The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Robin was a very controversial name, and I think that's
what made it powerful, because you either love it or
you're kind of like repulsed by it to some degree.
But it doesn't sound like a finance company. The name
itself tells you a lot about what the company stands
for and what the products help you achieve. The number
one health and Well.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
In the podcast, Jay Sendi, Jay Shendy, Jez Only, j Sheet, Hey, everyone,
welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to listen,
learn and grow about how you can become happier, healthier,
and more healed. We talk about everything from personal growth
to finance, relationships to business and today's guest is someone

(00:42):
who's built something truly culturally phenomenon. And I think a
lot of you may be using the product already, a
lot of you definitely have heard about it, and a
lot of you may have a lot of questions like
I do, and so I'm so excited to have on
on Purpose. Vlad Tenev the CEO and co founder of Robinhood.
Vlad is a FIR generation immigrant from Bulgaria. In twenty thirteen,

(01:03):
Vlad co founded Robinhood and pioneered commission free investing with
an intuitive mobile first interface, and today Robinhood has more
than twenty three million funded customers and over one hundred
and nineteen billion assets under custody. Please welcome to on
Purpose Flood kind of Flood. It's great to have you here.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Thanks for having me Jay.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yeah, really really fascinating journey you've been on personal and professional,
and I think our audience and community are going to
get a lot of value to understand more about the
investing world from you. But I wanted to start off
with a question because your pre founder life is actually
fascinating in terms of how you even got involved, and
I wanted to ask you, what's a childhood memory that

(01:47):
you have that you feel has impacted the work you
do today.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
If I think about the childhood memories that I have
that stick out, they're all kind of like somewhat from
I would say, but I think I had a very
happy childhood by and large, like I wouldn't trade anything,
but my childhood was full of significant change. So a

(02:12):
couple of the memories that stick out was going to
the airport for the first time. You know, I grew
up in Bulgaria, very small country in eastern Europe. I
was born in the eighties, which was a time of communism,
so it was sort of like there was the West
and then the Iron Curtain and not a lot of

(02:33):
back and forth travel. My first time to the airport
was actually after the Berlin Wall fell. Communism in Bulgaria
had kind of collapsed, or was on the verge of collapsing.
My father was given an opportunity to go to the
US to study, which was you know, the events that

(02:55):
kind of conspired to allow that to happen could not
have conspired an earlier time, right, But you know, he
had to go by himself because we just didn't have
the money to like send even my mom with him,
much less my mom and me, So he kind of
went off by himself to see if he could make

(03:18):
it and make a new life for us and kind
of this new land. And I think I they were
trying to prepare me for this because I was an
only child, and you know, the weeks leading up to it,
and my parents were like, you know, your dad's going
to America. You're not going to see him for a

(03:39):
long time, you know, And it ended up being I
think about two years before before I saw him again.
I'm not a very emotional person. I've kind of been
described as stoic. I wasn't a very emotional child, and
I just remember like when we got to the gate
and I and my dad kind of like went to

(03:59):
the other side. I didn't I wasn't like allowed to
cross because of course I didn't have a ticket. I
just like cried and baled my guts out because it
kind of sank in that I wasn't going to see
him for a very long time. That's probably one of
the one of the biggest memories. Another memory, you know,
perhaps a little bit more relevant to robinhood, was after

(04:25):
I had moved from Bulgaria to the US and we
had gotten enough money to have a vacation, and of
course the only place to go back on vacation was
to see my grandparents back in the home country. So
we'd gone back, and I remember the exchange rate of
the currency, right, It used to be sort of like
two Bulgarian leva for one dollar. But I came back

(04:48):
and it was two thousand. So Bulgaria had gone through
this incredible period of hyperinflation where the inflation of the
Bulgarian lev was the highest in the world. This was
nineteen ninety six, and I think nineteen ninety seven as well.
I think there were two years and so, you know,
my grandparents' pensions were just worthless. Everyone in the country

(05:10):
was struggling, and I think those early moments were when
I developed this like visceral understanding of how important money was,
because I think to a kid, money's maybe not so important,
but to me, you know, my parents were new in
the country. They were just like getting started from scratch,

(05:31):
basically starting from zero, and I always felt like every decision,
every family decision, had this like layer of like how
much money is going to be spent on this, how
important is it we have to like choose like the
the budget potato chips, or shop at Shopper's food warehouse

(05:53):
rather than Safe Way because they have like the dented
cans and stuff like that. So I think from very
early on, I got this understanding of like the importance
of money and saving it and protecting it, and that
that was just like driving so many of the decisions
that my parents were making on a daily basis.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
Yeah, thanks for sharing both of those, Actually, they're such
unique perspectives. With the first one, what was it like
when you reunited with your dad after two years and
you saw him, you're absolutely in tears.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
I remember that very vividly too. Actually, yeah, because I
landed in JFK Airport. I was five years old and
it was my first airplane flight, and I remember I
was just like puking my guts out that entire flight
because you know, they had some they were serving some

(06:44):
food on the plane, and I was traveling with my aunt,
who was like fifteen years old at the time, and
she was like a punk rock teenager, like she loved
American music. She had her Walkman on. She liked you know,
Nirvana and grunge. She later settled in Seattle, which which
I think made a lot of sense. But anyway, they

(07:05):
brought us the food in the plane, and you know,
it's funny. You think plain food was like just this
trash you don't want to eat it, but I thought
it was It looked amazing, So I just kind of
like engulfed all of it, and then of course that
led to uh me puking my guts out, and so
I didn't have a very fun plane ride. So I

(07:27):
felt a little off coming coming out on JFK, and
I hadn't seen my parents in a long time. It
was like I spent the majority of the past year
living with my grandparents. My dad first went and my
mom joined him later, and then I joined with my aunt,
and so I was very shy. It was it was
almost like meeting strangers, you know. Of course I knew

(07:51):
they were my parents, but after not having seen them
for a while, I was like kind of hiding behind
my aunt's leg and it would stick one eye out
get a look at them. And there's this picture of
me in the parking lot of JFK Airport when they
kind of like showed me the family car for the
first time, and it was this like Plymouth Duster from

(08:15):
the eighties. I don't know if you know the car,
but it had a mask. So back in the eighties
cars would have masks out front, and that was kind
of the style. And I could tell you could tell
by looking at me that I was like this shy kid,
very very nervous, didn't really know what was going on,
you know, landed in a new place, skyscrapers everywhere, you know,

(08:39):
there was just I remember the skyscrapers, you know, just
nothing prepares you for that when you're coming from a
very very small country it took me a little bit
of time to like get reacquainted with my parents. You
would think I would just like jump into their arms
and it would be like we we didn't miss a moment,
But there there was definitely a little bit of hesitancy
and shyness before I kind of warmed up and realized

(09:03):
who they were.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, I mean it makes sense because you had separate
so young that it's almost like you maybe haven't even
had an opportunity to even build a relationship at that age. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:15):
I mean when my dad left, I must have been three.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
Years, That's what I mean. It's yeah, I can't even
remember being three.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yeah, I mean I have very few memories from before then.
Who was basically saying bye to my dad at the airport.
Maybe my third birthday party. I vaguely remember through pictures.
Maybe yeah, the first snowfall. But yeah, it's like three
or four memories and that's basically it.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yeah. And with the second short story you shared about
the financial situation and seeing the inflation in Bulgaria and
coming back to that world you when you went back,
how did someone like that, how did a kid like
you shy separate from parents seeing that in Bulgaria get
to Stanford, Like, what does that journey look like? Because
I can imagine that that was an a simple or

(10:00):
easy journey. That doesn't seem like a natural, natural progression.

Speaker 1 (10:05):
So when I got to the US, I didn't know
how to speak English.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
That's what I was going to ask. That was it
your first language? Right?

Speaker 1 (10:11):
Yeah? And Bulgarian was my first language. I think it
kind of became clear, you know, once my dad went
to the US. Then my mom tried to teach me English.
But you know, it doesn't really work unless you're kind
of talking to kids and doing it on a daily basis.
And I was three anyway, so it would have been

(10:34):
tough going. So when I first got to the US,
and I went to school in Bulgaria, and I never
really like found a good group of friends in school either.
I was kind of a lonely kid. I mean it
was preschool in kindergarten, so I don't have too many

(10:55):
memories of it. But I would always switch schools too.
Like I moved in with my grandparents, they obviously lived
in a different part of town, so I would go
in a different school. So I never really liked I
didn't like the idea of school, and I remember kind
of dreading having to go in this new country, and
even more so I didn't speak the language. I remember

(11:16):
just like kindergarten was was really hard. They were all
all kinds of different types of kids. I couldn't really
like navigate my way around. I didn't know who was who.
I couldn't even tell the teacher that I needed to
go to the bathroom. So it kind of hold it
in all day. And then I remember first grade. I

(11:37):
have this like one memory from first grade, which was
I was in a little reading circle and you know,
you know, like the kids do these reading circles and
you're reading like these basic books. And I still remember
this first grade reading circle and I was like, man,
I can read, And not only can I read, but

(12:00):
I'm reading better than all these American kids. So I
think that's when I kind of had the realization that
maybe I was like intelligent or I identified as a
smart person. And I think my parents did this like
really valuable thing in hindsight, which was they kind of
like advocated for me. So they never got into like

(12:22):
the PTA or school activities or volunteering. They just didn't
have time because my dad was in grad school and working.
My mom was working as well, just to try to supplement,
and they're like, you know, our kid is smart. He
should be in the accelerated like math. Can he skip grades?

(12:44):
They were always trying to like push the teachers to
put me in another grade, and the teachers were like, well, well,
he's small and he doesn't really have that many friends.
We don't really think it's a great idea for to
have him skip a whole bunch of grades. But you know,
they kept pushing, and eventually, you know, I was given
an opportunity to skip a grade. And I did like

(13:07):
very very well at school. But I kind of had
this fairly early realization that I was smart and kind
of good at math and sciences. And then my parents
also had this way of like applying pressure, which I
think was like kind of honest from their perspective, but

(13:27):
also might have been a little bit strategic, which was
we're new to this country. We're immigrants, like we're not citizens.
We could sort of like get kicked out at any time.
There was this like fear of deportation always, and so
it was kind of like you got to do well
in school because otherwise we might get deported, and for

(13:51):
sure you're gonna have to get a scholarship because we're
not making any money in this family, so you're gonna
have to, like if you want to go to college
and make it in this country and get education, it's
kind of on you. I would kind of hear this
and really internalize it at an early age, but it
was quite intense. I was like, all right, well, I
better just like always a saw my exams and do

(14:14):
well because there was like all this pressure of the
family making it in this country that I felt a
big part. Yeah, that I felt a big part of.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Did it ever feel like too much or it felt
like it just got you to perform and you locked in,
Like did you find pressure to be your friend or
did you find pressure overwhelming? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (14:33):
I don't think that it ever felt like too much.
I think school felt School, at least kind of in
the early days, was relatively easy for me. Yeah, I
mean I kind of like sailed through elementary school. By

(14:53):
the time I got to middle school, I was probably
like four years ahead of my classmates, three or four
years ahead in mathematics, for example. My dad always emphasized
mathematics too, you know, he was he was an economist
in Bulgaria, and he was always like, well, you know,

(15:15):
if you're good at math, you can kind of do anything.
So all this other stuff, like you know, language, arts,
you know, you'll you'll figure that out. Math is like
the thing. And there was also a little bit of
a competitive element because I would be like, oh, Dad,
you know, how old were you when you figured out
like this type of math, Like when did you learn calculus?

(15:36):
And he was like, oh, I learned calculus when I
was in graduate school. I was like, all right, I'm
gonna do it in seventh grade. No, maybe it was
like eleventh grade or something pre calculus maybe. Then I
you know, started doing it outside of school. I started
doing all of these camps, like there was this one.

(15:58):
There was this one camp called CTY. I don't know
if you've heard of it. I did that in middle school.
And basically the way it worked was you take the SAT.
So the SAT is the for any listener who was
not an American college entrance exam here. I think it's
required again now for a while it wasn't required, but

(16:20):
basically you have to take it to get into a
good college. And for this camp ct Y, you basically
took it as a middle schooler, and then you know,
depending on how well you did on this test, you
could like qualify for certain classes. In eighth grade, I
got a pretty good score. I think I got a

(16:41):
thirteen seventy and I'd skipped a grade, so I was
like a younger eighth grade or two. And at that point,
you know, I had this math teacher in my middle
school and he had to like sign some stuff to
have me go to this camp. He's like seven seventy
on the on the math and the SAT like that's
higher than I ever got, you know, when I was
in college. So I think at that point, I just

(17:04):
I kept getting this reinforcement that you know, I was
really great at math. I should I should keep doing it.
And I guess Stanford. How I came to Stanford was
an interesting story. The second vacation that my family took
after we moved to America, they took me to California
and my dad was like reading all these travel books

(17:26):
and he had this book like the thousand and one
Places to See Before you Die, and a lot of
them were on the West Coast, so like the Grand
Canyon and Sequoia National Park, where you could drive your
car through this like big tree. I don't know if
you've seen pictures of that. We drove through the tree,
and we kind of did this road trip through California,

(17:48):
and there was this one day where we drove through
San Francisco and we spent the night there and it
was the middle of summer and it was raining. It
was like close to zero degree celsius. So I had
to actually buy a jacket because I was just unprepared
for this. So kind of kind of this miserable day,

(18:09):
and then we drove down. We drove down to Stanford,
which was in Palo Alto, about forty five minutes south
of the city, and everything cleared up. The sky was blue,
not a single cloud in the sky. It was sunny.
They were like I think summer school was in session,
so kids were like throwing frisbee at the oval and

(18:30):
they were like kids picnicking in the main quad, and
I just remember it felt so idyllic, particularly juxtaposed against
how horrible San Francisco was that day that I was like,
this is where I want to go, Like my parents
have been spending all this time talking about college. This

(18:50):
seems like a fantastic college. So back then I wanted
to be a lawyer. So there's this photo of me
on that road trip in front of the law school
at Stanford, and I'm like, yeah, this is where I'm
gonna I'm gonna go and be a lawyer. I had
seen a few good men, you know, the Tom Cruise movie.
I thought being a lawyer was so cool because you
get to like really get the people, like these intense arguments.

(19:12):
I think I always remembered that even when I applied
for college. I applied early to Stanford as a result,
but the lawyer thing I kind of grew out of.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
Let's take a short break to hear from our sponsors.
All right, thank you to our sponsors. Now let's dive
back in. Was robin Hood the story ever a part
of your early life or was that just a name
that stuck out as a name in and of itself? Yeah?
Did you ask the cartoon when you grew up? Or
did you read the book? I did?

Speaker 1 (19:43):
Yeah, No, I watched the cartoon. I was a big
fan of that. And of course Men in Tights was
another great one. The origin of Robinhood the name was
you know, the finance industry had a bad rap in
the early part of the last decade. Still does, really
still does. So you know, my girlfriend Selena my wife now,

(20:10):
but my girlfriend at the time, she was kind of
like she started dating me. I was this entrepreneur, I
had this idea, and she had to kind of explain
to her friends what I was doing. And she was
like a doctor and medical researcher at the time, so
that's a very concrete thing. You know, her friends were
mostly researchers and doctors. So she was like, well, Vlad,

(20:35):
you know, he's in finance. But then there'd be like
this groan, like, oh, you know, they thought I was
some kind of investment banker or something. She's like, no, no, no,
but not that kind of finance. They're like the Robinhood
of finance. They're trying to help the little guy, giving
them tools to invest and manage their money. And so
when we were kind of coming up with the name,
that was a name that that we got excited by.

(20:57):
And there were a couple of other names too, Like
we thought about naming the company Omaha actually, and we
got pretty close to that one. And in hindsight, you know,
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were never big fans of Robinhood.
They were kind of like crapping on us from time
to time publicly. So sometimes I think if we had

(21:17):
named the company Omaha, maybe we wouldn't have had that element.
I'd also never been to Omaha, so that kind of
like that sealed it for me. So Robin was a
very controversial name, and I think that's what made it powerful,
because you either love it or you're kind of like
repulsed by it to some degree. But it's not boring.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
It doesn't sound like a normal finance company.

Speaker 1 (21:40):
It doesn't sound like a finance company. And I think
in hindsight that was a really good thing because it's
just memorable and it's like emotionally gripping, and the name
itself kind of tells you a lot about what the
company stands for and what the products should like help
you achieve.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
Yeah, how old were you when you first died in that?

Speaker 1 (22:00):
Yeah, you know, it ties into what we were talking
about earlier. I was at home during the summer because
you know, my parents were working, and I spent a
lot of time with computers, and one of the early
things I discovered was like building a portfolio on Yahoo
Finance actually, and this was nineteen ninety seven, late nineties. Wow,

(22:25):
So during the dot com boom, when somehow, I don't
even know how I came across this, but I was
building a portfolio of companies that I recognized, like Yahoo
three Com, which made the Palm Pilot one of the
first consumer PDAs at the time PDAs. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(22:46):
I remember, well ahead of their time, right, yeah, very
I did decently well. In hindsight, everyone was doing well
on all those stocks for quite a long time because
it was the dot com bubble. But my parents basically
saw an opportunity to motivate me to do well on
the SAT to qualify for this camp that we were

(23:08):
talking about earlier. So basically they were like, if you
get above I think it was like thirteen hundred on
the SAT, we will let you invest with like the
dollar amount of your score. It was something like that.
And so you know, I was like very motivated by this.

(23:28):
And so when I got my thirteen seventy and my
dad and I kind of he funded an e trade
account for me and I started investing.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
No way, do you remember your vest investment? Yep?

Speaker 1 (23:40):
Yeah, I bought three Com, the company that made the
palm Pilot. My feeling was that this device was so interesting,
and they had started giving them out to my parents,
who by that point were working at the World Bank,
and I was like, all right, well, if the World

(24:01):
Bank is using them, this must be a company that
you know, is growing and they'll probably be around for
a while. And plus the device was just super cool.
You know. Pretty soon after my dad brought it home,
he didn't know how to use it, so I just
took it and started playing with it. So and actually
through that I learned a lot about investing, because what
happened was there was a spinoff. So first that started

(24:24):
at as three Com, but then this palm Pilot business
was growing and they spun it off, so then I
had two stocks. And then I started getting the prospectuses
in the mail and voting documents, and I learned all
about like shareholder proxy voting and all the stuff that
a normal twelve year old probably wouldn't wouldn't have occasion

(24:47):
to learn about. But because I was invested, I actually
like felt compelled to learn more. So yeah, I think
that really set me off on a lifetime of learning
about investing in finance.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah, how much How did did you make or lose?

Speaker 1 (25:02):
At first? I was I was up quite a bit.
Then in two thousand, I think my portfolio dropped to
maybe like twenty thirty percent of what I started with,
and then I think it probably took another ten years
beyond that for that portfolio to be in the green again.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
Oh wow.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
But I mean, I would say it's the great thing
about getting started young in general, not just for me.
You have plenty of time to actually like make up
for the mistakes, and you know, compounding over a long
period of time corrects a lot of mistakes. So I think,
generally speaking, the earlier you can get started the investing,

(25:41):
the better.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
Yeah, it's fascinating hearing about your own investing journey and
starting at twelve is is pretty young. I mean, that's
pretty impressive that you were able to compute and factor
that in. Have you ever taken an IQ test? Like,
do you know your argue? I have not. Yeah. Yeah,
I'm just say I was intrigued. Yeah, it just based
on everything you've been saying. I'm just like, it's rare

(26:03):
that I've met someone who's felt that they've always excelled
since an early age, like that's not as common an
experience anymore. Yeah, I don't know if you meet people
like that.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
I mean, I do think that Stanford in particular is
kind of an interesting amalgamation of people. So you have
a lot of people from like diverse, modest backgrounds that
come to Stanford, and usually those people have like excelled academically,

(26:37):
which is pretty amazing. And then you also have people
that come from like wealthy families from all over the world.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:47):
I think some people consider that to be not ideal,
like maybe it should all be merit based and everything,
but I think it actually has worked fairly well because
what happens is the folks from modest means that have
like really high horsepower get to make connections, and you
make connections with all of these people and it kind

(27:10):
of unlocks business opportunities for you. So, you know, a
lot of the folks that I met in my undergrad
and the different types of people, I think at the
time I kind of didn't recognize this, but they ended
up helping me in my business career, either because they
became journalists that like helped tell the story of Robinhood,

(27:33):
or they joined venture capital firms and they became indirectly
or directly investors in Robinhood, or they advised us with
certain things. I think everyone is so diffuse in general
because people grow up in different places. But like, college
is one of those moments that people get brought together,
and you do in a place like Stanford in particular,

(27:57):
get to encounter a lot of a lot of really
special people. And you know, when I came to Stanford,
I actually had no conception of going into business, you
know that I kind of stumbled into that later. By
the time I got to college, I was interested in
theoretical physics. That was like my passion because I was
consumed by this question of, like why are the laws

(28:21):
of the universe the way they are? I had read
about relativity when I was in high school, and I
was just like the first time I read like the
you know, Einstein's Book of Special Relativity, it just blew
my mind. And I had to read it like six
or seven times to figure out what was going on,

(28:41):
you know, and then I you know, you try to
understand more and deeper. And the question that really motivated
me was like why do the laws of gravity look
like this, but like all the sub atomic particles like
all the laws around article physics look different, and is

(29:02):
there one theory that is basic that unifies both of them.
This sort of like unification of quantum gravity was this
topic that really interested me. So I came to Stanford
to study that, and that's kind of what what pushed
me into into eventually doing math and going to UCLA
to study math with a professor named Terry Tao. But like,

(29:25):
if you think about that group of people, the folks
at Stanford who come to study theoretical physics, and you
don't do that because there's very little money in it,
particularly back then, right, this was like pre data science
and applied machine learning. So yeah, Actually, by by the
time I got to that point, I was looking around

(29:48):
and I'm like, wow, I'm the dumbest person here. These
are just I'm surrounded by like some of the smartest
people I've ever met.

Speaker 2 (29:55):
Well, and how did you get distracted from that?

Speaker 1 (29:59):
I was here at UCLA studying math, and two things happened.
The number one thing was when I decided to go
to graduate school and kind I think my bubble of
the academic world kind of burst a little bit because
I had this romantic notion that you would kind of

(30:24):
spend all of your time thinking about difficult problems and
just like being creative. It's almost like being an artist,
like maybe there's not much money in it, but you
spend a lot of your time just like practicing your craft. Right.
But then I was given this book. It was called
like the Mathematicians Survival Guide, and it was like chapters

(30:46):
about how to deal with the administration and the bureaucracy
of the graduate department, how to advocate yourself for yourself
with the department chair, how to make sure that you
get like a good research fellowship so you don't have
to spend all of your time teaching undergraduate classes. And
I think at that point I was like, oh, man,

(31:07):
like this is a career and it's not like the
career that I wanted. Another thing happened at the same time.
So my first month in grad school was September of
two thousand and eight, and Lehman Brothers went under that month.
It was it was the start of the global financial crisis.

(31:27):
You and I are basically at the same age, I think,
born in eighty seven. This was kind of like maybe
for you, for me certainly, like the folks that graduated
my year of college, some of them went to finance
and some of them even went to work at Lehman Brothers.

(31:49):
And it was sort of like one month after they joined,
you know, there was like photographs of them carrying their
stuff out of the offices and boxes. Right, So, yeah,
that was a tough time for a lot of people.
A lot of my friend's parents lost their jobs that year,
so it was the global financial crisis. And yes, somewhat oddly,

(32:15):
my good friend from college, whose name was Beiju Bod
who I ended up starting Robinwood with, he had gotten
a job in finance kind of on a whim, and
he managed to convince me that this time was the
best time to start a finance company. And of course
I wasn't like super committed to my PhD path because
of all the other stuff I mentioned. So I was like,

(32:38):
you know what, this sounds like an interesting problem. Let's
see if we can do something here. So we rented
a little house in South San Francisco in the South
Mission where we were paying like three hundred dollars a
month in rent. We're all living together. I had to
take care of this lady's cats, which was why the

(32:59):
rent was so cheap. That was kind of my first
experience with entrepreneurship. What attracted me to it was kind
of the same thing that attracted me about math and physics.
It was the act of creating something with you didn't
really have to listen to anyone telling you what to do.

(33:21):
You could use your entire mental faculties and your creativity
to like determine your own success and your outcomes. You know,
just like a couple of people who were really passionate
and committed could build something and you know, actually use
it as a vehicle to sustain themselves economically. So that

(33:43):
idea when I kind of discovered it, and I never
really like thought of myself as an entrepreneur before. I mean,
it wasn't really something that was common in the East Coast,
to be honest, or in Bulgaria. I mean you had
some but not technology entrepreneurship really. And then when and
I kind of started doing it and I started like
programming and writing code, then I just like found the

(34:06):
whole thing really intoxicating. So even though we didn't have
success it basically our first idea failed within a year,
I just kind of knew that that I wanted to
do it. So that that gave me the confidence to
drop out of UCLA start something a little bit different,

(34:26):
and it was it was the third idea that we
had that led to Robinhood, and that was kind of
the one that really worked. I think that the actual
experience and the mindset of an entrepreneur just like resonated
with me very very deeply, and I was having so
much fun, like unlike anything else that I had done,

(34:47):
that I just knew I had to keep doing it.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
Yeah, I mean, democratizing investing is such a at least
at the time as well, with such an ambitious goal
to think about trying to get the average person to
be able to have access to something that wasn't accessible
to them just a few years before, especially in a
place that seemed volatile, you needed a lot of capital
to get started. I want to do a bit of

(35:11):
investing basics for people who are listening, who may or
may not be using your platform already and want to
understand a bit more about it. If someone's sitting there,
going and I remember being this person, So I remember
twenty thirteen, I just left the monastery that I lived
in for three years, and I'd gone back into the
world of work, and I had a mentor who told
me exactly which crypto to invest in in twenty thirteen.

Speaker 1 (35:36):
Which one did he say? Well, at the time he
was like dogecoin.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
No, no, definitely wasn't. At the time it was like
ethereum lithium, like oh yeah, like coin yeah yeah. And
so he was mentioning all these places. And I remember
in twenty thirteen, with very little capital, very little investment knowledge.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
See now, if someone said my mentor and what did
you call him?

Speaker 2 (36:03):
Your yeah, mentor yeah, yeah, mentor. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:05):
If now someone's like, oh, my guru told me the
which cryptocurrency to invest in, I would be like, hey,
you should be a little skeptical of this mentor. But
in twenty thirteen that was actually like.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
I should have listened.

Speaker 1 (36:18):
That was before the space got a little a little corrupted,
before the pretenders came in.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
Yeah. No, he'd been successful in tech, investing in things
for years. And yeah, i'd met him. He was I
was what twenty six at the time, he was fifty five.
Oh wow, and so he you know, he'd been around.
He was a very smart, thoughtful, thoughtful person. I didn't
really understand anything of my investing and I grew up
in a family where we didn't have a lot. Growing up,
there wasn't I didn't see my parents invest. I didn't

(36:47):
see them have that, And so I remember being like,
he was just like, just put one thousand dollars, put
one hundred dollars into each of one hundred pounds. I
was in London, So he goes, just put one thousand
pounds into one hundred pounds into each and just see
how it goes. And I remember being so risk averse
that I didn't even want to put one thousand pounds
into it. And that's probably all I had at that time.
I was working a job where I made thirty one

(37:07):
five hundred pounds a year at Eccentria, and.

Speaker 1 (37:11):
I we're in the UK.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
As in the UK, Yeah, I could have put one
thousand pounds in and I didn't. If I did, it
would have been a great investment. But the question I'm
asking is a lot of people don't invest because they
don't have enough knowledge, but they also feel they don't
have enough money. At what point should you feel confident
and comfortable to start investing what amount? And yeah, let's

(37:33):
start that.

Speaker 1 (37:33):
Yeah, I mean a lot of Robinhood customers start with
as little as ten dollars, and I think that was
actually the innovation that Robinhood unlocked. So before we came
into the mix, you used to have to pay a
trading fee, and if you started in the UK, you
probably paid a trading fee at twenty thirteen as well.

(37:54):
I mean still do that market hasn't gone zero commission yet.
Let's say you have to pay ten dollars per trade, Well,
that's you know, if you make one hundred dollars investment,
that's ten percent of the of the actual value in
the investment, and if you want to sell it, you know,
then that gets to twenty percent for the round trip.

(38:15):
And so it doesn't really make sense to start with
one hundred dollars in that sense because you have to
count on many years of appreciation to just pay for
your transaction fee. But if you lower the fees to zero,
you could start with any amount, which is what you
did exactly, And that was kind of our big that

(38:35):
was that was sort of one of the three big
innovations that I think made Robinhood possible and really made
it take off. It's eliminating the commissions and lowering the
account minimums to zero because a lot of brokers also
had account minimums. You couldn't even open account unless you
had two thousand dollars or sometimes more in there. And
we said, you know what we really wanted. And the reason,

(38:56):
by the way that they had these accounts minimums was
these companies were not automated enough to service small accounts.
They just lose money on them. And so we said
to ourselves, well, it would be it would not really
uphold the mission of a company named Robinhood to have

(39:19):
an arbitrary account minimum. We should make it zero. We
should hold ourselves to that standard, and we just should
like incent ourselves to make the business as efficient as possible,
because I think that would be the long term correct
way to build the business. Like, let's point everything towards
creating a forcing function for us to be more efficient

(39:40):
and more automated and adopt technology more aggressively and be
the first to do it relative to the market. And
a company where everything is pointed towards using technology to
lower the cost of things, make things as usable as possible,
and as automated as possible, that seems like a long

(40:01):
term robust structure for a company. So we kind of
like that, But yeah, a lot of customers start with
just ten dollars or even less.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
And what would you say the three biggest mistakes new
investors make when they don't know what they're doing.

Speaker 1 (40:15):
I think this is a little bit strange, given like
so much of Robinhood, at least in the public realm
is you know, meme stocks and meme trading. But I
think probably the biggest mistake one can make is buying
something just because someone on the internet like thinks that
you should buy it and is posting it. I'm personally

(40:39):
a big believer in thinking for yourself, and like buying
something because people on social media are saying it's a
good idea, It's just like kind of anathema to me, Like, sure,
use it as a signal, but like make your own
decision and kind of think through it yourself and don't

(41:00):
just rely on the opinions and commentary of others any others.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
Big mistakes that people may.

Speaker 1 (41:07):
I think just like waiting to get started, you know, now,
particularly with the tools there's you know, with Robinhood kind
of entering the market, not just Robinhood, but most of
the competitors that at least survive in the space. There's
no maintenance fees, no kind of onboarding fees, keeping money

(41:31):
in the savings account where in particular now with high rates,
you know a lot of the banks are offering you
zero percent, so your money is just losing money sitting
in savings, not doing the simple things to optimize I
think our mistakes. And there is so much free content
out there on the internet, on YouTube, and you know

(41:55):
that just spending even thirty minutes to get educated and
actually just like getting started and opening an account and
creating the habit of investing even if you don't think
you have much money. The technology is there so that
you could actually do the exact same things with one

(42:15):
dollar as you can with thousands of dollars. And you know,
through another thing, Robinhood pioneered fractional shares. You can invest
any dollar amount in pretty much any stock. You don't
need a whole share. So one of the first things
that we did, which we thought was very cool, was
you have, for example, companies whose share prices are hundreds

(42:38):
of thousands of dollars per share, like Berkshire hathaway A
Shares for example, and you know they would almost pride
themselves on having this share price that's inaccessible to normal people,
and not everyone could be invited to this club of
like shareholders and they have the annual shareholder meeting. But
you know, Robinhood figured out how to break up these

(43:00):
stocks into pieces and you can buy a dollar of it,
and you know, then you had all these retail investors
showing up at the shareholder meetings, and I think that
made those guys very angry actually in hindsight. But how
did you vary?

Speaker 2 (43:13):
How did you even pull that off? How's that even possible?

Speaker 1 (43:16):
Yeah, it was a big technical challenge, Yeah, big technical challenge. Basically,
what happens is the company has to keep inventory in
all of these names, and you imagine, like let's say,
I mean the way that this works is probably a
little bit more complicated, but to simplify it, let's say

(43:36):
you want to buy a dollar of Berkshire Hathaway. Well,
then we would essentially have to keep inventory of a
whole share and then allocate internally different pieces of it,
and then you know, when the total sum exceeds one share,
then we go out and buy another one. So we're
kind of like managing this portfolio of you know, right

(44:00):
around one share in every instrument.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:04):
Yeah, and then we can just do that through technology.
I mean, we have great engineers and data scientists and
brokerage experts that can manage the system.

Speaker 2 (44:14):
If you had to say that for a new investor,
there's certain factors they should understand about a stock before investing.
What would you say the three key things that they
should know? An amount of information they should have before
they go in and put any amount in.

Speaker 1 (44:29):
I guess without giving people two specific investment advice because yeah,
I'm kind of not really allowed to do that. I'm
a big proponent in investing in companies that create products
that you like and use. You know, if you use
the product, if you think that the company that's making

(44:53):
those products is improving the products, and if you're bullish
on continuing to be useful and you think it's trending
in the right direction. That's been sort of my philosophy.
It's how I got started to and I think that's
why if you look at the Robinhood customer base and
we're now publishing the stocks that our customers are investing in.

(45:16):
Most we call it the Robinhood Investors Index, it tends
to be consumer companies that make products. They're sort of
like heavy in innovation, So for example, in Nvidia, Tesla, Apple,
these are some of the most commonly invested stocks, and

(45:36):
it's because our customers are younger, they believe in the future.
They tend to be early adopters of technology and innovation.
They believe in artificial intelligence, clean energy, electric vehicles. So yeah,
those tend to be like both sort of like some
of the most held instruments and some of the first

(45:59):
instruments that people kind of buy into. We also have
a product first trade recommendations, and it's difficult for the
service to recommend individual stocks, but for someone that actually
comes in and they say, you know, I just want
to invest, I don't really know, I don't want to
pick my own stocks. Over time, we're increasingly getting better

(46:22):
and better equipped to serve that customer. So now you know,
you can just answer a couple of questions and we'll
recommend a diversified portfolio of ETFs, explain to you what
all the pieces are, and then you'll kind of see
how it all works mechanically. And I think sometimes just
like going through the process of making a trade, it's

(46:44):
much simpler than like reading a book on it I
like to say that it's like playing a violin. You're
not going to learn to play a violin really well
by like reading a book on how to play the violin.
Maybe if you're already really really good and you're trying
to get a little bit better understanding the behind, it
is going to help. But otherwise it's just sort of
like pick up the thing and start practicing, and you'll

(47:06):
get better the more you do it. One of the
things I became interested in when I was an undergrad
is options trading. A lot of my students my year
were applying to be options traders. That was like a
before went fully electronic. That was a job that people had,
right And there was this book like Options, Futures and Derivatives.

(47:29):
It was called something like that by Hull, and it
was like this thick dictionary explaining how all these option
strategies work. And I just kind of imagine, you know,
if someone had to understand that book before kind of
like going into options trading or discovering it for the
first time, I think that would be just like an

(47:51):
incomprehensible barrier. But like, you build up some intuition for
these things by doing it, and it sort of like
makes you more motivated to read the literature, and it
also sort of like gives you more real world knowledge
than you could ever get from just reading. So I
think just like getting started and doing it is the

(48:12):
most important things. It's a skill like playing a sport
or playing a music instrument, more than just like an
academic pursuit.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Yeah, how many of you uses do you find going
beyond just that first trade? Do you have a percentage
of users that you know, go beyond their first or
second trade and kind of continue on and build and
grow versus like they tried something out and kind of
just said, oh, it's not for me. I don't know
what I'm doing.

Speaker 1 (48:37):
With consumer technology, there's sort of a funnel for everything.
You know, there's people downloading the app, not everyone who
downloads the app actually ends up creating an account. Not
everyone that creates an account funds it. And you know,
we're definitely focused on making sure that we have a
really good funnel, that it's clean, that people who you know,

(49:01):
enter are getting exactly what they want. I adventure to
say that our funnel is probably much more efficient than
those of our competitors. That said, there are things that
certain customers want that. We're not like ideal at offering now.
So for example, if you want an advisor. A lot

(49:22):
of people want a financial advisor. They want someone to
manage their money for them, tell them exactly what to do.
We don't have a great comprehensive solution for that yet,
although we're working on it. I think we will get
there eventually one of the advisors, I think AI certainly
will be involved, if not you know, replacing the advisors,

(49:45):
certainly augmenting and giving them kind of superhuman capabilities and
the ability to service more customers. But yeah, I think
that's certainly one of the most interesting applications of AI
and financial services. But yeah, right now, the platform is
like very self directed. It's for folks that want to

(50:05):
be in control of their money, and like, you know,
like the the most hardcore Robinhood users are the ones
that really are just kind of like optimizing everything, you know,
they're optimizing their taxes, they're optimizing all of their fees
and commissions. And we do attract some of those people
that really want to be hands on with everything because

(50:28):
it's a very easy to use tool we have. We
tend to have the lowest pricing across all services that
we offer. We sort of like from the very beginning,
have built with like the self directed retail customer in mind.
So I think for that customer, there's probably no better fit.

(50:48):
If you want to be in control over every aspect
of your finances and you actually in some cases are
openly distrustful of other people telling you what to do,
and they're there's a lot of people like that. They're like,
I don't even want to listen to a financial advisor
because I feel like they're just gonna talk down on
me in a good scenario or rip me off in

(51:11):
like a bad scenario. And those people are like, yeah,
like they tend to gravitate toward robin Hood.

Speaker 2 (51:19):
Before we dive into the next moment, let's hear from
our sponsors, and now let's get back to the episode.
At a time when investing is becoming more talked about,
more diverse, there's more options. I want to get your
personal opinion on people think about stocks versus people think
about property, for example, which of course is far more expensive.

(51:39):
But I feel like we've seen a generational shift from
people wanting to own their homes, purchase their homes, get
a mortgage versus now people moving towards renting more. Are
you seeing that trend? And are you seeing people move
towards stocks? So you still what's your personal take on
people choosing between buying and renting versus using that capital elsewhere.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
For a while, the American dream involved home ownership, yes, right,
and I have mixed feelings about it, to be honest,
because there's a lot of like corporate interests that are
pushing for more homeownership. I mean, if you're a bank
and you're giving people mortgages. You know a lot of
people criticize leverage in the stock market, but if you

(52:25):
think about the amount of leverage in a thirty year
fixed mortgage, right, it's like ungodly right, you end up
paying much more in interest than you know, even the
principle sometimes yeah, I mean again, without getting into investing advice,

(52:47):
real estate I think has been tempting for people because like,
you can see it, you can touch it. It's sort
of like this thing that you can use and it
feels like an investment, even though it really isn't, especially
when you give when you take into account all the fees,
like the brokering fees on either side of the transaction, property, taxes, maintenance. Meanwhile,

(53:10):
you know in the stock market, you have it on
your phone now, commission free, some of the lowest fees,
access to like the widest variety of companies that are
really even though it's the US market, by and large,
the US markets increasingly global. I think, and I wrote
this article back in twenty twenty one, investing in the

(53:32):
global markets is really the new American dream. And actually,
during the hyperinflation episode in Bulgarian the nineties, my grandparents
didn't have access to any tools that allowed them to
invest in equities. So my grandfather, who was a medical

(53:52):
doctor on navy vessels in Bulgaria, he had like a
contact on the port side who would basic give them
access to copper cookware. So he would take his Bulgarian
leves from his pension and get copper cookware. We had
this closet. They had this closet in their apartment that
was just full of copper cookware, and that was like

(54:14):
that was their robinhood app like that's where they would
self custody their wealth. I mean, right now you can
buy any stock, you can buy crypto. We started offering
crypto in twenty eighteen for the lowest fees in the industry,
and you can get you know, you can get access
to ETFs, you can have gold ETFs, so really in

(54:39):
your pocket you can diversify and hold pretty much any
asset and you can even do real estate through the
form of reats and other publicly traded ETFs. Yeah, you
can get exposure to that asset class. But like real
estate investing in terms of buying a primary home yet,
it's I think the story behind that is is difficult.

(55:01):
It's like very liquid, high transaction fees. You're kind of
like picking a particular neighborhood. So even if the global
real estate market does well, something could happen to that neighborhood.
You know, you build a power plant next door, and
you're kind of in big trouble. So even though I'm

(55:22):
not making any investment recommendations, I think it's yeah, it's
hard to kind of like equate those two. I think
really the future is going much more toward investing in
publicly traded stocks and cryptocurrencies.

Speaker 2 (55:38):
Yeah, yeah, that's what I want to ask your opinion,
So yeah, definitely not official advice. I've read an amazing
stat that said the next generation is set to inherit
an estimated seventy two trillion dollars over the next twenty years,
with twenty seven trillion going to millennials alone. Yes, and
that blows my mind because first of all, I'm like,

(55:58):
who are those millennials'.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
Big wealth transfer, big wealth trends?

Speaker 2 (56:02):
When someone like you hear is that, what goes through
your mind.

Speaker 1 (56:05):
What goes through my mind is there's a big opportunity
for Robinhood. There's a big opportunity for us because we've
got more millennial app users than basically all the incumbent
brokerage competitors put together, even more so gen Z. I
think if you look at gen Z, over sixty percent
of our competitive set just uses Robinhood. And so we

(56:27):
already have relationships with these folks and we're offering more,
Like we don't just offer stocks. We have an awesome
credit card, we have among the best retirement products, an
amazing retirement product with a first built in match in
an IRA. We have a high yield product, and we're
adding just more and more over time, and we're making

(56:50):
it really easy to transfer your account. If you're you know,
a customer of a legacy brokerage to Robinhood so you
can take advantage of all these amazing and rates and
the user experience. So yeah, I think that we'd like
to put ourselves in the position where Robinhood is like

(57:11):
the home for all of these assets, and I think
I think we're rapidly getting there.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
What do you think you've done differently to attract those
groups and those communities into your space, Like, what what's
been the big difference.

Speaker 1 (57:25):
I'd like to say that the way we communicate and
the marketing is a big part of it, But I
think the biggest thing is like the the economics, getting
rid of account minimums and trading commissions, removing the friction.
These are all barriers that prevented people. Yeah, I think

(57:47):
I mentioned to you earlier that you know, before Robinhood,
if you had one hundred dollars, it would have just
been nonsensical to invest. The fees would have just ripped
the part of your portfolio. And you know a lot
of times there were barriers that prevented you from getting
started in the form of minimum account balance requirements as well.

(58:07):
So we got rid of all of those and basically
that allowed a whole bunch of customers that were previously
under served to be able to open accounts, and you know,
unfortunately a lot of those customers were from disadvantage historical demographics.
And you know, I think it's a great thing that

(58:28):
we've now kind of opened the doors to basically everyone
to open up an account and become an investor.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
Yeah, similar to the to the property question, I wanted
to know your take on traditional retirement accounts like the
four oh one K, like in comparison to the more
aggress aggressive growth strategies in stocks, like what's your what's
your take there? Again from an opinion base.

Speaker 1 (58:50):
Yeah, so four one k's are fantastic, Uh, for those
that you know are privileged to have an employer that
offers one. In particular, if an employer offers a four
oh one K with a built in match and they're
matching your contributions, you know, that's free money. So that

(59:11):
value prop is very very strong. But you know, not
everyone has access to that, And so what we've done
is and actually I think over time, users and kind
of end consumers can be less reliant on individual employers.
I mean, it used to be that you would have

(59:32):
a job and you could like count on that employer's
pension to take care of you. You know, maybe you'd
work at the same employer for twenty thirty years, then
you'd retire and you would kind of subsist on the
pension plan, and then of course social Security kind of
filled in some of the gaps. But I'd say the
future of Social Security is very much shrouded and a

(59:57):
cloud of uncertainty, right, So I think the upshot is
people have to take it upon themselves to be responsible
for their own finances and their own retirement. I don't
think that you can rely on the government. I don't
think you can rely on any one employer. Many people

(01:00:17):
aren't sticking around at a single employer for very long now,
And so what's important is having these investment accounts not
tied to the employer and actually tied to the user.
You're kind of carrying around your retirement with you. And
that's why we launched our IRA products, your individual retirement accounts.

(01:00:38):
So we offer roths and individual retirement accounts. If you're
a Robinhood Gold subscriber, you get a three percent match
on contributions. So basically you might not have an employer
matching you, but Robinhood will match out of our own
economics in a world where you can't rely on a
single employer and you have these accounts that should travel

(01:01:00):
with you. I think that it's much more future proof
and the product's really been resonating. You know. We had
end of twenty twenty three, which was the first year
that we launched our retirement products, we had about one
point seven billion in assets under custody and that's gone
up more than six x since the beginning of the year,
so now we have close to ten billion in assets

(01:01:23):
in retirement accounts at Robinhood.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
Was that more recent development or was that something that
was always part of the plan.

Speaker 1 (01:01:31):
We had always talked about offering retirement products. There's just
I mean, the financial space is so big and there's
so much that we want to do that the order
of things becomes important and which what's first, And you know,
there's sort of like always a balancing act between innovative

(01:01:54):
new features that you don't find anywhere else but Robinhood.
And those are things like twenty four hour market offering,
which allows you to trade stocks twenty four hours a day,
and we're the first to market with that for individual
stocks like Tesla and Nvidia and Apple, things like retirement
accounts that others offer, but you know, we'd have to

(01:02:14):
kind of like catch up and add them, and of
course we try to put our innovative twist, like the
matches onto them. And then there's just like scaling the infrastructure,
and that includes things like customer support and just making
sure that the infrastructure gets more reliable and sophisticated to
handle more, which you know, as we're expanding globally and

(01:02:36):
servicing other customers in different countries is also a giant
area of investment for us.

Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
It's so interesting, isn't it, Because I feel like you're
seeing all these new disruptive platforms. Technologies give people so
much opportunity that wasn't accessible before, but often they come
under even more scrutiny and challenged then banks or anything

(01:03:04):
anything else did in the in previous years. I was
wondering what your take on the GameStop movie was. I
don't know if you saw it.

Speaker 1 (01:03:09):
Did you get to see it or I saw some
clips of it?

Speaker 2 (01:03:12):
Okay, yeah, what was the full thing? No?

Speaker 1 (01:03:15):
I mean I saw the clips that I was in.
Of course I wanted to I wanted to see how
I was portrayed certainly not out of vanity or anything
like that.

Speaker 2 (01:03:23):
Did they have to ask permission for that? No?

Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
It was kind of the weirdest thing. You know, your
likeness and name can just be kind of taken and monetized.
And I don't think the movie made very much money,
But yeah, they certainly didn't ask for permission, right.

Speaker 2 (01:03:40):
And then when you saw the clips of you and
how did you feel? Like? How did that?

Speaker 1 (01:03:43):
I thought they kind of got my mannerisms right. It
made sense because I think they probably looked at interviews
that I'd done, and you know, they they basically had
figured out sort of like my way of speaking. And uh,
you know, the actor that played me was very good
looking guy, you know, the Winter Soldier. I think they

(01:04:03):
had to kind of make him look a little uglier
so he could he could more accurately portray me. But hey,
I'm not complaining. The plot was obviously like complete fabrication.
I think people really liked this whole conspiracy theory thing,
and you know, there was this like conspiracy theory of
collusion floating floating around particularly at that time, So I

(01:04:27):
don't think they could actually like explicitly say the conspiracy theory,
but they were just evoking it in all sorts of ways,
So those parts were fictional, but I think they got
my mannerisms right.

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):
And then I mean I saw you do at the time.
You did tons of interviews. I think you did a
clubhouse with Elon and yeah, there are a bunch of
different things that I saw that you did at the time.
What does it feel now reflecting back on that time,
because I imagine that there was so much scrutiny, there
was so much conspiracy, there was How have you felt
about it since then? Like now you can look backwards

(01:05:05):
eye on it, I guess as supposed to at that time,
where you're looking right at it. What's changed over the
last three years.

Speaker 1 (01:05:11):
Yeah, you know, from time to time I do look
at like some old clips of my interviews back then,
and you know, I kind of feel bad for myself
because I was like a little kid, you know. It
just the company was private. I was always particularly at
that time, I was just very focused on getting the

(01:05:34):
technology to work, and I didn't really want to be
in the public eye. And I certainly didn't see myself
as you know, some kind of political figure wrapped up
in some kind of political quarrel over investing or regulation.
I think what happened was, you know, GameStop for better

(01:05:56):
or worse put robin Hood sort of like firmly into
the zeitgeist right before it was a little fringe. I mean,
we still had a lot of customers, but we weren't
we weren't like a politicized brand. And I think at
that point I really had to learn really quickly not
just how to like build technology and lead teams to

(01:06:19):
do it, but also how to represent the company. And
you know, it's like you can see in those interviews,
I'm kind of like reading a script and that was
my approach to interviews for a while. It was like
reading my points and trying to communicate the facts of
the message. But you know now now, I know now
that I'm much more wise and mature and still not

(01:06:42):
nearly as as experienced as you. You've probably done thousands
of these, right, but it doesn't really resonate with our audience.
To just like read the facts, you have to give
some emotion and some feeling and have some empathy, and
you know, there has to be a little bit more.
So I've had to kind of learn all that stuff.

(01:07:05):
And now they just look incredibly inauthentic and robotic. And
I think the the more time has passed, the more
I'm kind of trying to be as authentic as possible
in my appearances. And I think that had to be
had to be something that I learned and doing so,

(01:07:26):
especially in that time where the stakes were super high
and we were about to go public, and you know,
you have like all sorts of advisors and lawyers and
you know, professionals that are trying to protect me and
the firm, say, don't say this, be careful not to
say this. Be careful when you're kind of making this
point that you don't make people think that you're actually

(01:07:48):
meaning this. So and if you're kind of running the
algorithm through your head of like what you can't say
and what you what you should say, and how what
you're saying could be kind of like interpret.

Speaker 2 (01:08:00):
Did it's exhausting hearing exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:08:02):
Eventually, to some degree, like you practice enough and it
becomes second nature and you can kind of rip up
all the guidelines and be pretty confident that you're doing
the right thing. But I think it has to be authentic.
And back then I was just like very inexperienced at
all this stuff. I sort of undervalued it, and I

(01:08:25):
think it took a while for me to get to
like a basic level of competency.

Speaker 2 (01:08:30):
Yeah. No, I mean I think it's fair. I think
that every founder goes through that journey of like you've
been building something in private in a room or an
office for so many years, and all of a sudden
your company gets notoriety in mainstream culture, and then all
of a sudden you're having to do things that you
don't necessarily set out to do as a founder. I
feel like even actors go through that way. You're just

(01:08:50):
working on a movie on a set and then you
have to go promote the movie, but or you're seen
in public and something impacts the movie, and that wasn't
necessarily what you signed up for. What were the actual
ramifications or consequences of all of that, Like, what actually,
how did that actually affect Robinie apart from the cultural propelling.

Speaker 1 (01:09:09):
Well, I think a lot of a lot of people
who were just like looking at me at the time,
and maybe we're not Robinhood users themselves. Maybe some of
them were Robinhood users, but others were kind of thinking
about it and were aware of it. I think some
people got the impression that I just like maybe didn't
care about our customers, and I think that was the

(01:09:32):
part that actually like pained me and kind of stayed
with me over time. They're like, oh, look at him,
he doesn't have any emotions and he's just like talking
about these clearing house regulatory requirements, but he doesn't understand
the pain that kind of customers went through who wanted
to you know, buy game stop or AMC or all

(01:09:54):
these other things. I mean, like, I definitely understood the
pain that those were some of the most painful sleepless
nights for me going through that whole uh ordeal. But yeah,
my approach was always just I'm I don't I don't
want to like talk about doing stuff. I like to
do stuff, so uh, I'm not gonna like, maybe maybe

(01:10:17):
I'm not going to be like super emotive with my customers,
but I'm just gonna build them great products that save
them tons of money and give them a great experience
so that they could learn to invest and manage their money.
I think that was painful. Obviously, the collusion narrative was
painful because.

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):
It was like proven there's no there's no.

Speaker 1 (01:10:36):
It was disproven. I mean, learning how to communicate and
actually like to some degree, like going through a crisis
and then surviving and then sort of like learning from
it and building building back better so that you don't

(01:10:58):
actually repeat the same thing again. I mean, Robin Hood's
had our share of issues over the years. Like we
definitely haven't been perfect. But I mean one thing I'm
proud of is they're all like we've made mistakes, but
they're a series of original mistakes, so we tend not
to make the you know, same mistake twice, and so

(01:11:18):
like throughout all of these we've just like built up
a ton of scar tissue and learnings and have been
a much stronger company. And I think all of this,
all of the crises, you know, I remember the dates.
You know, It's like, you know, it's like January twenty eight,
twenty twenty one, or December twelfth, twenty eighteen, or March second,

(01:11:39):
twenty twenty right at the beginning of COVID when we
had a day long trading outage. So you kind of
remember all of these events and kind of take different
things away from them. But I mean, at the end
of the day, we've been a company for ten years
and you're gonna if you're in a disruptive space where

(01:12:00):
you're kind of challenging the status quo and trying to
change things, some people are if some people are going
to be unhappy, right, and you have to have thick
skin to kind of get through that.

Speaker 2 (01:12:15):
Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic, isn't it. When when companies
are doing something for the first times, it's inevitable that
there's going to be mistakes and mismanagement and challenges.

Speaker 1 (01:12:26):
And I think and it's almost like, you know, if
you're being too careful, if you actually make zero mistakes,
you might not be successful. You're probably aren't going to
be successful because you're just like not pushing hard enough.
Like it's like he at some point, not taking any
risk is like the biggest risk of all, particularly in
like a hot competitive market. So you just you have

(01:12:48):
to know the right amount. I think it's a it's
somewhat of a fine dance, but it's it's certainly not
acceptable to like play everything super safe in the world
world of business.

Speaker 2 (01:13:00):
And I guess the challenge is because it's dealing with
people's money, it's even a more heightened.

Speaker 1 (01:13:06):
There's a heightened sense of safety. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, and
people can be very emotional about their money.

Speaker 2 (01:13:13):
But first, here's a quick word from the brands that
support the show. All right, thank you to our sponsors.
Now let's dive back in. What were some of the
biggest mistakes that you felt and the lessons you learned
from them that were so pivotal that you think would
be useful for other founders, for customers to hear, for
other people to just be aware of, Like this is

(01:13:34):
how you now look at it versus at the time
when you're like, well, we need to be risk pro
risk try things out.

Speaker 1 (01:13:40):
Designing our infrastructure with scalability in mind from day one
probably would have saved us quite a bit of grief
because we've had to like rewrite and like redo multiple times.
The conventional wisdom is you don't want to prematurely optimize anything.
The Silicon Valley sort of like tombs are littered with

(01:14:02):
corpses of startups that had perfect infrastructure and no users,
you know. Yeah, yeah, So it's always hard to do
the counterfactual on these things, because like you know, if
we had if we had overinvested in those things, maybe
we like wouldn't have customers and then no problems but
no customers, right. I think we can end up being

(01:14:23):
like tormented by our pass too much. So I don't
even I don't know how helpful it is.

Speaker 2 (01:14:29):
Yeah, that's that's an interesting take. I can see why.
I can definitely see why. I mean, the only thing
that stood out to me was you saying that your
most difficult period was in twenty twenty two, when Robin
Hude's business took a hit amid the market downturn. Yeah,
that's true, and I feel like what was so what
was what was so tough for you personally about that?

Speaker 1 (01:14:51):
I mean you've Yeah, some people might hear that and
be like that's crazy, Like how can that compare to
Game Stop?

Speaker 2 (01:14:57):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:14:58):
I think the thing about Game Stop was like very
acute difficulty, you know, and it was like almost like
a roller coaster ride. You know, it's like intense, but
it's over in three minutes, and it's kind of clear
what you have to do to get out of that
difficult situation. You know, we navigated it, we became stronger company.

(01:15:21):
Twenty twenty two was like a slower burn, right, and
we had just gone public in middle of twenty twenty
one kind of at the end of the window. The
window has kind of been basically shut since then for IPOs, right,
and we kind of squeezed in right before things got
really bad. And so what happened was you had this

(01:15:42):
period where it became clear that inflation was getting completely
out of hand, and that freaked everyone out. And then
it became clear that the FED was going to hike rates,
and we had kind of like everyone was prepared for
a multi year period of like zero rates, and you know,

(01:16:03):
to tame inflation, the FED, who hadn't really dealt with
inflation for thirty years, had to hike rates up at
the fastest pace in the past several decades. And what
happens was when rates go up, people typically invest less
because you imagine, if you can get five percent on

(01:16:24):
your cash just sitting there and the stock market appreciates,
you know, seven to ten percent each year pre tax,
and you can get that five percent rate without taking
on market risk, that becomes much more much more compelling relatively,
so you'll have less investing. And then that's what we saw.

(01:16:47):
Less people were interested in opening up brokerage accounts and
investing for the first time, and that was like our
whole business. You know, that was the core of our business,
and we didn't really have anything for a high rate
environ at that time. And you know, there was some
criticism of this when we went public and some questions,
you know, the analysts and investors would be like, well, Robinhood,

(01:17:10):
you've done really well during COVID and during this extended
period of zero rates. The company has gone to twenty
million users in that time. But how are you guys
going to do in a environment where the interest rates
are higher? You know, is this just is Robinhood a
zero interest rate phenomenon. Of course, you know we had

(01:17:31):
answers to that, but until you prove that, people don't
really believe you. And so we actually had to like
go through an incredibly challenging process of like changing the
strategy of the company, effectively refounding the company in twenty
twenty two, when you know, the entire macro environment shifted,

(01:17:56):
and I think we we did a really good job.
I mean, within six months after that we had gone
adjusted ebadat positive. In twenty twenty three, we had gap
profitability at the first time. We now have eight business
lines that are generating one hundred million in revenue or
more so, the business is very diversified. More than half
of the rent revenue is interest rather than transactions. And

(01:18:21):
now we're starting to get the question, Wow, like Robinwood
is doing so well in this high interest rate environment,
the Fed's going to cut rates. What are you guys
going to do when when the Fed cuts the rates?
And like, you can't. You can't have these like high
interest rate revenue streams firing on all cylinders now, So
now we have to go backwards and and prove that

(01:18:42):
customers still would want to trade options and crypto inequities.
So it was I think, n interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:18:49):
Yeah, it's funny how it just keeps uscillating between cycling.

Speaker 1 (01:18:53):
I guess, well, the more times you do that cycle.
I always felt like when we were private, every time
we raised a new round of funding, we had to
kind of like reprove ourselves to these new investors that
came in and just didn't understand the company. But then,
you know, the longer we lasted, as we got up
to like Series H I think in private funding, and

(01:19:17):
you know, by that point, the Series ABC investors had
developed such a deep understanding of the company. They had
so much trust and I think it's the same with
the public company, or at least i'd like to think. So,
you know, you pick your investors, your investors pick you,
and the more cycles we go through, we are building
institutional knowledge as a public company, and I do think that,

(01:19:42):
you know, the market is starting to recognize that, hey,
maybe this founding team, the management team of this company
knows what they're doing. And the more cycles we go through,
I think the more we'll prove that out.

Speaker 2 (01:19:55):
Yeah, And I think I've read somewhere where you were
saying that that time really changed how you look to
being a CEO and a leader and reprioritizing the company.
Was what was you You just talked there about almost
what you did in terms of building product, diversifying income streams,
you know, having all of the portfolio of how people
could use Robin hood, But what was that like for

(01:20:18):
you internally from a leadership per cective? What changed as
how you about how you led?

Speaker 1 (01:20:24):
Yeah, So there was this exercise that I would go
through with with some of my team where I would
imagine if a new person came into the roles as CEO.
And I've told this story a couple of times, and
it's not like I imagine myself being fire. I was

(01:20:45):
worried about that or anything like that, but it was
almost like, Okay, this thought exercise of let's say I
didn't come with any of the baggage of like having
founded the company and made all the decisions to get
us to this point. If I could look at it
from with a beginner's mind and just say, hey, I'm here,

(01:21:05):
I'm seeing this company, this is kind of the state
of affairs. What would I do differently? And you know,
I came up with a bunch of things that like
a stereotypical like top CEO coming in would do differently.
They would pull back on remote first and get people
in the office so they could collaborate and work together
in person. And even though I had turned Robinhood into

(01:21:28):
a remote first company not too long before, I reversed
my own decision there, which was kind of tough from
a self consistency standpoint. People have a very hard time
being inconsistent with their prior selves. So I think that's
like one mental barrier to get past. Another one was

(01:21:48):
I just made this realization that you know, if you
look at our business, a lot of our revenue is
generated by you know, relatively small component of very active traders,
and we actually weren't building products specifically for them. And
as a matter of fact, we looked at kind of

(01:22:09):
this customer base very deeply in twenty twenty two, and
these folks tend to be more sophisticated. So actually, when
when the markets are crashing or moving sideways, they tend
to actually be more resilient because they can deploy more
sophisticated strategies that can take advantage of all sorts of

(01:22:30):
market environments. And we saw what we saw was the
more active someone traded Airgo, the more revenue they generated
for us, the less happy they were with Robinhood. So
so actually our most active customers had like the least
customer satisfaction with the platform. So then when we kind
of like grock this, we were like, this is a

(01:22:52):
five alarm fire, like any healthy business, Like, you know,
you don't.

Speaker 2 (01:22:57):
Have to be an MBA.

Speaker 1 (01:22:59):
From Wharton to realize that your most valuable customers being
like unhappy with you is a big problem. So but
what was remarkable was when we kind of like shifted
focus towards making these active trader traders really really happy,
we fixed it like that like much faster than I

(01:23:20):
thought possible. I think within six months we had basically
like solved the problem. Yeah, it's kind of interesting, a
lot of introspection to how we ended up sort of
like ignoring the active trader audience for for so long.
I think once we sort of like refocused on that
and and really started treating them like the important constituent

(01:23:41):
part of the user base that they are. Uh, the
company just started doing much better. I think by and
large that was the biggest part of our of our
turnaround as a company since going public.

Speaker 2 (01:23:55):
That's that's fascinating. I mean to to discover that your
deepest us is on Yeah, it must be like such
a yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:24:03):
And part of it was like Robinhood was historically very targeted,
very focused on the first timers. We want to be
someone's first brokerage account. We want to make it easyasy
as possible to get started with five dollars, right. But
what happened was one a lot of the people that
got started with us then became really sophisticated and like

(01:24:27):
wanted more advanced tools and had more specialized needs, but
still loved Robinhood and loved the simplicity and the easy
abuse of the interface. But the other part was if
you think about our options trading platform. For example, we're
one of the few, very few that offer options trading
for no contract fees. Most of our competitors charged sixty

(01:24:50):
five cents per options contract, So if you trade one
hundred contracts, that's sixty five dollars. That's real money. And
there's some active traders that you know, spend thousands of
dollars a month on other platforms paying these contract fees.
So even if like the platforms not really built for you,
there's like a really strong economic incentive to use it.

(01:25:13):
So you had a lot of these like super active
options traders that were using Schwab or e Trade or others.
Maybe they're using their charting from their other platform, but
they're putting the trades in via Robinhood and just to
save fees. So you know, we grew active traders. We
also had some using us because the economics were so good. Yeah,

(01:25:35):
and that way we sort of like built up this
large active trader business. Incidentally, while building products for first
time novice investors.

Speaker 2 (01:25:45):
Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting that since the beginning
everything you talked about from the name, there's always been
people who've been disgruntled, slightly angry, as you said earlier,
like this feeling of like, oh, these guys are doing something,
you know, has that kind of like has that kind
of changed now as a company matures and like people
see you become established and not obviously competitors. But when

(01:26:08):
you look at the people who felt that way initially,
do you find that founders are reaching out, you're more
connected to people and as you've become more established as well,
or does it get lonelier as things go on?

Speaker 1 (01:26:20):
Well, I think in different ways it does get lonelier,
But I would say in general, I think in the
past couple of years especially, we've like fixed more problems
than we've created, hopefully, and so our customers generally have
been getting happier and happier, not just the active traders,

(01:26:41):
but you know, the great thing when you fix things
for active traders, they're like power users of the platform,
so the customer experience for a more casual user improves
as well. So yeah, fortunately, you know, again knock on wood,
we've been like we've been avoiding like major catastrophes in

(01:27:01):
the last few years, which you know, the last few
years have been hard, just with standard business challenges to
work through. So that's been really nice. I think, like
to some degree, I don't expect Robinhood to ever be
perfectly understood and non controversial, so it just comes with

(01:27:22):
the comes with the territory.

Speaker 2 (01:27:23):
I guess what's made you comfortable with that? I feel
like that's obviously always hard. We always want to be liked.
We want what we create to be, you know, overall
seen in a certain way. What's made you comfortable with that?

Speaker 1 (01:27:35):
Well? I think the first time that, for example, I
saw a negative press about Robinhood probably was like twenty eighteen,
twenty nineteen. So for the first four to five years
of the company's existence, it felt like everyone was kind
of rooting for us, Like the regulators were fans, right,
you know. I remember our first FINRA exam. We had,

(01:27:58):
you know, someone kind of looking at what we were doing.
Finn was our primary regulator, and you know, this was
a young guy. He's like, hey, there's never any like
new brokerages filing. This is like super interesting. I wish
you guys luck. It gave me this feeling of like wow,
I every investor in person I talked to was like

(01:28:22):
run as far away from regulation as possible. You don't
want to be a regulated business. It's going to just
grind the company to a slow death, so find some
way to do it via partnerships or something. When we
got started, it was unheard of to like be a
financially regulated startup. It was really before the word fintech existed.

(01:28:42):
For example, Robin Wood predated that probably created it to
some degree. And then you know, the press was always
telling this David and Goliath tale where we were these
little guys that were going after the you know, big, established,
gigantic competitors, and you know, we had the millennials on

(01:29:02):
our side, and so it was just like very very
positive always, and it kind of it was like, I
don't really get what all of the fuss is about,
Like all of the negative press and all this stuff
that people are talking about that's happening to other companies,
maybe not us. Eventually I would get like the comms

(01:29:23):
and marketing people that they would come and show me
the clock of like company perception. Have you seen this?
It's like this clock and like basically, when you're kind
of here, everyone loves you, and when you're kind of.

Speaker 2 (01:29:39):
Here, everyone hates you.

Speaker 1 (01:29:41):
And they're like, so you're here at like four o'clock,
but you should get ready. In the next six to
twelve months, you'll be here and everyone's gonna hate you
and you just haven't seen it. Yeah, and then it
keeps going around and they're like, look, Facebook is here.
They're like a little ahead of you. Everyone hates them now.
They ended up being exact actly right. A six to

(01:30:01):
twelve months later. It was like all negative press. But
I guess like the way I got used to it
was just going through that. Right. It's like the first
time a negative article hits, you're like, holy shit, it's
negative press. I've never seen it before. You kind of
feel like it's the end of the world. And then
you know, after the six hundredth one, you're just kind

(01:30:24):
of like, Okay, it's another one of these things. I'm
just gonna move on and run my business. Yeah, and
then when the press turns positive, you're like positively surprised
and you're not expecting it. So I think that's how
I got through it. You just get punched in the
face enough and your face contorts to the shape of

(01:30:44):
the fist.

Speaker 2 (01:30:44):
Right, What how have you managed your personal life through
all this because I feel like, you know, when we
started the interview today, you talk so much about your
personal life and you know how you came to this
country and the build, and I feel like, you know,
as you're an entrepren and your professional and personal life
almost become one. And you know, when you're building something
that's growing as fast as you are, you get absorbed

(01:31:07):
and you have to be like you know, you sleep
and dream and eat Robinhood, Like that's how it has
to work, That's how it goes. What's been powerful for
you in your personal life that you think is allowed
you to reinvent, reboot, stay renewed, stay re enthusiastic, Like
you seem as excited about robin Hood today as I

(01:31:27):
imagine you would have been in twenty thirteen, if not more.
And what's been allowed you to renew your enthusiasm so consistently.

Speaker 1 (01:31:35):
My kind of sort of like analogy of so many things.
My mental model for so many things that I use
in business and in life is kind of the barbell.
Like I like to get things on opposite sides of
the barbell right, and I tend to ignore the things

(01:31:56):
in the middle right. So basically, for me personally, my
work is like highly intellectual, and that's maybe on one extreme,
and what's what's the opposite of like intellectual, just sort
of like the physical. So I really focus on that,
and it's just uh, super basic. And you know, when

(01:32:16):
I started, I would kind of not really spend too
much time and effort on my health. But as I've
gotten older and the job's gotten more stressful, I notice
that like effort I put in here pays off multiples. Right,
So now my like wellness routine and my training, I

(01:32:37):
spend more time just dialing it in so making sure
I get the right amount of sleep, that I have
an awesome mattress that like I keep my bed at
the right temperature. I like to journal before bed, and
I like to shut off the devices. The devices, by
the way, has been the hard part for me. You know,
I like try really hard. I have to do unnatural

(01:32:58):
things to like stop from looking on my phone, like
my phone's not with me right now, for example, because
you know, I would just it's hard to avoid looking
at it. And if I know it's in my pocket,
you know, then it's almost like too close. So I mean,
actually during the whole game stop stuff, it was particularly

(01:33:21):
acute for me because I was at home, so there
was no boundary between work and personal and I was
going a little bit crazy, and so I had this
thing where I would try to sleep with my phone
in a different room so I'm not always just tempted
to check out what emergency is happening, which ended up

(01:33:42):
being a big problem the morning of game stop because
it took forever for my team to like get a
hold of me. And then now then for a while
I slept with like three phones next to me, which
it really backfired. But yeah, my health, I work out
a lot. I've gotten into like hot cold therapy. At
first I was doing cryo, but then I got like

(01:34:04):
a cold plunge at my house that and and that
really helped. And yeah, just like the basics of sleep
and diet, I think has made a world of difference,
and just trying to like I don't think I've figured
out the device thing and sort of like my rhythm
of the day perfectly, but that's a that's a work

(01:34:24):
in progress.

Speaker 2 (01:34:26):
And you're marriage. You're married too, right, you mentioned, Yeah, Yeah,
what's how's how's it been like dealing with all of this?
But it sounds like you've been together for quite some time,
Like it's.

Speaker 1 (01:34:35):
Yeah, I've been married for almost ten years now. Yeah,
got a got a bunch of kids, great kids, and
they don't really know what I do.

Speaker 2 (01:34:48):
Came back to how your wife to know what you did?

Speaker 1 (01:34:51):
Yeah, well she did, but yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:34:55):
Showed them at the cartoon and they'll get it.

Speaker 1 (01:34:57):
Oh yeah, they love that cartoon. I think like the
credit card, they kind of get a little bit because
they know they can use it to buy toys. Yeah,
my wife is a great compliment to me. She's very patient,
she's very empathetic all the things that I'm not, and
so she's just been an amazing partner through all the crises.

(01:35:19):
And she sort of like knew me before Robin Hood, right,
I mean she kind of helped come up with the name.
So I think I think she feels like Robinhood's like
one of the children, just kind of like I do.

Speaker 2 (01:35:32):
Yeah, that's beautiful, man, I wanted to this. I'll probably
cut and put back in. You mentioned the credit card there.
I'm intrigued as to product you created because you saw
the traditional versions of them being ineffective. So when you
go build a credit card, what's wrong with a traditional
credit card that you can get from anywhere else, Like

(01:35:54):
what are you doing differently?

Speaker 1 (01:35:55):
I think there are a couple of problems with additional
credit cards. One is that basically the rewards are kind
of incomprehensible. I think that anytime there's like websites devoted

(01:36:15):
to like exactly how you should kind of like work
through your points to optimize the value you get from
all the points, like media empires like the Points Guy
were created on the back of this, right, It's like, yeah,
if you want to spend ten hours a week optimizing
your points and maximizing the rewards, I think that's pretty good.

(01:36:38):
But we wanted to create something that simplifies all of
that and basically just by like using it for the
vast majority of people, you know, you get the best rewards.
So simple, clear reward structure that you don't have to
be like a PhD to decipher people building their credit.
If you're a student and you will are you know,

(01:37:02):
you don't have a credit history, typically you have to
start out with like a really crappy card. You have
to sort of like upgrade your way to a nicer
card once you prove that you're worthy and you know
there's a crappy starter card for people with no credit history,
and like the premium card for folks that have the means.

(01:37:24):
We asked, can we can we fix that? Can we
actually have a starter card that has the same economics,
the same rewards, the same design, uh for as like
a highly premium card. And then the digital experience. You know,
most cards don't really think through how to take all
of the things that technology and you know, fintech has

(01:37:48):
given us and sort of like give them to you
in the same package. And those are things like virtual cards.
I don't know, if you've been to a restaurant, you
probably you probably go to restaurant. It's where you have
to give your credit card to lock down the reservation.
Imagine you could create a virtual card so that not
every restaurant has your actual card number, and if you

(01:38:10):
want to cancel the reservation, you don't have to call
the restaurant. You could just disappear that virtual card, right
Or if you want to sign up for a free trial,
you can create a virtual card seamlessly and that can
be your free trial card, but you don't have to
give them your real phone number. Helps maintain people's privacy
and in fact, there are great innovative businesses Privacy dot

(01:38:32):
Com created with this notion. We put all three of
these things in one package. One card for everyone, the
best rewards in the industry, three percent cash back on
all categories, a beautiful physical card, including the solid gold
variant which I have in my wallet I can show you.
And a digital experience that's like world class. And we

(01:38:56):
put all these together and it's definitely the best reviewed,
most popular product that we've ever rolled out, even more
popular than free trading. So it's it's been quite amazing,
and now it's just like like we people want to
rolled out faster. That's the one limitation. We had over

(01:39:18):
a million people join the wait list for it within
a month of announcement. And the bet was that if
we make the rewards and the product so good, we
wouldn't have to spend the typical like five hundred dollars
to acquire a credit card user that the big bank spend.
We could get it just organically, and that seems to
have proven out. Now it's just about getting it into

(01:39:38):
everyone's hands while also validating the economics and the underwriting
of a new credit model.

Speaker 2 (01:39:45):
That it's been fascinating talking to you. Your truly an
extremely unique individual. In a positive sense, it's no thank you,
it's really brilliant.

Speaker 1 (01:39:54):
Maybe some negative too, you know, brilliant.

Speaker 2 (01:39:56):
Brilliant to dive into your mind. Honestly, it's it's been
really fascinating for me. We end every episode of on
Purpose with the final five, so these questions have to
be answered in one word to one sentence maximum. So
if lad ten of Dizzy your final five. The first
question is what is the best advice you've ever heard
or received?

Speaker 1 (01:40:15):
Be honest, don't lie to others, but most of all,
don't lie to yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:40:20):
Good advice. Question number two, what is the worst advice
you've ever heard or received?

Speaker 1 (01:40:25):
I think, in the context of the company, trusting experts
who have done it before is bad advice. Generally speaking,
I think you have to listen to experts and understand,
But like I don't think people should blindly trust anything.

Speaker 2 (01:40:44):
Question number three, if we saw one of your evening
journal entries, what would we learn about you that we
haven't learned today?

Speaker 1 (01:40:51):
I still really loved math, and I spend a non
trivial amount of times trying to solve basic math problems.

Speaker 2 (01:41:00):
Really yeah, Oh wow, that's cool in your journal.

Speaker 1 (01:41:04):
In my journal, yeah, you'll see pictures of like triangles
and spheres and stuff in there.

Speaker 2 (01:41:10):
That's cool. Fourth question, how would you define your current purpose?

Speaker 1 (01:41:15):
I think it's it's to seek truth. I think if
I had to find like a personal I think a
lot about like what are my what are my personal values?
What do I care the most about? And I think
my top value is is truth? Actually I care about truth?

(01:41:36):
And I mean in terms of purpose, I really want
to understand how the universe works mathematically or mathematically physically. Yeah,
I mean we can start with that, but of course
psychologically is good too.

Speaker 2 (01:41:55):
Cool.

Speaker 1 (01:41:56):
Financially I think we're closest to that one. Yeah, pretty
close to understanding how it works financially.

Speaker 2 (01:42:02):
And how do you define truth? That's a sub question
to them all the faith.

Speaker 1 (01:42:05):
I think that's a really good question. How is truth defined?
I think that truth is something that multiple observers will
simultaneously agree on. Yeah. So if you had like multiple
independent intelligent observers observing an event with like the same information,

(01:42:29):
they should agree on it. And if they agree on it,
then you have like high confidence if it's true. Now,
of course, if it's something that's like fact based. It's
even easier because you can just like prove that it's
true if it follows from axioms. But probably the more
interesting one is if there's some ambiguity.

Speaker 2 (01:42:52):
Yeah, I also find but I.

Speaker 1 (01:42:53):
Think you need a notion of verification and also some
notion of like independence.

Speaker 2 (01:43:00):
Yeah. One of my favorite verifications of truth I feel
in my definition is timelessness. That's something being timeless. It
was as true a thousand years ago as it is today.

Speaker 1 (01:43:11):
Yeah, Lindy effect right, tell me about it. Yeah, basically,
like I think it was. I read about it from
Nassim Taleb. Yeah, so so basically, like he says, a
good approximation for how long something's likely to be relevant

(01:43:32):
is how long it's already been relevant. So I think
the way he kind of describes it as the New
York Times bestseller list, if a book sort of like
hits the best seller list and is a best seller
for one week, you can basically assume that it's going
to be irrelevant in a couple of weeks. Right, But
if you know the Holy Bible people have been reading

(01:43:54):
it for two thousand years, you have pretty high confidence
that it might it's it's going to be relevant in
two thousand years from now in a way that you
wouldn't with what's on the bestseller list now.

Speaker 2 (01:44:05):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:44:06):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (01:44:06):
Fifth and final question, we asked this to every guest
who's ever been on the show. If you could create
one law that everyone in the world had to follow,
what would it be.

Speaker 1 (01:44:14):
I think there's too many laws. Yeah, I think deleting
laws is the more interesting thing. If there was a
law where in order to create a new law, you
had to delete at least one existing law, I would
feel much better about it.

Speaker 2 (01:44:29):
That's a good law.

Speaker 1 (01:44:30):
If you think about overregulation, which I think is a
big problem, it's really really easy for new laws to
be created. It's easy for like organizations and the government
to get bigger, and that creates all sorts of problems,
Like it's impossible to get you know, high speed rail
in California. Right we need a force to counteract that.

(01:44:51):
And right now it's very easy for these things to
get bigger and more laws. But like periodically we've got
to go in there and slash laws and make things smaller,
and there's there's a lot of pressure against this.

Speaker 2 (01:45:05):
Well said Vlad. I look forward to many more conversations
with the philosophical, seeking of the truth, psychological. Truly, truly
wonderful to get to know you today, and thank you
for being so honest. Thank you for being so open
and vulnerable. And even though you describe yourself as stoic
at the start, I definitely feel you shared. You shared

(01:45:26):
a lot of emotion and what you shared, so thank
you so much for doing that. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:45:31):
Thank you for taking the time, you know, it's been
It's been a lot of fun. Yeah. I don't usually
do uh, I don't do too many podcasts in general,
but this was a unique experience.

Speaker 2 (01:45:41):
Yeah, I'm very grateful, grateful for your time. Thank you
so much. Wise, thank you, thank you so much for
listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it, you'll love
my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort is the
key to growth and the strategies for unlocking your hidden potential.
If you know, oh you want to be more and
achieve more this year, go check it out right now.

Speaker 1 (01:46:04):
You set a goal today, you achieve it in six months,
and then by the time it happens, it's almost a relief.
There's no sense of meaning and purpose. You sort of
expected it, and you would have been disappointed if it
didn't happen.

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