The Wall Street Journal - 22.02.2020 - 23.02.2020

B4| Saturday/Sunday, February 22 - 23, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Baiju Bhatt

Co-founder, Robinhood

Baiju Bhatt considers himself

lucky. Every day, he gets to

work beside his best friend,

Vladimir Tenev.

Mr. Bhatt and his fellow

co-founder of the investing

app Robinhood share an of-

fice with their desks placed

next to each other. Mr. Bhatt

met Mr. Tenev more than a

decade ago, when the two of

them were studying physics

at Stanford University. Mr.

Tenev is now one of Mr.

Bhatt’s most trusted advisers.

The idea for Robinhood

came to the two men while

they were working in New

York, witnessing the Occupy

Wall Street protest move-

ment as it emerged in 2011.

They saw that not many of

their peers were investing in

the stock market, and the

two men wondered if the

ability to trade without pay-

ing commission would get

the younger generation ex-

cited about investing.

Here are four of his most

trusted advisers:

—Francesca Fontana

Age: 35

What is your favorite book?

“The Case for Mars”

by Robert Zubrin

What time does your alarm go

off on weekdays?“I wake up

naturally at 7 a.m.”

What’s your secret talent?

“I love playing ‘Magic:

The Gathering.’

What’s your management

mantra?“To do your best work,

you have to enjoy what you do

ANASTASIIA SAPON FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL and the people around you.”

Vladimir Tenev

Co-founder and co-CEO,

Robinhood

James Higa

Executive director,

Philanthropic Ventures

Foundation

Meyer “Micky”

Malka

Managing partner,

Ribbit Capital

Vanessa Larco

Partner, New Enterprise

Associates

PERSONALBOARD OF DIRECTORS

The trusted advisers of top business leaders

Mr. Bhatt met Mr. Tenev in the summer of

2005 at Stanford. “We both had this 1970s,

Mick Jagger hairstyle...we thought we were

really cool, but the truth is we probably weren’t.”

Between the two men, Mr. Tenev has always been

the one to keep a cool head and think about

things logically rather than emotionally. The two

men see each other “all day, every day,” at work

and at the gym, where they work with the same

trainer. Mr. Bhatt says they have to remind them-

selves to hang out as friends. “We went to go see

‘Joker’ together,” Mr. Bhatt says.

Mr. Bhatt first met the former Apple execu-

tive in 2014. Mr. Bhatt asked Mr. Higa about

what it was about the group of people who

founded Apple that enabled them to be so creative

and reinvent an industry.

“His answer was simply that a lot of the same

people who worked together on the iPhone were

the same people that worked on the iPad, all the

way back to the Macintosh,” Mr. Bhatt says. That

lesson stuck with him as he co-founded Robin-

hood. He says he also values Mr. Higa’s generosity

and empathy.

Mr. Bhatt met Ms. Larco when she was the

director of product management for mobile

and web at Box, a cloud content manage-

ment company. Mr. Bhatt says Ms. Larco advised

his team to focus their product on the younger

generation of consumers, even if the market was

smaller. She and Mr. Bhatt stay in touch at least

once or twice every quarter. “She is incredibly tech-

nically competent and brings that level of rigor to

solving a lot of product problems,” Mr. Bhatt says.

“It’s a really great, long-term friendship and work-

ing relationship.”

Mr. Malka, an early investor in Robinhood,

met Mr. Bhatt around 2014 and has been a

close adviser ever since. Mr. Malka’s so-

called street smarts have been valuable to Mr.

Bhatt. “He grew up in Venezuela during the hyper-

inflation, so he has this mentality of not taking

good things for granted and being scrappy and re-

ally humble,” Mr. Bhatt says. Mr. Malka also goes

out of his way to reach out. “It’s sometimes hard

to remember that we need to stay in touch with

our advisers,” Mr. Bhatt says. “He’s very proactive

about it, which I really appreciate.”

cording to App Annie.

But some of these apps have

also been the subject of safety con-

cerns. Apple pulled Monkey from

its App Store in January for not

following guidelines to prevent

abuse, the company says. Allen

Loh, Monkey’s chief operating offi-

cer, says a new version of Monkey

with advanced safety features will

be released in the coming months

for people 18 and over.

“We have to fully embrace the

responsibility of ensuring we cre-

ate a safe experience for our us-

ers,”Mr.Lohsays.

Mr. Loh says his team recently

removed more than 3.2 million un-

derage accounts that had been us-

ing an older version of the app.

Yubo has faced its own safety

challenges. In Florida, law-enforce-

ment officials say they arrested a

man who allegedly lured a minor

through Yubo.

In a statement, Yubo said it is

EXCHANGE

TECHNOLOGY|KATHERINE BINDLEY

“currently investigating why the

Yubo safeguards were not able to

identify the suspect sooner in order

to improve our moderation system

and reinforce our solutions to iden-

tify suspicious profiles online.” It

added that the prevention of child

abuse has been a key priority for

the past three years. “Yubo recog-

nizes its responsibility in protecting

young people using its service and

has gone far beyond many of the

main social-media services.”

Yubo says it has safeguards al-

ready in place. It monitors mes-

sages and analyzes profiles and

photos for suspicious signs. Age

verification is required for

flagged accounts.

Teens are doing more to protect

themselves than many give them

credit for, says Dr. Hinduja. “They

are doing something to keep them-

selves safe or we would have expo-

nentially more victimization than

we do.” ROBERT NEUBECKER (3)

Hoop makes money through ad-

vertising: Users have to watch ads to

earn virtual “diamonds” that are re-

quired to send a Snapchat request.

Mr. Gervais and his co-founder

got the idea for Hoop after

launching an app two years ago

called Dazz, which let Snapchat

users send anonymous ques-

tions to their friends.

The app was downloaded

more than 250,000 times—in

three days. Mr. Gervais says

Apple Inc. pulled it from the App

store a few days later, saying the

app was missing safety features.

Hoop’s interface looks a lot like

Tinder and Bumble, another dating

app, but Mr. Gervais says it is not.

Users can specify if they want to

find friends in their own country,

but they can’t get more local than

that. They also can’t communicate

in the app. Of course, Mr. Gervais

says he has no idea what happens

after they move to Snapchat.

The app’s terms say that anyone

13 to 17 is supposed to get parental

permission before downloading it—

but like with other social-network-

ing apps, there is no way to enforce

it. Like Yubo, users are shown pro-

files only within their declared age

range. Certain tools remove inappro-

priate content before it is posted to

a profile and users can report con-

tent as well, Mr. Gervais says. Users

can decline to show their age and

their Snapchat profile name is hid-

den until they’ve accepted a request.

Another app that had been mar-

keting itself as a way for Generation

Z to make new friends is Monkey.

Users are matched up with strang-

ers for video chats based on their

age, interests and other factors.

They have 15 seconds to interact, af-

ter which they can mutually agree

to extend their time or add one an-

other as friends on the app.

Monkey, too, has been a hit, with

more than 850,000 downloads a

month globally from the Apple App

Store and Google Play store, in

seven straight months last year, ac-

your friends. Yubo makes money

from users who pay small amounts

to push their stream to more peo-

ple, or for a subscription that in-

cludes unlimited swipes and the

ability to see who “liked” them.

Yubo isn’t ubiquitous in the lives

of American teens yet—and maybe

never will be—but the company

says the app has 25 million users

signed up, with nearly half of daily

use now coming from America.

The rise of Yubo and other

similar apps raises big questions:

Do these apps provide unique and

meaningful benefits? Given what’s

out there, why do they need to

exist at all? And can they ensure

the safety of the many children

who use them?

What’s likely to perplex older

generations is why teens can’t just

hang out—online and off—with their

existing friends from school

and various activities.

“They’re hoping for a

connection,” says

Sameer Hinduja, co-di-

rector of the Cyberbully-

ing Research Center and

professor of criminol-

ogy at Florida At-

lantic University.

“It’s pretty basic.”

Dr. Hinduja says

that ideally, social

discovery apps could

help young people expand

their views. He has seen many

apps geared toward young peo-

ple, such as Chatroulette and

YikYak, take off and subsequently

dissolve over safety concerns.

Yubo started out as Yellow, an

app whose sole purpose was to help

users meet people on Snapchat. A

newer one, Hoop, recently took off

doing exactly that. Users sift

through profiles of strangers—opt-

ing to request a connection on

Snapchat or to X out people they

don’t want to see again.

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘strang-

ers,’ ” says Lucas Gervais, the 26-

year-old French co-founder of

Hoop’s developer, Dazz SAS. “They

have the same kind of hobbies; they

practice the same sports or activi-

ties. That’s it.”

Hoop’s maker says it was down-

loaded nearly a million times in

the first two weeks of February,

around the same time TechCrunch

published an article about the app.

It works through Snap Inc.’s devel-

opment kit.

A breed of upstart

apps is taking on an

internet function that

might seem unneeded

or even ill-advised:

helping teens talk to

strangers.

Branded as “social discovery” ser-

vices, these apps pitch themselves as

alternatives to outlets that already

specialize in online connections, like

Facebook and Instagram. They say

they are better at helping young us-

ers meet like-minded people outside

their existing circles. And they say

they have safeguards, such as sepa-

rating users by age and using artifi-

cial intelligence, to protect against

the inappropriate or unsafe behavior

that has plagued previous attempts

to connect young people online.

Their user numbers suggest that,

whether they succeed in striking

the right balance, apps like Yubo

and Hoop are tapping into a

need among teens and 20-

somethings for new ways

to branch out online.

“There is no place to-

day to socialize online,”

says Sacha Lazimi, the

26-year-old French co-

founder of Yubo, which

connects strangers

with messaging and

live-streaming.

It is a counterin-

tuitive statement for

anyone who has seen

teens sending Snaps rapid

fire to their friends, responding to

videos on TikTok, FaceTiming for

hours, or using Instagram. But Mr.

Lazimi thinks those platforms allow

for too much passive participation.

“Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok

are all about performance, content

and individual behavior,” he says.

Yubo features a swiping inter-

face similar to Tinder. But Mr.

Lazimi insists it is not a dating

app. The point, he says, is to facili-

tate communication between peo-

ple all over the world who share

mutual interests.

Users review a feed of profiles in

their respective age bracket; if two

users both swipe right, they become

friends. A core feature of Yubo is

live-streaming video conversations.

The broader Yubo public can view

and comment on them—though us-

ers can only view streams by others

in their age groups. An algorithm

recommends current conversations

it thinks you would like based on

Young people flock to apps that let them chat with like-minded

people online. But safeguards are imperfect.

AppsThat Say:

Do Talk to Strangers