Robinhood Founder & CEO, Vlad Tenev: Robinhood’s $85BN Resurgence & Tokenizing SpaceX & OpenAI

1. What Line of Business Will Be the Biggest For Vlad in 5 Years Time

Everyone likes tokenization in principle, but it's not really as attractive when it's being done to you. I think it's important for the tokenization mechanism to work without the opt-in of the companies that are being tokenized. I do think it's a big problem that a retail investor can't get access to Stripe shares. I've shared this viewpoint with Patrick and John, and they give me some variant of, “Oh, well, we're just a small Irish family company. Please don't tokenize my shares.”

2. How Robinhood 4x’d Its Market Cap in 8 Months

Vlad, dude, it is so lovely to have you back in the studio. Do you know what's funny? When you were last in that chair, you had a market cap of $35 billion, and today I think the market cap is about $85 billion. And so it's been a pretty good 8 months.

That was 8 months ago? Really?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's amazing. And I felt pretty good back then. It's always nice when the market cap goes up; things get easier. You walk a little bit straighter, and people listen to what you have to say. So, we don't look at it. Of course, that's what they tell you: you can't pay attention to it.

Is that the biggest load of BS in the company? I'm friends with Daniel at Spotify, and it's $148 billion now. And I think he feels a lot better now—it's $148 billion.

He does. Yeah. I think it's very difficult. I don't know if it's easier with other companies, but my product pushes stock prices into your brain by using it. It's just hard to ignore. So, I think it's especially difficult for a business like ours.

It's the most meta thing, isn't it? It's like you guys looking at stock prices on Robinhood.

Yeah.

It's like talking about doing a podcast about podcasting. I did just want to start on that because it has been insane. I tweeted last night: this is kind of the story of Wall Street, bluntly, which is just this insane rise of Robinhood in the last year. If you were to put it down to 1 or 2 things, what do you think the Street has appreciated that they did not before?

I think we've been saying the same things and articulating a strategy pretty clearly over the past 2 years, really, and I think it just takes time to understand that it's working. We've gotten fortunate in a sense that many things have worked very, very well.

When you look at cost stabilization and reduction, to what extent is that efficient management and just becoming leaner versus AI introduction and AI being the driver of that?

AI is a big part of it, and I think we've been pretty mum on how much we've been using it internally. I think we've been talking about it in very general terms, and we've started to roll out AI products. Actually, Robinhood Cortex, our AI system, rolled out to customers today just a little bit earlier.

3. AI Writes 50% of All Net New Code at Robinhood

But the impact that it's had on internal teams, ranging from software engineering to customer support—the really big internal teams—has been huge.

In terms of software engineering, a likely Benioff statement was that it was 50% of Salesforce's new code today. What would you say yours is?

4. Why Robinhood Built a Secret ChatGPT for Support

I think that sounds right. It's difficult to say with these agentic systems, right? We've moved from GitHub Copilot, which is an autocomplete system, to Cursor, and now things like Windsurf, where all of the code is written by AI. The adoption rate within engineering for us is close to 100%. So, it's hard to even determine what the human-generated code is. If I had to guess, it's the minority.

5. “We Were Shipping Nothing”: Vlad on the 2020–2022 Culture Crisis

Totally get that. Customer-support-wise, you said that's the other big pillar.

I think we're best-in-class there, actually. Even stronger than the dedicated customer-support AI companies in terms of what we've done there.

And so you've built your own, or do you use off-the-shelf?

We've built our own.

Wow. Why did you decide that versus using off-the-shelf?

Well, first of all, when we started, the off-the-shelf companies, like Sierra, for instance, were just getting off the ground. The big companies that we were using—we were a big Salesforce customer—were not as developed yet, and so we built a lot of things.

For a company like Robinhood, a lot of the complex work is in system integration. It's getting all of the data to answer customers' queries, and we're starting to do actions. Based on your query, we need to do some kind of action, and that requires a deep level of integration with our back-end systems that I think most vendors haven't really figured out how to do yet.

Why have you been quiet around it when the Street clearly appreciates AI-efficiency stories within public companies?

Yeah, I think we've been thinking about how to tell the story better, and one of the things we've been thinking about is: should we just have an event, like a product event, like we just had in the South of France?

Oh, that sucks for a location, dude. Where are we going to choose? Let's do the South of France.

Yeah. Well, it's probably not going to be in the South of France again because we just did that, but there's lots of great places to have events. And I think there's now enough meat and enough things that we can talk about that it would actually be a really cool event.

Would you ever make your customer-support tool a SaaS product that you would open-source to everyone? Revolut has now done this with its HR tool.

Yeah. We've had discussions about that internally. I think the challenge is that the value is in the deep integration with our proprietary data, and I don't know if we want to get in the business of going into companies and doing deep integrations with their proprietary data.

But generally, I ask the question for everything: if we build a great tool internally, can we actually make it available as a service to others? Because that's the way to ensure that it stays great. There's external pressure from customers, not just internal teams. So, I'm a huge fan of that type of platformization.

Where do you think AI is not where you would most like it to be?

I think there's still a problem with hallucinations, and there's a lot of work that needs to be done to scaffold against that. That's actually one of the things that was the origin for the company that I'm chairman of, Harmonic. Can we design a system that prevents hallucinations by design and ensures that every step of the reasoning is logical and follows from the previous one?

6. The One Customer Type That Transformed the Business

I think that entails a different approach to generating AI output, one where every piece of output is checked before it comes out and there's a very clear measure of correctness. So, I think that's going to be an interesting system that will change everything.

We're going to get to Harmonic because it's super exciting, and congrats on the Series B. Super exciting there.

Thank you.

The product expansion has been insane. I spoke to Neal Mohan specifically before, who said about the speed of product build. When we look at it, though, you started with young first-time traders, added options and crypto, attracted maybe higher-risk profiles, then speculative traders, high-volume spec traders. Robinhood Gold and Cash Management led to more.

I guess my question is: how do you think about the different customer profile types you serve today, and how has that changed over time in your thinking, given the massive product expansion recently?

I think there's 1 big change, which is that recently we started thinking about not just the millennial and Gen Z customer, but also the active trader—the digitally native active trader—and that's a very different type of profile.

These are folks that you can almost think of as having some similarity with gamers. They've got the screens, the headphones, the fancy keyboards, and they're just locked in. They're locked into their system, and they have very specific needs. They need to be at the frontier of technology and innovation. They care about speed. They care about latency. And we really had to get into that customer's head to design products like our futures ladder and Robinhood Legend.

Why did you decide that was a market that you wanted to go after?

We were aware of this being a market that was important to us back in 2019, but we weren't really doing much about it. We had our strategy: we're going to make an extremely simple-to-use mobile app with zero commissions. And we were targeting first-timers because the thesis was, well, first-timers would benefit from this. They like ease of use, and commissions are really a big barrier if you're starting with $100.

That wouldn't have been possible before.

And what happened was, when we went live, we started getting active traders that were high volume, incidentally, without actually going after that customer base. And that was because the value prop of zero commissions was so strong that if you were someone that was paying $1,000 a month in commissions, you would do all of the fancy research elsewhere and just do your trading on Robinhood.

The value prop was strong even though it wasn't explicitly designed for that. And so we built an active-trader business incidentally without even trying. We were aware of this. We were like, “Wow, a lot of our revenue, which is much higher than we anticipated when we modeled this first-time-investor business, is driven by a well-defined, circumscribed chunk of our customers.” And we ignored that for a while because what we were doing was working very, very well.

But in 2022, it became apparent that we weren't treating this customer base well. They were even more important because they're actually resilient since they're active. They have bearish strategies. When the market's moving down, they remain active; when the market's moving sideways, they can do multi-leg options.

From that point on, we realized we weren't serving them well. They were turning to other platforms; they were outgrowing us. So we put some of our most hardcore people on the task of making Robinhood the best platform for active traders, and not just serving them incidentally.

I think that was actually the number 1 reason behind our business turnaround. It's realizing that that was actually the core of our business and that we had to invest in it in order to have resources to do other things.

7. “CoreWeave Is Retail’s Way Into AI” - The Meme Stock Defense

Well, do you think the memeification of stocks is a good thing or not?

What do you mean by the memeification of stocks?

When you have things that bluntly take public attention and really capture the zeitgeist, like—I think you've bluntly put the cool and the culture in them, actually, at this point—but the GameStops of the world, is that a good thing because it actually brings more people into markets? They can learn. They're entering the market for the first time.

Or is it fundamentally bad because, bluntly, it's inflated? It's not artificially inflated because it is real, but it's not based on fundamentals.

I think that people are buying these stocks generally for a very different reason than a meme coin, for example, or even GameStop back in 2021. I think they legitimately believe that these are going to be gigantic industries.

CoreWeave, for instance, is one of the few opportunities that, as a public markets investor, you can actually buy into AI and the growth of the AI industry. If you think about it, what are your options if you want to invest in AI as a retail investor? You've got Nvidia.

AMD.

Yeah, I mean, AMD, but really Nvidia is $4 trillion, right? You've got Tesla, where AI is maybe—I don't know—10% to 20% of the story there. So you don't have too many opportunities at sub-trillion valuations.

When CoreWeave comes along, that's AI exposure at a lower level, and people are interested in that. And then Circle—you have the stablecoin industry, right? People are betting that that's going to be a big thing. That's sort of clean exposure to stablecoins.

In terms of the availability of exposure, you guys did this fascinating new product, so to speak, in terms of the tokenization of private companies. Talk to me about the decision around that new product. Take me to that room. What was the discussion like, and how did you come to the decision that this was a product you wanted to do?

Yeah, I mean, it was very clear from the beginning. I actually wrote an article in The Washington Post in January that argued for tokenization.

You said tokenization will be the biggest innovation in finance in the last decade.

Yeah. Yeah, I said that yesterday. It wasn't quite as clear, I guess, back in January for my Washington Post op-ed, but I think there are 2 benefits of tokenization that are very, very extreme.

One is, like stablecoins, it's going to be the easiest way to get exposure to U.S. assets if you're outside of the U.S. Stablecoins are very popular outside the U.S. for people who want to get their hands on dollars. In the same way, I think stock tokens will become the best way to get exposure to U.S. stocks and other assets. So that's the ex-U.S. use case.

The use case that's going to be very powerful even within the U.S., where we actually have decent access through Robinhood and other things to U.S. stocks, is illiquid assets that have not been successfully made tradable or accessible to retail, like private companies, but also real estate and even things like art.

So I think in the U.S. that is actually very meaningful, and we wanted to demonstrate that we have the technology built to do this outside the U.S. I mean, it works, and all that's left is just details and, in the U.S., regulatory clarity.

So we wanted to start with the 2 companies that I think are significant, hard to get, challenging, but also in demand, and that's SpaceX and OpenAI, which, incidentally, were the 2 that I used as examples when I wrote my opinion piece on this.

8. Inside Robinhood’s Tokenized Private Shares Product

I totally agree. I have more LPs than ever calling me about access to both of them, so I completely agree with you in terms of those being the demand side. The question I have for you is, just so I actually understand: if it's a token, it's not equity, or it is a reflection of equity? What am I actually buying?

Yeah. I'd say the analogy is to a stablecoin. Basically, if you think about it, we have some traditional assets in a box. We tokenize that 1-for-1, and the tokens actually get put on blockchains where they're tradable.

For stablecoins, Circle, for example, has some U.S. Treasury bills and notes in a box that back the tokens that are freely tradable. So in this way, we have access to private company shares or other types of exposure.

OpenAI doesn't have shares. They're a nonprofit, so they have profit participation units and convertible interest securities that give shares upon a successful conversion to a for-profit. OpenAI is particularly complicated, but you can think of it as exposure in an SPV, like a traditional instrument that then gets held by Robinhood, tokenized, and given to retail.

They were a little bit upset by this.

Yes.

Were you surprised that they were upset by it? But do you think that was unfair?

I thought part of it was unfair. They issued a statement that said, “Please be careful,” which I thought was a little bit gratuitous. But I think it could have been worse.

I understand from OpenAI's perspective that they've got a lot of stuff going on. They're trying to convert to a for-profit. The last thing they want to deal with is some guy tokenizing their stocks. They don't even understand exactly how that works, but it's sort of a confusing distraction at best.

But I would say it's in line with their mission. Their stated mission is to build artificial general intelligence and make sure it benefits all of humanity. So one way to make sure it benefits all of humanity and not just executives and wealthy investors is to make humanity have ownership of it, which up until now hasn't been possible.

Some of the most important companies of our time have not been accessible to retail, and I think that's a huge problem.

Is there anything that you would have done differently about the launch or the messaging?

I think there are always things to learn. For example, I think this statement that it was somehow unsafe was not very positive for us. If you look at OpenAI Newsroom's Twitter, this was actually the most popular tweet that they had ever tweeted. It had the most likes and reposts, which surprised me.

I didn't quite think it would resonate so much. It's so new, so I don't know if I would have done much differently.

I think the problem is everyone likes tokenization in principle, right? But it's not really as attractive when it's being done to you. It's sort of like digital NIMBYism, right? Everyone's like, “Oh, great. Tokenization. Can I make it happen over there?”

The problem that's happened in private markets in general is the best companies have lots of options. They can raise money from anywhere, so they don't consider retail. That leads to this adverse selection problem where, basically, the only companies tapping retail are the ones that don't have any other options.

That's why all of the initiatives to give access to retail to these opportunities have failed thus far. So I think it's important for the tokenization mechanism to work without the opt-in of the companies that are being tokenized.

I think that's actually the innovation that we've been able to drive. We figured out how to make this work without actually having the companies opt in.

Are you fearful that regulation will stop that? Because if it works, this could be the biggest line of revenue in your business.

No, I think it could be big. I would say that in the EU, it's pretty clear. The EU has clear crypto-asset regulation in the form of MiCA.

In the U.S., more work needs to be done for sure. There are 2 elements to it: accredited-investor laws and crypto laws, both of which need to happen in order to truly unlock this.

My belief is part of the reason why we're demonstrating this in the EU, aside from just giving our EU customers access to all these amazing products, is that it could show the rest of the world that there's real value here.

You heard the SEC Chair Paul Atkins say, “Tokenization is an innovation, and the SEC has to stop putting up roadblocks and start embracing these innovative technologies.” So I think we've got support from both sides, in effect, to improve this.

9. “Capital as a Service” - Vlad’s Wild Vision for Startup Fundraising

How do you think about inventory? And what I mean by that is, you mentioned the 2 there that are kind of the gold standard. Could you go as low as a Series B?

When you look at Harmonic, I know you announced a round today. a16z did it, Kleiner Perkins did it, and you're the chairman. There are a lot of people who would love to buy into that Harmonic token right now if you put it on Robinhood.

Does it go that low? How do you think about where the line ends in terms of accessibility?

It's a great question. The intent would be to go as low as possible.

If you talk to crypto people, crypto people will tell you, “Well, the future is on-chain issuance. What you’re doing right now is not ideal compared to on-chain issuance, where the equity goes on-chain from the very beginning.” What I tell them is nobody gives a shit about on-chain issuance. The only place where people are even thinking about on-chain issuance is in your head.

What people want is capital as a service. If you’re an entrepreneur, you want capital in your bank account quickly and with as little friction as possible. I think that’s where this eventually ends. You should be able to go on Robinhood, or maybe other services as well, upload some information, and actually compete in a marketplace. There will be market pressure to make the information as clear and compelling as possible.

You push a button, and then money enters your bank account, and you can get back to running your business. I think that’s the logical conclusion. It’s capital at all stages, but perhaps the most interesting is the earliest stages. If we succeed in doing this, there will be more startups. It’ll become easier to create a startup.

I think it actually pays homage to what crowdfunding always promised to be.

Yeah, but never actually was. So, I totally get that. What does that look like, then, in terms of the rollout for the next 6 to 12 months of tokenization, and what assets you tokenize, when, and how you do it?

What’s live right now in Europe, fully live, is public stocks, and we’ve got 200-plus of all the big ones. We’re going to continue to roll that out and get to thousands. We will make the private stocks tradable as well, so we’ll get those—

Inventory. Sorry, just pause there. Why does inventory matter in the thousands? When you actually look at trading volumes and see the concentration of names that trading volumes go toward, do you need much more than 200?

I think that you never know what’s going to become popular. There’s always a long tail, and something happens in a random company, and it’s interesting. We don’t really want to be in the business of picking winners and losers or deciding what stocks you want to buy.

We’d like to keep it simple and just say, generally speaking, if it’s listed, we’d like to actually offer it. There have been issues where, unfortunately, sub-dollar stocks are left listed for too long, and some of these have turned into scams. I think that’s a problem we’d like the listing exchanges to deal with.

We’ve had to deviate from that to some degree, but ideally, if it’s listed, we just turn it on and we’re good to go.

So, we move from 200 to 1,000 there. Great. What else?

There are a couple of things. On the public stock token side, this product will progress in a couple of stages. We’re in stage 1, where every time we mint or burn a new token, we actually go to the market—to Nasdaq or likely NYSE, an actual exchange—for every trade.

Every time you buy, a new one is minted. The second phase is that we put these tokens on Bitstamp, our exchange. Then you can trade the tokens directly against other cryptos and dollars. That needs stage 1 because we need to have a significant number of these tokens minted before we can enable the liquidity.

10. The $100M Revenue Line Vlad Wishes He Could Kill

Phase 2 unlocks 24/7 trading. In phase 3, you can actually interface with the blockchain directly and self-custody. You can do all the collateralized lending and borrowing, all the DeFi, and self-custody. That’s when things start to get really interesting. I think the crypto wallet will be a first-class experience for all these tokenized assets.

Is that a $100 million revenue line for you? Because you have 9 products that are $100 million revenue lines. Now—

The crypto wallet, up until recently, has not even been monetized. I think we’re just starting to monetize it.

When you look at the 9, which do you think is most underappreciated?

I guess I don’t really even think about it that way. We break it down as 9 revenue streams, but I just think of it as: We get customers, customers become Robinhood Gold subscribers, and once you’re a Robinhood Gold subscriber, we get you to use all of our products and increase your average revenue per user on the platform.

We do break it up into business lines, but it’s sort of a map of the world, right? What I really care about is the reality of how many customers we get, how much money they’re putting into the platform, and whether we’re serving all of their financial needs. You can slice and dice it in lots of different ways, but if they’re putting all their money into Robinhood, I think we’re happy.

In 5 years’ time, which do you think will be the biggest revenue generator?

I think crypto is interesting because right now crypto is this separate segment of the business. We look at it, and the outside world perceives it as a different asset, right? It’s like, “How big is your crypto business going to be relative to, say, your options business or equities business?” It’s very much, “This is a separate asset that you’re trading.”

But what we’re starting to see already is that crypto is going to be this layer behind everything. Everything is going to be powered by crypto to some degree.

What do you mean by that, just so I understand?

I’ll just give you an example. Right now, Robinhood Gold has an interest component where you can earn interest on your cash. As we get stablecoins out, crypto will have that as well. You’ll be able to earn interest on your stablecoins, and that’ll be a significant business. You might consider that part of crypto, but that’s something akin to a savings account.

Prediction markets, over time—you see overseas things like Polymarket. That’s a prediction markets business, but it’s also powered by crypto.

The joy of me is I have no ego, so I’m not afraid to ask very stupid questions. I hang out with likely Jack Zhang from Airwallex, who—I don’t know if you know him—but he’s fucking brilliant, like one of the most underappreciated founders.

He’s very negative on the future of stablecoins. How do you see the next 3 years of stablecoins, and would you share his negativity?

I don’t know if I would go that far. There are definitely use cases. I’ll just give you an example: Robinhood uses stablecoins for our corporate purposes. We have this use case where we trade a lot of crypto, and that requires settling with counterparties.

When our customers buy a bunch of Bitcoin, we have counterparties that we have to send dollars to, and they send us the Bitcoin back. During market hours, Monday through Friday, everything works fine because we can settle intraday. We can wire them dollars, they send us the crypto to our wallets, and everything’s fine.

But what happens on a weekend? What happens on a weekend where the banking rails are closed, something’s happening in the crypto markets, and we’ve got retail customers that want to buy billions of dollars of crypto? You have a difficult situation, potentially, because we can’t move the money.

Either you have to take counterparty risk—meaning you have to trust that one side will deliver the dollars eventually, when they can, and send them the crypto ahead of time—which is a tough one, because counterparty risk multiplies if you have lots of counterparties. Or you have to have lines of credit with your counterparties, which are expensive. Or you have to prefund the bank accounts that you have, which can be different.

All the counterparties tend to have different bank accounts, unless you force them to centralize. You have to prefund and plan for what could be an insane amount of volume, and that’s very capital-inefficient. But stablecoins—

You have goosebumps listening to these different options. That’s fucked.

Yeah, they’re not good options. We had to deal with this in 2021, and our solution was to raise lots of capital and prefund, and hope that it was enough, right?

But now, with stablecoins, we can just send the dollars over the weekend. They instantly get to our counterparties, and they can send the crypto back. Problem solved. That’s a real use case, and that’s led to us adopting it.

The 24/7 movement of dollars in real time is a real thing. I don’t think you can argue that, outside of the US, particularly in developing countries, stablecoins have become the easiest way for retail customers to get access to dollars. I think that’s a real thing.

They’ve basically obsoleted American Express travelers’ checks, which foreigners and people in countries with depreciating currencies would stockpile to preserve their money.

Are you ready for a really unfair one?

Let’s see it.

Of the 9 products that do $100 million in revenue, if I forced you to shut 1 down today because of focus, which would you shut down?

Oh, good question. I’ll tell you 1 that I wouldn’t mind disappearing over time: instant withdrawals revenue.

We make money from customers withdrawing money from Robinhood into their bank account instantly. It’s a good business for us.

How big a business is that?

I want to say this is 9 figures.

Yeah, we can check that, but I think that's one of them, either by itself or in combination with some related thing. But yeah, it's a big business, and we've got a GM there who is very proud of this business. He hates when I say this, but I tell him, “Hey, if your business goes to zero, I would not be upset because that would mean nobody's withdrawing money from Robinhood.” If it's just that everyone keeps their money in Robinhood all the time, we feel pretty good.

One of our goals is to remove all reasons why someone would want to move their money out to an external bank account.

Great answer. That's a phenomenal one. It's like being in a job interview and being asked for your biggest weakness, and you're like, “I just work too hard.” Okay, me and you've got a whiteboard. We're planning a new product.

Chalkboard, please.

Oh God, I hate chalkboards. They remind me of school. What product have you not done that you would most like to do in financial services?

Private markets is one that I've been very excited about. I think we have a plan to do it. The time between having an idea and executing on it with a new product has decreased quite a bit.

If you told me 6 months ago that I'd be sitting here embroiled in some controversy because I've tokenized private markets and we've been able to deliver that to customers, I would have been surprised. But the team has been executing unbelievably well.

I think what we talked about earlier, which is still in the future, of having this capital-as-a-service offering—you just press a button and money is deposited in your account, whether it be a business account or a personal account—I think that would be quite meaningful.

The one that no one can crack and everyone wants to—people have tried. Nik at Revolut wants it. It's the ultra-high-net-worth and the super-high-net-worth people who are with Goldman, likely Pictet, or likely J.P. Morgan. Do you want that market?

Yeah, and I think we're interested in that market.

How do you win it where others haven't?

I don't know if a lot of people have really tried very hard, to be fair. I think that people making $100,000 is a very nice market, too. It can be very tempting to go up and say, “Okay, why don't we serve the people making $1 million, $5 million, ultra-high-net-worth? If you can literally be my family office...”

11. Robinhood Is Building... Cash Delivery Trucks?!

I think that is an attractive proposition, and actually, that's my goal. I'd like to have all of my personal stuff on Robinhood. I don't think we're very far from being able to service my needs adequately—maybe a couple of years.

What do we not have today that we do need to service your needs?

Private banking, which, by the way, we're rolling out. It's happening very, very quickly. To my knowledge, this is the first digital private banking product. Private banking has been a very brick-and-mortar experience; all of the features require a branch. Nobody's been able to crack how to deliver that service without a branch.

I'll give you an example: cash delivery. I don't know if you heard about this cash delivery innovation, which I'm very excited about.

Please tell me.

Yeah. One thing that high-net-worth individuals have access to from private banking is a cash truck. I was floored by this when I got to the level where this could happen. First Republic Bank, which is now sadly defunct, had a service where cash would be delivered to your house, so you didn't have to go to an ATM. They offered it for larger amounts of cash, and it would come in an armored vehicle.

I don't know anyone that has ordered a cash delivery in the thousands from a cash truck. I'm with Goldman. I don't think they do cash trucks. Is that actually a thing?

It was a thing. It was why we loved First Republic Bank, because going to the bank and going to an ATM is annoying. It's much more convenient to have the cash brought to you.

Do you still use cash?

Yeah.

Wow. For what?

Tipping.

Oh, you Americans. No, this is an American thing. Huh? Why do you need, like, $50,000 in cash?

You've got to tip. I have a lot of people that give me services, and you've got to tip them all. It's amazing. I also have people that work for me who use services, and they have to tip people, too. So there's a whole operation.

So you're going to do cash trucks.

So what we asked ourselves was—

Amazing branding. Can you imagine, like, Dollar Hood cash trucks?

Well, Citi's, yeah. I don't think we want to operate the trucks, but we asked ourselves what this would look like if it were a mass-market product. Not everyone needs an armored truck going to their house, and that's quite expensive. But everyone gets a DoorDash or a Deliveroo like you have here, right?

Can we solve the problem of needing to go to an ATM and just get the cash delivered to you, either if you're at your house or if you're out somewhere and you need cash? This has happened to me a lot. My wife gets her haircut, she wants to pay in cash, and then I have to go look for an ATM. It's annoying.

So yeah, we're going to solve that problem by combining the logistics of on-demand delivery with all the work that we're doing in finance, and you'll get cash delivered to your house. Actually, with digital banking without a branch, nobody's been able to figure out how to handle the ATM problem, right? Nothing ruins the private banking vibe more than having to go to a 7-Eleven or a CVS to withdraw cash. It's not a premium experience.

You also don't want to send customers to some other bank. I'm sure Citi is great, but I don't want my customers going to Citi if they're a private banking customer. So how do you do a branchless experience? People still have these needs where you have to go to a branch. Well, you should bring the branch to the person. That's a thread we're going to pull on.

That's what high-net-worth individuals have: people coming to their houses for all of their needs. If you need a notary, they show up at your house. If you need to buy a watch, they'll show up at your house. That's the goal. I think that's how we have to deliver it to our customers.

The thing I think is so interesting with your business is the different insertion points that different players have taken. If you look at yours, commission-free trading was your insertion point into the first customer base. When you look at Revolut, FX is the core. When you look at Monzo, it's actually just the current account, which is a hard one to get first, but the current account was core. And then each expands from there.

If I'm totally honest—and I hope I can say this, knowing you a little bit over the years now—I thought yours was kind of the lightest in terms of commission-free trading. It felt like a looser insertion point, but I was clearly wrong when I look at what you've done. Why has commission-free trading actually been the best insertion point, or was it not? Was it just execution alone?

Yeah, I think that's a good question. I think that you could build a big business with all of these insertion points, right? And these guys have—I mean, Monzo and Revolut have done very, very well. Big, impressive businesses. I do think eventually—

Do you worry more about Revolut or Chime?

I think I'm more impressed by Revolut. Revolut's got product velocity, international scale, and a strong founder—an impressive guy. I don't think we butt into each other very much, but I think it's going to be more.

Chime we don't butt into each other very much either, because they're targeting sort of paycheck-to-paycheck customers. Their customers aren't really investing. But we'd like to get in there, too. We'd like to continue to go down-market and eventually serve someone that doesn't have money to invest.

I do think that the end state of Robinhood involves the current account as well. We have to get people's paychecks. It's just easier that way if you can have everything go through Robinhood.

What is the timeline to that, do you think?

Well, banking is rolling out very, very soon—I mean, imminently, depending on when this is coming out—to the first customers.

How do you think about the regulatory tactics that have been used by Monzo, Revolut, and Starling, where they've really gone for the banking license? When you sit back and analyze that, how do you reflect on it?

I think it's different depending on the jurisdiction. In the US, a banking license has traditionally been very onerous. I mean, you have folks in your board meetings approving new products, so that's tough.

You do in the UK, Monzo.

Yeah, yeah. And Revolut, to my knowledge, doesn't have a banking license here, and it's been fine for them.

Well, bluntly, it's been the advantage: it's enabled a product velocity that Monzo wasn't able to have because they had regulatory capital provisions, which meant they couldn't move that fast.

Yeah, but banks—there are certain advantages in the other direction. If you want to be someone's bank, you can say that we're a bank. Some people really care about that.

You know, Neil at Mettle is, I think, a very dear friend of yours, and he responded when I asked him, “I LOVE VLAD.” All caps, actually, and it made me very happy. He asked very specifically, “How did Vlad go from a culture and company that shipped almost nothing”—sorry, those were his words—“to now shipping at the most extraordinary pace?” Be as specific as possible.

We were kind of gummed up in 2020 and 2021, just trying to scale. At the end of 2019, we had 800 employees and maybe $200 million or so in annual revenue. Still a big business, but by the end of 2020, we had close to $1 billion in annual revenue. We quadrupled the business, roughly, and that was tough because it happened while we were remote and dealing with the pandemic.

We hired all these people, and I think in hindsight we ingested too many people. It became hard to operate, and these were new people who didn’t know how to work with us. We were all remote, and we also had to scale customer support. This was before AI, so if we quadrupled our customer base, we had to more than quadruple our customer support team because, frankly, we weren’t even doing a great job with the folks we had back in the day.

It was about making sure we had really, really good talent. That involved some cultural changes to reorient the company post-COVID and bring people back into the office so we could onboard better.

How important is being in person? I make sure everyone’s in person for all of our companies.

I’m a big in-person bull in general. I think we’ve operated much better since we went back, and it was actually very painful for us because we went remote-first. I had to pull that back entirely, which pissed a lot of people off.

Is it as bad as you think? A lot of people say, “I can’t pull it back.” I think very few doors are actually one-way.

Totally. No, there are no one-way doors that I’ve encountered. It can be done, and we’ve done it, which I think is a great example.

Okay, so we’re back in the office and we have new personnel. Is there anything that you’ve done to really supercharge product delivery, iteration, and shipping?

I think making sure that everyone feels accountable to their business results is important. There are probably 12 little things that you just go and do. If you really want to ship fast and deliver fast, you have to orient your culture toward optimizing for that.

I think it’s difficult in financial services especially because you also have to protect people’s money and be safe. I think it’s important not to treat these two things as if they counterbalance each other: “Oh, well, we can’t ship fast because that compromises safety.” You have to say, “No, I want you to do it at high quality, which means delivering it safely, but also, once you know what to do, executing relentlessly.”

That’s relatively like Steve Jobs: “No, I want it beautiful and fast.” I totally understand that. What’s your framework for deciding which new products to do versus not do?

I think I follow my intuition quite a bit.

Do you agree with the dictatorial style of leadership?

Which kind?

Dictatorial, top-down.

I think certain things have to be top-down for sure. The vision has to be top-down.

How many direct reports do you have?

I think it’s about 15 to 20. You know when it’s necessary because it’s very clear when something needs to be top-down: You have people who aren’t agreeing with things; they’re disagreeing with each other. If that goes on for too long and it’s not intentional, that’s probably a sign of some form of dysfunction. That’s when you need to be top-down.

But I don’t think you have to be top-down to an extreme degree. I think that’s the difficult part. What I try to do is be clear about where we’re going and what the end state is, and give people who are in the details and can focus on their thing a lot of autonomy in how to achieve the actual thing. Then they become owners of it. They become accountable to it.

I wouldn’t be top-down and dictate exactly how everything is done. For some things, I’ll have opinions, like the products that I’m very close to, how the events are done, and how it’s announced. But I want to make it clear that my GMs, the product leaders, and the folks who are close to the ground can overrule me. I encourage them to actually yell at me and tell me I’m being an idiot when they think so.

What element of your leadership do you know is bad but continue to do regardless?

I think I’ve been accused of having low emotional intelligence.

Do you work on that, or do you just accept that, hey, that’s part of me?

I try to work on it a little bit. It’s always possible that I’m inept, but I don’t know. I consider myself somewhat emotionally intelligent.

Do you tie your happiness to the performance of the company?

I try not to, but it’s sometimes hard to avoid. Just think about it: I’m pretty happy now. In 2022, I was kind of in the dumps, and it took an inordinate amount of effort to climb out of that.

I can’t remember who it was, but someone asked, “Did you ever feel in the dumps that it actually wouldn’t work?”

That it actually wouldn’t work? I guess, as a relative question, I never really felt like the company was in danger of going bankrupt or anything. The good thing about 2022 is that we’d raised $6 billion in cash in 2021.

Which can be a good thing and a bad thing, but we had this before you went public?

This was after we went public. 2022 was after we went public. We raised a bunch of cash in the IPO—I think $1.5 billion to $2 billion—but also during GameStop we raised around $4 billion, so we had a lot of cash.

It was painful, though, and I did ask myself whether I was the person to do this because I went from leading a growing startup that went public, and that was a nice capstone. Many people consider going public to be sort of an—

End goal in and of itself.

And then I was administering a reduction in force and leading a turnaround.

Do you like being public? I’ve never met a public CEO who actually likes it.

I like being public, actually.

You do? Why?

I do. I think it’s great because we’ve flipped, in my head at least, from thinking about all the public-company stuff, like earnings and all of that, as a nuisance to seeing it as a fun opportunity to connect with our community of shareholders and retail investors.

If you look at our recent earnings calls—I don’t know if you’ve seen them—we have quite a lot of fun.

I’ve got them.

The vision is like a postgame press conference. I’ve got the Robinhood logos behind me and the big mics.

Yeah.

It’s basically like postgame press conferences, which are a lot of fun. They’re fun if the team wins or if the team loses because, if the team wins, you’ve got them wearing the nice designer clothes. They’re feeling confident and talking well. If you’re rooting for the team, you want to see them win.

If they lose, sometimes you get dirt about players not pulling their weight. They come in with the towel over their shoulder and they’re getting railed by the press: “You played badly. Why did you not get any assists? Why did you only score 7 points?” Getting a star player railed on by the media after a terrible game is always entertaining. This is really the business equivalent of that.

Do you think Stripe should go public?

I think two things. Stripe can do whatever it wants, and obviously they can raise infinite amounts of capital from the private markets to run their business. I do think it’s a big problem that a retail investor can’t get access to Stripe shares, which has been a category-defining company.

I’ve shared this viewpoint with Patrick and John, and they give me some variant of, “Oh, well, we’re just a small Irish family company. Yeah, please don’t tokenize my shares.” So we’ll see.

I absolutely love that. Dude, I’d love to do a quick-fire round. I could spend all day talking to you. What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months?

In the past 12 months, the area that has led to a lot of thinking—I don’t know if we’ve changed our mind on it too much; we’re kind of barreling ahead—is prediction markets.

Prediction markets are an interesting category of thing. Some people consider it gambling, so you have the whole “Is it gambling or is it investing?” controversy that we’re continuing to contend with. It’s the bane of our existence to some degree. I believe it’s investing. Many people believe that it’s gambling.

There’s also the question of whether it’s going to be state-regulated or CFTC- and federally regulated like a future. We have lots of debates about what that looks like in our product, from separate apps, a separate tab, and a separate brand to the other spectrum: just fully integrated. That’s basically the direction we’ve gone.

That’s a heady one. That one’s at the frontier. Private markets, I’m guessing, are going to be tough to navigate. There are a lot of people who don’t like what we’re doing there, but I’m quite motivated to actually make that work.

12. The One Competitor Vlad Actually Respects

So, I think we'll ultimately prevail there.

Which competitor do you most respect, and why them?

I think Revolut is a good one. Revolut—you can tell the culture is in a good place. That's the kind of company that cares a lot about winning. I think it's pretty clear, so I respect them tremendously.

I respect Coinbase. I think they're a technology company in our space. We come across them quite a bit, and we collaborate in some ways. But, you know, they're led by a no-bullshit founder. I think they've done very well. I think there are a lot of smaller players that are also hungry and doing well.

Any that are non-obvious but super interesting?

I think Altruist is somewhat interesting as a competitor. Have you heard of Altruist?

No.

Yeah. So, it's funny. It's great—we have all these competitors in all these different fields.

Well, you do everything, dude. There's quite a lot to compete with.

Yeah. So, Altruist is kind of our competitor in the likely RIA custody business. This is sort of the products we offer to advisers to serve their end clients. Their pitch was, “We're Robinhood for advisers.” They do some things very, very well, and we believe we can be Robinhood for advisers.

They have a CEO who's a good-looking guy. He's kind of hanging around all these advisory conferences. We entered that space via acquisition a couple of months ago, so that should be interesting.

We booked this in yesterday, right? I stalked the shit out of you. You'll be impressed, I think, by the level of stalking the shit out of you I did. Let's see.

I hear that you now have a personal trainer, and you didn't for many years. You solo-trained for many years.

Well, you didn't see my Men's Health article, did you?

No.

So, I was in Men's Health about a year and a half ago. I didn't get the cover, unfortunately, which I thought was very disappointing. I think I deserve it.

I didn't have the money back then. I don't know how much they're worth.

I can order you a cash truck if you'd like one. But anyway, there's a Men's Health feature on me working out with my trainer. I think for that one, I deadlifted close to 400 pounds, but they showed the picture of me deadlifting 135 for some reason.

We're going to put this up right here. It's going to be beautifully visualized for this video. Wow. Well done.

Thank you.

So, how did training change?

I started working with a trainer. I had a bad back injury right around the time I had my first child. I was lifting incredibly heavy weights, and I popped a disc in my back. I had surgery scheduled because I literally couldn't get up from a seated position without excruciating pain going up my leg. At the last minute, I bailed from it. I'm like, “Ah, it's feeling a little bit better.”

It took 2 years to become pain-free from the time I popped the disc. Then I rebuilt from first principles. During COVID, I started working with a trainer, and for the first year, when we were all remote, we were doing bodyweight and dumbbell stuff only. Gradually over time, I got into lifting heavy and doing barbell work again.

It was just going from working out by myself, as you said, to rebuilding my form and doing everything properly from the ground up. It's like a basketball player rebuilding their free throw. I had to just do everything properly, starting with very little weight.

13. From Men’s Health to Japanese Toilets

Dude, I was sold when I heard that you're in Men's Health. That's the coolest thing that you've said for the last hour. I'm still super impressed. What purchase under $500 has had the biggest impact on your life?

What is that?

It's a bidet. If you're taking a poop, you can just push a button and it cleans you without needing toilet paper. Very environmentally friendly.

No.

You've never heard of this Japanese toilet?

No.

Yeah.

You don't use loo roll?

I do, but for drying only.

Ah, yeah. This must be so disappointing when you go to a place without it and you're like, “Shit, I've got to go back to the old way.”

It is disappointing. Yeah.

I'm sorry. Let me just make sure next time you're here, we'll get one of these for you.

You should get one. Yeah, it's fine. I just try to avoid using the bathroom.

You've opened my world to cash trucks and now—

Japanese toilets.

Japanese toilets, dude. That's amazing.

They even have a portable one, actually. If you don't want to spend the $500, for $30 you can get this little thing that's battery-operated and take it with you.

If you want to go to $10,000, you get the full toilet.

Oh, well, I'm sold. Yeah, that has some nice features.

That is—I'll ask for it for Christmas. What's the biggest advice on marriage?

Well, I've only done it once, so I don't have voluminous advice.

You don't? But you've been through a shit ton. I mean, Christ, Vlad.

Yeah.

And you're still together.

My wife and I would disagree with this. I think she's more of a—like the movie Severance.

Yeah.

I think she would prefer a more Severance-like existence, where I come home, I don't really think about work, I take off my work clothes, and I'm in home mode. There's more strict separation.

I prefer closer to full integration—my work people coming to my house and hanging out with my kids, me doing a meeting while I'm on vacation, and my kids coming to work. So, it can't just be one way. It has to be both ways.

I think there's also something about full, unconditional commitment, where you just know that if you have an issue or a concern, you can work it out.

14. “I Was in the Dumps”: What 2022 Taught Vlad About Resilience

But ultimately, which one was the hardest—oh, shit—that turned into a good thing? For example, when I was 17, I was kicked out of school for being very bulimic. Because of that, I went to this really loose school where they gave me loads of free time, and I started a podcast.

I want to say being public through 2022, seeing our stock go from—I don't know what it was in 2021, irrationally high perhaps, but it was still high after we went public—down to being worth below cash was a very—

That's offensive, isn't it?

It was below cash. People were betting that we would just waste our cash and never be profitable. It was offensive in hindsight, but it was tough. I think that, in hindsight, led to us making a bunch of decisions and investments and responding to it in a very positive way. Now we're reaping the benefits.

15. Where Robinhood Is Headed: The Next Decade of Financial Infrastructure

Okay, final one for you. Where is Robinhood—and you can choose the time frame—in 5 or 10 years' time? Where is Robinhood in 5 or 10 years' time?

The vision behind Robinhood is to make it possible for everyone, whether they be an individual or a business, to buy, sell, or hold any financial asset or conduct any financial transaction. That involves us going from U.S.-primary to fully global, and from retail-only to serving not just retail but businesses and institutions.

Dude, I so appreciate you. I so appreciate all you've done for me. You've always been so good to me. Thank you for joining me, and this has been so much fun.

Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

I look forward to buying this bidet now.