CEO Vlad Tenev on Robinhood's Record Year (+200%, ~$100B Market Cap)

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev joins Molly O’Shea from Robinhood HQ to break down the company’s record year and what powered its growth. Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD) stock opened 2025 under $40/share and ended the year around $113/share, a ~200% annual gain, pushing the company to roughly $120B in market capitalization. But as Vlad explains, the bigger story is under the hood. Today, Robinhood has 11 separate business lines generating $100M+ in annual revenue (!!), including prediction markets, margin, Gold subscriptions, cash sweep, crypto, and institutional infrastructure via Bitstamp. Vlad walks through Robinhood’s three long-term arcs: becoming #1 for active traders, owning wallet share for the next generation, and expanding globally into business and institutional markets. The conversation spans: Prediction markets as a new supercycle (sports, weather, insurance) Tokenized stocks and 24/7 trading in Europe Reinventing earnings calls as live, interactive experiences Unlocking private markets and AI companies for retail investors Robinhood Cortex, an AI financial assistant with full portfolio context Why retail investors today look very different than in 2021 This is a deep look at how Robinhood matured alongside its users — and how Vlad thinks about the next decade of finance. Vlad Tenev:Molly O’Shea: ⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ https://x.com/MollySOShea%E2%81%A0Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryvc https://x.com/sourceryvc%E2%81%A0 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 YouTube: https://youtu.be/7cvVgxJYb-I 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga http://public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Molly O'Shea?

  I heard you want to be the LeBron James of earnings calls.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Did I say that?

• 0:04Molly O'Shea?

  You're coming off of a record year. What happened?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Robinhood was pretty much a options and crypto and equities business. And now we have 11 business lines that generate 100 million in annual revenue or more.

• 0:17Molly O'Shea?

  Global domination.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Of your finances.

• 0:20Molly O'Shea?

  Maybe like a week or so after the yes no event, can you share more about what you released?

• 0:25Speaker 01

  One is a big upgrade to prediction markets. You can see prediction markets now on web. So that makes it a lot easier for people to engage and interact with our prediction markets. The second thing is the ability to trade individual player actions. So the sports experience in Robinhood is just getting much deeper and much more dynamic.

• 0:46Molly O'Shea?

  You're on the cover of Men's Health.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  I can sign it for you. I actually have about 75 copies in there.

• 0:53Molly O'Shea?

  Is Harmonic gonna solve time travel?

• 0:56Speaker 01

  If there is a solution.

• 0:57Molly O'Shea?

  If there is a solution.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:59Molly O'Shea?

  What is your hottest prediction for 2026?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  That's a tough question.

• 1:07Molly O'Shea?

  Vlad, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Happy to be here.

• 1:10Molly O'Shea?

  Thanks for having me in Robinhood's HQ.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I'm happy that you're here, actually, I should say, yeah.

• 1:16Molly O'Shea?

  Well, you're coming off of a record year. This is gonna come out in January. And you've deployed two new business lines that have reached over, well, they're not new, but they've reached over $100 million in revenue. What happened last year?

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're talking about prediction markets and Bitstamp. So very different business lines, obviously. But if you look back the time we went public, Robinhood was pretty much a options and crypto and equities business. And now we have 11 business lines that generate 100 million in annual revenue or more. So I think the story is, for a long time, we were criticized that we were sort of a business that would do well when markets were going up, interest rates were going down, as was the case in 2020 and a large part of 2021.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  But what happened when interest rates went up and we had sort of like the reversal of

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Most of the trends that were powering our business and our IPO during COVID, we had to, we had to kind of bear down and pivot our business into one that was more all-weather. So the Robin Hood you see today, much more diversified, where we have 11 business lines that are, that are at scale. And a couple more that are, that are also, you know, in that 10 to 100 range, but that we feel like are gonna grow over time. So I like to use the analogy of automobiles, right? Maybe a couple of years ago, we were a V6, then we went to a V8. There's not a lot of automobiles with 11-cylinder engines, but you know, we're pretty close to a V12.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  And then, you know, maybe, maybe one day soon, W16, like a super hypercar. And then I'll have to find a new analogy. We'll have to do jet planes or rockets or something.

• 3:19Molly O'Shea?

  That's pretty good. Okay, so what are these 11 business lines? Can you explain that a little bit more?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you can slice it a couple of different ways. One way to look at it is how much of our business is generating revenue from transactions? So, you know, we have transaction revenue, which you can think of as trading commissions, rebates for market makers, payment for order flow. We have a card product, so we earn interchange from swipes. And those are all, you know, money we make from every transaction. Then there's also net interest revenue, which you can kind of think of as money that we make from being the custodian of assets and also lending against those assets.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  And so we have a spread that we take on the cash that we hold on our platform. That's probably the simplest one. So we offer a great yield on cash. Right now, I think 3.5% with some added incentives on top, which still gives us 75 basis points for, for ourselves. And, you know, the cash sweep program, we call it, the high-yield offering has gone from basically nothing in 2022 to tens of billions of dollars under custody. So that's grown into a big business. The margin book.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  You know, which is a tool, margin is a tool that active traders use to to use leverage on their portfolios. We weren't really that competitive on margin, to be fair, up until 2024. And then we really started competing on rates, competing on user experience. And now the margin book is, I mean, it's, it's well more than doubled in the past year. And now that's grown into a big business. And Robinhood Gold itself, which is a subscription product, were up to 4 million gold subscribers, you know, and that's really ramped.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Now, now at this point, 15% of all of our customers, thereabouts, are Robinhood Gold subscribers. And of the customers that join on a quarterly basis, the new customers, it's like upwards of 40%. So we've, we've really done a good job and just the gold subscription itself is now a nine-figure business. And that's really before we've made significant progress on expanding Robinhood outside the US, still very much a US business. And very little progress sands Bitstamp, which is our institutional business, on expanding from retail only to business and institutional.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  So if I think through like Robinhood's trajectory, I think right now the engine behind our business is active trading. So that's sort of like the first area where we're targeting being number one. We want to be the number one business for active traders. But we don't want to just stop there because not everyone trades. The second arc of our business, we call it, is, is number one in wallet share for the next generation. So we really want to be the place where you put all of your money and we want to handle all of your financial needs. And that's where we track assets under custody and Gold subscribers. We want to be a big platform with lots of assets, serving all of your financial needs.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  And then the third arc, which is the one that's longer term, I kind of call it our 10-year arc. How do we go from US primary to fully global? And retail only to business and institutional? I think if you look 10 years from now, we see a world where more than half of our revenue could be outside the US. And also, cut another way, more than half of our revenue could be business and institutional rather than retail. So there's just multiple vectors by which we could grow the business by 10x. And I think we have a plan to pursue all of them.

• 7:28Molly O'Shea?

  Global domination.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Of your finances. Yeah, it's like, and we view it really as, can we apply technology to make it so that, you know, we know people have options and there's a lot of services that want to do this. But can we apply technology to cut down costs? And at the same time, give you the best customer experience? So that you just don't have any reasons to move money outside of Robinhood. You have plenty of reasons to move it in, but Robinhood products and services can serve you better on platform. And you shouldn't have to need to withdraw money to your bank account or to another service, because it should just be a no-brainer to keep it with us.

• 8:14Molly O'Shea?

  So we're maybe like a week or so after the yes/no event. Can you share more about what you released?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  We released a few things. One is a big upgrade to prediction markets. So one of the things is you can see prediction markets now on web. Whereas in the past, you had to be logged into the app. Which I think one of the big use cases of prediction markets is not just as a trading product, but almost as a news media product, the source of information. So that makes it a lot easier for for people to engage and interact with our prediction markets. The second thing is combos for sports. And and the ability to trade individual player actions. So the sports experience in Robinhood is just getting much deeper and much more dynamic.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  You can put together lots of trades into one big one.

• 9:09Molly O'Shea?

  Is this like a parlay, kind of an alternative?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Very, very similar. And I think the the other thing that gets me excited about that is you can imagine doing it for any category of prediction markets, not just sports. So these contracts over time will get much more personalized and specific. And you'll get into things like bespoke insurance products, which which I think will be really cool.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  And then the the other thing we released was Robinhood Cortex. Now, you've seen, Robinhood Cortex is our AI model. You've seen us do a few things that are AI powered in the app. We've had Cortex stock in Crypto Digest, which explained to users exactly what's going on with a stock in real time. And then we've also added Cortex powered screeners and indicators on Legend, which is our pro trading platform. Now you can talk directly to Cortex. So basically Cortex has an interface in the app, which has full context of all of your financials and also real time market data.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  It knows about all the tradable stocks and prediction markets and instruments, and it can do stuff for you. So for example, if you want to scan through the entire universe of traded symbols and place a trade, you can just ask Cortex to do that with your voice. So it's like a full AI assistant that has like super intelligent financial knowledge at your disposal.

• 10:51Molly O'Shea?

  What are you most excited about?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  I'm excited about that one because you know, there's just a lot of, a lot of times where I have a specific question and I don't have a way to, to easily take all of my financial data, put it into ChatGPT or another AI model and, and get a good answer without doing a whole bunch of work. So this sort of like gives you that type of intelligence where all of your financial data is.

• 11:19Molly O'Shea?

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• 12:04Molly O'Shea?

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• 12:48Molly O'Shea?

  On Jack Altman's podcast, and hello, Jack, he was so helpful with some of the questions. You guys talked a lot about the generational differences between attitudes and behaviors in brokerages and financial services. So how do you, one, can you just reshare that? And then, two, how do they fit into each of these different products that you have?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think one of the things we spend a lot of time talking about is we have to do two things that are simultaneously somewhat challenging, which is make sure we grow with our customers. Like, we don't want someone to just be 24 years old, opening a Peribody account, and then graduating to Schwab or something like that, which means we have to actually add more products and features as those customers grow and their lives get a little bit more complicated, so we could serve them there. While at the same time as we do that, make sure the product is still attractive to someone that's starting out for the first time.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  So we don't want to lose the next generation, because, you know, a lot of our predecessors get into this trap of being a generational company. And I think that's certain death, right? Because eventually, like, nobody's figured out how to live forever. So eventually, their kids are going to inherit the money, and, you know, their kids are probably less tied to the legacy brokers than their parents and grandparents. So, yeah, I think it's simultaneously growing with our customers, making sure we add the products and services, while also making sure we pay attention to the next generation and continue to be relevant for them, and add all the new things that, you know, get the 18-year-olds and the 24-year-olds into the markets.

• 14:39Molly O'Shea?

  Is that prediction markets?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  I think young people love prediction markets, obviously, but we also see a lot of people in their 40s and 50s engaging with prediction markets. You do tend to see, you know, young people adopting technology sooner and earlier and just being open to trying new things, but I think the reason we got into prediction markets was we were just very interested in it.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's right that it's turned into a young person thing. But yeah, I didn't really see it going that way necessarily. You look at some of our competitors.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Some of them have been offering prediction markets for quite a long time. You look at even the big guys like Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Interactive Brokers. But really with prediction markets, it was the 2024 election that was, I think, ground zero. That was the time that everything changed. Because like up until that point, there wasn't an event big enough to actually bring in a lot of customers. And I think the presidential election just started it all really, and created this new prediction market super cycle. And a lot of it now is sports.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  But we see a world where prediction markets can disrupt multiple gigantic industries, not just sports. Like I was talking to someone last week. And you might know Robinhood just added weather prediction markets on the platform. And, you know, nobody really thinks of using weather prediction markets in this way. But, you know, you can trade and hedge fire risk. You can hedge hurricane risk. And if you think about the process of like insuring yourself against a fire or a hurricane, it can be very expensive and it's cumbersome. You have to talk to a broker on the phone.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  And the contracts that we have available right now are already competitive with some of those products. And this is before they get like more bespoke and personalized. So I see a world where the insurance industry can just be disrupted by a lot of these products. So I think, yeah, there's a lot more to build. We're still pre-institutional adoption at large scale.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  I think that it's still early innings in the prediction market super cycle.

• 17:16Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, it's super early. At least what I've seen, um, working with Kalshi over the last year on some things, they were a sponsor. What I've learned from prediction markets over the last year is it's crazy to see what it takes. And you know, there's similar parallels here with the story to get federally regulated and become legal and all that kind of stuff. And be able to then provide access to, you know, everybody democratize access to it. But the crazy part is you never really know what something will look until it's out into the public. People start to adapt it to themselves. So they've been working on prediction markets for forever. And so, you know, you're, you're hoping that people use it for these great financial, cool, uh, arbitrage moments, that kind of thing.

• 18:01Molly O'Shea?

  That are a little bit more sophisticated, but then you unleash it to the masses. You have to market it really aggressively because it's super competitive and then it becomes somewhat degen. And that's become a narrative that comes along with it. And I think that's where the younger generations come along, but it's cool because there's also a lot of really sophisticated people that are taking it on and using it and making good amounts of money, whether it's weather or anything like that. But my biggest observation from this was you never really know what something will become until it's actually unleashed into the world. And then it takes a lot of effort to kind of conform it back to what you want and the principles around it. Are you concerned at all about any of the aura around that, how it's perceived?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  I think that you, you definitely make a good point that the shape of something is not clear. And I think there's, there's definitely been a lot of questions and a lot of things that we have to work out. You know, from market integrity and what kinds of contracts lend themselves to like.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Easier spoofing and manipulation than than others. For example, you can look at the mention markets and say, well, if someone's aware of a mention market, then they can just say the things, right? And we've been generally pretty careful about what we list. I think the the thing we want to make sure we get right is integrity. Because if people are concerned about market integrity, then they stop participating in the markets. And that makes everything downstream a little bit more challenging. It's harder to pull liquidity, prices get worse, customers are sort of like reluctant to to participate. So I I think there's probably more that can be done. But I do think we've got the tools to do it.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  I mean, if you look at other asset classes like equities, we've had to do surveillance and market integrity and monitoring for insider trading for many, many decades. So I I do think this is one thing that the industry is poised to do. And and I think we'll we'll do a pretty good job of it. And there might be some twists and turns where we kind of settle on some common standards and and common ways of doing things.

• 20:22Molly O'Shea?

  So I was talking to Amit, right? I think we were at Palantir.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  He's great.

• 20:25Molly O'Shea?

  Right around the Palantir interview, which is really funny.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  I saw some clips from that.

• 20:31Molly O'Shea?

  I don't follow stocks as closely as I used to. I want to know from him, he covers this every day. He covers the top stocks, really fun ones, too. And this last year, we had a little bit of resurgence of this Wall Street Bets energy. And so what's the difference between retail traders today versus retail traders in COVID? And I ask you that, too.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, my my take on that is

• 20:56Speaker 01

  COVID was a little bit idiosyncratic. So there were there were a couple of waves of activity that I remember. Okay, one one of the waves was, you know, companies that Had filed bankruptcy, like there was a little bit of a spike of activity around Hertz, for instance, which which hit the news cycle. And then, and actually, I think in hindsight, that that was like a negative criticism of Robin Hood, oh, we're, you know, facilitating, making it easier for these people to invest in bankrupt stocks. And and I think we've done a lot to make it clear, oh, this this company has filed bankruptcy.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Because we actually, my my general philosophy is, we want to make it easy for people to do what they want to do, of course, so long as it's compliant and everything. But we should also give them the information so that they're aware of what they're doing. Now, it turns out, I think, in the Hertz case, that those traders made money through like a interesting contortion of bankruptcy proceedings. But again, that was like a little bit of a trend. Then there were the companies that got hit hard by COVID, and maybe in the past, the government could have bailed them out, but this time, they didn't.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  And so I kind of think of it as a retail bailout. You know, rather than the companies getting the money as they had in the past, retail investors got money in the form of stimulus checks. And a lot of that went into brick and mortar retailers like GameStop and AMC, and also the airlines, like American Airlines for was a trending stock at that time. So there was a component of nostalgia, I think, associated with it. You know, people were familiar with the names, maybe they, maybe millennials remember a world where they would go to the movies and sort of like would go into GameStop and shop

• 23:03Speaker 01

  for games. And they kind of like missed that because everyone was locked up at home and that seemed like a very, very, that's like the furthest thing you wanted to do. Mixed in with some actual due diligence, where, you know, some people were very systematic about understanding what the Fed was going to do. There were a lot of people that were broadcasting and actually, you know, doing deep intelligence about, you know, who's buying the stock and and what the prospects are.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  But yeah, it was, and then all of this, of course, culminated in

• 23:40Speaker 01

  in the GameStop sort of like meme craze, followed by the inflection of crypto activity that I think culminated in our IPO in the middle of 2021. But I think the feeling that at least I got in 2021 was it felt, it felt very unstable in a sense. Like the thesis behind why people were investing in these companies were sort of like ephemeral thesis. Like they, they had to do with the state of affairs at the time. Whereas now it feels a little bit more meaningful. I mean, we're, we're in the middle of a big technology disruption wave with AI.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  The, the feeling that I get, and I think many people get is that we're still pretty early in that. And of course there's talks about whether we're in an AI bubble. But if you look at how many chips are being produced, how much inference is being purchased? How many weekly active users ChatGPT has? It does seem like there's actual substance and real revenue and real products behind it.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  And the companies that retail is, is investing in are companies that by and large have, I mean, they're, they're not like stories. They're, they're companies with real revenue and, and real growth. So I think it does feel qualitatively different. And I kind of juxtapose this.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  I think Robinhood, for better or worse, is kind of a bellwether for what retail is doing, right? And you look at our business right now, we've got about 350 billion assets under custody. And it's fairly well diversified. You know, the bulk of it is in stocks and we have a little bit of crypto as well. And if you look at the volumes, the volumes are really spread out. I mean, we're seeing record trading volumes, pretty dispersed among a lot of different stocks. Whereas in 2021, Robin was much less diversified. We had higher concentration in, in crypto, particularly Dogecoin. And

• 25:51Speaker 01

  A lot of the activity was much more concentrated in stocks that were sort of like these meme story stocks. So I think the health of the retail investor has improved. I think they, I don't want to say that, you know, some people say, okay, retail investor has grown up and matured. I don't want to be pejorative because I think retail investors have always been smarter than people give them credit for. But I think the maturation of the retail investor is kind of mirrored the maturation of Robin Hood, the business. We've gotten more diversified, they've gotten more diversified, and there's sort of like

• 26:31Speaker 01

  much more stable foundation underneath the activity and also our company.

• 26:37Molly O'Shea?

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• 27:20Molly O'Shea?

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• 27:31Molly O'Shea?

  One of the coolest stories from this year, I think, was Open Door. And this was an amazing moment. This happened kind of a little bit spontaneously, but I was able to capture Keith Reboi right after he rejoined the board. You saw the run-up of Open Door, and then you actually saw action happen against it. They brought a new board. They brought in really phenomenal, actual executives and are going about change in a way that you wouldn't have expected a huge run-up would happen from, you know, just retail investors. It was a really, really cool story.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  I think being public gets a bad rap in many ways. I don't know, you probably talked to a lot of people, some of which are public. And if you ask anyone whether they like being public, they'll probably say, no, it's terrible. It's just, you have to do earnings, it's a chore, you can't do anything. And I actually think it's incredibly powerful to be a public company for a couple of reasons. I think one, and we've tried to do this ourselves. If you start thinking about earnings as an opportunity to engage with your shareholders, both institutional and retail, you could do a lot more with it than if you're just sort of going through the motions and you think of it as a chore.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  So one year ago, we were kind of doing earnings the old fashioned way, right? We had the Polycom, we had the script, I would read the script, we would take the questions over Polycom, sell-side analysts would be on the call exclusively. And then, you know, I was looking at the recordings and we have a, even back then, we had a community of retail fans that would listen to our earnings and stream on YouTube. I always looked at that, right? And it was Amit, Amit was one of the first, but there were a bunch of others as well. And I was just like sitting there looking at it. And I said to myself, man, I'm bored. And if I'm bored, the people watching this must be really bored.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  And at one point, the livestream, I forgot who it was, he kind of apologized to the audience. He's like, you know, I know it's a little bit dry, sorry guys, but maybe we'll get to Q and A soon. And they would get to the Q and A, which would be the engaging part because we would be unscripted, even though the Q and A was also quite scripted. So I was like, all right, let's like tear this down from first principles and make it fun. What's an example, what's an analogy, something we could learn from and lift from maybe another industry that is similar to this, but entertaining? And I thought, well, you know, it's kind of similar to NBA playoffs post-game interview, you know? There are some differences, but some similarities.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Like you've had something happen, whether it's a quarter or, you know, an NBA finals game. You've either lost or you've won. It's either like a good quarter where you're beating and you have good things to say, or maybe it's a bad quarter. But it's kind of entertaining either way, right? If you look at Anthony Edwards. It's entertaining whether he wins. He comes in and he's wearing like his outfit and he's got his swagger and he's like, you know, "We crushed those guys. I had 50 points." Or when he loses, he's shirtless and he's got the towel on his shoulder and he's just like, "The body language is good, is bad." Maybe he throws some shade at the coaching staff or the teammates.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  But you want to watch either way. So we asked ourselves, you know, "How can we actually make this informative but also entertaining?" And we started Q4 of last year was our first earnings call where we did live video and it was like in our office. It was sort of like one baby step. And then you fast forward to our previous earnings call. It was at the Chase Center. We had live video. We had live Zoom Q and A where retail investors would basically livestream and ask their questions live. And we had sell-side analysts, but also buy-side investors and the media in there.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  You know, everyone always told me, "Okay, sell-side analysts are the only ones going to these calls." And you ask yourself and you ask others, "Why?" Well, there's no good reason why, you know? The reasons are made up. Well, sell-side analysts would get their feelings hurt. They would feel like they didn't have as much time if they're competing for question slots with retail investors and the media. So I think if you break it down from first principles and rebuild the experience, a lot of the constraints that people think exist aren't real constraints and you end up with a better product. So we went from, I think, hundreds of listeners on the old Polycom

• 32:19Speaker 01

  style earnings to tens of thousands, maybe even 100,000 at the last one. So it increased the actual audience of our earnings by multiple orders of magnitude.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  And an open door, you mentioned open door. They saw what we were doing and they were like, we want to figure out how to engage retail too. So they became the first partner that we actually, they not only livestreamed their earnings and took questions live, but they livestreamed it in our app on Robinhood to their retail shareholders. And so I think other companies are starting to see this and say, okay, yeah, we want retail shareholders. Retail shareholders become kind of defenders of the company when things get a little bit rocky too. I mean, you kind of see it, and this is one of the reasons why I really want retail investors to be able to invest in AI companies.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Because if you look at who's defending AI companies against controversy, it's basically AI researchers that work there or venture capitalists that are investing in them. But they don't have like a grassroots effort, a retail army that's actually supporting them. And I think that's a problem. I think that it's one thing that worked very, very well for crypto, particularly when the industry was under threat from regulatory overreach. So many retail investors had access to crypto from the very beginning that there was like this army that became a significant voting bloc, right? And, you know, they own the thing, so they want to protect it. They want to go up and they want it to go up in value.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  They wanted like a clear regulatory framework and AI doesn't have that. AI is like one of the fastest adopted products, but also one of the least popular. People are afraid that it's going to take my job, that it's going to, you know, affect my life negatively. I think a big part of that is there's no retail investment in AI. I think Google to some degree has like. Patch that up a little bit by getting their AI efforts into gear. But yeah, aside from Google, you know, OpenAI, Anthropic, all the startups, basically out of reach for for normal people.

• 34:38Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so I heard you want to be the LeBron James of earnings calls.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Did I say that?

• 34:44Molly O'Shea?

  No, you didn't. Anthony Edwards.

• 34:48Molly O'Shea?

  And.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  LeBron James is is one of my favorite players. I had a chance to meet him once, but he's kind of at the at the tail end of his career. I'd like to have a little bit more longevity than that.

• 34:59Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  I'll be sad when he retires because he's the one, I think he might be the only NBA player that's older than me.

• 35:06Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  So if he retires, my dream of being able to play in the NBA will be officially, I'll be like, it's unrealistic at this point.

• 35:13Molly O'Shea?

  It's over.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't make it anymore.

• 35:16Molly O'Shea?

  Done. Oh, my God. And that's interesting. Okay, so that brings us to tokenization because I know that you had efforts earlier this year, especially in France. The release of offering, I think you now offer stocks in Europe, over 400?

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Uh, over 1500.

• 35:33Molly O'Shea?

  1500?

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, we tokenized 1500 stocks are available for trading in Europe right now.

• 35:38Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God. On the last earnings call, it was 400.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we've really, the the team's been cranking. Uh, yeah, we we've got a, we've got a big plan. I mean, it's not a one and done. We'll tokenize some stocks and and and leave it. There's like a three-phase plan. Tokenize more stocks and then, uh, we have to integrate them into Bitstamp to allow 24/7 trading and also, uh, unleash them on DeFi so that you can self-custody them and do collateralized lending and borrowing and and all of that stuff. So, yeah, there there's a lot more to do.

• 36:13Molly O'Shea?

  So for people who don't know what that means, what does that mean?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Tokenization is the act of taking a real asset, an asset that has some utility and

• 36:28Speaker 01

  You you take that asset and you custody it, so you hold it somewhere. And then you mint and burn tokens against it. So and then those tokens can trade 24/7 and have access to the world of decentralized finance. So the basic example of a tokenized asset is a stablecoin, and it works in the exact same way. I take a dollar. I put a dollar or, you know, a treasury note or bill in a box somewhere where it's custodied. And then I I mint a token representing that dollar. And now that token gets access to everything crypto has to offer. 24/7 trading, instant settlement, real-time payments that are 24/7.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  And then all of the software that people build in the crypto world to allow for trading, lending, and borrowing is is accessible as well. And I think the interesting thing that it allows that is very difficult to do now is it can take things that are illiquid and not tradable and make them tradable. So I wrote a piece in the Washington Post in January of this year about how private markets need to be unlocked and tokenization could actually be the gateway. Because in the same way that for stablecoin, we can take dollars and custody them, it's very easy to take private companies and custody them.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  And you can mint tokens against that. And suddenly you have real-time 24/7 trading of private assets, which solves a lot of the historical problems that we've had with with private assets. Not enough liquidity. You have to build all this infrastructure to get them trading. And by the way, once you have this infrastructure, you need market makers. I think crypto provides a lot of that out of the box. So you sort of like.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Solve both sides of it simultaneously. You know, traditional finance, I'd like to say, in traditional finance, it's very easy to custody something. Like, we know how to custody something. And it's sort of like, once you custody something, you don't really have to do a lot of work. You're just holding it somewhere. It can even be manual. It could be, you know, you're holding pieces of paper that have legal agreements. But the actual trading becomes difficult. You know, you have to create an alternative trading system or an exchange. You have to attract liquidity. That stuff is very, very difficult. But in crypto, it's kind of the opposite.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  The trading comes for free. Fractionalization, it running 24/7, getting liquidity, very easy. So if you combine these two things, right? Where custoding something is simple and trading something, once you have it custodied, is simple. Then you unlock all sorts of things that were difficult to make tradable and liquid. So private companies I'm excited about, but you can also imagine you could do this to works of art, a car. You could tokenize a car. You can tokenize, you know, unique collectibles.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  So I think that we will likely see a world where pretty much anything can be tradable real time, like a stock.

• 39:58Molly O'Shea?

  There's a publicly listed entity called Destiny.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:03Molly O'Shea?

  And that's a closed-end fund. So is that just structurally incorrect for this? What do you think about that? Because it's the same thing for privately listed companies in a public domain.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's a closed-end publicly listed fund. And we actually, we've announced something called Robinhood Ventures, which is the general umbrella underlying our efforts to sort of like facilitate access to private companies. Tokenization is a mechanism to do that, but we don't, it's not yet legal in the US to tokenize private companies. So we've done some early steps along that outside the US in EU, where we're tokenizing public stocks and we also did a token giveaway of SpaceX and OpenAI.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  So in the US, we have Robinhood Ventures and we filed Robinhood Ventures Fund One, which is a closed-end listed fund that will invest in private companies. The difference is the fund is by its nature more diversified. So you're not able to trade an individual company, but you're trading basically a basket of companies. And I think it's good, but it's, it's, um, obviously it's a, it's a different product. This is more of like, if I want to passively have exposure to private companies as a broader asset class, closed-end fund is a great solution. And I think it's, it's probably the best we can get in the US until tokenization becomes legal.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  And then outside the US, we, we've already demonstrated the mechanism to, to trade individual companies.

• 41:45Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. It's interesting and I really like the premise. I mean, it's kind of similar of getting access to AI companies where all the value is accruing is just this insane opportunity that a lot are missing out on. And something similar to when we were interviewing Alex Karp in his office, it was right after their earnings and he was saying their run-up this year, they're offering working-class Americans exposure to venture-type returns. Like something that you wouldn't normally get and the outcomes of it is insane and the people that actually get the exposure and the effects is just amazing. And then there, you know.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  He's, he's talking about just retail investors investing in Palantir stock.

• 42:29Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Palantir has done well.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:33Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so in terms of the private companies, how do you gain custody of, of their shares? And do you ask for permission? How does that work?

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Well, I think the OpenAI and SpaceX giveaway were generally an exception. You know, I wanted to be the first to tokenize those. But and there are mechanisms where you don't need the permission of the company. Yeah, you can acquire LP interests and an SPV, for instance. For Robinhood Ventures, thus far, every company has been sort of like direct. And you can see the companies are announcing their fundraising rounds. And Robinhood Ventures is sort of in their name as an investor. And I think that's definitely the preferred approach. And generally, we would like that, right? We want the companies to be open to us participating and see the value.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  I think what surprised me is I would have thought that we would have more issues getting companies to return our calls. Because when we first got into this area, we offered a product called IPO Access, which is basically retail shareholders getting into IPOs of companies. And we did it with our IPO, which was the largest retail allocation of an IPO of its size. And we did something like 25% retail. And this was in 2021. The first year, I just really had to, you know, claw and scratch and really fight to get into some of these deals. You know, the companies and the CEOs would say, why do I need this?

• 44:15Speaker 01

  You know, why can't I just go public the normal way? I just want to get it over with and keep running my business. That was kind of the reception. But this year, basically, every consequential company going public is reaching out to us beforehand, asking us, you know, for advice on their retail strategy, how they can engage retail. And we're starting to see not just big allocations to retail, but companies actually talking about it. You know, when they do their IPO media, they say, well, we gave retail a huge allocation. We love retail investors. Robinhood helped us with that. So there's been a shift from me having to like really argue and advocate

• 44:56Speaker 01

  and work hard to get into these deals to now it's just much more organic and companies see the value. And I think the same thing is happening, but at an accelerated rate for private companies. And I think that, you know, five years from now, the exact mechanisms, whether tokenization is legal or closed-end funds, that's less clear. But what I know is I'm very confident that retail investors getting exposure to private companies will be easier, much more common, and the companies will, by and large, want this, and it'll be a standard part of

• 45:37Speaker 01

  their capital raise. I'd like to go even earlier stage. I mean, my vision is I want to drive up the amount of entrepreneurship in this country, and it's still very, very hard if you're an early-stage founder to raise capital. You have to like work on your product and spend a lot of time refining it while also fundraising full-time, and that's very, very hard to do. So if we can make that a little bit easier and help with raising money at the early stage, it can lead to more entrepreneurship, and, you know, the risk is higher, but also the return potential if you're an investor in these companies

• 46:16Speaker 01

  is much greater. So that's what I'd really like to build to, early-stage opportunities being unlocked for retail as well.

• 46:25Molly O'Shea?

  On the topic of AI, can we talk about Harmonic?

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah.

• 46:29Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so what is the vision and the mission of Harmonic?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Harmonic is building what we call mathematical superintelligence, and it's an artificial intelligence that can solve math problems better than any human mathematician. And so the company's been around for a couple of years. I'm chairman of the board and co-founder, but I'm not like day-to-day operating. Well, the North Star was can we actually solve really, really important math problems like the Riemann hypothesis or, you know, Hodge conjecture. You know, there's like...

• 47:06Speaker 01

  This this group of math problems that have been open for hundreds of years that are called the millennium prize problems and they're considered very big, difficult and and actually valuable. So that was kind of the North Star. And the reason we wanted to do that was if we could solve those problems, well, maybe we could, everything downstream of math, like theoretical physics, becomes unlocked. So then you can imagine solving really hard physics problems. Like, I don't know if you're interested in this, but I was very interested as a physics major. How can we unify the strong, the weak, and the electromagnetic force with gravity? So it's sort of like, there's these four forces.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Three of them, we kind of have a theory for how they originated from one single force in the early part of the universe. And then we have a hypothesis that we can unify these three. Gravity somehow fits into there, too. But we just have no idea how it fits in. And I think this is the holy grail of theoretical physics. How do you unify gravity with with the other three forces into a theory of everything? And actually, if you can solve that, then there's all kinds of exciting engineering developments. Like, depending on how that theory looks, you can imagine things like faster than light travel and it gets really crazy. But anyway, these are, we had to think of some near-term milestones because we can't

• 48:34Speaker 01

  just go after the Riemann hypothesis or grand unification on day one. We started solving like competition math problems. And we became one of the first models to actually get a gold medal on the International Math Olympiad, which is the hardest math competition in the world. And then after that, my mental model was, okay, we're going to release this product and we're going to commercialize. We're probably a year away from actually solving.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Unsolved math problems. Because it seemed like the gap between, you know, hard competition problems and unsolved math problems was very, very large. But in November, just this last month, Aristotle, um, I did this analysis. Um, Aristotle assisted in or solved 11 Erdesch problems. Um, I'll tell you what an Erdesch problem is. So Paul Erdesch was a, he's considered the most prolific mathematician. He would go around and basically, uh, stay with his friends for two weeks at a time. His friends were all mathematicians. And he would kind of like, help them work on their math problems.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  And he was like a traveling salesman of math. And so he became really prolific. He published thousands of papers. There's actually an Erdesch number, which is similar to a Bacon number. Have you heard of the Bacon number? It's basically how many degrees away you are from Kevin Bacon in a movie. So if you were in a movie with Kevin Bacon, your Bacon number is zero. If you were in a movie with someone who was in a movie with Kevin Bacon, it's one. So there was an Erdesch number two, which is if you co-authored a paper with Paul Erdesch, you're zero. And if, you know, you co-authored a paper with someone who co-authored it with Paul Erdesch, you're one. Um, there's even an Erdesch Bacon number, right, where you add the two.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  So then you have people that have co-authored a paper with Paul Erdesch and, uh, starred in a movie with Kevin Bacon.

• 50:39Molly O'Shea?

  Who's hit that number?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  So there's someone that has an Erdesch Bacon number of three, because they were in Good Will Hunting with a mathematician who co-authored a paper with Paul Erdesch. Anyway, there's these Erdesch problems. There's about 1,100 of them. About half of them are still unsolved to this day. So half of them are open. And now with Aristotle, um, people are doing like systematic, they're going through them. And there was one that Aristotle solved fully autonomously. And then a bunch of others where Aristotle assisted in solving or converting into formal math language. So that, that was quite a bit faster than I thought, that people would actually be using the product to accelerate math. And then actually, last week, we,

• 51:24Speaker 01

  um, we announced a pretty cool result. There's a William Lowell Putnam math competition. If you've seen A Beautiful Mind, uh, They mentioned this math competition because John Nash, who was a Nobel Prize winner, he never did well on the Putnam. And so he always sort of like had a bit of a chip on his shoulder. And he was like, oh, that that person's really smart. They took the Putnam in this year and they did really well. Well, Aristotle, which is the name of the math model that that the company builds, in a consumer form, which just people can use freely, got 10 out of the 12 problems of the Putnam correct, which is a lot more than I got on the Putnam. So like the

• 52:06Molly O'Shea?

  What'd you get on the Putnam?

• 52:07Speaker 01

  The I got a I got a zero. Actually, I didn't even check. I might have gotten some points, but I knew I did so poorly that I didn't even like check my result. But but yeah, it's like the the child has surpassed the parent in mathematical ability. And then things get weird.

• 52:25Molly O'Shea?

  OK, so is Harmonic gonna solve time travel?

• 52:30Speaker 01

  I hope so. Yeah.

• 52:32Molly O'Shea?

  OK.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  If there is a solution.

• 52:34Molly O'Shea?

  If there is a solution.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:36Molly O'Shea?

  I just interviewed Palmer Lucky and he was like, I don't think people travel forward in time. I think they travel backward in time. Or was it the opposite of that?

• 52:45Speaker 01

  I think it would be back. It would be the opposite. It's pretty easy.

• 52:48Molly O'Shea?

  He had like a hot take on this. It was great. He's like, I don't think they're coming from the future. I think they're coming from the past.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you could imagine traveling forward in time is is much easier in a sense, because you just have to freeze yourself. Traveling backward in time might actually violate fundamental laws of of physics.

• 53:11Molly O'Shea?

  Fun.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that one's harder. Faster than light travel, I think, is is somehow a little bit more tractable, even though that's also very hard. It might be impossible.

• 53:23Molly O'Shea?

  OK, what is your hottest prediction for 2026?

• 53:29Speaker 01

  My hottest prediction for 2026. That's a tough question.

• 53:34Molly O'Shea?

  I mean, look, we have sports, we have weather, we have economics, we have politics. There's so many options.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  I really, I'm hoping, I don't know if this is a hedge or a speculation, but I hope we get a lot of snow in California this year.

• 53:49Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:51Molly O'Shea?

  Snowboard.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  I'm predicting or hedging. I like to ski.

• 53:54Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, great. All right, well, lastly, we just want to address, you were on the cover of Men's Health.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  I can sign it for you. I actually have about seventy-five copies in there.

• 54:06Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 54:07Speaker 01

  You can't find a copy of Men's Health. I've bought them all.

• 54:10Molly O'Shea?

  How'd you get in there?

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Well, word got out about my amazing physical fitness.

• 54:17Molly O'Shea?

  Super athletic abilities?

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, word travels fast. I don't know how they did it, but they were like, hey, we want, we want to write.

• 54:23Molly O'Shea?

  We saw your earnings calls.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:25Molly O'Shea?

  You gotta get in print.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  They did this interesting thing where they juxtaposed Robinhood's like financial health with my physical health. And they're like, just as the company is getting to profitability, the CEO is cutting body fat and

• 54:41Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  increasing his bench and his deadlift. No, the one thing is, in that article, so the journalist followed me around for my workout. And she was like taking notes and recording. And so this was like, I was like, okay, this could go one of two ways. One, I could be really nervous and completely screw up. Or this could be the best workout of my life, where it's like added motivation to lift more weight. So it was the second. This was like, I went for ninety minutes straight and I was like setting PRs and everything. So I was deadlifting, I think, four plates. So it was four hundred pound deadlift. And, you know, I worked really hard to lift that weight. It's, it was, it was a lot of weight.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  And in the article, she puts my warm-up set. So she has me like, looking really intense, but lifting the 135 pounds.

• 55:37Molly O'Shea?

  What a shame.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  And I worked through, I tried to get them to change it, but...

• 55:41Molly O'Shea?

  I'm sure that's what happened.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know, that's my story, I'm sticking to it.

• 55:46Molly O'Shea?

  That's amazing. Well, thank you so much, Vlad.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Thanks for being here.

• 55:51Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once-a-week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.