Speaker

Vlad Tenev

Vlad Tenev

Co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, the commission-free trading app that pushed the US brokerage industry to zero fees. Born in Bulgaria and raised amid hyperinflation before emigrating to the US as a child, Tenev studied physics and mathematics before dropping out of a Stanford maths PhD to build Robinhood with co-founder Baiju Bhatt.

He steered the company through the January 2021 GameStop ‘meme-stock’ crisis — a middle-of-the-night collateral call that forced Robinhood to restrict trading and triggered a congressional hearing and a lasting collusion narrative — and through its 2021 IPO and the ~80% drawdown that followed in 2022. Beyond Robinhood he is chairman of Harmonic, an AI company building ‘mathematical superintelligence’ whose model Aristotle reached gold-medal performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad.

Core positions

  • Democratising finance is the mission. The north star is maximising direct equity ownership by retail investors worldwide — and closing what he calls the biggest inequity in capital markets: retail’s exclusion from late-stage private companies such as OpenAI and SpaceX, to be reached through tokenisation abroad and traditional fund structures at home.
  • Ownership as social ballast. Rooted in his childhood under a failed market system, Tenev argues that if people own a stake in the great industries, they will protect it — broad ownership makes a society more stable and prosperous.
  • Narrative beats facts. His GameStop lesson: once a story wins mind-share, evidence does not overturn it — ‘a juicy falsehood is more powerful than a boring truth’.
  • Math as a training gym for decisions. Hard mathematics builds the endurance to sit with difficult problems; no business decision, he argues, is as complicated as a genuinely hard proof.

In the wiki