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- Robinhood at $5.6 Billion...Hoo-Ah!
Robinhood at $5.6 Billion...Hoo-Ah!
Howard Lindzon
May 10, 2018
Today Robinhood announced a $360 million series ‘Hoo-Ah’ today. Here is Fortune with the details.
Tom, Gary and I at Social Leverage are thrilled. So are our LP’s. We are proud angel investors (series A and B as well).
Robinhood is an amazing company, founded by crazy smart Baiju and Vlad, who built a great team and insanely good product. Forget the valuation for the moment and try and appreciate the scale of the growth story. The Company was founded in just 2013.
I have been saying this is day one for do it yourself investing since 2008.
We are now officially in Day 2.
This ‘Silicon Valley Is The New Wall Street‘- post from February 2014 now looks pretty good. For those too lazy to click:
In 2008, my vision for Stocktwits was as a lead generation for all the brokerages. Stocktwits would be the water cooler and the brokerage API’s would allow our users to enter orders right from their web or mobile conversations to their favorite broker. Roger Ehrenberg would join me on brokerage pitches back in the day. It was not a lot of fun explaining our vision.
The big online brokerages are ruled by the compliance departments, not API’s. Legacy lawyering.
I figured, much like I figured web video advertising would be solved in 2006 when I started Wallstrip, that one broker would break ranks and do something innovative.
NOPE.
The good news is things are changing in 2014. I was only 6 years early. Robinhood is solving a big, but simple problem and they have a hungry, young, mobile and social group of loyal customers banging on their door.
It is my belief that with API’s and the likes of Robinhood and Stocktwits, that people will be able to turn messages into trades/investments in three clicks from whatever device they are using and from whichever app they choose.
It is fun and fulfilling to see things really come together.
Back to work.
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