Vlad Tenev on Robinhood's $85BN Resurgence

That was was that eight months ago, really? Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing. And I felt pretty good back then. It’s always nice when the market cap goes up, things get easier, you walk a little bit straighter, people listen to what you have to say. We don’t look at it, of course. That’s what they tell you. You can’t pay attention to it.

He does. Yeah. I think it’s very difficult. I don’t know if it’s easier with other companies but my product pushes stock prices into your brain. By using it, it’s just hard to ignore. So I think it’s especially difficult for a business like ours.

We’ve been saying the same things and articulating a strategy pretty clearly over the past two years, really. And I think it just takes time to understand that it’s working. We’ve gotten fortunate in a sense that many things have worked very, very well.

AI is a big part of it and I think we have been pretty mum on how much we’ve been using it internally. I think we’ve been talking about it in very general terms and we’ve started to roll out products. Actually, Robinhood Cortex, our AI system rolled out to customers today. But the impact that it’s had on internal teams ranging from software engineering to customer support, like the really big internal teams, has been huge.

That sounds right. It’s difficult to say with these agentic systems, right? We’ve moved from GitHub Copilot, which is an autocomplete system to Cursor and now things like Windsurf where nearly all of the code is written by AI and the adoption rate within engineering for us is close to 100%. It’s hard to even determine what the human generated code is. If I had to guess, it’s the minority.

I think we’re best in class there actually, even stronger than the dedicated customer support AI companies in terms of what we’ve done there.

Well, first of all, when we started, the off the shelf companies like Sierra for instance, they were just getting off the ground. The big companies that we were using were a big Salesforce customer, were not as developed yet and so we built a lot of things. For a company like Robinhood, a lot of the complex work is in system integration. It’s getting all of the data to answer customers’ queries and also we’re starting to do actions. Based on your query we need to do some kind of action and that requires a deep level of integration with our back end systems that I think most vendors haven’t really figured out how to do yet.

I think we’ve been thinking about how to tell the story better. One of the things we’ve been thinking about is should we just have an event, like a product event like we just had in the South Of France?

Yeah. Well, it’s probably not gonna be in the South Of France again because we just did that. There’s lots of great places to have events. Yeah, and I think there’s now enough meat and enough things that we can talk about that it would actually be a really cool event.

Yeah. We’ve had discussions about that internally. The challenge is the value is in the deep integration with our proprietary proprietary data. Data. I don’t know if we want to get into the business of like going into companies and doing deep integrations with their proprietary data. But generally I ask the question for everything, if we build a great tool internally, can we actually make it available as a service to others? Because that’s the way to ensure that it stays great. There’s external pressure from customers, not just internal teams.

So I’m a huge fan of that type of platformization.

There’s still a problem with hallucinations and there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to kind of like scaffold against that. That’s actually one of the things that was the origin for the company that I’m chairman of, Harmonic. Can we design a system that prevents hallucinations by design and ensures that every step of the reasoning is logical and follows from the previous one. That entails a different approach to generating AI output, one where every piece of output is checked before it comes out and there’s a very clear measure of correctness.

I think that’s gonna be an interesting system that will change everything.

There’s been one big change, which is recently we started thinking about not just the millennial and Gen Z customer but also the active trader. Yeah. Like the digitally native active trader and that’s a very different type of profile. You can almost think of them, they have some similarity with gamers. They’ve got like the screens, headphones, fancy keyboards and they’re just locked in to their system. And they have very specific needs. They need to be at the frontier of technology and innovation. They care about speed, they care about latency.

We really had to get into that customer’s head to design products like our futures ladder, like Robinhood Legend.

We were kind of aware of this being a market that was important to us back in even 2019 but we weren’t really doing much about it. So we had our strategy that was we’re gonna make an extremely simple to use mobile app with zero commissions and we were targeting first timers because the thesis was, well, first timers would benefit from this. They like ease of use and commissions are really a big barrier if you’re starting with $100 Like that wouldn’t have been possible before. What happened was when we went live, we started getting active traders that were high volume incidentally without actually like going after that customer base.

And that was because the value prop of zero commissions was so strong that if you were someone that was paying a thousand dollars a month in commissions, you would do all of the fancy research elsewhere and just do your trading on Robinhood. The value prop was strong even though it wasn’t explicitly designed for that. And so we built an active trader business incidentally without even trying and we were aware of this. We were like, Wow, there’s a lot of our revenue, which is much higher than we anticipated when we modeled this first time investor business, is driven by a well defined kind of circumscribed chunk of our customers.

And we ignored that for a while because what we were doing was working very, very well. But in 2022, it became apparent that we weren’t treating this customer base well and they were even more important. They’re actually resilient. Since they’re active, they have like bearish strategies. When the market’s moving down, they remain active. When the market’s moving sideways, they can do multi leg options. From that point on, we realized we weren’t serving them well, they were churning to other platforms, they were outgrowing us and so we put some of our most hardcore people on the task of making Robinhood the best platform for active traders and not just serving them incidentally.

And I think that was actually the number one reason behind our business turnaround. It’s realizing that that was actually the core of our business and we needed to invest in it in order to have resources to do other things well. Do you think the memeification

People are buying these stocks generally for a very different reason than a meme coin, for example. I think they legitimately legitimately believe believe that that these these are are going to be gigantic industries. CoreWeave, for instance, is one of the few opportunities that as a public markets investor, you can actually buy into AI, the growth of the AI industry. I mean, you think about it, what are your options if you want to invest in AI as retail? You’ve got Nvidia.

Yeah, Nvidia is $4,000,000,000,000 You’ve got Tesla where AI is maybe 10%, 20% of the story there. So you don’t have too many opportunities at sub trillion valuations. So when CoreWeave comes along, that’s like AI exposure at a lower level and people are interested in that. And then Circle, you have the stablecoin industry and people are betting that that’s gonna be a big thing and that’s sort of like clean exposure to stablecoins.

Yeah. I mean, was very clear from the beginning. I actually wrote an article in the Washington Post in January that argued for tokenization and

Yeah, I said that yesterday. It wasn’t quite as clear, I guess, back in January for my Washington Post op ed. But I think there’s two benefits of tokenization that are very, very extreme. One is, like stablecoins, it’s gonna be the easiest way to get exposure to US assets if you’re outside of The US. So stablecoins, very popular outside The US for people that want to get their hands on dollars. In the same way, I think stock tokens will become the best way to get exposure to US stocks and other assets.

So that’s like the ex US use case. The use case that’s gonna be very powerful even within The US where we actually have decent access through Robinhood and other things to US stocks is illiquid assets that actually have not been successfully made tradable or accessible to retail, like private companies but also real estate and even things like art. So I think in The US that actually is very, very meaningful. We wanted to demonstrate that we have the technology built to do this outside The US. All that’s left is just details and in The US regulatory clarity.

We wanted to start with the two companies that I think are significant, hard to get, challenging but also in demand and that’s SpaceX and OpenAI, which incidentally were the two that I used as examples when I wrote my opinion piece on this.

I’d say the analogy is to a stablecoin. Basically, you think about it, we have some traditional assets in a box, we tokenize that one for one and the tokens actually get put on blockchains where they’re tradable. So for stablecoins, Circle for example has some US treasury bills and notes in a box that back the tokens that are freely tradable. In this way, we have access to private company shares or other types of exposure because OpenAI doesn’t have shares, they’re a non profit. So they have profit participation units and convertible interest securities that give shares upon a successful conversion to a for profit.

So OpenAI is particularly complicated but you can think of it as exposure in an SPV, like a traditional instrument that then gets held by Robinhood and tokenized and given to retail. They were a little bit upset by this. Yes.

I thought part of it was unfair. They issued a statement that said, you know, please be careful, which I thought was a little bit gratuitous. But I think it could have been worse. I understand from OpenAI’s perspective that they’ve got a lot of stuff going on, they’re trying to convert to a for profit, The last thing they want to deal with is, you know, some guy tokenizing their stocks. They don’t even understand exactly how that works but it’s sort of like a confusing distraction at best.

But I would say it’s in line with their mission. You know, their stated mission is to build artificial general intelligence and make sure it benefits all of humanity. So one way to make sure it benefits all of humanity and not just, you know, executives and wealthy investors is to make humanity have ownership of it, which up until now hasn’t been possible. Some of the most important companies of our time have not been accessible to retail and I think that’s a huge problem. Is there anything that you

I think this like statement that it was somehow unsafe was not very positive for us. I mean, if you look at OpenAI Newsroom Twitter, this was actually the most popular tweet that they tweeted ever. It has like the most likes and reposts which surprised me. I didn’t quite think that it would resonate so much. I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s so new, don’t know if I would have done much differently. I think the problem is everyone likes tokenization in principle, right? But it’s not really as attractive when it’s being done to you.

It’s sort of like a digital nimbyism. Everyone’s like, Oh great, tokenization, kidding, make it happen over there. The problem that’s happened in private markets in general is the best companies have lots of options. They can raise money from anywhere. So they sort of like don’t consider retail. And that leads to this adverse selection problem where basically the only companies tapping retail are the ones that don’t have any other options. And that’s why all of the initiatives to give access to retail to these opportunities have failed thus far.

And so I think it’s important for the tokenization mechanism to work without the opt in of the companies that are being tokenized. And I think that’s actually the innovation that we’ve been able to drive. We figured out how to make this work without actually having the the companies opt in.

I think it could be big. In The EU, it’s pretty clear. I mean, EU has clear crypto asset regulation in the form of MICA. In The US, more work needs to be done for sure. There’s two elements to it: accredited investor laws and also crypto laws, which both need to happen in order to truly unlock this. Part of the reason why we’re demonstrating this in the EU aside from just giving our EU customers access to all these amazing products is that it could show the rest of the world that there’s real value here.

And you heard the SEC chair Paul Atkins say, you know, tokenization is an innovation and the SEC has to stop putting up roadblocks and start embracing these innovative technologies. I think we’ve got support from both sides in effect to improve this.

It’s a great question. My intent would be to go as low as possible. And it’s funny because we’re kind of straddling the crypto and the traditional finance side. And if you talk to crypto people, crypto people will tell you the future is on chain issuance. What you’re doing right now is like not ideal compared to on chain issuance where the equity goes on chain from the very beginning. What I tell them is nobody gives a shit about on chain issuance. Like the only place where people are even thinking about on chain issuance is like in your head.

What people want is capital as a service. If you’re an entrepreneur, you want capital in your bank account quickly and with as little friction as possible and I think that’s where this eventually ends. You should be able to go on Robinhood or maybe other services as well, maybe upload some information and actually you’ll be competing in a marketplace so there will be pressure, market pressure to make information that’s clear and as compelling as possible. You push a button and then money enters your bank account and you can get back to running your business.

That’s the logical conclusion. It’s capital at all stages but perhaps the most interesting is the earliest stages. And I think if we succeed in doing this, there will be more startups. It’ll become easier to create a startup.

Well, what’s live right now in Europe, fully live, is public stocks. Yep. And we’ve got about 200 plus of all the big ones. So we’re gonna continue to roll that out and get to thousands. We will make the private stocks tradable as well.

I think that you never know what’s gonna become popular. There’s always a long tail and, you know, something happens in a random company, it’s interesting. And we don’t really want to be in the business of, like, picking winners and losers and what stocks you want to buy. We’d like to keep it simple and just say, generally speaking if it’s listed, we’d like to actually offer it to all listed ones. There have been issues where unfortunately sub dollar stocks are left listed for too long and some of these have turned into scams and I think that’s a problem we’d like the listing exchanges to deal with.

We’ve had to deviate from that to some degree. But ideally if it’s listed and we just turn it on and we’re good to go.

the public stock token side, this product will progress in a couple of stages. We’re in stage one where every time we mint or burn a new token, we actually go to the market, to the Nasdaq or NYSE, to an actual exchange for every trade. So every time you buy, one new one is minted. And the second phase is we put these tokens on Bitstamp, our exchange. And so then you can trade the tokens directly against other cryptos and also dollars. That needs stage one because we need to have a supply of a significant number of these tokens minted before we can enable the liquidity.

So phase two unlocks 20 fourseven trading. And then phase three, you can actually interface with the blockchain directly and you can self custody, you can do all the collateralized lending and borrowing, all the DeFi, the self custody and that’s when things start to really get interesting. I think the crypto wallet will be a first class experience for all these tokenized assets.

The crypto wallet up until recently has not even been monetized. I think we’re just starting to to monetize it.

I guess I don’t really even think about it that way. I mean, we break it down as nine revenue streams but I just think of it as we get customers, customers become Robinhood Gold subscribers and once you’re a Robinhood Gold subscriber, we get you to use all of our products and increase your average revenue per user on the platform. We do break it up into business lines, we consider that, but it’s sort of a map of the world. What I really care about is the reality of how many customers do we get, how much money are they putting in the platform, are we serving all of their financial needs.

And I think you can slice and dice it by lots of different ways. If they’re putting all of their money in Robinhood, I think we’re happy.

Crypto is interesting because right now crypto is sort of this like separate segment of the business. We look at it and the outside world perceives it as a different asset. How big is your crypto business gonna be relative to say your options business or equities business? It’s very much like this is a separate asset that you’re trading. But what we’re starting to see already is crypto is gonna be this layer behind everything. Everything is gonna be powered by crypto to some degree. What

Well, I’ll just give you an example. Robinhood Gold has an interest piece where you can earn interest on your cash. Well, as we get stablecoin out, crypto will have that as well. You’ll be able to earn interest on your stablecoins and that’ll be a significant business. And you might consider that part of crypto but that’s something that’s akin to a savings account. Prediction markets over time, you see overseas things like Polymarket. That’s a prediction markets business but it’s also powered by crypto.

I don’t know if I would go that far. There’s definitely use cases. I mean, I’ll just give you an example. Robinhood uses stablecoins for our corporate purposes. So, we have this use case where we trade a lot of crypto that requires settling with counterparties. Mean I if our customers buy a bunch of Bitcoin, we have counterparties that we have to send dollars to and they send us the Bitcoin back. During market hours, Monday through Friday, everything works fine because we can settle intraday. We can wire them dollars, they send us the crypto to our wallets and everything’s fine.

What happens on a weekend where the banking rails are closed and something’s happening in the crypto markets and we’ve got retail customers that want to buy billions dollars of crypto, you have a difficult situation potentially because we can’t move the money. So what happens is either you have to take counterparty risk, meaning you have to trust that one side will deliver the dollars eventually when they can and send them the crypto ahead of time, which is a tough one because counterparty risk multiplies if you have lots of counterparties.

Or you have to have lines of credit, lines of credit with your counterparties that are expensive. Or you have to pre fund in the bank accounts that you have which can be different, you know, all the counterparties tend to have different bank accounts unless you force centralize. And so you have to pre fund and plan for what could be an insane amount of volume and that’s very capital inefficient.

Yeah, it’s not good options. And, you know, we had to deal with this in 2021 and our solution was to raise lots of capital and pre fund and hope that it was enough, right? But now with stablecoins, we can just send you the dollars over the weekend, they instantly get to our counterparties, they can send crypto back. Problem solved. So that’s a real use case and that’s led to us adopting it. So the twenty fourseven movement of dollars in real time is a real thing. And I don’t think you can argue that outside of the stablecoins have become the easiest way to get access to dollars for retail.

And I think that’s a real thing. They basically obsoleted American Express travelers checks which, you know, foreigners and countries with depreciating currencies would like stockpile these things to keep their money. Are you ready for

Instant withdrawals revenue. Yeah. So we make money from customers withdrawing money from Robinhood into their bank account instantly. It’s a good business for us. How big a business is that? I wanna say this is nine figures. I mean, we can check that but I think that’s one of them. But yeah, it’s a big business. Our GM there is very proud of this business and he hates when I say this but I tell him, hey, if your business goes to zero, I would not be upset because that would mean nobody’s withdrawing money from Robinhood.

If it’s just like everyone just keeps their money in Robinhood all the time, we feel pretty good. So one of the goals we have is remove all reasons why someone would wanna move their money out to an external bank account.

Private markets is one that I’ve been very excited about. I think we have a plan to do it. The time between having an idea and executing on it with a new product has decreased quite a bit. I mean if you told me six months ago that I’d be sitting here embroiled in some controversy because I’ve tokenized private markets and we’ve been able to deliver that to customers, I would’ve been surprised but the team has been executing unbelievably well.

What we talked about earlier, which is still in the future of having this like capital as a service offering, if you just press a button and money is deposited in your account whether it be a business account or a personal account, I think that would be quite meaningful.

Yeah. We’re interested in that market. Think How do you win it where others haven’t? I don’t know if a lot of people have really tried very hard to be fair. I think that people making a $100,000 a very nice market too and I think it can be very, very tempting to go up and say, Okay, why don’t we serve the people making a million, 5,000,000? And ultra high net worth, like if you can literally be my family office, I think that is an attractive proposition. And actually that’s my goal, I’d like to have all of my personal stuff under Robinhood and I don’t think we’re very far from being able to service my needs adequately.

Yeah, so private banking, which by the way we’re rolling out happening very, very quickly. To my knowledge, this is the first digital private banking product that’s really designed for I mean private banking has been a very brick and mortar experience. All of the features require require a branch. Nobody has been able to crack how to deliver that service without a branch. And I’ll give you an example, cash delivery. I don’t know if you heard about this cash delivery innovation which I’m very excited about. One thing that high net worth individuals have access to from private banking is a cash truck.

So, I was like floored by this when I got to the level where this could happen but like First Republic Bank which is now sadly funked, had the service where cash would be delivered to your house and, you know, you don’t have to go to an ATM. They offered it for larger amounts of cash and it would come in an armored vehicle.

Is that actually a thing? It was a thing. It was why we love First Republic Bank because going to the bank and going to an ATM is annoying, much more convenient to have the cash brought to you.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

You’ve got a tip. I’ve a lot of people that give me services, you know, you gotta tip them all.

So And also I have people that work for me that use services too and they have to tip people. So there’s like a whole operation. So you’re gonna do cash strokes?

Yeah. I don’t think we wanna operate the trucks but we asked ourselves what would this look like if this was a mass market product? Okay. Not everyone needs an armored truck going to their house and that’s quite expensive. But everyone gets a DoorDash or a Deliveroo like you have here, right? Can we solve the needing to go to an ATM problem for you and just get the cash delivered to you? Either if you’re at your or if you’re out somewhere and you need cash. And this has happened to me a lot of places, you know, my wife gets her hair cut, she wants to pay in cash and then I have to go look for an ATM.

It’s annoying. So, yeah, we’re gonna solve that problem by combining the logistics of on demand delivery with all the work that we’re doing in finance and you’ll get cash delivered to your house. So nobody’s been able to figure out how to handle the ATM problem, right? Nothing ruins the private banking vibe more than having to go to a seven Eleven or a CVS to have to withdraw cash. It’s not a premium experience. You also don’t want to send customers to some other bank. I’m sure Citi is great but I don’t want my customers going to Citi if they’re a private banking customer.

So how do you do a branch list? People still have these needs where you have to go to a branch? Well, you should bring the branch to the person. I think that’s a thread that we’re gonna pull on. And that’s what high net worth individuals have, they have people coming to their houses for all of their needs. If you need a notary, they show up to your house. If you need to buy a watch, they’ll show up at your house. That’s the goal. I think that’s how we have to deliver it to to our customers.

I think that’s a good question. I think that you could build a big business with all of these insertion points, right, and these guys have. I mean, Monzo and Revolut have done very, very well, big impressive businesses. Do you whine more about Revolut or Chime? I think I’m more impressed by Revolut. You know, Revolut’s got product velocity, international scale, strong founder, impressive guy. I don’t think we like butt into each other very much. Chime, we don’t butt into very much either because they’re targeting sort of paycheck to paycheck customers.

Their customers aren’t really investing. Investing. But we’d like to get into there too. We’d like to continue to go down market and eventually serve someone that doesn’t have money to invest. I do think that the end state of Robinhood involves the current account as well. We have to get people’s paycheck. It’s just easier that way if you can have everything go through Robinhood.

Well, banking’s rolling out very, very soon, imminently to the first customers.

It’s different depending on the jurisdiction. In The US, banking license has traditionally been very onerous. You have folks in your board meetings approving new products, so that’s tough.

And, you know, Revolut, to my knowledge, doesn’t have a banking license here and it’s been fine for them.

Yeah. There are certain advantages in the other direction which is if you want to be someone’s bank, you can say that we’re a bank and some people really care about that.

We were kind of gummed up in 2020 and 2021 trying to scale. We went from end of twenty nineteen, we had 800 employees and we had 200 or so million in annual revenue. Still a big business but by the end of twenty twenty, we had close to 1,000,000,000 in annual revenue. We quadrupled the business. That was tough because it happened while we were remote, we were dealing with pandemic, we hired all these people. I think in hindsight we ingested too many people, it became hard to operate.

You know, these were new people that didn’t know how to work with us, we were all remote. We had to also scale customer support. This was before AI. So if we quadrupled our customer base, we had to more than quadruple our customer support team because frankly we weren’t even doing a great job with the folks we had back in the day. So it was making sure we have really, really good talent that involves some cultural changes to reorient the company post COVID, bringing people back into the office so we could onboard better.

I’m a big in person bull in general. Yeah, I think we’ve operated much better since we and it was actually very painful for us because we went remote first. So, I had to like pull that back entirely which pissed a lot of people off. It

Totally. There’s no one way doors encountered. It can be done. We’ve done it, which I think is a great example. Okay.

I think AI has been important. I think there’s probably like 12 little things that you just go and do. If you really want to ship fast and deliver fast, you have to orient your culture towards optimizing for that. It’s difficult in financial services especially because you also have to protect people’s money and be safe. And I think it’s an important thing to not treat these two things as things that counterbalance each other. Oh well, we can’t ship fast because that compromises safety. You have to say, no, I want you to do it at high quality, which means delivering it safely, but also once you know what to do, executing relentlessly.

I think I follow my intuition quite a bit. Do you agree with dictatorial style of the leadership? I think that certain things have to be top down. The vision has to be top down. How many direct reports do you have? I think it’s about fifteen, fifteen to 20. I think you know when it’s necessary because it’s very, very clear when something needs to be top down because you have people that aren’t agreeing with things. They’re like disagreeing with each other. And I think if that goes on for too long and it’s not intentional that’s probably a sign of some form of dysfunction.

And that’s when you need to be top down. But I don’t think you have to be top down to an extreme degree. That’s the difficult part. What I try to do is be clear about where we’re going and what the end state is and give people who are in the details and can focus on their thing a lot of autonomy to how you achieve the actual thing. And then they become owners of it, they become accountable to it. So I wouldn’t be top down and dictate exactly how everything is done.

For some things I’ll have opinions. The products that I’m very close to, how the events are done, how it’s announced. I want to make it clear that, you know, my GMs, the product leaders, the folks that are close to the ground can overrule me and I just encourage them to actually yell at me and tell me I’m being an idiot when they think so.

I’ve been accused of having low emotional intelligence. Intelligence.

I try to work on it a little bit. Maybe I’m inept, but I don’t know. I consider myself somewhat emotionally intelligent. Do you

I try not to, but it’s it’s sometimes hard to avoid. I mean, just think about it. I’m happy now. In 2022, I was kind of in the dumps and it took an inordinate amount of effort to, like, climb out of that.

I never really felt like the company was in danger of going bankrupt or anything. The good thing about 2022 is we’d raised 6,000,000,000 in cash in 2021 which, you know, can be a good thing and a bad thing but This

This was after we went. 2022 was after we went public. We raised a bunch of cash in the IPO, think 1.5 to 2,000,000,000 but also during GameStop, we raised like 4,000,000,000. So, we had a lot of cash but it was painful and I did ask myself whether I was like the person to do this, right? Because I went from leading a growing startup that went public and and that was a nice capstone. Many people consider going public to be sort of like a end goal in and of itself.

And then I was like administering a reduction in force and leading a turnaround. Do you like being public? I’ve never met a public CEO who actually likes it. I like being public actually. You do? I do.

I think it’s great because we flipped, in my head at least, from thinking about all the public company stuff like earnings and all of that, from being a nuisance to being just a fun opportunity to connect with our community of shareholders and retail investors. So if you look at our recent earnings calls, I don’t know if you’ve seen them, the vision is it’s like a postgame press conference. So, I’ve got the Robinhood logos behind me and Postgame the big press conferences are a lot of fun.

They’re fun if the team wins or if the team loses because, you know, if the team wins, you’ve got them wearing the nice designer clothes, they’re feeling confident, they’re talking good, you know, if you’re rooting for the team, want to see them win. If they lose, sometimes you get dirt about like what player is not pulling their weight or, you know, they come in with like the towel over the shoulder and getting railed by the press, like you played bad, why did you not get any assists, why did you only score seven points.

So, you know, getting a star player getting railed on by the media after a terrible game is always entertaining. This is like the business equivalent of that, really.

I think Stripe can do whatever it wants. Obviously, they can raise infinite amounts of capital from the private markets to run their business. I do think it’s a big problem that a retail investor can’t get access to Stripe shares which has been a category defining company. I’ve shared this viewpoint with Patrick and John and you know, they give me some variant of Oh, well we’re just small Irish family company. Please don’t tokenize my shares.

Prediction markets is kind of an interesting category of thing. Some people consider it gambling, so you have the whole like, is it gambling or is it investing controversy that we’re continuing to contend with. It’s sort of the bane of our existence to some degree. I believe it’s investing, many people believe that it’s gambling and it’s also like is it gonna be state regulated, is it gonna be CFTC federally regulated like a future. So So I think we have lots of debates about what that looks like in our product from separate apps, separate tabs, separate brand to the other spectrum, just fully integrated which is basically the direction we’ve gone.

That’s a heady one, that one’s at the frontier. Private markets I’m guessing is gonna be tough to navigate. There’s a lot of people that don’t like what we’re doing there. But I’m quite motivated to actually make that work, so I think we’ll ultimately prevail there.

I think Revolut’s a good one. Revolut, you know, you can tell the culture is in a good place. That’s the no bullshit company that cares a lot about winning. I think it’s pretty clear. So respect them tremendously. I respect Coinbase. I think they’re a technology company in our space. We come across them quite a bit. We collaborate in some ways but no bullshit, founder led. I think they’ve done very well. And I think there’s a lot of smaller players that also are hungry and doing well.

Any

I think altruist is somewhat interesting as a competitor. Have you heard of altruist? It’s funny. It’s great. We have all these competitors in all these different fields. Well, you do

Yeah. Altruist is kind of our competitor in the RIA custody business, the products we offer to advisors to serve their end clients. Their pitch was, we’re Robinhood for advisors. They do some things very, very well and we believe we can be Robinhood for advisors. They have a CEO who’s a good looking guy, he’s kind of hanging around all these advisory conferences and, you know, we entered that space via acquisition a couple months ago. So that should be interesting.

Well, you didn’t see my men’s health article, did you? No. So I was in men’s health about a year and a half ago. I didn’t get the cover, unfortunately. Fuckers. Which I thought was very disappointing. I think I deserved the I Mensch health didn’t have the money back then. I can

But anyway, there’s a Mensch health feature on me working out with my trainer and I think for that one, I deadlifted close to 400 pounds, but they they showed the picture of me deadlifting one thirty five for some reason that can’t stop them.

I had a bad back injury. Right around the time I had my first child, I was, like, lifting incredibly heavy weight and I popped the disc in my back. So I had surgery scheduled because I literally couldn’t get up from a seated position without excruciating pain going up my leg. So I had the surgery scheduled. At the last minute I kind of bailed from it, I’m like, it’s feeling a little bit better. It took two years to become pain free from the time I popped the disc.

Then I kind of like rebuilt from first principles. So during COVID, I started working with a trainer and for the first year when we were all remote, we were doing body weight and dumbbell stuff only. And then gradually over time, I got into like lifting heavy, doing barbell work again, but it was just going from working out by myself, as you said, to like rebuilding my form and doing up, like, just it’s it’s like a basketball player rebuilding their free throw. I had to just do everything properly starting with very little weight.

You’ve never heard of this Japanese toilet? No. Yeah. You don’t use Luro? I do, but for drying only.

It is disappointing. Yeah.

one. Yeah. I mean, it’s it’s fine. I just try to avoid using the bathroom. You’ve opened

Japanese toilets. Japanese toilets, dude. They even have a portable, actually. If you don’t wanna spend the $500 for $30, you can get this little thing that’s battery operated and you can take with you. If you wanna go to 10,000, you get the full toilet.

Yeah, that has some nice features. That is. I’ll ask for it for Christmas. What’s the biggest advice on marriage? I’ve only done it once, so I don’t have I don’t have voluminous advice. You don’t but you’ve been through a shit ton. I mean, Christ, Vlad. Yeah.

My wife and I would disagree with this. I think she’s more of like You know the movie Severance? Yeah. She would prefer a more severance like existence where it’s sort of like, I come home, I don’t really think about work and, you know, I take off my work clothes and I’m in like home mode and there’s sort of more strict separation. I prefer closer to like full integration. My work people coming into my house and hanging out with my kids and me doing a meeting while I’m on vacation.

You know, my kids coming to work, so it can’t just be one way, it has to be both ways. I think that’s one thing we disagree on. But I think there’s something also about just like full unconditional commitment where you just know that if you have an issue or a concern, you can can work it out.

Oh, amazing. Being public through 2022, seeing our stock go from I don’t know what it was in 2021, irrationally high perhaps, but it was still high after we went public, down to being worth below cash was a very And that’s

It was below cash. So people were betting that we would just, like, waste our cash and never be profitable. It was offensive in hindsight. It was tough and and I think that, in hindsight, led to us making a bunch of decisions and investments and, like, responding to it in a very positive way that now we’re we’re reaping the benefits of.

Well, the vision behind Robinhood is to make it possible for everyone, whether they be an individual or a business, to buy, sell or hold any financial asset or conduct any financial transaction. That involves us going from US primary to fully global and from retail only to serving not just retail but business and institutions.

Always pleasure.