What Did Robinhood Teach About Controlling Unit Economics?

Baiju Bhatt says a lesson from building Robinhood is that controlling the unit economics of what you sell leads you to vertically integrate, and to control the components that drive the cost. Robinhood did a lot of that. Asked whether a space company can borrow the stack that already flies and only redo part of it, he says a large chunk has to be redone.

There is nowhere near enough launch capacity for what everybody wants to do. There is not enough mass to orbit, not enough rideshares, and not enough ways of getting stuff to space. SpaceX's accomplishments are monumental, he says, and he does not want to speak for them, but they are going to use a lot of their payload for what they are building. To control the scale and the unit economics of a data-center company, the whole thing has to be looked at as vertically integrated. That is difficult. Each piece is still a build-versus-buy choice, and the answer is not dogma. The north star is whether the output cost can compete with doing the work on the ground.