Want Some Crypto?

If you’re looking for zero-fee stocks, margin trading, and 24/7 Bitcoin buys, the founders of Robinhood have an app for you.

- Max Chafkin and Julie Verhage

Late one Monday morning last December, Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev, co-chief executive officers of online stock brokerage Robinhood, called an emergency meeting in the company’s cramped Palo Alto office. Behind them on a flatscreen TV an image of the Greek sun god, Helios, appeared over a hot pink background with the words “DON’T SLEEP” in giant, yellow type. On the bottom, right-hand corner of the image was a date: Jan. 31.

The meeting was short but to the point. Bhatt and Tenev told the 150 employees—some watching via video from Robinhood’s Orlando office—that the company was in danger of missing out on Bitcoin, which, as they saw it, was the biggest thing to happen to the financial-services industry in decades. Workers would have to drop what they were doing and focus on giving clients access to it, or Robinhood might become irrelevant. “We haven’t been taking this seriously,” Bhatt recalls telling the staff.

The previous Thursday, with the price of the cryptocurrency soaring, Bitcoin exchange Coinbase briefly hit No. 1 in Apple’s U.S. App Store—meaning it was being downloaded more than Facebook, Netflix, YouTube, and everyone else. The same day, according to data from market researcher App Annie, Robinhood, which had been ahead of Coinbase at times earlier in the year, was ranked 194th. By Dec. 11, when Bhatt and Tenev called the meeting, Bitcoin was trading at $17,000 per coin, up from $1,000 at the beginning of 2017.