Robinhood’s CFO transition played out over 7 years and included a powerful mentorship story

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based fintech and trading platform, which offers traditional asset and cryptocurrency trading, announced in November that CFO Jason Warnick is retiring. He will move into an advisory role in the first quarter of 2026 and remain with the company until Sept. 1, 2026, as Shiv Verma, SVP of finance and strategy and treasurer, steps into the top finance job.​ Fortune recently sat down with the duo at Robinhood’s Washington, D.C., office to delve into how they orchestrated the handoff—and what they learned along the way. 

Today Robinhood has a fully built-out finance organization and a place in the S&P 500. In 2024, the company earned $2.95 billion in total net revenues and annual net income of $1.41 billion. This marked Robinhood’s first year of GAAP profitability year since going public in 2021. Robinhood is growing fast—its revenue is already approaching half the size of mid-tier financial firms like T. Rowe Price and Broadridge.

But when Warnick joined the company in late 2018 after two decades at Amazon, the finance function was barely a dozen people. Verma had been hired as treasurer weeks earlier, plus there were a handful of accountants, and one finance contractor.

In talking with Warnick and Verma, both based on the West Coast, they conveyed a startup-like vibe at the company: informal, not at all stuffy, and open to ideas and debate, and at times, laughter. “I actually told him it’s not too late if he wants to change his mind,” Verma quipped of Warnick’s pending retirement. “I’ll miss him as friend.”

Verma considers himself as super analytical. “I’m a math guy; a former bond trader,” he said. But what he learned from Warnick is the ability to delegate. Otherwise, you can “start at six in the morning and go till midnight,” he said. “And I have a three month old at home.”

“His wife is certainly upset with me, right?” Warnick quipped. “She loves Jason; she’s not such a fan of the timing,” Verma parried back. “Although, she is genuinely happy for both of us,” he added.

The camaraderie between Warnick and Verma began as members of a team, led by Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev, that navigated the company through some rough waters. In March 2020, Robinhood suffered a major app outage on one of the biggest up days in market history, leaving users unable to trade as the Dow surged, Warnick recalled. 

“We weren’t engineers, and you can feel kind of helpless,” he said. But he and Verma quickly concluded that their role was not to fix code but to triage stakeholders. That meant calling bankers, investors, and board members in real time and being as transparent as possible, Warnick said. That groundwork, he believes, helped Robinhood raise billions of dollars in early 2021, when meme-stock volatility and surging volumes again stressed the platform. The capital raise was aimed at strengthening the company’s financial position and supporting its rapid growth at the time, Warnick said.

Building a successor by design

This transition was years in the making, something you might expect at a 100 year old Fortune 500 firm but not necessarily a nimble disruptor. “We’ve been joined at the hip for seven years,” Verma quips. But over those seven years, Warnick steadily expanded Verma’s remit—from treasury to finance, then investor relations, corporate development, benchmarking and customer strategy, and partnerships. Along the way, Verma hired a dedicated treasurer and a VP of finance, often at Warnick’s urging, to allow him to step back and concentrate on higher-leverage decisions.​

That deliberate scope expansion mirrored Warnick’s own progression at Amazon, where his responsibilities grew, eventually culminating in oversight of a 500-person finance organization and a role as chief of staff to the CFO. At Robinhood, the same model meant that by the time the transition was announced, Verma was already managing more than half the finance organization and acting as a central node across the business. He has attended every board meeting since Robinhood went public, co-presented earnings, and regularly joined audit and risk committee sessions.

Verma describes the last seven years as a compressed Silicon Valley lifecycle: early buildout, pandemic-era hypergrowth, the GameStop frenzy and IPO, followed by a sharp selloff. In 2022, Robinhood cut roughly 30% of its workforce and shifted to a general manager model. “We’ve come a long way,” Verma said, “to a very skilled public company.”

The most important skill of a CFO

Today CFOs are expected to own the numbers, but also act as core strategist, digital leader, and enterprise change agent. Earlier in his career, Warnick said he was once asked by a mentor, What do you think is the most important aspect of a CFO’s job? He answered, capital allocation. 

“That’s important; that’s what drives future returns for the company,” he recalls his mentor telling him. “But you don’t get to allocate the capital yourself.” The most important skill a CFO has, Warnick said, is influencing the ultimate decision-maker—the CEO. “So our job is to bring data and finance into the discussion and influence the outcome,” he said. “And I think that that is one area where Shiv just shines.”

Verma spends a lot of time with Tenev, the board, and cross-functional leaders in engineering, legal, compliance, and risk, focusing on the decisions that matter most for Robinhood’s long-term trajectory, he said.

For the finance leaders, what looks like succession planning was arguably really the foundation of a solid mentorship. “He’s still my first call when I’m struggling with something,” Verma said of Warnick. 

As for Warnick’s retirement plans, they are still being fleshed out, but will include travel with his wife, as they are now empty nesters. One thing’s for sure: if Verma wants some advice, he’s only a phone call away.