Ok, maybe the title is a bit misleading, but in a way, it is kind of like a real life Robinhood story.

Many millennials have probably heard the mobile trading app called RobinHood, and everything it tries to accomplish. If you aren’t familiar with what RobinHood does, they provide a commission-free stock brokerage service, something that had never been done before 2011. Robinhood makes money  “from its margin trading service, Robinhood Gold, which starts at $6 a month. Additionally, Robinhood earns revenue by collecting interest on the cash and stocks in customer accounts, much like a bank collects interest on cash deposits.” That’s taken directly from their site. But for the big question, how did the company start?

Amid the 2008 financial crisis, founders Baiju Bhatt and Vladimir Tenev met at Stanford university as math majors. They both went their separate ways, Tenev going on to pursue a PHD, and Bhatt going on to work in finance. During the recession Bhatt was able to see the future of stock trading, using electronics and algorithms. They developed their own trading system while living out of a small apartment in San Francisco (they insisted on being near silicone valley).

The two, now starting to slowly build their team, would then go on to pitch their prototypes and software in New York. Realizing that lots of hedge funds and banks were using extremely antiquated technologies,  they would realize that there was an opportunity to create a business. Vladimir and Baiju put together a team of mathematicians and computer scientists to create software products that made it easier for banks to write trading strategies.

Their goal was to create a platform in which people could buy and sell stocks easily, without the complexity of most platforms. They succesfully did this, their product has won tons of awards for its innovation.