Robinhood is not an advisory firm. We commit capital where we have conviction, and the corporate, governance and capital-markets execution that follows is in the service of that investment. Before we put money behind a founder, we screen for five things.

TL;DR

  • Capital first, corporate next. We screen for the structural risks that decide whether we can underwrite a company today, in 12 months, or not at all.
  • Five questions, in this order: cap table cleanliness, PCAOB audit history, incorporation & IP, board reality, and listing intent.
  • These are the same checks an institutional investor does pre-commitment, not advisory diagnostics. The output is an investment decision, not a treatment plan.
  • Conviction is earned. We say no often. We say yes only when capital and execution can ride together.

Most IPO houses sell advisory hours. We don’t. At Robinhood, the corporate workstream (cap-table cleanup, audit, governance build, prospectus drafting, post-listing IR) only activates once we’ve put capital into the company. Capital comes first. Corporate comes next.

That means the first conversation with a founder isn’t a sales call or a diagnostic. It’s an investment screen. Here are the five questions we work through in the first 30 minutes, and what each one tells us about whether we should commit.

1 · What does the cap table look like, really?

Not the cap table the founder shows on slide 4. The cap table including side letters, founder loans, employee promises, the convertible note from 2021, the friend who put in $50K with no paper, the shareholders who left and never formally exited. Listing requires a clean cap table. If yours is even slightly tangled, that’s two to four months of restructuring before any other workstream can move.

2 · Has the company been audited by a PCAOB-registered firm, or by a local firm only?

This catches more founders than any other question. Local audit firms are fine, for local. If you’re targeting a US listing, you need PCAOB-registered audit workpapers, and you need two years of them, not one. If your company has been audited locally for the past five years, you’re not eight months from listing. You’re twenty months, because you need to start the PCAOB cycle from a clean base. We’d rather tell you that on day one than discover it together six months in.

3 · Where is the company incorporated, and where does the IP sit?

Incorporation jurisdiction and IP location decide a lot of the structural overhead. A Malaysian-incorporated operating company with a Cayman holdco, IP in Singapore, and revenue across five countries is normal, and listable. A Malaysian operating company with IP that was assigned informally to the founder personally years ago, and never properly transferred back: that’s a real problem we have to fix before anything else moves. Founders almost never know the answer to this in detail. We need to.

4 · What does the board look like, and what does it actually do?

Listing requires independent directors, audit committee, nomination committee, remuneration committee. It also requires those committees to actually meet, document minutes, and discharge their duties, not just exist on paper. A founder who has run a private company for ten years usually has a board that meets twice a year over dinner. That’s fine for private. It’s a several-month upgrade for listed. We need to know which one we’re starting from.

5 · Why do you want to list?

The last question, and often the most useful. “To raise capital” is rarely the real answer. Sometimes it’s liquidity for early investors. Sometimes it’s brand credibility for a B2B company that needs enterprise customers. Sometimes it’s currency for acquisitions. Sometimes, and this is the one we screen most carefully for, it’s because someone told the founder that listing is the goal. If the founder can’t tell us, in their own words, what the listing is for, we’d usually rather wait and have that conversation again in six months.

What the screen produces

By the end of the 30-minute conversation, we know roughly:

  • Whether this is a company we can commit capital to today, in 12 months, or not at all.
  • Which exchange (or exchanges) actually fit, and whether the post-investment 18-month listing path is realistic.
  • The biggest structural risk, usually one of the five above, that has to be cleared before we’d underwrite.
  • Whether Robinhood is the right capital partner for this company, or whether the founder would be better served by a referral.

Conviction is earned. We screen before we commit, and we say no often. The companies we do back, we back with capital and with our operator team behind them. If you’re thinking about a listing and you want both from the same partner, the first conversation is the one above.