During the pandemic, Robinhood experienced explosive growth in trading volume, leading to significant infrastructure challenges, including a full day of trading outages.

The core of Robinhood's business was identified as active traders, who are more resilient and continue to trade even in downturns, which led to a strategic refocus on this customer base.

Robinhood's early success demonstrated its transition from a financial services application to a culturally relevant consumer application, highlighting its unique value proposition, especially after facing multiple project failures and struggling to achieve product-market fit despite various marketing efforts before launching.

In early 2021, Robinhood faced a collateral call of $3.7 billion due to increased trading activity, which was unprecedented for the company.

In 2022, Robinhood faced a significant downturn as trading activity declined sharply due to inflation fears, leading to nearly half of its users leaving the platform.

In 2022, we had to effectively refound Robinhood due to a significant shift in the macroeconomic environment, which required us to change our strategy to adapt to higher interest rates.

Navigating the negative press cycle and loss of trust from users was exhausting for Robinhood's leadership, but it led to a commitment to transparency and rebuilding trust.

When Robinhood launched in March 2015, we converted hundreds of thousands of users from a waitlist, exceeding initial expectations of a 10% conversion rate.

The founders of Robinhood recognized the financial industry's shortcomings and the opportunity to create a new kind of financial services company, driven by the rise of electronic trading and mobile technology.