20VC: Robinhood Founder Vlad Tenev on His Biggest Lessons Managing Through A Crisis, The Events of The Congressional Committee, Raising $2.4Bn Fast and Why It Was Necessary & Why It Is Ludicrous To Suggest Robinhood Put The Business Ahead of it's Customer

Vlad Tenev is the Founder & CEO @ Robinhood, the company that provides commission-free investing, plus the tools you need to put your money in motion. To date, Vlad has raised over $5.6BN with Robinhood including a $2.4Bn raise this month and some of their investors include the very best in the business; Ribbit, Sequoia, Greenoaks, Index, IVP, Thrive, GV and more incredible names. Before Robinhood, Vlad started two finance companies in New York City. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Vlad made his way into the world of startups and how the "Occupy Wall St" movement spurned much of the inspiration for the founding moment of Robinhood? 2.) Looking back over the last month, does Vlad believe Robinhood is a victim or an enabler of the crisis? What does Vlad believe upset customers the most? With the benefit of hindsight, what would Vlad have done differently? What does Vlad believe are some of the biggest misconceptions about how the last few weeks played out? 3.) Funding: Why did Robinhood need the scale of funding that it took, so fast? What are the capital requirements for a business like Robinhood? Who regulates their compliance? Was Robinhood forced to put the interests of the business ahead of the interests of their customers? Why does VAR need to be changed as a risk estimation mechanism? 4.) What has Vlad learned as CEO about managing through a crisis? What did Vlad do to ensure morale remained high internally, despite the external events? What works? What does not work? What did Vlad learn about himself through the experience of the congressional committee and testifying before them? As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. What a timely episode we have in store for you today. The world has been talking about little other than Robinhood and GameStop over the last month. And so I thought, who better to have back on the show than Vlad Tenev, founder and CEO of Robinhood? Now, I know Vlad's been on a couple of other podcasts, and so I really went for some different and quite untouched angles today. And wow, what a show we have in store. But for those that do not know, Robinhood provides commission-free investing, plus the tools you need to put your money in motion. To date, Vlad has raised over $5.6 billion with Robinhood, including a $2.4 billion raise just this month. And some of their ambassadors include the likes of Ribbit, Sequoia, Green Oaks Index, IVP, Thrive, GV, and more incredible names. Before Robinhood, Vlad started two finance companies in New York City,

• 0:45Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:29Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  But you're not tuning in to hear from me, so now I'm very, very excited to hand over to Vlad Tenev, founder and CEO at Robinhood.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:26Harry Stebbings?

  Vlad, it is such a joy to do this. I so enjoyed round one and I can't wait for this one. So, thank you so much for putting up with these terrible British tones once again.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Hey, it's a pleasure, man. I appreciate you doing it with me, having me on your show again. It was a lot of fun for me. I'm hoping, I don't know if we'll have much to talk about. I think we did the last one a couple of months ago, right?

• 2:44Harry Stebbings?

  No idea if you've got anything to talk about. Let's hope someone's put a schedule in place. But let's start for those that missed the first episode. And if they did, what was the aha moment with Robin Hood? And what was that kind of brief founding story?

• 2:56Speaker 02

  My co-founder Beju and I met at Stanford. We're both first-generation immigrants. His parents immigrated from India and then I immigrated myself from Bulgaria when I was five years old. Bulgaria, by the way, in mid 90s, had a financial system that went through hyperinflation. You know, I remember going on vacation with my family back to visit my grandparents in the mid 90s. And one year, a loaf of bread was two leva. The next year, it was 20,000 leva or something like that. So I think we take it for granted in this country that we have democracy and capitalism and relatively stable dollar and a financial system that works. But all of this kind of set the substrate for how I grew up, how Beju grew up, and eventually us meeting at Stanford.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  When I graduated, it was 2008, and then I went to grad school to study a math PhD. His first month on his job, my first month in grad school, Lehman Brothers went under. Financial system collapsed. This was also kind of a turning point in institutional finance because it basically went from people placing trades on the floor, you know, humans being involved in these transactions and in trading, to completely automated. You know, everything now happens in data centers in New Jersey and Chicago and all of the major market centers. The floor of the New York Stock Exchange is basically a media studio. We entered the financial industry at that point. We were building software for institutions, algorithmic trading software,

• 4:26Speaker 02

  because that was a growing market. So we built our previous company Kronos as a software provider of low latency, high-performance trading platform technology. In 2011, we were in New York building Kronos and there was a confluence of a few different things. One of them being the Occupy Wall Street movement, which I think it exemplified a lot of the frustration that young people had with the markets. They realized you had people of our age group saying, we had this economic crisis. The recovery went to the top 1%. Financial system isn't really working for normal people. I still remember, actually, when we were in New York, we remember the Occupy Wall Street tent cities in Wall Street.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  When we moved to San Francisco and built our office there, we were on Market Street where the tents would just extend all the way through to, all the way to the ferry building. So this thing was just everywhere, ubiquitous, and young people from around the world were frustrated with the financial system. So I think our response to seeing this was to spring into action and actually build something to solve this problem. That's what led to Robinhood. And the idea was no account minimums, no $7 to $10 trade commission, a user interface that just worked and allowed you to go from not being an account holder to owning your first stock in five minutes or less.

• 5:49Harry Stebbings?

  Now, Vlad, if I was thinking about this interview beforehand, I was thinking, how could I make it the best it could be, but also be quite un-British? And maybe ask some of the harder questions. I thought I'd just have to ask the harder questions. So if we start at the crux of the issue, you know, a lot of people have suggested that Robinhood are maybe the enabler and not the victim of the events of the last few weeks. How would you respond to Robinhood being the enabler and not the victim?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Well, it depends how you would define the crisis. I think there's a lot of things going on and we're getting criticism from almost opposite ends of the spectrum for opposite reasons. There's a people like Charlie Munger who are looking at what's going on. They're basically like individuals shouldn't be investing, or if they are, they should be investing in passively managed index funds in their IRA accounts. And so what Robinhood is doing, facility- Or enabling people to buy these meme stocks is wrong and should be stopped. Then there there's the people that saw what happened on January 28th. And they're very frustrated that Robin Hood didn't allow people for that one day

• 6:55Speaker 02

  to buy shares in GameStop and AMC and these other meme stocks that people wanted to to buy shares in. There's almost two opposite views of what the crisis is, depending almost on your your ideology. I would say we're sorry to both of these people, right? I understand how everyone feels. I do think Robin Hood is, to address, you know, the first point, a source of good for this world. Having more and more people investing is has been a positive enabler. Because if you look back at wealth inequality and income inequality, these are big problems that are threatening the fabric of society. We can only connect the dots going backwards, but we can't really quite grasp all the implications of rising inequality.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  We're seeing it pop up in populism and in so many other places. You know, a lot of us have read Thomas Piketty's Capital, right? It's very clear if you look at the data. Inequality can largely be explained by the investing gap. The wealthy invest their money, and that has compounded historically at very, very high rates. The non wealthy spend their money and earn wages. And those wages, at least for the last several decades, have not been increasing at the type of rate that your investments have been have been increasing in the broad market indices.

• 8:12Harry Stebbings?

  When you say about the equality, someone said on Twitter, they DM'd me. And they said, Robin Hood in the past few weeks has been more Sheriff of Nottingham than a Robin Hood. But how do you feel when you hear that Sheriff of Nottingham versus Robin Hood, personally, man?

• 8:26Speaker 02

  I feel, you know, it hurts.

• 8:27Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  It hurts. There's no way to sugarcoat it. It hurts. I mean, the way that I get through it is just saying, hey, like, we're maybe going to be misunderstood for a short amount of time, but what we can do is just keep doing our thing. Try to communicate better with our customers and the general public. Because a lot of the people that are saying these things are non customers and they're just kind of. Hearing it indirectly from the media or for the public. I think over the long run, the truth will come out and people will understand after we get out of the nexus of this meme stock craze, if we ever do, maybe we won't, in which case we'll just learn to manage through it appropriately. But I think the truth will come out eventually and people will start to understand that if it wasn't for Robinhood, people wouldn't even be thinking about doing any of this stuff, right?

• 9:13Speaker 02

  This would just not be accessible to these people. So the idea that somehow the most wrong thing was this allegation of collusion that we're somehow colluding with hedge funds that we have no business relationship with to somehow restrict buying of these stocks. Yeah, I think that was just wrong and it's been a harmful narrative, not just to Robinhood, but I think to the sort of faith in how the financial system as a whole has been functioning.

• 9:39Harry Stebbings?

  Kenneth, where do you think that comes from? And what do you think you could have done to get ahead of it bluntly?

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Well, I think it came from the internet. I'm not sure. We don't have the tools to like specifically trace the origins of it. But I think from people's perspective, they like simple stories. The story that's out there on some of these internet forums is one of hedge funds versus individuals. You actually look at the data, it's never that simple. You have a lot of institutions and hedge funds that are actually long these stocks. You have some individuals that are shorting them because a lot of the retail platforms, not Robinhood, but other retail platforms allow shorting or allow, you know, other ways of going negative. I also shared the stat that with GME, according to CNBC, retail was a net seller, a net

• 10:28Speaker 02

  seller of GME Monday through Wednesday, which by the way, is before Robinhood put in place the buying restriction. So Monday through Wednesday, as the stock was increasing, retail overall was was net selling it, who was buying it then? And we don't have all of the data, but I assume it's institutions and a lot of these players that have been covering their shorts. I think the true story, when you get into the details, is very complicated. There's a lot of not just financial industry infrastructure in play. But also, a lot of institutions long, a lot of individuals short. I think that people just prefer a simple story that it takes two seconds to understand. The hedge funds versus the individual story.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  This idea that everyone is on one side or another and which side is Robinhood on is just very, very compelling to people. And it's so compelling that it just like spreads virally, like wildfire through the internet.

• 11:23Harry Stebbings?

  When I thought about this situation, I thought about the quote, there's no such thing as bad publicity. You know, I'm sure account signups went through the roof. I'm sure usage went through the roof. So, given everything that you've been through over the past month, would you agree or disagree with there's no such thing as bad publicity?

• 11:38Speaker 02

  I think, look, certainly you're right. We've had extraordinary growth. I mean, we've published a lot of our numbers. We've had extraordinary growth over 2021 that has surprised our expectations. We did have extraordinary growth Wednesday, leading up to our decision to halt opening positions in some of these stocks as well. It's hard to say counterfactually, would it have been even more extraordinary in hindsight? Maybe, maybe not. But I'll have to say, one thing that I'm very, very proud of is you look at the media. It seems like Robinhood is just making tons of, Robinhood is always in the media, right? Last March, March of 2020, when the market cratered because of the coronavirus pandemic,

• 12:21Speaker 02

  when people figured out it was getting serious, Robinhood had some service reliability issues. You know, we also experienced extraordinary growth. Our service reliability wasn't up to the standard that we hold ourselves to for our customers. The thing that I'm proudest through, which nobody's really talking about, is throughout this whole thing, with much, much higher growth, we were there serving our customers. And, you know, even though on that Thursday, people couldn't open positions in these 13 securities, thousands of other securities and all of the people that were investing for the long term are buy and hold investors. They experienced, we were up and available for them largely. And I'm, I'm very proud of all the investments that we've made dealing with that March of 2020 issue.

• 13:04Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you, it's such a unique time and challenge for you to go through. Have you learned anything about yourself and about the business? When testifying, I guess specifically, when testifying before a congressional committee, because it is a unique experience.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  It's a unique experience. I think it's challenging. I don't know. I'm still struggling a little bit with what exactly the goal of that is in terms of what could it accomplish? Just because the format is so unique, right? Like you have five minutes per representative to answer questions. And actually, that five minutes is divided among, we had five witnesses. And obviously, I got the bulk of the questions, but in some of these cases, it's like, you know, Mr. Tenev, can you explain payment for order flow? And all of your arrangements there, and you have 12 seconds to answer that. And I know people are frustrated that, you know, I didn't give detailed and complete answers to some of these questions.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  But I'm also thinking about what I can say about market microstructure that will make sense to anyone, not just the listeners, but you know, the representatives in 12 seconds. I just can't believe that that's like the best forum to educate either the public or our representatives on what's going on.

• 14:16Harry Stebbings?

  I think we're always quite quick in these situations to forget the human behind this in many respects. You left your wife, your kids at home that morning for a very unique and unusual day. Can I ask Vlad, as a person and as a leader, were you nervous and how did you feel going into it?

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Well, I tried to get as prepared as possible. At the end of the day, like the facts are the facts. Robin Hood played this by the books or as close to possible as to what the books are for something that's never happened. One thing we pride ourselves in is putting the customer first and operating with the highest possible standards of of conduct. And so was I nervous? Yeah, it was a new experience for me, so I was nervous from that sense. But I also was not nervous because I don't really have anything to hide. I mean, if people want to know what the VAR charges and the capital requirements that were mandated by Dodd-Frank that we had to comply with, you know, we're an open book on that stuff, like we can share as much information as we have.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Ultimately, we didn't really have much of a choice. We had to do this or else we could have had a much bigger problem that was systemic and financial system destabilizing. We had to comply with all of these requirements.

• 15:29Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, one big element surrounding the events in the last month was also the capital raising in conjunction with it. I guess my question too is like, why did you need so much cash so quickly? And I guess like in terms of capital requirements within your business, how you think about that?

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know if you had a chance to read my written congressional testimony. There's a little chart on, I don't know if it was page nine or page 10, that showed the increase in the VAR charge. So VAR stands for value at risk and it's basically the relevant element here. You looked at what the VAR charge was on Monday versus Wednesday, and it was something like a 10x increase just in a couple of days. When something could increase 10x in a number of days, it becomes very, very difficult to model. And so we were able to meet our requirements by putting in place restrictions on the opening of positions in all of these securities. But we obviously had two things in mind.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  One is we don't want to have low limits, so let's raise the capital so that, you know, we could tolerate VAR charge increasing much higher than that. But it's also, we saw that we were still number one on the App Store, so we had all these new customers coming. Presumably, a lot of them wanted to transact in these stocks too. So we were kind of anticipating, like, what would the VAR charge be if we had 20, 30, 40% more users? How long are we going to be number one in the App Store? What if we're there for like many, many months? I mean, what if it's like Zoom? Zoom hit number one on the App Store when the pandemic started and has been like sitting there ever since then. So I think the uncertainty around what the future would bring led to us wanting to raise an excess amount of capital.

• 17:12Harry Stebbings?

  I guess some people suggested that, you know, you maybe put the interests of the business ahead of the interests of the customers in terms of restricting customer trading activity. How do you respond to that suggestion?

• 17:23Speaker 02

  The suggestion is ludicrous for two reasons. One, I just want to say, everything I stand for is allowing customers to be able to trade what they want to trade, when they want to do it. We also have the majority of our customers who are buy and hold investors, and it's in no one's interest for Robinhood to be out of compliance and breaking laws because the outcomes of that are much worse. You know, we want to avoid a situation where none of our customers can trade anything, right? That would have been a worse situation. A lot of people also have asked me, oh, why don't you just halt both sides of it? Why did you only allow selling but not buying? To that, I have two very simple reasons.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  If you have a customer who's unable to close their positions at the all time high, as bad as this was, not allowing customers to close their positions would have been much worse. I mean, there would have been like rioting on the streets if we had not allowed selling.

• 18:18Harry Stebbings?

  Totally agree in terms of not allowing the selling. Are there any other misconceptions? You say that was ludicrous and I totally appreciate that sentiment. Are there any others where you're like, man, that's just ludicrous? And I've heard this too many times too. You've done these interviews, Vlad, I've heard you on, you know, the all in, Dave Portnoy. You've done them. Are there any others where you're like, I keep getting these questions and actually I'm tired of it. This is not how it was.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  I think the whole thing about like, you should have seen this coming. I think if you understand and if you look at the numbers, you can't really see it coming. Things are changing by orders of magnitude in a couple of days, practically overnight. I was out there saying like, T plus two needs to go. We need to go to instant settlement. The DTCC actually came out with a statement saying we're pushing towards T plus one. Of course, it's going to take a couple of years, so it's going to be slow. So I don't know if that's enough. We have to do more to make sure that there's systemic change, preventing this from happening again.

• 19:14Harry Stebbings?

  Carlos, do you think this is like a seismic shift in terms of where power sits? In terms of the seismic shift from large institutions and large corporates? And that power shifting to the wave of consumer and consumer power in the hands of many of our internet forums? Is this like a permanent shift or do you think it's a temporary shift?

• 19:33Speaker 02

  I think it's a permanent shift. I think there's a movement in this country that has started and is continuing to have more of the investing done by individuals directly. And of course, you can say a lot of these institutions are investing on behalf of individuals as well. You know, people point out that the hedge funds have as their investors pension funds, university endowments, all these other people. But there's still intermediaries and sometimes intermediaries upon intermediaries. I do think what you're seeing now Is people investing their money directly? And I think that's a great thing. And I don't think that's going to slow down.

• 20:09Harry Stebbings?

  How can you model a future, though? When this could happen at any point. Some internet forum could do, choose another stock. The internet could consolidate around it and boom.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  And then every single person could buy one stock.

• 20:23Harry Stebbings?

  How do you model and plan it? When the power shifts to such volatile trading mechanisms and waves?

• 20:30Speaker 02

  I think that's a good question. I think that rather than thinking about modeling that, we like to think about how can we be robust to it, right? Like, we're a platform provider. Our customers expect us to be available to operate at low latencies and to allow them to, to not just close their existing positions, but open accounts smoothly and, and open up new positions. So we have to think about how Robinhood can be robust to it. And we have to comply with the rules and the various deposit requirements and bar charges. Our way right now, without rule changes and changes to how deposit requirements are calculated, is to raise billions of dollars, which we've done. But then we also have to take a look at these rules and make reasonable and surgical suggestions

• 21:15Speaker 02

  for ways in which they don't account for risk appropriately. I'm all for risk management and protecting against systemic issues at these clearinghouses. But I think one thing we have to start looking at is this value at risk charge. Is it actually an accurate measurement of risk? Or is it something that is having unforeseen effects that are actually increasing risk in certain circumstances and should be changed?

• 21:41Harry Stebbings?

  What's, what do you think is a more accurate measurement of risk? Before we move on to your leadership and that, what do you think is a more accurate measurement of risk?

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Well, I think first of all, there's a couple of different critiques of the value at risk. One of the more interesting ones is from Nassim Taleb, who wrote Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan and Anti-Fragile. So he writes about this stuff. He wrote this post, I want to say in the 90s, about how like value at risk has to go. His view was that it's actually not a good measurement of risk because it misses tail events, because it, it kind of. assumes a normal distribution and normal standard deviations. But market returns aren't normally distributed and they have fat tails. So value at risk actually will will lead to you missing things and not properly measuring your risk. In this particular case, you look at value at risk. I think the problem is a little bit different.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  The problem is that, you know, when there's volatile events happening in the market, a lot of the brokers actually need that cash the most, right? They need that cash for their business and you end up having to put larger and larger amounts of money to these clearing houses, larger amounts of your corporate cash, precisely at the moment that you need your corporate cash to like run your business and manage your own risk. I think it's having somewhat of a perverse effect of exacerbating issues in times of volatility, rather than preventing and protecting against them.

• 23:04Harry Stebbings?

  I do have to ask, you know, everyone's asked you every question about every area of the business, but I'm intrigued, you know, more for you personally. What have you learned about managing through a crisis as the leader? It's such a unique experience. I'm sure Zach's been through similar experiences, but it is a unique experience. So what have you learned about really managing efficiently through a crisis?

• 23:23Speaker 02

  I've learned that communication is very important and it's perhaps the most important thing. We've gotten better as an organization despite what you're seeing out there. I mean, we have a great communications team. We're all learning through the first time. We're building scar tissue for how to deal with this. Ultimately, I think that the next time you see this, you're already seeing this happen. Robin Hood is becoming much more transparent with the inner workings of the financial system, with the general public and our customers. I haven't really been on Twitter very much historically. Like I would post stuff from time to time, but not really sort of actively engaging. I'm learning that the public wants and expects more of that from us. They expect not just, you know, their social media companies and tech companies,

• 24:06Speaker 02

  but also their financial companies to operate much more in the open and demystify some of these things that are convoluted and have been hidden for for very long.

• 24:16Harry Stebbings?

  Do you enjoy that, Vlad? Because it is a big change and now you need you yourself for a brand, not just Robin Hood and bluntly, the tech company founders. Today are celebrities like any other celebrities, whether we like it or not. Do you enjoy that?

• 24:29Speaker 02

  My primary goal is just to serve our customers. I view it as a means to an end, the end being happy customers that love our service. So I'll continue to do whatever I have to do to make our customers as happy as possible and increase the base level of happiness in the world.

• 24:47Harry Stebbings?

  Ted, tell me, like, there were some hard moments. I honestly, last time I think, you know, how do you deal with the shit hit the fan moments? But like, this was a real shit hit the fan moment. What did you do to get through it? Like, I, you know, what's your coping mechanisms?

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's such a great question. I think that a lot of times people mention, you know, that there are peacetime leaders and there's wartime leaders, right? And I actually perform probably even better under a lot of pressure. Not to say that I want to invite more pressure or invite that, but I think the organization also performs well under pressure. The priorities become extremely clear, extremely clear, like there's a clarity around what to do and it just gets done very quickly. Raising the capital to unrestricted, communicating with customers and improving the way, the speed and kind of the accuracy and clarity with which we communicate.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Making sure the service is reliable. Forget to some extent, you know, debating what the H2, you know, 2021 roadmap is going to be. Like, let's make sure that we can scale and serve three X peak load from our previous peak as quickly as possible. What do we need to do that? I think there's sort of a tunnel vision around what the priorities of the organization are in a crisis that that's very helpful.

• 26:01Harry Stebbings?

  What did you say to the team? Last one before the quick fire. What did you say to the team, you know, because obviously when they are, think of your, anyone from a marketer to an engineer and they're getting a lot of discussion from friends and getting a lot of questions. What did you say to them in terms of keeping their heads down and running their own race and keeping morale high internally?

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Said, think about the customer. I think the thing is that people at Robinhood didn't have much of an opportunity throughout the past couple of weeks to really engage with the public too much. Because everyone was just like sprinting to make sure our service was reliable. The people that weren't directly involved in that all helped out and basically did customer support. Customer support is actually another area we've been investing a huge amount of resources to, and it's gotten a lot better. We keep rolling out more and more live phone support use cases. We're seeing more automation. We're seeing upstream issues being resolved in the product much more rapidly. Everyone has an ability to contribute and it's very clear what we have to do.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  And certainly, I think my message has been, think of the customer. We have a huge responsibility to our customers and this is our moment. We've always talked about financial services being as culturally relevant as music and the arts. And that idea has been very, very abstract in the past, but it's very clear to people now. Like investing is as culturally relevant as music and the arts and sports. So we've got to seize that moment and just execute so well that people are like, wow. Like this company just proved that they're the market leader and they deserve to have our business and remain the market leader.

• 27:41Harry Stebbings?

  Final one before the quick fire, but I've thought there's so many times when I've seen it on Twitter. And it's the picture of you and then there's a picture of the guy from Succession with the long hair. And I always think back to our first interview and kind of knowing you a little bit and I'm like, geez, I wonder how Vlad feels when he sees that comparison. How do you feel when you see that comparison? Are you like, damn it, that guy's a good looking guy? Or are you like, damn it, I wish these people would stop comparing us?

• 28:06Speaker 02

  I actually, I prefer the Adam Driver one. I think Adam Driver is a more, his range as an actor is a little bit broader.

• 28:15Harry Stebbings?

  But I do want to dive into a quick fire Vlad. So I'll say a short statement. As you know, you give me your immediate thoughts. Ready to rock and roll?

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Yes, I am. I will do zero thinking.

• 28:24Harry Stebbings?

  What three traits would you most like your children to adopt?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Courage, truth-seeking, kindness.

• 28:29Harry Stebbings?

  In crisis times, heroes come to the forefront, personally, professionally, in whatever way. Who was a hero for you in this crisis and what did they do?

• 28:37Speaker 02

  I guess the number one person that if I had to pick just one, it would be our mutual friend, Mickey Malka. Basically agreed to fund our initial five hundred million dollars with five-minute phone call.

• 28:49Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, Mickey is one of the most special people in the business, so that makes me very happy to hear. But personal, what media training have you done personally? Because you've developed a lot in terms of your interview style.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  I think practice helps. Practice and doing a lot of, a lot of these, I think, has made me feel a little bit more comfortable. And just also getting out of the eye of the storm or the, the edge of the eye of the storm. Because when you're trying to talk about something while actively like solving it and there's so much uncertainty, it, it makes it very, very difficult. You know, that first Thursday when I was on CNN and Bloomberg and CNBC, it was very much in the thick of it. You know, I was running on fumes myself. So those were probably not my best showings. I recognize that.

• 29:35Harry Stebbings?

  Were you getting any sleep, Joe's aside?

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Not much, to be honest with you. I mean, a, a little bit, but I'd like to get my six hours plus. And it's been challenging over the past couple of weeks, but hopefully it'll equilibrate over time. I sleep Friday nights, so Friday nights are always kind of the most relaxed night of the week if you're in the financial services industry, because the markets aren't open on weekends.

• 29:58Harry Stebbings?

  What's Vlad time? Like my time on the weekend, I go for long walks and long runs. What's like your Vlad time? Like, I love this. This is where I'm me.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  I also like walks. I'm also really interested in astronomy. I got into it probably more seriously last summer. I don't know if you remember the comet Neo Eyes that came pretty close to Earth. So I was in Southern California at the time and I was like, you know what? I'm going to get a really nice pair of binoculars so that I can see this thing. And then, you know, I, I had the binoculars and then I started getting curious about all sorts of other things, like let's look at. Mars, let's look at Jupiter. Wow, you can see the moons of Jupiter in your binoculars. How cool is that? And you can see Saturn, but it's a little bit hard to see because, you know, you have to keep your hands super still. You can't see the rings. So then there was this great conjunction on December 21st last year.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  I don't know if you heard about it, where Jupiter and Saturn got super close together. It's the closest they've been in something like 600 years. And so you could actually see them in the same field of view of a high magnification telescope eyepiece. So I was like, okay, I'm going to get a nice telescope so I can look at this thing.

• 31:06Harry Stebbings?

  What's your most lavish purchase?

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Probably a telescope. I mean, it's not super lavish, right? But yeah, having a nice telescope is certainly a bit of a luxury. And I've been getting into astrophotography and kind of taking pictures of the planets and the nebulae and the moons, and it just puts it all in perspective. You realize like how small you are, how little the universe cares.

• 31:27Harry Stebbings?

  Final one, Vlad. What do the next five years hold for you and for Robinhood? Paint that picture for me. Now we've got a fresh start. What does the next five years hold?

• 31:35Speaker 02

  Well, I think despite all of the growth and all the things we've accomplished, there's still a lot more to do. We're still available only in the United States. I'm disappointed that we can't serve your grandmother in the UK just yet. We'd like to change that. There's also lots more products that people want in their financial lives and already use their wallets for. So I think Robinhood can really evolve to be the money button on your phone, just like truly your mobile wallet. And then I also think, even look at our core business of equities, options and crypto. There's more to do. Still a little bit under half of households in the US are investing. But we'd really like to think about, what does that number look like if it was 95% plus?

• 32:17Speaker 02

  What if 95% plus, close to 100% of people are investing? I think you realize that Robinhood's had some impact, but there's a lot more to be done and it's a huge opportunity.

• 32:29Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, I will tell my grandmother that she will soon be able to use Robinhood in the coming years. I'm sure she'll be thrilled. But Vlad, listen, thank you so much for doing this. I honestly really appreciate it. I know it's been a busy few weeks, so it means a lot and thanks for joining me.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Anytime, man. I appreciate you as well.

• 32:45Harry Stebbings?

  Very special to have Vlad back on there and I want to say again a huge thank you to him. He's been insanely busy, obviously, over the last month. So for him to take the time out, it really does mean a lot to me. So Vlad, huge, huge thanks for that. And if you'd like to see more from us behind the scenes, you can on Instagram at H Stebbings 1996 with two Bs. However, before we leave you today, did you know that more than 80% of US public stock is owned by just 10% of Americans? This divide is even greater in the private markets. Carter makes it as easy to issue equity to your employees as it is to issue payroll and for employees as easy to accept it too. More than 16,000 companies issue equity to their employees through Carter. Whether you're just getting started or getting ready to go public, the team at Carter can help. Check them out at Carter.com. And then another

• 33:29Harry Stebbings?

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• 34:13Harry Stebbings?

  the myriad of issues that arise throughout a fund's lifetime. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public, head over to Cooley.com and also check out CooleyGo.com. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I can't wait to bring you an incredible episode with Daniel Eck, founder and CEO at Spotify on Monday.