Fireside chat with the VP of Product at Robinhood, Josh Elman

Hi, I'm Michael. This is Josh. The funny thing is, we're going to talk a little bit about your career. Josh has had this kind of unbelievable career over the past 20 or so years in product. Started a company called Homestead. Who here is old enough to remember or ever having streamed a song from real networks? I am old enough.

Awesome.

That's good. Good for you. Went to LinkedIn. Zazzle, Facebook, Twitter, then went to the dark side and actually went to the capital side of the business instead of the labor side of the business and was a VC at Greylock for 7 years. He invested in the company that I work for, so Josh is actually a board member of Medium. So once every couple months I have to defend myself to Josh.

I get to study capital over his labor.

Exactly. And is now VP Product at Robinhood. So first of all, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Greylock, Robinhood. How the hell did you do that? We were just talking about career trajectory. If I had to write the path, you just walked that path.

When I started out from college, I wrote this thing on my resume that said I want to create great technology that changes people's lives. And the couple things that that meant to me was like, I graduated in '97 when like the internet bubble was first starting to happen. And I just, it felt like this window of time where my life was just lined up with this amazing thing exploding and just how do I get on the ship? And I really always talked about how to change people's lives and make people's lives better. And it was always about like, how do I actually affect what people do? How do we use technology? Not because it's cool, not because it makes things run faster on a semi, um, Conductor, or not because, you know, you can compile code faster in their language, but really you can just use something in your daily life and make it a part of your habit, and we can make these products that are digital much faster and better. And so everything I've done in my career is like, what are other waves you can get on that, that will really happen, that might happen now? The first one I got on, you know, when I started RealNetworks, even though most of you don't remember it, or at least like half the room did, that was like, let's put audio video on the internet so you can access any piece of audio content or video content that you want from anywhere right now. And while RealNetworks is not the company that carried that all the way through, man, that mission is bigger and bigger than ever. I mean, the combination of Netflix and Amazon Prime and Apple and the iPod and the entire wave that had, and Spotify, like, RealNetworks wanted to be all those things and had that vision. And it was so fun to kind of like dream like when a The dream then used to be when 100 million people do this, or when 300 million people do this. And at Real, I learned this because the first product I worked on, RealPlayer, I was running— I started as an engineer and was running kind of engineering, and then ended up running engineering and product. We had a couple hundred million people using our product every week or every month. And I was like, whoa, this actually works. You can touch this many people. It was like on most Windows PCs at the time. And I was a— Windows engineer, so I knew how to write code for Windows, and I thought that was the coolest thing. Totally irrelevant now, or mostly irrelevant, but like—

It was cool.

And so then when I kind of moved on, like, I've just kept that exact same mission and idea. I actually started business school, which is a whole different topic, and saw social networking starting to happen. Friendster and LinkedIn were just getting going, and when I squinted at a good friend of mine who then went on to be a a revenue VP at Twitter and he's over at Instagram now. And he and I were just jamming on this social network thing could be huge, could be hundreds of millions of people. And I was like, you know what, I know I'm in business school, but maybe I can go help LinkedIn. I emailed them and I had done the same program at Stanford as Reid Hoffman maybe 8 or 9 years earlier. And so they recognized it as a weird program called Symbolic Systems, and they recognized it. And they were like, oh, why are you in business school? I was like, 'cause I wanna be a product manager. They were like, come and be a product manager here. And I'd already shipped at that point, RealPlayer was actually cool. And so it was relevant that I'd shipped a product to hundreds of millions of people. And so they're like, come here and do it. And I was like, didn't I go to business school to be a product manager? They're like, you don't need business school. I dropped that after a semester and got on the social networking train. And then everything since then has been a combination of my own ADD. I don't recommend people job hop like I did between LinkedIn and Zazzle and Facebook and Twitter. If you find a good rocket ship, stay on board. I kind of did the high degree of difficulty by jumping around. I was like, oh, this LinkedIn thing will be big, but Jobs is kind of boring. Maybe Zazzle will reinvent commerce. Imagine that— do you guys even— who's heard of Zazzle? Okay, that's not bad.

That's pretty good.

Zazzle is an on-demand custom manufacturing platform, and at the time, the biggest social platform wasn't actually Facebook or MySpace or anything else, it was eBay. Amazon was this weird commerce site that sold books and CDs and a few things, and eBay was like the social promise of the internet. You could buy anything from anybody and they could ship it to you. I thought Zazzle was gonna be the next wave of this where you could buy anything designed by anybody and Zazzle made it on demand and shipped it out. They would print t-shirts or mugs or greeting cards. I was like, oh, that seems like a bigger future. I got on that train. It turns out instant custom manufacturing hasn't actually become a thing, so I was kind of wrong.

Yeah.

You're not always right. Then I saw Facebook blowing up and I was like, Facebook's got so much legs left. I jumped on. This was right when the Facebook platform was blowing up, and I loved that job, but I kinda wasn't actually a product manager. I actually got to work with Mustafa back then, so Mustafa is hosting this, it all kinda comes together. But we had really fun times building the platform, but I was like, I'm not gonna leave Facebook, it's gonna be a giant company, but if I could go to Twitter. And it took me 6 months, but I just believed Twitter had so much opportunity to be so big and so giant. And I said, it might not be as big as Facebook, but I can get this role to be much more involved. And I— it took me 6 months, actually, from first meeting the team. I think I first got introduced to Biz Stone. And 6 months later, Jason Goldman, who was kind of running product then, was like, OK, Josh, I think we finally have a role for you. Why don't you come on board? And there was about 80 people in the company. I was like, I'm in. And it worked out perfectly. And that was great until Twitter has had this rolling heads of product and other things, including this—

I have no idea what you're talking about.

I think Michael was one of the dark arts teachers for a couple of years. As well, we kind of joked that it was like the Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts, you know, new VP product every year too at Twitter. But I was part of that whole system that got rolled, and then I was like, you know what, maybe I've been better at picking companies, I'll try the VC thing. And after—

Well, I wanna talk about picking companies for a second. So one of the things that you did in your career around picking companies is you found people like at this hockey stick inflection point, like the Facebook platform was there, like maybe Zazzle didn't quite hockey stick, like Twitter was definitely hockey stick, sticking while you're there. You've learned a bunch of things about growth. And we've had these conversations. Are there principles that you've taken away from that work? Either things that— anti-patterns that you've seen or good patterns you've seen that are useful for this crowd?

It's a great question. I think there's 2 parts to it. One is in terms of picking these things when you kind of see that inflection point, the first is finding that trend, finding that thing that you believe in the world that's going to get to a lot more people. And you have to sort of squint your eyes and go, could I actually imagine this thing in 100 million people's hands? Now we're talking scales of a billion. Could I imagine a billion people doing this? I mean, I think when we were talking about Facebook back in 2008, we were like, a couple hundred million people, wouldn't that be amazing? And Mark Zuckerberg, you know, would get up in front of the company and be like, when we get to a billion, and people would be like, a billion? And like, I mean, now they're at like 2. And it's just kind of amazing to sort of like have that foresight, but being able to do that, I mean, that's what we do. We're building technology, we're building products. We don't think about how cool it is to have a nice little cafe down the street that can serve X many people and you can really never get capacity and your next dream is maybe bump out the wall next door and be double the size. We build technology that's digital that can get to so many people so quickly. So being able to squint and do that. The second thing though is finding teams that have this really weird balance of pragmatism and vision at the same time. I've talked to a lot of companies, I got to meet a lot of founders and get inside of a whole bunch of companies on the VC side, and this thing is still really rare where when you meet the people at the company, they paint this cool vision of the future, but they also can tell you how they're at this step now and they have to get to this step, and then they have to get to this step before they can get there. When you find that balance where they're very realistic and pragmatic about what needs to be done to get them closer to that vision, but then still have the vision, then things really work. When you get too focused on the vision, you miss all the steps in between. When you get too good at the steps in between, I've seen a lot of companies, gaming companies, get really good at optimizing every little step in between, and then don't paint that big vision. They never kind of, or rarely, make it all the way through. And that really then becomes the secret of finding those companies that I found had that balance, give you a much better shot. And then growth is all about how you do every single thing you can to get to that next step. And like, you know, the big vision, you're still laying bets and everything else, but doing growth at any of these companies in consumer growth is everything you can just to get to that next step and being super clear about that.

All right, so here's a thing. You've seen, like, you're now Out of capital and back in labor, running product at Robinhood, which— and you're doing more than just product management, right? So describe your full role just so people have context.

You know, I mean, I'm the VP product there, but I'm really kind of running the product organization. And we basically have lumped kind of everything that is understanding our customers, figuring out what we're going to build for them, figuring out how to get it in their hands, sort of all in one group. 5 separate teams underneath me, product management of course, and then user research. And one of the secrets of Robinhood— maybe I shouldn't give everybody else our secrets— is we invest a lot in user research, or some, some other companies call it consumer insights. We are talking to customers all the time, and we are really just trying to understand what are their pain points, how do they think about money when we have ideas, how do they think about our ideas, what words would they like us to use to describe them. How should a feature work one way or another? But really, it's also just getting back to their core pain points. And we really use that to figure out where to go, because we only want to build things that we think we have real insights that customers want. So product management, then a research team, a design team that really takes all that and really tries to realize it. We have a content team that's separate, because so much of what we do is telling our story, whether it's words in the product, words in the website, whether it's the way that we write articles that really help people understand what's going on in the market, or start to help people understand, like, options are a very, very complex thing. And we've written a lot to help people sort of break down how they can build strategies around investing in options. So we actually think content is a real strength and sort of separate from these organizations. And then marketing, which I kind of pair closely with growth because they're really the same thing, it's how do we use a combination of money and intuition and product features to get the product in the hands of more people. And so we put all that together and collectively we build our roadmaps and try to go crank out as many things as we can as fast as we can that we think customers will love.

So you're back hiring and you've worked with a lot of PMs. I have a 2-part. One is general traits that you've seen for good PMs over the years, and then the other thing is Do you think that a single PM can do both the vision and the next step thing? Like, what have you ever— like, I find that to be really rare.

So I think to build a startup at the early stage, when you get really lucky is when you get this incredible collection of really rare people who all have these incredible skills. As you start to scale and you get very large, sometimes you can now say, okay, it's cool to have one person who doesn't have all the skills. that can actually just sort of broadly do their thing really, really well, and we'll complement them with the team around them. But at our stage, you know, we're 250 people or something, at our rate of scale, like, we kind of need to keep finding those rare unicorns who really bring it, because so much of what we do is different, and we are rotating and flexing all the time. And if you're not adaptable, you know, that's kind of the first skill, like, you won't be able to really thrive in the organization.

That's such a key trait. like that adaptability, especially in like, you know, seed to Series A to like to— I mean, it's like up through like you're just constantly changing your mind and pivoting. And so like having people that are like, all right, that's cool, let's toss that plan out and we'll do this new one, I'm good. Like that's— do you have good people like that?

Oh my gosh, I mean, this, this checking and savings that we launched today, the number of times we have just thrown out parts of these plans and even pivoting on a different plan we were building to think about these features was an incredible shift. And to go back to your question about what skills, so adaptability is one. The other 2 that, or the 3 that I really look for, I loved what, I think it was Maxime who said, I just look for what they actually did. People have a lot of stuff on their resume, and my first question's like, what'd you build? Oh, why'd you make that decision? Oh, how come it looked that way? What research insight caused you guys to do this? What'd you learn once you shipped it? And it's not that I necessarily care about their judgment, but I'm just like, you can tell the people super quickly once you poke a few layers down. You can just tell the people who were actually in the seat making all those hard decisions and doing all that joyful work, and the ones who are like, yeah, I worked on that thing, but really somebody else did, and I own this one little piece. So you can tell that quickly. The second thing I really look for is self-awareness. I really want people who kind of understand their strengths and weaknesses, and it doesn't mean that you should focus on your weaknesses to build them up or to complement your strengths. It's just know what you're good at and know what you're not as good at, and then you can really make conscious decisions. I'm gonna do more of the things I'm good at, and I'm gonna try to shield myself from the things I'm not good at, or try to make sure I'm complemented by other team members, or— I'm going to really focus on those things I'm not as good at so I can build them up so I'm stronger overall. Both are perfectly fine solutions. And I actually have a question that I ask every PM candidate. And I just say, here's 5 skills I think you need as a PM. Which are you best at and which are you worst at? And I go through, you've got to be really good at telling a narrative and vision to your team and rallying all of them around it and being constantly good at the narrative and vision. I said, you've got to be good at working with designers to produce a truly exquisite UX. And it's not that you need to make the UX, but if you've got to wireframe or you've got to give designers feedback to propel them to do their best work, that's a hard skill. And not everybody's great at working with designers to produce exquisite UX. I'd say working with engineers to solve gnarly technical problems. You're trying to do something with AI. You're trying to do something that's super complicated. There's race conditions. And are you a good PM that helps the engineers get to some conclusions there and helps limit scope on the things that are really Stupidly hard so that you guys can get a great product out and work through them? Are you just great at execution and process? When you break down a problem, do you hit it A, B, C, D, E and set the milestones and just run a really tight ship through the whole process? And then I ask metrics and iteration. Once something ships, how good are you at evolving it? And I ask the question, I was like, which are you best at and which are you worst at? And half the time, PM candidates can't follow instructions, and they literally tell me how they are at each one of these things, and I'm like, okay, cool, so which are you best at and which are you worst at?

Okay, cool, which one are you best at and which one are you worst at?

So I've always been quite good at, and I think one of my PM strengths has been the narrative and vision. When we need to tell stories and put a product together and kind of why are we doing this and who it is for, I've just been able to get a team rallied around something in a way that I haven't seen as many other PMs do. And I think that's been one of my real strongest skills. I think I'm actually pretty good at it. And then I say, in metrics and iteration, I'm also quite good. There's some people who are better, but I'm in that upper tier. And I'm worst at process. I'm good at plowing a project through and getting it done with a bunch of people and making sure we don't drop too many things on the floor, but I know PMs who, man, run a really tight ship, and I'm just not one of them. And if you need somebody who can do that, like a project that's super complicated and needs to be ordered on a Gantt chart, that's just never me. But I'm amazed at how many PMs aren't self-aware enough to answer that question well and don't follow the instructions just to give me a best and worst. And you can color it a little bit, but you're like, I'm best at this, I'm worst at this, and I'm also pretty good at this. is a perfectly reasonable answer. And then I have one more thing that I test for in all my interviews, which is product curiosity. My basic expectation is if you wanna be a product manager in Silicon Valley and you wanna help build the future of technology products, you should be trying new stuff a fair amount. And even if you're not, if you're busy and life's busy and you aren't downloading new apps every day, that's totally fine. But when something does cross your desk that kinda makes an impact, You should start asking questions about it. You're like, why is this cool? I wonder why they did this. What kind of decisions did they make? So I just ask people, what is a recent product that is new to you and new to your life that you think they had a really great product team behind because they actually made some really cool decisions? And I'll be honest with you guys, you guys should probably think of an answer to that question. I'm surprised at how many mediocre answers I get. I mean, I literally—

I love my iPhone.

One person was like, well, my Alexa speaker. Speaker is pretty cool. And I was like, what do you do with it? And they're like, well, we listen to music for a little while. And I'm like, really? Like, there's nothing new? Like, the coolest one for me recently is Notion. I don't know if anybody's tried it. It's kind of a note-taking app on your phone that lets you add all these widgets and tries to make it pretty easy to collaborate. And the widgets are actually like much simpler than anything I've ever seen. And so it's like this sort of power of like a quasi little bit of a spreadsheet table builder within a notes app on your phone. So I've made some clever documents in it with something that I've never been able to do. I kind of haven't made it perfect in my life, but I really like it. And it's just cool. A friend told me about it, and I've been looking for a better notes tool, and Notion was the closest thing I found. And at least that's something. And one person answered Airtable the other day, and I thought that was great. I thought that was a great answer, because Airtable's super clever, and then I was like, What have you done with Airtable? And they're like, oh, it just raised a lot of money. And I was like, no, like, come on, I don't give a shit. Like, like, like, you should just be thinking about these things all the time.

Uh, Notion's pretty cool. Have you tried Coda?

I've tried Coda. Coda's complicated. It, it, like, I couldn't onboard to it and I couldn't, I didn't have a use case to do it. That's been my problem with Airtable too. Who uses Airtable or has tried it? Can somebody shout out the use case that got you to pop on Airtable? Personal CRM. Personal CRM.

Oh, that's good. Was that Suyash?

Job search. PRD list. PRD list, okay. I need to go try some stuff, 'cause I've tried to set it up and it's like, ah, screw it, Google Sheets, easy, done. But I know that Airtable's better.

This is fine.

I just haven't like, figured out how to do it. But Notion, because I spend way too much time on my phone, and Notion was at least easier to play with and really get going on my phone.

That's cool. Okay, so you spent 7 years as a venture investor. So first of all, why? I mean, other than you think you get pretty good at picking companies. But I have a theory just about You have a little bit of— we both have a little ADHD. We love the quick— and part of that is about loving quick feedback cycles. We've had this conversation before. And one of the reasons that I decided not to go that path, even though we joked to Twitter that the management path was manager, director, VP, VC, because generally you hit the VP level and then you got fired. And a bunch of people went on to be VC. So, but the feedback cycle as an investor is very long. You generally don't know if your fund's gonna return for like 10 years. And you don't know if a company's gonna be good for, especially if you're doing seed or Series A, it's probably 10 years. And as a product person who also enjoys having millions of people that you can ship A/B experiments to and get statistically significant results within a couple days, I was like, holy shit, I'm way too... You're a product person. what's the word, insecure, to basically be able to make those kind of bets?

How did it feel? You know, I'll come back to the how it felt, 'cause that's actually like, why I left is a very different thing than why I got in.

Okay.

But look, there's a couple things. Like, I've told you, like, my career was, you know, a little bit of ADD, and when I got to Twitter, I felt like I was home. Ev Williams, who's now running Medium, and I get to work with him again, was the CEO at the time. We had, it was 80 people in the company, felt kind of like a family, and we literally had this mission to bring information and give, you know, help everybody instantly connect to the kind of information they care about. And Twitter was powerful. I was using Twitter so much, more than Facebook, everything else. Twitter's the only company that I've ever left where I use the product more now than I used it when I worked there. 'Cause like when you work at like any of these companies, you're like on it all the time. and you're playing with it and everything else. Twitter, I'm on it more even though I don't work there, and I loved it. I'd been through LinkedIn and Zazzle and Facebook, and all those were good experiences and bad experiences, and I think if I had been a little bit more patient, I kicked myself a bunch for just chilling out and being happy in my job and let things flow a little bit more, which now I'm doing, but if I had just let things flow a little bit more, I might've stayed at one of those longer and actually gotten through some of the little bumps and actually stayed for a very, very long time. I respect so much my friends who are running Facebook now, who I worked with back then when we were all trying to figure it out, or my friends who stayed through LinkedIn and became real executives there. I still have my ADD, so I got to Twitter and I was like, I'm home. I wanna be here forever. I wanna take this company public. It's the last product I ever wanna work on. Then literally a year into my time, the board decides to fire Ev Williams, decides to fire Jason Goldman, who was sort of the head of product, and Jack Dorsey kind of came back into the company. It was a really weird, tumultuous time. It went from so much fun where I was pinching myself to go to work every day to, do I really even want to be at this company? Do I know what it stands for? Am I even connected to the vision? Then A couple months into Jack being back, I didn't have a choice, and I was asked to leave the company. Asked to resign from the company is how they do it politely. You might have experienced some of that.

Sure.

And I said, oh crap, I'm out of LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter. They're all gonna go public and be very worthwhile companies in the next couple years, and those little stock options I got, I would go to my wife and be like, look, it actually worked. We can buy a house in Silicon Valley. All those things, and I was like, maybe I'm not good at this product thing. Maybe I'm good for a little while. I was very happy with the work I'd done at these companies of getting something off the ground, but maybe I don't stick, and maybe it's me. Maybe it's not circumstances and everything else, maybe it's me. Maybe I need to try something very different. What am I actually good at? Maybe I'm better at this picking and finding. That was one part of it. The second part of it was I had a theory at the time that if I had $100 million and I found the right type of companies, that we were gonna still create several $10, $20 billion plus companies in the age of the mobile internet and the age of bringing people together through their phones. This was 2011, July of 2011 that I was asked to resign from Twitter. And I was like, this is just happening now, and shit, I'm not at Twitter, I'm not at Facebook, I'm not at LinkedIn, but in mobile, this is still gonna happen. And I really was so committed to this, like bringing people together. And to be honest, that was right. Instagram happened, Snapchat happened, like Musical.ly, other things kinda happened, but those are the two that really happened. And really, Facebook happened. Facebook and WhatsApp happened. And then Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp, collected it all, and really Facebook happened. But I was right that there was so much more to be done. One of my best friends started Path, which was a brilliant product that was so close about how we bring each other together, and it wasn't quite Instagram, and it wasn't quite Snapchat, which got much bigger and Path didn't, but this thesis was right. And so I thought, gosh, maybe I can try to be a VC and those companies will happen. Greylock actually got to invest in Instagram 4 days before it sold to Facebook. He had raised a bunch of money and then was like, ah, peace out. I'm going to go be part of Facebook. Congratulations to him. What a journey they've had. I got really close to the Snapchat team. I'm still relatively close to their founders. We almost got to invest. If I'd invested in there, maybe I'd still be a VC because I would have had this. I got to invest. Ev Williams was raising his Series A, and because we had gotten to work together at Twitter. We got a chance to invest in Medium. I got to invest in one called Discord, which some of you might use if you're gamers. Phenomenal company, really brings people together around gaming and play, especially on the PC. I really loved it, and I said, gosh, this chance to go build a $10 billion company plus, and that's always been my goal, is like, can this thing be worth $10 billion or more? Was really holding true, and then I just started to lose that. I said, I don't think there's gonna be another company that looks like that. I think Facebook is that company for almost every space. $10 billion in market cap for Facebook as opposed to another startup that's doing it. You see this with the challenges that Snap is facing. You certainly even see this with the challenges that Twitter's facing that's carved out its thing, but it's not seen as really growing and absorbing it. As a VC, I started to go, okay, what's the next big thing? And if you don't see it and you don't know it and you don't believe it and you don't believe with $100 million you can turn that into a billion dollars, you shouldn't be a VC because that's the job, the only job. In fact, the entire job is to run around feeling like you have $100 million in your pocket and you got to go spend it and you got to turn it into a billion. And I kind of hit that wave where I'm like, gosh, is it crypto? And I said, you know what, I think it's fintech, but I don't really want to be an investor in fintech because it's a whole different beast to be an investor in that space. I just want to go build a great consumer product. And I'd gotten lucky enough to underprice Robinhood a few times and got to know the founders really well, even though we never agreed on price. And said, I'm thinking about going back to work. Could we hang out? And, you know, turned into me being there.

That's so cool. All right, I think we're gonna open it up for questions. Mustafa's got the mic, is acting like Phil Donahue, which is another old person reference.

Exactly. Awesome.

Super old.

Hi, Josh. Thanks for having us. The question that I have is for Robinhood. How do you guys envision algorithm trading? And I looked into it, you guys partnered with Quantopian, and that's something that, you know, a lot of users can engage in and create this algorithm trading strategy and trade on Robinhood. But is there a way to kind of simplify that process? You know, it seems like Robinhood wants to simplify things for traders, and I think algorithm trading is something that's very necessary for the market. And so how does Robinhood look at that?

It's a great question about Robinhood. You know, one of the things we've just done and invested a lot of time, and I was lucky to kind of get to see this work already very well in flight, is we just set up our own clearing infrastructure. We're the first company to do this in over 10 years, to really move on to our entirely run and hosted and self-operated clearing system. And that gives us a lot of flexibility now to go explore a lot more. Because we're not dependent on any partners or anything. We're talking directly to the street for every single trade. So as we talk about lots of new ideas like algorithmic trading and other stuff, we now have the flexibility to do it. Our primary focus right now has been to serve retail people who literally like might not feel like any other system is for them. They don't like the minimums, they don't like paying fees every time they wanna make a trade, because those, like it doesn't actually cost anything to make a trade, digitally have a transaction. And so we're really focused on serving our customers right now, and we do think that there's a possibility that our infrastructure may play into that, but it's not— we don't really talk about our roadmap, and we don't, you know, we're really focused right now on sort of serving our customers better. Let's do over here first.

Hello.

Hi, Josh. Josh, can you talk about what was your first 90-day plan look like at Robinhood? My first 90-day plan? First I had to prove to myself that I could do product again, 'cause I was actually kind of worried that I got fat and soft as a VC. And to be honest, I kind of did. Damn, VC, you walk into a company and you go to a board meeting with Michael and you're like, I got a bunch of feedback for you. Why don't you do this? And why don't you think about it this way? Are you sure your strategy's angled the right way? And can you produce this different dashboard? Because I'm not sure you're looking at the metric in the right way. And you think you're doing product, and you talk to your other VC friends, and you talk about your companies all the time, and you're like, and I told them they should do this, and then they did it 3 months later. And you think you have all this impact. And I was so embarrassed when I got into Robinhood.

Love you.

I was so embarrassed when I got into Robinhood, and I just remembered how much intense hard work there is every day with the company. So number one was prove to myself that I could do it again, pick up the skills. Number two was just help the team see that I could be part of the team. I'm coming back in and first thing I did was actually ship some features. There was a big issue around, we have this chat product called Feed within our crypto experience where you can go talk to other people trading crypto. And we had some problems with it. It wasn't moderated very well, so people were saying lots of bad things. And we just, we literally turned it off, like, on my second day, because we were like, this is unacceptable.

Right.

And I came in and kind of, we put a little plan together to get it moderated and cleaned up. And I just was a PM and kind of proved it. You know, and then the third thing was, get to know everybody in the company who has made the company successful so far, and try to ask them why, and try to figure out what those secrets are. Because I wasn't walking into a company where I had a plan to kick shit around and change things. I was working at a company that was doing so many things right, and I wanted to figure out how do we take the right things and scale them and double them and triple them and 10 times them and add people, but add people who will help us do that. So those were the first things I did, and then it was, okay, got a bunch of stuff in flight showing that I can ship stuff myself. Now how do we go build the plan that starts to get from the founder's mind? I think founders are so important at any company. Whether it's Facebook size or down, they have a vision for where you wanna go, and my job as a head of product is not to stamp my own vision on what we gotta do, but to really understand theirs, push them, start to think about the tactics, and then marshal the team in order to do it. And so I spent a lot of time doing that. We started to build a plan for really the next 3 months and then the rest of the year, and I still have gone in and shipped a bunch of features, and now— What's the next step? I'm in kind of that scaling part of building out our product team, our marketing team, our design team, in order for us to be able to separate now into tracks and create more leaders who can drive things. Let's take 2 more questions.

Yeah, you touched on it a little, but curious how you think about being a great product leader alongside a product or sort of great product leader CEO and the relationship between VP of product and that CEO or founder?

How much time do you—

no, I'm just kidding. Michael has some great answers on this too because he gets to work with literally one of the favorite product-driven CEOs I've ever gotten to work with, and I love still getting just to be on his board and get time with Ev Williams. But I think this is a really, really important thing, and I think a lot of people get it wrong. I think a lot of people come in and say, I'm the VP product. I gotta build the roadmap. What do you kinda wanna do? Cool, but I actually think we should do this. And they kinda say, I'm in charge of the product roadmap. I think the exact opposite. I think my job is to figure out how to build a scalable infrastructure that helps channel the founders and their quirks and their likes and their dislikes and their wants through the company and get just enough input from everybody at lower levels in the company from the founders where they can kinda get the founders in touch with what's going on in the product so it never deviates too far from their sensibilities. People in the company can start to learn that so they can make decisions better themselves without doing it. And so I really think my job is to create the infrastructure that makes sure that that will happen and scale as we get to 8 product managers to 20 product managers, from 8 designers to 20 designers to 40 designers. And it's setting up the right review processes where we can have— our founders are Beiju and Vlad. Where we can have Beiju and Vlad involved in the important decisions, but they don't need to be in all the meat and all the sausage grinding in order to get there. Where I can collaborate with them on the overall goals and make sure we're very aligned so that as I go work with the teams, they understand the direction and that we have enough checkpoints where we are constantly checking in, where everybody's in touch with the way that they see it, where they don't. I mean, you talk about Apple and how important Steve Jobs was to that company, and the thing was, Steve could walk around the company into any room and he could sort of give input and people knew it. And his team had done such a good job keeping him apprised of all the things going on that he always had context and he always kind of knew what was going on. But everybody on the team knew that it was important for this to be the Apple way, which originally was the Steve way, and he did an incredible job, I think, transitioning it to the Apple way. And I think that the VP product's job is to Make sure that happens so well and hope you've got founders who you believe in enough to go the distance. And if as a VP product you ever feel like you've lost faith in the founders and their judgment and their decisions, it's a good time to get out of there. And if the founders ever think the VP product is kind of like, hey, stop giving me input, I got this, like I think that's time for that relationship to break on the other side.

Very cool. Mustafa, are we wrapping?

I think, I think that's it.

All right, that's a good way to end on like an amazing customer journey.

Thanks, Josh.

Nice to see you. Thanks, everyone.