Rishi Khanna, CEO of Stocktwits — Facilitating a Global Conversation for Individual Investors
In today’s episode I’m joined by Rishi Khanna, CEO of Stocktwits, the original social platform for individual investors and traders with 6M registered members.
Rishi and I cover a number of topics, including:
Lessons learned as a serial entrepreneur:
- Selling and storytelling: Selling is a critical skill and one that Rishi learned especially when he was scaling Novus. He’s realized the importance of selling in hiring, fundraising, and numerous other parts of his business
- The importance of going back to basics: Understanding key numbers, the product, and the use case you are solving for your users and keeping these in mind are key while scaling startups
- Doing the small things: Rishi emphasizes that startups aren’t easy, and taking care of the details is especially important. Over time, these small wins scale up to provide big opportunities
Growing Stocktwits:
Stocktwits' mission is to host a global conversation for retail investors and traders across all asset classes. Prior to Rishi joining, Stocktwits had already organically created a highly engaged community with millions of users, and Rishi saw an opportunity to deliver more value to this community. In particular, he saw an opportunity for international expansion — and the team has recently launched in India with eyes towards the U.K. and Australia. Stocktwits has also recently included crypto trading on its application, and will soon release an equities trading product.
The Benefits of Social Trading:
Rishi fundamentally believes that investing is like a craft or a trade, and in order to get better at this craft you need to learn from others. In Rishi’s own life, his dad played an important role in helping him ramp up the investing learning curve. Rishi fondly recalls taking prices out of the morning newspaper and charting them on a graph to help his dad. With Stocktwits, Rishi hopes to enable a social platform that facilitates this type of learning. Stocktwits also enables users to quickly get a pulse of the market, providing unique insights on what the retail and individual investing community is currently interested in.
Last but not least, Stocktwits is currently hiring across the board! If you’re interested, you can see open roles here.
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Rishi Khanna:
Rishi Khanna is the CEO of Stocktwits, the original social platform for individual investors and traders with 6M registered members. Before Stocktwits, Rishi was Managing Director at SS&C GlobeOp at SS&C Technologies Holdings Inc, where he had overall responsibility for sales, product, operations and strategic direction of a number of businesses serving the alternative assets industry. In 2007, Rishi co-founded and served as President of Novus, a global portfolio intelligence platform company that invented the art of portfolio intelligence, solving unique data and analytics challenges facing capital allocators and fund managers across liquid and illiquid investments. Prior to co-founding Novus, Rishi was responsible for the development of the technology and product platforms for Gerson Lehrman Group. Rishi holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University.
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About the Author:
Anirudh Singh is a second-year MBA Candidate at The Wharton School, where he is part of the Wharton FinTech Podcast team. He has a passion for economic development, venture capital, financial services, and all things FinTech. Don’t hesitate to reach out with questions, comments, feedback, and opportunities at singhan@wharton.upenn.edu.
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