When brokerage and financial services platform Robinhood launched its IPO in 2021, Robinhood’s CFO Shiv Verma says the company had a lofty goal: “We want to be the financial super app.” “To be honest, we didn’t know what that meant. We were still figuring it out, we were seeing ‘What does this actually mean? What do we want to do?’ Now, you can see the pieces coming together, and it’s focused and it’s disciplined,” Verma told CFO Brew. Verma’s been at Robinhood since 2018, recently as its SVP of finance and strategy before his promotion to CFO earlier this year. He worked on several big projects along the way, including building the company’s treasury team. He also joined Robinhood six weeks before now-former CFO Jason Warnick, whose mentorship helped Verma become the next in line for the finance chief role. Verma’s got big ideas to help Robinhood achieve its super app dreams via its “North Star”: profitable growth. He also explained to CFO Brew how he plans to get there via a balanced investment strategy that keeps sights on the company’s long-term future. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What are your priorities as Robinhood’s new CFO? The first and foremost is just capital allocation…We spend a ton of time on, “How many developers do we have? Are they productive? Are we giving them the right tools? Are we shipping fast enough? Are we obsessing about speed and velocity?” My second main priority is very similar to what Jason [Warnick] had: We need to keep growing. We are a growth company, and how do we enable the business to do that? There’s two ways you can do it: one is the meat and potatoes, and two is the frontier technologies. By meat and potatoes—we grew so fast, sometimes we forget we’re not even barely 10 years old, we just don’t even have all the asset types and account types. So we need [to] keep investing in the core business, but then also pushing the frontiers, on new products. And Verma’s third main priority? Keep reading here.—DL | 
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