The Silicon Valley Start-Up That Caused Wall Street Chaos Robinhood pitched itself to investors as the antithesis of Wall Street. It didn’t say that it also entirely relies on Wall Street. This past week, the two realities collided. Baiju Bhatt and Vladimir Tenev, the co-founders of Robinhood, at their office in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2016. The duo promised to democratize trading.Credit...Aaron Wojack for The New York Times Jan. 30, 2021 The online trading app Robinhood became a cultural phenomenon and a Silicon Valley darling with a promise to wrest the stock market away from Wall Street’s traditional gatekeepers and “let the people trade” — making it as easy to put millions of dollars at risk as it is to summon an Uber.