Vlad Tenev on Building Robinhood, the GameStop Crisis, and Democratising Finance

Vlad Tenev

I have a very fuzzy recollection of that time. Sometimes you talk to trauma victims, or people who have many children, and they tell you the pregnancy and the childbirth were very painful, but for some reason they don't remember it — and evolutionarily that gives you the signal that you should do it again. It was a very challenging time. It was towards the end of COVID, and I felt like everyone was going a little bit crazy. People had been cooped up at home for about a year without much human-to-human interaction. From a crisis-management standpoint it was very difficult, because we were doing these conference video calls with all these different stakeholders. The regulators weren't in their offices.

Vlad Tenev

What happened was we got an automated file in the middle of the night, and it had big numbers on it — big numbers that kept changing. It was a situation which had no precedent. We had to make a tough call to put GameStop and a bunch of other companies on position-closing-only, which basically meant you couldn't open up new positions or take on more risk for a period of about one day. It wasn't even that long. But because there was this viral narrative that had taken over social media — that it was the retail investors taking down the hedge funds, and we were the tool — it became a good-versus-evil thing. What at any other time, for any other stock, would have been an innocuous risk-management decision to control our internal risk turned into 'Robinhood is on the side of the hedge funds, colluding against the retail investor'. The fact that the company was named Robinhood made it a juicy false narrative that kept going viral.

Vlad Tenev

In the middle of the night when I woke up, my phone was basically unusable. It was like those videos of what happens when a Kardashian turns off do-not-disturb — just a constant buzzing thing. I couldn't even get on a Zoom call because there were random people calling me telling me to turn it back on. That was my morning.

Vlad Tenev

That's absolutely right — you can make the argument that we kind of started the whole thing. If you were joining Robinhood in 2020 leading up to the GameStop episode — and a lot of people joined that year — GameStop was one of the collection of free stocks given to new customers. A lot of people came in, got their free GameStop share, maybe weren't that engaged, and then when they saw GameStop going up, suddenly those shares were worth a lot of money.

Vlad Tenev

The major thing is just that Robinhood colluded with hedge funds to shut down trading. There was another false narrative that's funnier — Sequoia actually had to refute it. Someone put on the internet that the White House called Sequoia Capital, one of our venture investors, and got them to pressure us to shut down GameStop. On Reddit that had thousands of reposts. We don't really have any business with hedge funds, so the idea that a hedge fund would collude to have us shut down trading of a stock always seemed silly to me. What we learned is that a juicy falsehood is more powerful than a boring truth.

Vlad Tenev

I didn't actually talk to Daniel at that point, but I did call him when he was dealing with his Joe Rogan situation — when Rogan was in the process of getting cancelled and Spotify was getting immense pressure from both sides. That was probably Daniel's GameStop moment. I called to pay it forward, to offer whatever support I could. He's probably wiser and better than me at these things, so I don't know if he needed it. At the time Mark Zuckerberg called me, Elon Musk called me, Marc Benioff called me. A nice side effect was that these people probably wouldn't have cared about little Robinhood otherwise, and suddenly I got to talk with business magnates who had built massive companies and were giving me their perspective on the whole situation.

Vlad Tenev

No — I thought that was probably the best media appearance of the week, for sure. Which isn't saying much, because I had some bad ones.

Vlad Tenev

I didn't see the entire thing, but I did see the parts I was in — about six minutes — and some of the rest. I know it didn't do very well, but I found it more or less entertaining. My favourite part was that my character was played by a very good-looking actor, Sebastian Stan, which I wasn't displeased about. I would have thought Adam Driver would also be good, but Sebastian Stan is maybe a slightly less good actor and probably easier on the eyes. What I enjoyed most is that in every single scene he was shirtless — in the kitchen grinding a smoothie talking about GameStop, in the bathroom shaving. The idea of me being shirtless while dealing with all these complicated business situations just made me laugh.

Vlad Tenev

2022 was harder in the sense that it was a gradual, slower burn. GameStop was acute and very painful, but once we resolved it — unlocked the shares so they could be purchased again, did the congressional hearing, did the round of podcast appearances — the acute part was over. That was really one day. In 2022 it was a gradual shift of all the economic trends that had been tailwinds during COVID reversing rapidly into headwinds. First the COVID relief stimulus cheques stopped. Then inflation ticked up, which hit people's discretionary spending and investing. Then interest rates went from a long period of rock-bottom to the highest in over thirty years — four or five percent. When that happens, investing becomes less attractive: you could get your average seven percent from the stock market after inflation, or five percent just sitting in cash. So people reallocate and hold more cash. Our business was first-timers getting into the stock market, so all our tailwinds turned into headwinds.

Vlad Tenev

It was obvious to the market too, and not just for Robinhood — our entire sector got hit hard. We went from IPO-ing at about a $32 billion valuation in 2021 to trading at $6 and change in 2022. We lost more than eighty percent of our market value since IPO. People were calling Robinhood a broken IPO. I was getting advice that maybe I should figure out a buyout and go private. All these things come up that have nothing to do with running your business and building products, and they become distracting.

Vlad Tenev

I took some solace that it wasn't Robinhood-specific, but as an entrepreneur you really just want to win. I said, I'm not going to be one of these people who gives up — we lost a lot of great founders in that period who just left their companies. And I'm also not going to batten down the hatches and ride it out, hoping for interest rates to go back to zero, turning into an ostrich or a turtle. A lot of businesses did that. A lot of the mortgage companies basically said, 'the market will improve at some point and people will want mortgages again.' We asked instead: what can we give our customers that lets them thrive in this environment, where rates are high and cash is attractive? That led to the revival of Robinhood Gold, which started with giving customers the highest yield on their uninvested cash. We followed with Robinhood Retirement, which now has over one and a half million accounts — the best retirement product on the market by a wide margin, with a three percent match for Gold members. We diversified the business away from trading, and away from being a zero-interest-rate business. Quicker than I imagined, we became a company with eleven business lines, each generating over $100 million in annual revenue.

Vlad Tenev

I don't know if I'd characterise it that way — I still think I'm very nice. What it was, was that I had to spend a lot of time thinking about how to fix things. During COVID there was a lot of pressure, partly from what other companies were doing, but also because we were doing very well and growing very quickly. At the end of 2019 we had about 700 people and a bit over $200 million in revenue. By the end of 2020 we had thousands of people and close to a billion in revenue — a threefold-plus jump. And around us, a lot of contemporary companies were struggling. We grew alongside Airbnb, who started a little before us. So what was in the air was 'batten down the hatches', but our business was booming — customer support was strained, our engineering systems were strained, and we hired a bunch of people just to keep up.

Vlad Tenev

We continued that hiring and became a big company very quickly, and things didn't work well together. A lot of people who joined while we were remote had never met in person. So it wasn't that we were coddling employees — the inputs that drove that acceleration in headcount weren't sustainable. You only have one COVID. When it reversed, it gave us an opportunity to rethink all the changes we'd made to keep up and reset. It was painful at the time, but it led to a much healthier company. Not to use another weightlifting analogy, but they're so good: if you want to get really strong, one way is to gradually build muscle while keeping your fat low over a long time. What Robinhood did was bulk up gigantically — gaining a lot of fat in the process — and then do a massive leaning-out. You end up in the same place. In retrospect, the thing I'd do differently around the edges is the culture: enshrine the values earlier — high performance, safety always, lean and disciplined, one Robinhood.

Vlad Tenev

A good business suggestion: things get easier if you do them multiple times. You could practise once and make a big show of it — take a small thing you were wrong about and say, 'I want to tell you about something I completely screwed up. It was a wrong decision, and now we're taking it back.' It could be the snacks in the office. Get rid of the Sichuan food catering on Wednesdays, see how it goes, realise it's not so scary, then do it for a serious thing, and eventually for three or four things at once. During COVID we introduced these wellness days, where an entire team would take a day off after working particularly hard. I never liked the idea. At one point I said, let's kill the wellness days — I don't want to be a wellness-day company; we have generous PTO, take a PTO. The idea that an entire org would take the same day off seemed like a problem — what if there's an issue and we need someone? There was fear that we were taking a perk away. We took off the wellness days, there was complaining for one day, and then we never heard about it again. Once you do these things and realise your deepest fears about the consequences were wrong, you learn something.

Vlad Tenev

Our values are high performance. We make it clear to employees and to anyone applying that this isn't meant to be a cushy, chill job. It's for people who want to stretch — to do in one year what another company would expect you to do in ten. We keep a very high performance bar, and that filters into how we compensate: we reward people disproportionately based on impact, and we stay away from rewarding conventional things. At a typical company, people are paid roughly proportional to the size of the org they manage, which incentivises empire-building — I want a big team because that makes me more important by traditional HR metrics. We want to incentivise the opposite: can you have a lot of impact with the smallest possible team?

Vlad Tenev

Safety always is another value. Sure, we move fast and hold ourselves to a high bar, but you can't use that as an excuse to cut corners or compromise on the security of customers and their money. Regulatory compliance is very important to a trusted financial platform. Then lean and disciplined — I always ask how we can do more with less. We scrutinise every dollar and every process. On culture, it comes down to how we hire, how we performance-manage and reward, and the working environment. On hiring, I'd rather have a small team of the best people than a large team of mediocre ones. And if it's not working with someone, we want to make it as easy as possible, process-wise, for that person to go somewhere else.

Vlad Tenev

Sometimes it's obvious we made a hiring mistake, and at that point we want it to be as easy as possible — if it's three weeks and it doesn't make sense, for us or for the person. Six months, once you know it's not a fit, is way too long. But sometimes people come in and don't hit the ground running right away, and if we see potential and they're extraordinarily good at a particular thing, they can get there, and that might take six months. Generally, what most companies suffer from is process getting in the way and making it very difficult to move on from low performers. We try to make that very easy.

Vlad Tenev

Perhaps one thing that's unconventional, at least in financial services, is the emphasis on early-career people. From the very beginning we put our company next to Stanford — my alma mater, and Baiju Bhatt my co-founder's as well. We spent a lot of time recruiting interns and engineers, going to career fairs at the top tech universities. It's very good for the company, because a lot of companies in our space tend to get older as they go, and the people there become disconnected from young people. That puts you at risk of becoming a generational company. Charles Schwab serves baby boomers very well; E*Trade came later and was really a Gen X company, but they've struggled to get the younger generation excited. The best way to stay relevant is to make sure the company itself has the point of view of young people — you're sitting with them, working with them, learning from them.

Vlad Tenev

We don't stick interns in the basement to fetch coffee. We want them working on projects that ship to production and doing meaningful work. I like to say I started off as an intern at Robinhood — I went straight from school into becoming an entrepreneur, with no career experience — so I have empathy for what it's like. If I can go from an internship to CEO, everyone should have that ability.

Vlad Tenev

It's a big meeting with a lot of people, and I like large groups because then everyone can hear what's on everyone's mind. I don't like a lot of one-on-ones — mine are basically on-demand, when something critical needs deciding. The leadership meeting is at the start of the week, so a lot of it is cascading important information: 'I spent time thinking about this over the weekend,' or 'we should be moving faster on this.' We also review goals with a very simple mechanism — green, yellow or red. If it's green, we don't talk about it; if it's red, it deserves scrutiny, and we see how to turn it around as fast as possible. That involves a little ceremony — I have a gavel and I hit it. It's nice to lighten up extremely serious things so people actually enjoy talking openly about goals that aren't going well. The assumption is that everyone on the leadership team is very strong, so if things aren't going well it's usually not for lack of effort, and the perspective of multiple people can help turn it around.

Vlad Tenev

I'm usually involved in the most critical product launches or projects at any given time. We do a lot of product events — this year we'll have about five of various sizes — and they tend to have themes. We're doing one on December 16th called Yes No, on prediction markets and AI. I spend a lot of time making sure the messaging is right, the design of the event, the look and feel, and of course the products that go into it. I present at the events and introduce the products, with the teams working on them. The event is like a television show.

Vlad Tenev

It wasn't always the case. We have great people who think entirely about the storytelling — what we're doing and what the purpose is. The events are a good forcing function: if you're communicating a new product to twenty million people, it forces you to distil it into the essence of what twenty million people can understand. Where I make mistakes is that I can get too jargony, too into the details, because I assume the average person watching is as deep in the business as I am — which isn't a great assumption. So I think from first principles: if you've never heard of a prediction market, how do you explain what it is and why it matters for society? You start there, and then all the products plug into that foundation and tell a coherent story. As founder and CEO you have to spend a lot of time personally getting involved in that, because if the CEO doesn't think about it, the story doesn't get told.

Vlad Tenev

When we started doing these events, that was a huge inspiration — we thought we should make them exactly like the Apple events, because they'd perfected it. But now we're on our fifth event this year and we don't think about the Apple events at all. It's like learning a new instrument: at first you practise what the greats composed, but once you reach a certain level you know enough to break rules and change things. Interestingly, I don't think 'a thousand songs in your pocket' was a rule Apple always had — in a lot of their events they got deep into the technical details, the megahertz of the processors, even bake-offs where they'd load a website on a PC and a Mac and the Mac would load ten times faster and everyone would gasp. But Jobs had this element of showmanship — the presentation, the anticipation, the story. He was basically an artist, probably the greatest of all time at that particular element.

Vlad Tenev

We told the team from the beginning that there are two areas where we want to be absolute best-in-class in our space: customer service and software engineering. Those are the big teams with multiplicative impact. Customer service interacts with all the customers who have issues, and traditionally it's a big cost centre for our peers because it scales with the number of customers. By and large, if you interact with customer service on Robinhood, you're interacting with our AI agents, and I think we're best-in-class there. On software engineering, it's about accelerating product velocity — and we've seen tremendous increases, because from a very early point we made it as easy as possible to use every AI tool. It started with GitHub Copilot because that was the only game in town, then Cursor and Windsurf until that got acquired, and recently Claude Code has been very popular.

Vlad Tenev

The important thing about AI adoption is you have to track the right metrics and look at them carefully. For customer support, it's the AI deflection rate — what percentage of tickets that would otherwise go to an agent are fully self-served by AI — and you want to drive that as high as possible. For software engineering, it's the percentage of code commits generated by AI, but you also check that total engineering velocity, the monthly commits per engineer, keeps increasing — you want to make sure AI isn't just doing a larger share of a shrinking whole, but that in aggregate you're more productive. Now it's baked into the process where we almost think of it as headcount: how much compute do you need next year, instead of how much headcount, and how hard have you tried to use AI agents in every team's workflow? The next frontier is creative and marketing. High-quality advertising collateral used to take deep work over a long time by great artists; if you empower those artists with the best tools — ElevenLabs, Midjourney, Runway — the total amount of creative can increase a hundred or a thousandfold and be much more personalised.

Vlad Tenev

I actually don't think anybody can — these are hard problems to get right, and most people don't even have metrics to track it. Take customer support. I break its AI progress into three phases. Phase one: a company puts its help centre into an AI chatbot, so it can answer any question from the help centre — like a better search function. Most companies doing AI for support are in this phase; it's easy to get going. Actually, most companies still aren't even there and are pushing you to navigate a help centre yourself. Phase two: the AI can go into the database. It can see Shane's account, that he has $50,000 and just deposited money from Chase, and use that for better contextual support — but it's still read-only. Phase three: the AI can take non-read-only actions — it can change things, refund your Gold subscription fee. That requires deep integration into the backend systems. Utility goes up as you get deeper, but so does cost, so very few are in phase three. That's where Robinhood is.

Vlad Tenev

Most companies are vendoring this, and it's hard, because a vendor can't save you much time in the actual work of plugging into all your systems — that's work your engineers have to do. What made it easier for us is that from an early point we wanted our data to be easily queryable internally, so we could run good analytics. Once your data is queryable, you generally have good systems hygiene — it's in one place, with clean interfaces. Work we did without thinking about AI made it easier to plug in the models and build agents. We have Robinhood Cortex, our AI model, and its most visible use case is the stock and crypto digest: go to a stock that's moved and it gives you a real-time view of what's driving it. Some competitors have done this, but ours updates basically every minute — whenever new information comes in — whereas most companies do it once a day, so it's stale for companies where lots of news happens.

Vlad Tenev

The company I started a couple of years ago and am chairman of is called Harmonic, and it's building mathematical superintelligence — AI that can solve maths problems at a level exceeding the best human mathematicians. It's not quite exceeding all of the best, but it certainly exceeded my level, which I didn't think it would do so quickly. Earlier this year we achieved gold-medal performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad, the world's most prestigious maths competition — these are cracked high-schoolers; only about five people got perfect scores. I say high school, but I'd struggle to solve a single IMO problem right now. Our model, Aristotle, solved five out of six.

Vlad Tenev

The bet was always that this would generalise. As a maths major, I felt that if you can figure out how to solve a hard maths problem, you can solve pretty much any problem — it generalises to general problem-solving, like making better business decisions. We tested that. They released a product for mathematicians and researchers, and it's been used to solve unsolved maths problems, including an Erdős problem. Paul Erdős was a prolific mathematician who travelled the world, staying at people's houses and working with them for weeks at a time. He left a collection of conjectures — things that seem true but he couldn't prove. There are something like a thousand Erdős problems, about half of them still open, and Harmonic solved at least one. There's always debate about whether it was solved elsewhere and nobody found it, so there's controversy around these announcements, but solving an unsolved problem people care about is a big deal. Going from competition maths to solving Erdős problems in a couple of months — and just yesterday they released an update where Aristotle learned to write computer code too, hitting a new state-of-the-art of around 97 percent on a software-verification benchmark.

Vlad Tenev

Two things. One, these models used to be a monolithic LLM; now Aristotle is actually a network of agents optimised for slightly different things. Two — and this is the key — the interesting thing about maths is that you can pose a problem as computer code, and if you pose it as code there's a way to machine-check the validity of the proof automatically. That lets you create a synthetic data pipeline. The vast majority of the data that trains Aristotle is data we generate, not internet data. You ask a question; the model reasons and tries to solve it, and on the way it generates lemmas and facts that are proved. Because you can machine-check them, you know they're correct, so you feed them back into the training, and as it solves problems it gets smarter and smarter. It's probably closer to training a model to play chess really well than to training an English-language LLM. The fundamental techniques overlap — lots of reinforcement learning, post-training, pre-training — but the main difference is that ability to machine-check the results, which gives you a good reward signal.

Vlad Tenev

We've already shown an ability to create new knowledge, and that will continue. Right now, at low cost, you can produce a proof that's ten pages long. In a year it'll be a hundred pages; in three years, a hundred thousand pages. What kind of problem has a hundred-thousand-page proof? Probably some of the deepest problems in mathematics. And the same thing happens in dependent fields — physics, computer science. What's the equivalent of a really deep result in physics? Understanding unification, aligning the theory of gravitation with the other forces — the problem in theoretical physics for fifty years, with little progress. AI could help, and if we figure it out, the consequences for new engineering are profound.

Vlad Tenev

I think there will be multiple models, and it will depend on the data used to feed them. What's great about Aristotle is that you've got mathematicians using it to ask very complex maths questions, so you build an advantage in mathematics data — and that's true in other domains. People tend to use ChatGPT as a first crack; it's a good general model, but they won't go deep on every domain, so you're already seeing specialisation. Anthropic has a very good coding model and has done very well in the enterprise for software engineering. Google has a very strong model in general reasoning — Gemini 3 came out and surprised some people, though if you were watching the Robinhood prediction market on the top AI model by year-end, it became pretty clear mid-year that Gemini would take it. They should, based on the data access they have — probably the highest-quality data source in the world with few restrictions, near-limitless compute, and lots of net income to fund it. Interestingly, Google competes with Harmonic — they have a maths model called AlphaProof that also converts maths from English into a programming language for the reward signal. AlphaProof was the first AI model to get a silver medal at the IMO last year, but they didn't announce a gold this year, so the Harmonic team was excited to surpass its capabilities in a year. I'll say Gemini has far surpassed ChatGPT in my own usage over the last two weeks — it blows it away. I love the race as a consumer; competition pushes everybody to be better. I heard there were reports of OpenAI calling a code red. It's funny, because when ChatGPT came out in 2022, Google called a code red and said it was an existential threat to search, and everyone counted them out — a big, slow company being disrupted. It's amazing how quickly the narrative can shift. You've got to tip your hat to Sundar, Sergey and the team.

Vlad Tenev

Maths is a good way to train your brain to do hard things. It's like — if you can deadlift 500 pounds, then picking up your crawling baby off the floor is very easy. No business problem is as complicated as a really hard maths problem. If you get used to the pain and the mental stress of beating your head against the wall for twelve hours on a single problem — which Baiju and I did very often in college, pulling all-nighters on problem sets — that's really good training. It's like going to the gym for business problems.

Vlad Tenev

I'm obsessed with getting more people into the markets, and in particular giving access to private markets — I think that's the biggest inequity in capital markets today. It matters because you see all these companies building AI models. We're in the midst of possibly the greatest technology revolution of all time, and there's going to be large-scale disruption and dislocation. AI is simultaneously the fastest-growing technology and among the least popular — people worry it's going to take their jobs. And the majority of AI companies are private, even at valuations of tens or hundreds of billions, which means retail investors can't invest in them. Juxtapose that with the fact that going public keeps getting more challenging — more process, fewer companies doing it, more institutional capital funding private companies — and you get a situation where retail investors are shut out of some of the most important companies. It's not just AI; look at SpaceX, valued in the hundreds of billions, the most impactful private space company, and retail has been shut out from the beginning. I'm trying to correct that — give people exposure and make it so everyone's an owner. If everyone owns something, they want to protect it, and I think we're more likely to have a stable and prosperous future.

Vlad Tenev

Real estate is incredibly meaningful, especially now that most people have difficulty buying their first home. You could attack it from multiple angles. One is breaking it into little pieces — maybe I don't want to take on a mortgage and own my own home, but I want to be an investor exposed to one or multiple homes in areas I think will do well. But my priority is late-stage privates. We launched Robinhood Ventures in the US to solve this, and our first closed-end fund, which we filed to take public, is in the quiet period, so I can't say much about the mechanics. The biggest opportunity and biggest problem is in private markets, and there's also opportunity in early-stage venture — exposing more people to companies at the earliest stages, where the risk is greater but so is the upside. If we streamline the capital-markets side and make it easier for entrepreneurs to raise money, that could lead to more entrepreneurship and innovation. Real estate the way it's been done isn't inspiring — generally low-quality commercial properties in random places. Real estate is so visual; the browsing experience on Zillow or Trulia has got really good, but it's far ahead of the experience of actually investing, so there's room for a real-estate investing product that's genuinely good, low-cost and easy to understand.

Vlad Tenev

Tokenisation as an underlying technology can be done, but it's not really permissible in the US right now. What you'd be tokenising is essentially a company, and once you tokenise a company you're into securities regulations, which have an established framework not currently compatible with decentralised finance and crypto. That's being worked out. But there's another mechanism in the US using traditional rails — 40 Act fund structures. There will be a flurry of innovation here, partly because the current administration has said it's open to using these vehicles to provide access to alternatives and privates. The limitation is that it's hard to make an individual asset — one property, one late-stage private company — tradable, but you can do a portfolio, so at least as a passive vehicle we can give that exposure. Tokenisation will work outside the US. A couple of months ago we did a crypto event in Europe where we tokenised hundreds of public equities and did a tokenised giveaway of OpenAI and SpaceX, which was very popular. Similar to how stablecoins evolved, tokenisation will be the primary vehicle for non-US investment until we get regulatory clarity, and then it'll seep into the US as well.

Vlad Tenev

It depends on the asset class. For privates, the second-order consequence is that entrepreneurs — the other side of the market — have an easier time raising capital. Rather than an opaque process of meeting investors one-on-one and pitching in person, imagine a digital fundraising process plugged into an electronic market where you push a button and get the capital. Secondary liquidity becomes much easier — an early employee or executive with shares locked up could sell on a transparent market without the paperwork, or waiting until IPO. The third-order consequence is an explosion of entrepreneurial activity: if it's easier to get funding and you don't have to spend full-time as CEO raising capital, there will be much more capital for startups, and consequently many more startups.

Vlad Tenev

It depends on the vehicle. There are tender-offer vehicles in the US that allow trading only at NAV — the net asset value, priced by independent valuation bodies. The problem is that if a company hasn't done a financing round in four or five years, the NAV isn't necessarily reflective of the true cost. Other vehicles allow real-time pricing. The platonic ideal is for the price to be driven by supply and demand — willing buyers and sellers in a transparent market — because in any other scenario, if one side has more information than the other, someone can be taken advantage of. That's not the world we live in today with private assets, so there will be a transition period, and not all companies will like it. But it's inevitable to some degree, because there are already active derivative markets on private shares, and the data is getting out. That's a hard genie to put back in the bottle: if the price is out and you're doing a round anyway, people will just hedge their exposure. It's going to be increasingly tough in a global market to have as much control over the price as private companies historically have.

Vlad Tenev

Our preference is always to come through the front door — making sure the company wants exposure to retail. With the OpenAI and SpaceX tokenisation we were running an experiment; we wanted to be first — if there were a Guinness World Record for the first tokenisation of OpenAI and SpaceX, I wanted to claim it — but it was a small giveaway. The scaled solution is best when the companies are involved, and what I've seen as we've got Robinhood Ventures off the ground is that great companies do want to be part of this. We saw the same with our IPO Access offering, the number one retail channel for IPO participation. We started it in 2021 and have done roughly fifty IPOs since. At the beginning we got a skeptical reception — bankers would talk companies out of it, and we had to elbow our way into small allocations. This year there's a profound change: the best companies going public come to us asking for feedback on their retail strategy, and CEOs go on national television talking about disrupting the traditional IPO model and giving retail larger allocations. The same will happen for private retail access, just earlier-stage. There was a round table two days ago at the New York Stock Exchange called 'Make IPOs Great Again' — red hats and everything. The IPO process has become ossified and the branding is bad at all stages, so you can systematically make improvements and make it easier to go public.

Vlad Tenev

Our north star is maximising direct equity ownership from retail across the world. How do we get more people invested in public stocks? Can we start at a younger age — which is why we're excited about initiatives like Invest America and the Trump accounts? Can we get people outside the US plugged in? Can we open up private markets? If we maximise equity ownership, and the percentage held directly by retail, we'll end up in a more stable and prosperous society. I've been talking a lot about multi-generational financial services — how do we make Robinhood work better if your spouse, parents or children are also on it? There's a huge wealth transfer coming: over $120 trillion will change hands from the old generation to the young, and that's a big opportunity to accelerate our goals. If we do that, Robinhood as a business benefits as our customers benefit.

Vlad Tenev

The year my father left Bulgaria, he had an opportunity to study at the University of Delaware. In Bulgaria he was a professor of economics in tourism on the Black Sea coast — Varna, our warm-weather summer capital. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron Curtain lifted, suddenly people could leave. My dad went in 1991. We didn't have the resources for the whole family to go, and we weren't sure whether it would work out in America. That year the inflation rate in Bulgaria was over 100 percent. We talk about five percent inflation here, but this was triple-digit. I remember my mum looking out the window of our apartment in Varna at the line for the grocery store — you had to get there at the right time or there'd be no eggs, no milk, and the milk came in big plastic bags. There was power rationing too — rolling blackouts every night — so we'd huddle around a battery-powered radio with my grandparents.

Vlad Tenev

My mum came about a year after my dad, and I came six months after her. I was five, so I still remember some things. When I came to the US, one thing that shocked me was that there were bananas in the grocery store — big bunches of them. In Bulgaria, bananas were a crazy delicacy, because you had to get them from Cuba, our banana trading partner. Suddenly they were twenty cents. A little later, in 1996–97, Bulgaria had the unfortunate distinction of the highest inflation rate in the world — 1,800 percent in one year. The currency essentially collapsed and they kept adding zeros. It used to be about two leva to the dollar and it got to 2,000. My grandparents had opened a savings account for me when I was born, and I was looking at the statements recently — deposits of 10 leva, 20 leva, up to 2,000 leva in the mid-90s, and then the next one was basically zero. My grandfather would invest in copper cookware — we had a closet in his apartment full of copper pots and pans, because they held value better than the currency.

Vlad Tenev

If there'd been an easy way to invest and protect your wealth, it would have been much better for the country. The country got set back — around when I was born, 1987, was maybe the heyday, and then a long gradual decline. So much of it starts with the will of the people and how optimistic they are about the future. I saw the impact of a market system that just didn't work, and it made me appreciate what we have in this country, and want to make it more global — make it easier for people to own companies that produce things.

Vlad Tenev

We've talked about real estate. I'm a proponent of a diversified portfolio, so I don't want to say one asset is better than another. The general approach is: look at what wealthy people have access to — the tools they use to protect and grow their wealth — a lot of alternatives, real estate, private credit, private equity, venture capital. If we make it easy for the mass market to access those, I think we'll be in good shape.

Vlad Tenev

In hindsight, Bitcoin has been the top-performing asset of the past decade, and you're seeing it become more institutionalised — not just the digital-asset treasuries, but companies putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet, and asset managers embracing it. For a long time Vanguard said they wouldn't offer Bitcoin; even companies like that are changing their tune. Expect that to accelerate. Bitcoin, as the original crypto asset, is always going to be singular — nobody else can be the first or the original — which is why there's such a mystique about it. You go to Bitcoin events and the believers will tell you it doesn't matter what happens: it goes up, they buy more; it goes down, they buy more. At this point I would definitely not be a long-term Bitcoin bear.

Vlad Tenev

We do have fee-based products. In the beginning Robinhood was a simpler business — we offered equities trading, didn't make money at first, and eventually it became payment for order flow, margin lending, and interest on balances. But now Robinhood is a financial super app with eleven business lines, as of the last earnings call, each generating $100 million or more in revenue. The general principle is that we make money in all the standard ways — transactions, interest on assets, lending-based revenue — but we compress the margins and operate more efficiently. Through technology we offer our services at much lower cost and give the difference back to customers, so you're at a financial disadvantage using any other product than Robinhood. It's not as simple as 'free trading' — we make money in other ways — but using Robinhood should be cheaper, higher-value and more cost-effective across the whole product suite than any competitor.

Vlad Tenev

It's easy to explain the value prop: three percent cash back on all categories. If you're a credit-card nerd who follows The Points Guy, there are whole businesses around optimising points — but a lot of people don't want to play that game. They don't want to work in spreadsheets figuring out which card to use for travel, groceries and gas. Three percent on all categories lets you say, 'this is just my default card, at the top of my wallet.' If you want to do more work, pull out other cards for specific scenarios, but if you don't want to think about it, this is really good as a default. It's like the successful e-commerce companies — Amazon has done such a good job that it's become the default place to buy. Maybe you could find a belt cheaper elsewhere, but they serve you well enough that they're the first option. That's what we've achieved with the credit card. Even though it's not completely generally available yet, we have over half a million cardholders and we're among the fastest-growing cards — entirely from word of mouth, existing happy customers posting about it. Credit-card companies typically have to think hard about cost of customer acquisition, but our customers are coming faster than we can let them off the waitlist.

Vlad Tenev

I think it's a cost-structure problem. The big credit-card companies have tens of thousands of people manually servicing accounts, and they spend a ton on marketing. The actual economics of the card program are dwarfed by the economics of the large headcount needed to operate. Those are very painful decisions — not only shrinking headcount, but building the technology to automate the entire servicing and underwriting process. We had an advantage because we built it from scratch, from first principles. It's a very challenging problem to solve; I don't envy them. If we can put pressure on the credit-card companies to modernise, that's good for them and for the consumer.

Vlad Tenev

Here's the great thing. Unlike the pure-play credit-card companies, we have a brokerage business that ties into it. To get the three percent cash back, you deposit the funds into your brokerage account. We've created a flywheel through Robinhood Gold: by using the credit card, you also use the brokerage. At the beginning it was mostly the other way — existing brokerage customers adopting the card — but increasingly people come for the card and then start using brokerage and wealth management. The more Robinhood products you use, the more engaged you are; it lifts all boats, and each product line benefits. If someone uses the card as their primary card, they put more of their wealth into Robinhood and become a more profitable customer, which lets us close the gap between the rebates we get from the networks and the three percent we pay back.

Vlad Tenev

It's about coverage. The goal is for Robinhood to be both your secondary and your primary account. When you ask people what their primary account is, they usually mean where their paycheque lands — their bank. For a while we weren't playing in that space, but a couple of weeks ago we started rolling out Robinhood Banking, and on social media it's a hit. The team sweated the details — a combination of things you won't get elsewhere, like real-time cash delivery, which is available in New York, plus the bread and butter: child savings accounts, joint accounts so you can share finances with your spouse, a family-first experience to manage the whole family's finances in one place. And amazing economics — a high rate of interest not just on savings but on checking too. That's a huge annoyance with banks: they play this game where your money goes in and out of checking, and they penalise you for taking money out of savings too many times, for no reason other than to collect the spread on checking. It's a bit of a stupid tax where they penalise you for doing the right thing.

Vlad Tenev

That's right, though to be fair there's a delicate line — banks have safety-and-soundness constraints. For a long time banks were actually prevented from paying interest on checking. The fear was that if there was intense competition over the highest rate on checking, it would affect the safety and soundness of banks and lead to more bank failures, so the regulators said no interest on checking. That was later repealed, but by then the interest banks collected on checking accounts was such a big line item on the P&L that it became hard to part with — they became structurally reliant on it. If you have trillions in checking that you're used to earning five percent on, and suddenly you're giving the majority of that back to the customer, your earnings and profitability go down, and if you're public that hits the stock price — and suddenly it becomes a safety-and-soundness concern.

Vlad Tenev

We have a mortgage partnership with Sage Home Loans that gives you 75 basis points off the national average. The hard part about mortgages is that the business is very rate-dependent, so I don't think we want to get into underwriting or holding mortgages. We want to help people with all their financial needs, so for that one, being a network and letting different banks compete over who offers the best rate is probably the road we keep going down.

Vlad Tenev

I haven't thought deeply about whether we'd securitise mortgages. At the end of the day we just want to enable whatever offers customers the lowest cost — whether that's tokenisation or connecting directly to a network of competing banks remains to be seen. You could argue tokenisation would have a disadvantage at first, because the banks won't be tokenising, so you have to meet them where they are and give them information in ways they can support. But banks tend to be laggards on technology, so over time that shifts — if in five to ten years they're doing mortgage originations on-chain, you can imagine that becoming the primary market.

Vlad Tenev

For me personally, success is creating dramatically more value for the world than you create for yourself. I'd feel good if the aggregate positive impact on the rest of the world is much bigger than what happens to me personally. That's what's pushing me towards further ownership — making it so everyone has skin in the game. If I can play a part in doing that across privates, publics, and pre- and post-IPO, and make it so more people own the great industries of this country, it will lead not just to smarter and more well-off individuals, but to a more stable and prosperous society. That's a legacy I'd be excited to tell my grandchildren about proudly, when they're huddled around the fire on Christmas.

Vlad Tenev

Thank you. It's been fun.