC insurance in 2019.
2024
Aetherflux announced October 9: space solar beamed to Earth via infrared laser.
2025
Galactic Brain announced in December: orbital data center powered by space solar.
2026
Rebrand to Cowboy Space; $275M Series B; rockets whose upper stages become data centers.
Tactic: Separate your long-term conviction (the territory) from your current plan (the route) in writing, and give yourself explicit permission to abandon the route whenever the evidence tilts.
Principle 9
Respect both kinds of law
"If you're not breaking the laws of man and you're not breaking the laws of physics, there will be a path." The sentence sounds like a license for audacity, but its history is a lesson in humility. In December 2018, Robinhood launched a checking product without consulting SIPC, the agency whose insurance it was invoking. It was withdrawn in a day. "Next time they'll aim before they shoot," said SIPC's president.
The company learned. Its later history — its own clearing system, FDIC-insured cash management, licenses in the U.K. and Lithuania, a chief legal officer who later followed Bhatt to Aetherflux as adviser and investor — reflects a founder who came to treat regulation not as an obstacle but as a second physics, as real and as non-negotiable as the first. At Cowboy Space, the chief operating officer is also the chief legal officer. The structure itself encodes the lesson.
Regulation and physics share a property: both can be navigated, neither can be argued with. The founder who confuses "not forbidden" with "permitted" pays for the difference publicly.
Tactic: Before any launch in a regulated domain, list every agency whose rules your product touches and call each one before you announce, not after.
Principle 10
Partition the crown by zones of passion
Bhatt and Tenev were co-CEOs for seven years, an arrangement most governance experts regard as unstable. Bhatt attributes its durability to "trust, friendship and zones of passion": product and design for him, an expanding remit of regulators, capital, and public face for Tenev. When the IPO required a single chief executive, Bhatt stepped aside in November 2020 and became chief creative officer — two months before the GameStop crisis made Tenev's role the most exposed seat in American finance.
Stepping back did not mean surrendering control. The July 2021 voting agreement bound the two founders to vote director elections "as is mutually agreed," and by 2026 Bhatt held more voting power than Tenev. The partition was of operating responsibility, not of ultimate authority — which may be why the friendship survived what would have destroyed most founding partnerships. Tenev was an early investor in Aetherflux.
⚖
How the Founders Divided Robinhood
Operating roles shifted; control stayed joint.
| Period | Bhatt | Tenev | Phase |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013–Nov 2020 | Co-CEO; product and design | Co-CEO | Build |
| Nov 2020–Mar 2024 | Chief creative officer | Sole CEO; public face in GameStop | Crisis |
| Jul 2021 onward | Founder voting agreement party | Founder voting agreement party | Control |
| Mar 2024 onward | Board director; 32.0% of votes | CEO; 26.1% of votes | Next |
Tactic: With a co-founder, divide operating domains by genuine passion rather than title, and separately formalize how ultimate decisions will be made jointly so that role changes never become power struggles.
Principle 11
Announce the next company before the first one is done
At his 2015 wedding — the same year Robinhood's app launched — Bhatt told a room of guests that his next company would be a space company, then pointed at his Index Ventures investor: "And you will fund it." Nine years later, Index co-led the Series A.
The toast did several things at once. It made a public commitment that would be embarrassing to abandon. It planted a seed in the one investor whose trust he had already earned. And it reframed Robinhood, in his own mind and perhaps his friends', as an apprenticeship — what Hammer later called "the detour." By the time Bhatt sat down for coffee with Hammer in May 2024, the investor had been primed for a decade. Thirty minutes became half a day.
The Aetherflux Series A cap table reveals the payoff of a career's worth of relationships compounding: Index, Tenev, Gallagher, Leto. Trust earned in one domain transferred, nearly intact, to a domain with no overlap. Index's stated reasoning was explicit: "We double down on working with exceptional people."
Tactic: Tell the investors and collaborators who know you best what your next ambition is, long before you pursue it, so that when you arrive the conviction is already theirs.
Principle 12
Say the hard part out loud
"Space is hard and space is expensive." Bhatt says this, by his own account, "pretty often" — including to the investors he is asking for money. He told Semafor his plan would take "hundreds of millions, if not billions." He calls his own firm an "aspiring space company" until it puts hardware in orbit. He admits he "didn't understand aerospace" when he started.
This candor is strategy. In a field littered with promises that were twenty years away for fifty years, the founder who names the difficulty first acquires credibility no technical slide can confer. It filters for investors with the right patience. And it inoculates the founder against the most dangerous form of failure — the gap between expectation and reality that turns a hard problem into a scandal. Robinhood learned the cost of that gap the hard way, in a checking launch that overpromised and an interface that made risk feel like a game.
Tactic: Open every pitch for a hard project by stating its single hardest problem and your honest estimate of what solving it will cost.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Baiju Bhatt, recalling 2013, as quoted in 2018I began riding my bike to work and went to Whole Foods and bought a bunch of rice and beans, went into hibernation mode and it was one of the most creative moments of my life. I just stopped caring if I failed.
— Baiju Bhatt, Giant Ideas podcast, 2026I've been professionally operating in industries where I don't know what I'm doing. I didn't know finance when I started it, didn't understand aerospace when I started this, right? It's usually in the process of failing an idea that I'm like, this is the actual idea.
— Baiju Bhatt, TechCrunch StrictlyVC, June 2025Until you do stuff in space, if you happen to be an aerospace company, you're actually an aspiring space company. I would like to transition from "aspiring space company" to "space company" sooner.
— Baiju Bhatt, to Semafor, July 2025My motive was to take something which looked and felt like science fiction, and try to make it a science reality — and to build a business in the process.
— Baiju Bhatt, on Robinhood's seed-round rejections, 2026Until you are successful, frankly, nobody gives a damn.
Maxims
- Want in, not out. The most durable disruptions come from outsiders who believe the system is worth joining.
- Make doubt a contract. When an investor names a risk, offer to carry it yourself.
- Budget the catastrophe. A failure you have fully priced in advance cannot distort your judgment.
- Shrink until it ships. Ideas stay twenty years away for exactly as long as their smallest unit is the size of a city.
- Assemble, don't invent. Build from commercially available parts and let the arrangement be the breakthrough.
- Serve the stranded first. The customer with no alternative will forgive everything except your absence.
- Design is a statement of belonging. Every interface tells users whether the room is meant for them — and what it has made too easy.
- Hold the territory, release the route. Change the plan often; change the destination rarely.
- There are two physics. The laws of man are as real as the laws of nature, and neither can be argued with.
- Name the hard part first. In a field of broken promises, candor is the scarcest capital.
