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- Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev’s product philosophy: “One screen. One Button. One core action.”
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev’s product philosophy: “One screen. One Button. One core action.”
The first version of Robinhood was actually a social trading app.
“[It] allowed you to create a profile, follow other people, rate stocks, upvote news, private messaging,” Vlad explains. But the founders quickly realized that all these features just led to a muddled product.
He advises founders to learn from this mistake:
“Don’t throw the kitchen sink into an app. Make something super simple. Get down to the essence — one screen, one button, one core action. And build from there.”
Vlad and his co-founder then built an entirely new version of the app and focused on doing just one thing better than anybody else: trading stocks from your phone. And they ignored everything else.
At the time of this interview, Robinhood was valued at more than a billion dollars and Vlad admits that they still didn’t even have a web platform.