Robinhood CEO's Shocking Prediction On Stocks, The AI Bubble, & Gambling Controversy | Vlad Tenev

Vlad from Robinhood, thank you so much for coming on The Iced Coffee Hour.

1. Buying New vs Used Cars

Great to see you guys again.

Last time you sat here, you still drove a used car. Since then, your app, Robinhood, has grown to $125 billion—with a B—in assets under custody, up 50% in 1 year. Today, Robinhood stock is up 3%, which some people are like, “Oh, 3%, whatever, whatever, whatever.” Maybe I’m up $3,000; you’re up $150 million or whatever just in 1 day. I have to know: are you still driving a used car?

I can afford a new car now. I had a used 911 Turbo S last year. It was a holdover because I had ordered a new GT3, which is a very fun car, and now I drive that. I have a GT3 Touring with a manual transmission. The thing cooks.

Do you have a long commute?

No, not too long. It’s much shorter now that I got this new car—anywhere from 10 minutes to 20 minutes, depending on traffic.

Now, when you walk into Porsche, do they just give you any car that you want, or do you have to play the game a little bit to work your way up?

A lot of brands reward loyalty. If you’re loyal to a particular carmaker or dealership, they take care of you. Some do this differently, but I think for many of them, they do value loyal customers relative to just a random famous person reaching out to them who wants something. So, to answer your question, I don’t think it has helped me very much. I had to wait over a year, just like everyone else.

As the CEO and founder of Robinhood, if not the stock price, what is the metric that you obsess over every day?

I don’t think there’s 1 metric, really, because Robinhood works on many things. We have lots of businesses. Increasingly, my job is to have folks who effectively function as CEOs of their businesses reporting to me.

If I had to think about what idea or concept is most associated with Robinhood—what we can own—it’s really ownership. This idea of a world or a future with relatively few owners is inherently fragile. Can we actually make broad ownership a reality? Can we make it so that more people own equities and all the other assets around us?

One thing that I have been talking about recently is the percentage of households in America that own equities. Right now, that’s something like 65%. Before Robinhood came along, it was in the low 50s. I think we meaningfully contributed, and now the question is: can we get to 95%+?

With initiatives like Trump Accounts and our work on private markets, I think that becomes increasingly likely. Can we also force the rest of the world to catch up? That’s where things like tokenization come in. Can we make it really easy for the best stocks and other real-world assets from the US to be distributed globally so that everyone can benefit from all the great work we’re doing here?

How much of that, though, is an ownership problem, an education problem, or just a problem that most people don’t have enough money?

Yeah, that’s a problem too. Most people don’t have enough money, and I think that’s where forced ownership or default ownership has been really impactful.

One of the things that really moved the needle in the US was the employer-sponsored 401(k). If you have an employer and they have a 401(k) program, effectively, it’s like free money to participate and get the employer salary match. That by itself moved ownership by tens of percentage points.

Now you see countries all over the world trying to replicate this. Trump Accounts are ownership by default, too. Every single child born in this country gets $1,000 funded by the Treasury.

Now you’re seeing philanthropists like Michael Dell and Ray Dalio sponsoring their states. Michael Dell obviously has a much bigger sponsorship, where he targets lower-income ZIP codes all over the country.

2. How Robinhood Added $125 Billion in a Year

The solution to a lot of people not having enough money is making ownership the default and having employer- and government-sponsored programs, coupled with philanthropy, to help the people who are living paycheck to paycheck or have fewer means own stocks as well.

To grow $125 billion in assets under custody in 1 year is honestly unfeasible. I can’t even imagine that. Congratulations on the success. You can’t just say, “Okay, we’re going to grow in assets under custody,” and then grow. There are certain things that you have to do in order for that to ensue. I’m curious: what are the main things you focused on that have made that big of an impact on your company?

We have 3 ways that we’re furthering ownership, and really, assets under custody is a measure of how well we’re succeeding. If more assets are on the platform, then that’s more things that people are owning.

3. Reverse Interview: Coaching the Iced Coffee Hour

The first thing is serving our active traders. Active traders are still very much the core of the business. A lot of the asset growth is just people bringing in money so that they can trade different things. If we make the assets that we offer great, and if we have a great options-trading experience and great equities trading—we’ve added futures more recently, as well as prediction markets—people will bring in money to trade, and they’ll tell their friends about it as well.

We’ve seen a lot of growth there. You can also look at our market share across all of the core assets and the volumes. We hit lots of records in Q2, which we just reported on, including record equities trading. That’s really the engine, right? Equities is our core business, what we started with.

Last quarter, people were trading more equities on Robinhood than back in 2021, when we saw GameStop, which was also a crazy-high period. Organically, through compounding of our business, we’ve exceeded that peak options-trading all-time high. We’re now the top options-trading platform in terms of retail market share, so we’ve surpassed all of the incumbents who keep combining with each other. The task at hand gets harder, but we’ve crossed over into number 1 in options.

Futures and prediction markets have been super high as well. I’d say that’s 1 bucket.

The second bucket is: how can we be your financial home for life? It’s this idea of lifelong ownership. Can we get someone from when they’re born, to their teenage years, to college, to their first job, to when they have kids? Can we help them with all their financial needs all the way through to an inheritance event?

We’ve been building things to fill out that entire life cycle. Trump Accounts and custodial accounts are great examples, but recently we’ve also added trust accounts, which make it really easy to onboard a trust into Robinhood. We’ve got joint accounts, so if you have a spouse or partner, you can bring them into Robinhood as well.

Robinhood Banking has been huge there. It’s been scaling really rapidly, with billions of assets and a really high direct-deposit attach rate. That’s really about whether we can get someone to put their paycheck into Robinhood. That allows us to help them decide how much of their money should go into retirement, how much should go into their self-directed taxable brokerage account, and how much should go into strategies.

It’s been putting together all the pieces so that we can actually serve all of your financial needs. If they’re at Robinhood, you benefit, rather than having them dispersed among lots of other banks and siloed.

How much of that is just the deposit bonus, where I see crazy bonuses like 3% on crypto and 1% for retirement accounts? I think I’ve even seen 1.5% on something.

The deposit bonuses help, but they’re a minority of it. I think we share numbers on what percentage of AATS, for instance, comes in via deposit incentives versus otherwise, and it’s a good chunk of AATS activity. Still, AATS is a minority of the overall money moving in and out of the platform.

4. Agentic Trading and AI Agents That Refuse to Trade

Congrats on launching AI investing. As soon as I saw you guys launch that, I was looking over Twitter, or X, and I saw it everywhere. Everyone was talking about it all over Reddit. I felt like that was a huge leap forward in terms of what brokerages are able and willing to do.

I’m curious: how does a deal like that actually come to fruition? And with AI investing agents, are people actually making money?

Yeah.

We don’t really have a partnership per se. I think what you’re referring to is that we launched 2 things: Agentic Trading and Agentic card. What that allows people to do is, if you have your Claude Code, your Codex, or another AI agent, you can access the Robinhood tools. The idea is that anything you can do on your phone with Robinhood, you should be able to have your AI agent do through the paved path of the MCP server.

We launched with equities trading, and since then, we’ve expanded into options. We’ve announced crypto, so that’s coming soon. We keep adding little tools here and there. Recently, we rolled out the ability to see your tax lots. For those who can use AI agents and are reasonably sophisticated, it gives you the power of Robinhood at your disposal.

What data are you seeing with people who are using AI agents to invest? Are they making money? Are they losing money? How does that work out with broad data?

I don’t really look too closely at their returns, but we’re getting a lot of people trying it out. We’ve had over 100,000 people actually create agentic accounts, and they’re driving decent volume. They’re doing really sophisticated things, like pulling together all kinds of data sources from all over the internet and combining them into strategies.

I’d say my background is in algorithmic trading. Before I started Robinhood, I would write trading strategies, and it was an incredibly challenging thing because you had to be a programmer. You had to worry about all sorts of things, and you needed really deep integrations with legacy financial companies to even get access to the markets. Back then, you couldn’t trade through a normal broker; they were charging you $10 for every trade.

I think what’s happening is that it’s making the ability to trade algorithmically much more democratized, but there are still challenges. For example, sometimes these agents themselves aren’t optimized for trading. They’ll tell you, “I don’t want to trade right now. I don’t think this is a good idea.” Then you really have to work hard to make sure it does what you want it to do.

What if it’s trying to save the person from losing money, and it just sees something and says, “Hey, this is a bad trade”?

Most of the time when they don’t trade, it’s not actually for that reason. I think it’s just—

It doesn’t want to. It just doesn’t feel like it.

Yeah. It just doesn’t feel like it.

It didn’t have coffee that morning.

Yeah. It’s like, “I recommend that you actually open up your Robinhood app and put the trade in that way.” I don’t think that trading activity is in the training data. You don’t have agentic trading traces like you would programming traces. This is just a new thing that hasn’t been done before.

5. Will Financial Advisors Become Obsolete?

Given the way things are going, though, do you think eventually financial advisers are going to be obsolete?

I think there’s always going to be some need for humans. A financial adviser provides very different services. It’s like a concierge to you, right? It’s someone who is responsible and can help you make life decisions. A lot of people have financial advisers, and they’re almost a member of the family.

I think in that sense, some people will always want a human. I don’t know if that type of close emotional relationship is going to be replaced by AI. Right now, people are using AI to sanity-check certain things, and they say, “Okay, is my adviser telling me something that makes sense?” But there’s a human need that makes it really, really hard to trust machines for everything, because at the end of the day, you want someone to be responsible. I think it’s hard to have AI take responsibility. In fact, if you can own something—if you’re a fiduciary—it’s a different bar.

Yeah, but even if someone is held responsible for something, it doesn’t necessarily fix the actual problem if they make a mistake. I’ve had mistakes made before, myself. They might create a problem, but actually correcting that problem is more work than just dealing with the problem.

Yeah. I mean, at a certain level, you’re always responsible for your own financial decisions. Even if it’s an adviser I’ve hired, I choose to keep working with them, so it’s my responsibility as well.

6. Sponsors: Claude & Superhuman Go

I think a lot of people just don’t want to think about it. You come across a lot of people who have made money, and they say, “I just want to spend very little of my time thinking about finances.” They’re probably not going to prompt a Claude agent or OpenAI. They just want a person who takes that entirely off their plate. I think the more likely scenario is that you’ll see fee compression in that industry.

You’ll see fee compression because, basically, for a while there have been 2 models. There’s robo-advisory, which is asset management, but you don’t actually have at your disposal the full, comprehensive estate planning, financial planning, and tax planning. It’s very siloed toward financial advice and investment management.

Then you have full-service financial advisers who kind of take over. They’re a person who abstracts all of your finances, including budgeting and spending, for a lot of people. The robo-advisor market has consolidated around something like 25 basis points of your assets. So, 0.25% of all of your assets is typically charged as a fee. Some are more, and some are less.

Full-service financial advice has been in the 1%+ range. If I had to guess, there’s probably some middle ground where, on average, as more AI tools come in and start to blur these 2 models, it’ll probably consolidate to somewhere in between.

I got a fun story here. I uploaded my entire portfolio to Claude about a week ago, and I said, “Rate my portfolio. Tell me everything I’m doing wrong or any improvements.” It gave me a whole list and, believe it or not, it saved me $16,000 a year after tax because it said one of the funds I was holding had a slightly higher expense ratio than a near-identical fund that I could buy from Vanguard.

It said, “If you sell this fund, you could realize a very small loss, realize this tax loss, move it into this other fund that has a lower fee,” and that fee works out to $16,000 a year. I did it. I researched it myself in addition to that, but it pointed me in the right direction. It’s like, wait a second, that’s such a no-brainer. I didn’t think of that. I just wasn’t paying attention. There you go—16 grand a year saved.

Yeah. For a lot of things where it’s really clear-cut, it’s super, super useful, right? If you have a fund with a high expense ratio and there’s a similar fund with a lower one, of course that’s a straightforward one. Or if you’ve got cash in a savings account earning 0% and there’s another account that can get you north of 3%, of course the rational thing is to move all of that cash.

A lot of that doesn’t even need AI, to be honest. It’s just a very, very simple algorithm to see if you have funds that are underutilized and can be moved elsewhere. A lot of our investors ask us about this cash-sorting AI idea.

In the future, is the AI just going to move your cash to places that have high interest? Eventually, you’ll lose track of that. Oh, gosh, imagine if it just—

Well, my thought is that’s not even AI. You can just have a screen that says—we try to do this—“Hey, we offer 3.5% APY. You could be making incrementally tens of thousands of dollars per year just by doing this.”

Despite the fact that those products exist, people still like their legacy banks. Banks still have trillions of assets that are earning almost 0% because the inertia and the strength of that relationship are so high.

7. How AI Changes Investing Behaviors

Do you think investing will fundamentally change when everyone is using an AI investing agent and these AI agents can tap into all publicly available information instantly? So, it automatically just knows. Is that sometime down the time horizon? If so, how long? Or do you think that's not even feasible?

There are lots of different investing behaviors. I don't think that someone who is buying stock in a company that makes a product they use is going to be all that affected by AI. If you're thinking, “I use the iPhone. Great product. I believe in it. I want to own some Apple stock,” AI is unlikely to change that investment behavior significantly. What are you going to ask it? Maybe if you're really having second thoughts and you're not sure whether it's a good investment, you'll ask some questions. But by and large, I think that's durable.

Active trading is going to look significantly different. A lot of active trading is now geared toward technical analysis on charts. AI tools will certainly augment that quite a bit, and then you can bring in more data sources.

Passive, long-term investing and portfolio construction—I don't think that will change very much because, in that particular example, it's really about making an infrequent asset-allocation decision. Maybe you'll have more data communicating the decision and what's going on, which is what we're doing with Robinhood products: what's going on in your portfolio and why did we make those changes? But fundamentally, I think the asset-allocation process has been automated and streamlined pretty well, and I don't think there's much juice there. So, it's really trading. I think trading is where you're going to see the biggest change and the biggest disruption, which is why we're focused on agentic trading first.

What about productivity within Robinhood as a company? How much has AI changed the game?

It changed it very deeply. I think our AI adoption is close to 100%. If you're a software engineer—and really, software engineers are building all the products—the workflow has shifted from humans writing the code and humans reviewing the code to generally humans overseeing agents. Those agents are writing the code and reviewing the code, and your job as an engineer is shifting to making sure your agents are well managed, seeing how many agents you can employ, and whether you can keep them busy all the time, including when you're sleeping.

So do you think that, with Robinhood, eventually you could have just a few people running the entire company from home?

It's not our goal, for sure. Sometimes we do think about these things, but I think someone still has to be running the agents. At the end of the day, it's my financial fiduciary point: It's hard to imagine a world where a human is not responsible for decisions.

We've been focused on doing more with the teams that we have and giving people more leverage, but we're less focused on just reducing headcount.

8. Vlad's Biggest Mistake

What's the biggest mistake that you've made over the last year?

I'm sure I've made lots of little mistakes. My approach to things is really just, “How can I move forward?” I don't like thinking about the past very much. I think we can get stuck relitigating decisions, but really, it's about, “Okay, where are we now?” In some cases, I even prefer to be behind and to be an underdog because I think it gives us something to work toward and really push on.

If I had to think about what we've done over the past year, for active traders, we've launched prediction markets. That's an interesting business for us because usually we're not the first to launch a new asset class. Equity trading was a thing for multiple decades, even electronically, before Robinhood came along. We improved it, brought it to the smartphone, and brought it to 0 commission, but we weren't early to it.

Crypto trading—we weren't particularly early either. We launched in 2018, which was early relative to traditional companies, but a lot of crypto-native companies started in 2012 or even earlier. Bitstamp, which we acquired, was, I think, the longest continuously running crypto exchange. So we weren't the earliest there.

With prediction markets, we were 1 of the first to roll out that product as soon as they got legalized for the presidential election. We were there within weeks with a product, and then we've really expanded over time. It's grown to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, our fastest-growing business line of all time.

We've done well with active traders. Banking has been a really quick rollout. I think the challenge that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about now that we're doing all of these things is how we can make sure the core experience is coherent. We've been investing a lot more in personalization and making the app clean. I can say, “Maybe I should have thought more about these problems earlier,” but a year ago, we probably didn't have so many new products shipping.

9. Redesigning the App Around 13 New Account Types

That's what I've noticed as a daily user—probably an hourly user—of the Robinhood app. Every time I log on, there are more things to swipe through, and a lot of the things I'm not using. What I find really interesting is that you guys launched prediction markets, but then people could just email customer support and say, “Hey, can you remove this from my account?” I know people who have actually gotten that removed from their accounts, both for simplification and because they don't want to be involved with prediction markets, which I found really interesting.

You guys were able to engineer the app for a specific user experience. I don't know of—I can't name another company that could do that.

Yeah. At first, it used to be customer support, and now you can actually flip a switch if you want prediction markets to not show sports, as well as a lot of our core surfaces.

It used to be that Robinhood had only a couple of types of accounts. We had your brokerage account, crypto, retirement, and spending. Each of those accounts was its own tab, but not everyone used retirement, and not everyone used crypto. Then there was another problem: We added 13 additional accounts.

So we had to completely redesign things around the idea that every tab in the app should have a use case for every customer. Now we have investment, watchlist, search, and account. It's taken a lot of iteration to find the optimal solution because every change you make affects tens of millions of existing customers. It's highly consequential.

I do want to say, just because I absolutely loved this—not that it will necessarily lead to any conversation—but I love the fact that you can open multiple individual investing accounts.

Ever since you guys added that, it has completely changed the game for me. Now I don't have 1 strategy in 1 account, or multiple strategies all consolidated into 1 account. The UI for it is phenomenal from a user-experience perspective.

I am curious, though, about the personality trait of not litigating prior decisions. Do you think that's an essential trait of an effective CEO?

Not necessarily. I think a lot of people—and I shouldn't make it sound like I don't really think about what happened in the past. Of course, we do postmortems and reviews and things of that nature. But I think a lot of people just live in the past and spend 80% of their time worrying about things that have already happened, with a little less time thinking about, “Okay, what do we do now?”

I try always to think about the current state and what my options are, rather than saying, “If I had changed this 6 months ago, things would have been different.” I think it's also impossible, to a certain extent, to think through what would have happened if you'd done something differently in the past because there are so many inputs in those decisions.

It's a trap, sort of.

It's a trap, and, yeah, things are—the important things are never clean in the sense that, “If I had just made this 1 decision differently, my entire life since that point would have been different.”

10. The Importance Of Being A CEO

A lot of people say that you are 1 of the most effective CEOs and founders alive today, which you see all over X.

Wow, that's humbling.

It probably feels cool to know that. If you were to distill that job description down to 1 thing, I could see it being “problem solver.” Would you agree with that sentiment?

A lot of people say that you are one of the most effective CEOs and founders alive today. I mean, you see it all over X.

Wow, that's humbling.

It probably feels cool to know that if you were to distill that job description down to one thing, I could see it being “problem solver.” Would you agree with that sentiment?

I think it depends on the company. I think the job changes dramatically depending on what you're responsible for. I'll give you an example. If the company is small and you're the CEO and you're just trying to ship your 1 product to customers and make sure it works, the job is really: How quickly can I ship code? That's essentially the problem.

If you think about it on a base level, “problem solver” probably does fit, but “problem” is a very broad term. So, at a small company, how much code can I ship? I went through this evolution myself because when I started at Robinhood, I was writing a lot of code. Then you get to a point where maybe we have to do 2 products at a time, and it's not just shipping them but marketing them and designing them.

There, you're leading a small team of engineers and maybe dealing with a couple of domains that aren't really in your core competency. I think the challenge there is: How do you stay close enough to the work being done by the people you're managing, and also learn enough to be useful about these other domains that you're not an expert in? A lot of times, it's just whether you can put in the hours and the mental effort to learn about things that aren't your core competency.

A lot of engineers don't really have an interest in learning about marketing, legal, or operations, and I think it's limiting. If you don't know anything about the domain, how can you actually make improvements? You have to know enough to realize what's working, what's not working, and what you can change.

At every layer of scale, it becomes harder in a sense because you have more groups of people working on things that you're less directly involved in. There, it's about building systems. How can I efficiently—if I wanted to spend 5 minutes on something—get the best and highest-signal 5 minutes possible? What are the tools to do that? Do I have the metrics? Do I have customer verbatims?

Do I have AI tools plugged into the right data so that I can make every second I spend on something as high-signal and useful as it could be, and so that I'm not making decisions based on anecdote? A lot of it is building these systems and organizing things effectively, so that you know the person to ask or probe if something's going wrong or you have a question. It's also spending time on the right things.

That's fascinating. You just distilled the blueprint of building a huge company and how to organize your life as an operator or executive. If you were to identify 1 trait or belief that a lot of operators who aren't working at maximum efficiency have—something that's holding them back—what similarity do you see among those people? What should the primary question CEOs, operators, and executives be asking themselves in order to become more effective?

I think one thing is being able to get into the details of every team and every work stream. A lot of people just rely on assessments from people in management, but sometimes it's really helpful to get both ends of the barbell, so to speak: the senior executive's view of a situation and also the view of the people on the ground.

You could have the problem that if something breaks somewhere up in the chain—in bigger organizations, this is a problem—if you have individual contributors, managers, directors, and senior directors, and something's broken in the chain, you could get bad information about what's happening. That's why I find it very helpful sometimes to go as close to the ground as possible.

Look at the code. Be able to look at the code, look at the actual copy that's shipping to the website, and talk to people who are individual contributors or interns. I spend a lot of time talking to interns. I think being able to get extremely deep into the details is important. Not a lot of people do that.

The other thing is just hiring well, making sure that the people around you—in my case, the general managers and the functional leads—are incredibly strong. I've been fortunate to evolve to a place where it's just a group of incredibly capable people running really big businesses and growing alongside the businesses that they're running.

It's a hilarious parallel to draw there: staying close to the problem. We have a friend named Ben Mallah, and he buys huge commercial apartment complexes or just commercial real estate. He just bought a new place that's hundreds of units, and he gets his son to move into the complex to be close to the problem—to know what it's like to actually be a resident there, to know where to make improvements, and where to spend money to have the highest possible return on quality of life for the residents.

That's similar to what you're saying here. You need to talk to everybody in the food chain. You need to get the executive opinion as well as the opinion of the person who's actually assembling the product.

You also need to talk to the customer. It's both the customers who are loud on Twitter and the ones who are loud in customer support, which aren't always the same. You need to look at what the Redditors are saying on the different subreddits.

But there's also a lot of customers who are quiet and will just silently stop using the product. They aren't going to talk about it on social media or write in a support ticket. You have to figure out how to get to those customers, too.

11. Sponsor: Northwest Registered Agent

I think it really helps to be obsessed with your business and to feel like every little problem is going to be on my mind until I figure out a way to solve it. If I figure out a way to solve it and it's actioned, then I can put it away in a little drawer and check up on it later.

Something I've noticed about myself is that I spend a lot of time obsessing about every little detail. In some cases, that can be annoying and not ideal for staying calm and having great mental health, but I think it's actually really good for the business.

12. Why Regulation Stifles Innovation

What's the next thing you want to do that regulation currently blocks?

Oh, that's a great question. I'm sure the regulators will love that one.

I think generally we've had really strong, constructive relationships with the regulators, particularly in the last couple of years, when they've been much more keen to support innovation.

I think the couple of things that have been fresh, new issues—and one of the other things we're doing now—is we're starting to think about how we can push change in all these policies, rather than just being a participant in them, right? The PDT rule—you guys might be familiar with that rule change. We're very supportive of that. This is a rule where, if you don't have $25,000 in your account, there are restrictions on day trading.

So, that being repealed was very good because, essentially, what it did was penalize customers who didn't have a lot of money in their accounts. A lot of customers start with us without having a lot of money in their accounts, and they get into these situations where the intent of the rule was probably to prevent them from making rash decisions. But then you get into a situation where, if you want to close your position for a risk-management reason, it gets flagged as a day trade.

Then you get restricted, and you basically have to make that decision. You intend to do it, and you turn to another broker because the other weird thing about this rule is that it's on a per-broker basis. So, if you're a pattern day trader somewhere, you can move your account elsewhere, and then you sort of start from scratch.

13. Robinhood Ventures, OpenAI Exposure, and Seed-Stage Access

So, that was a great positive change. A couple of other things that I'm quite keen on: one is the accredited-investor rule. Since we last spoke, we've really been pushing the idea that private ownership is the next frontier of our mission.

For various reasons, but the main one is that there's a lot of disruption by AI. A lot of the top AI companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic, for instance, are private. They're going into the trillions of dollars in valuation, and there's a small circle of wealthy insiders that's benefiting from all the growth. It's not broadly distributed.

Our solution to that is to make it easy to own these companies or get exposure to them. In the US, we have Robinhood Ventures, which you can think of as a basket of private companies. We have Robinhood Ventures Fund 1, which started with late-stage, pre-IPO companies. OpenAI is actually in that fund, and it gave investors a low-cost vehicle for investing in and getting exposure to private companies.

On the heels of RV1, we started RV2, Robinhood Ventures Fund 2, which takes another angle. It's still a basket of private companies, but rather than them being ultra-late, immediately pre-IPO companies, we went to the opposite side of the spectrum. Now we're giving exposure to seed and Series A, which is the earliest stage of capital formation.

Rather than tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in valuations for these companies, Robinhood Ventures Fund 2's typical valuations are in the tens of millions.

How do you pick those companies, and what if they don't want to be a part of them?

Yeah, great question. This is one of the things we figured out this year. We've taken the position that, if a company doesn't want to be in Robinhood Ventures, we generally won't force them.

Every deal that we've done for Robinhood Ventures thus far—and this isn't true of some of our competitors, of which there are a couple—has been done directly with the company's blessing. Some of our competitors will go in and do the second-layer SPV or LP interest, announce it, and then you'll see the company come in and say, “Actually, we don't know anything about this.” Not ideal.

With Robinhood Ventures, we've taken the position that we go directly with the company's blessing in all of these cases. That's true of all the deals that we've done thus far. This wasn't an obvious decision, right? There's a trade-off. What you really want is the access, but you're also creating a new product, and you want that new product to be accepted by the stakeholders in the industry.

What if we take it a step further and say that everyone gets access to these private companies? Wouldn't the really wealthy people just get in even sooner?

There's always a cat-and-mouse game, in the sense that the wealthy always figure out how to get better things. Our job is never done, right? We have to keep working to get even earlier access, and then they get in a little earlier, too.

But look, Robinhood Ventures Fund 2—seed and Series A—that's pretty early. It's hard to get earlier. We're partnering with Y Combinator for that fund, so I think we'll prove out the model of seed and Series A funding for retail.

Now, the problem with these things is that they're still baskets, right? What we're hearing from customers is, “Maybe I like these 3 companies, but I don't like these other 3.” I think the end state is going to be investing in and trading individual private names for those that want to, so that it feels pretty close to what trading a public stock on Robinhood would feel like.

That part needs both continued product innovation and reform of accredited-investor standards, which now limit direct investments in private companies to high-earning, wealthy people.

Is there any other product that you wish existed? For me, I wish that you guys—or someone—created a Venmo where we could send each other stocks. Instead of sending Jack $100, you'd be like, “Yo, here's $100 of Google.”

Yeah. Last time you guys asked me for Robinhood Social, right? I said, “Oh, well, maybe we'll have something to announce in the future.”

You know, he said to me—the audacity of Graham to say this—he was like, “Didn't we say something about Robinhood Social last time?” Then they launched it, and I was like, “If you think that because you suggested Robinhood Social, afterwards Vlad was like, ‘Yo, let's do it. Let's launch it. Let's launch it.’”

Yeah. No, I thought it was funny because, obviously, it had been in the works.

Broke

his heart.

We didn't just whip it up in a couple of weeks from when we had that conversation to HOOD Summit, when we announced it. Sometimes I get asked about things in the works, and I really want to spill the beans right there, but then I'm like, “We have these events. We're launching things.”

So, if we just keep guessing, you just wouldn't say no.

You can probably tell based on my reaction what's in the works and what's not, even though I try to keep a very calm poker face. Robinhood Social has done well, and now, I don't know if you guys are seeing it, but people have started cross-posting Robinhood Social screenshots on X.

People need to be verified, by the way, because my profile is up there. I think people think that I'm a scammer on Robinhood Social because I don't have a check mark. There's no way to verify that it's actually your username, Graham Stephan.

Okay, I'm JLSLBY. Follow us on Robinhood Social, guys.

Yeah, but that means someone else is going to create one that's very similar.

And then they're going to start scamming. I don't know. We'll have to figure this out.

The one thing that we think works really well with Robinhood Social is the fact that the trades and the portfolios are verified. Now we have P&L widgets and all these things. On other social-media platforms where people are sharing their trades, you don't really know whether they're BSing, or they could be faking the screenshots.

14. Robinhood Chain, Stock Tokens, and 24/7 Trading

With Robinhood Social, we take care of that verification as part of the platform, which has been a really nice, positive, and differentiated aspect. But we'll obviously have to solve this verification problem for the profiles as well.

Is there any financial product that's not really being discussed, though? As someone who's so on the pulse with customer demand and broad investing data, there has to be some kind of whisper of an investment style. No one thought 5, maybe 10 years ago, that we would have AI investing agents, right? But someone may have, and I feel like you would probably be the person of all to ask: What could the future of finance look like?

Something we may not even be talking about right now—in 5 to 10 years. Is there some sort of product or service, or something else?

Yeah, I mean, Robinhood Chain is a good example of what the future could be if we could rebuild the infrastructure from the ground up. I don't know if you guys are familiar with Robinhood Chain. It's basically the hottest chain in crypto right now.

We rolled it out a couple of weeks ago, and it's been top 5 in DEX volume. The TVL, or total value locked, has been growing tremendously. One of the benefits is that it has stock tokens, which are tokenized representations of stocks that are available for customers outside the US for now. They're still available in 120+ countries around the world.

If you're on Robinhood Chain and you have stock tokens like Tesla, Nvidia, or others, you can actually do everything with them that you could do with another onchain crypto. You can send them to people onchain, just like you would send Bitcoin or Ethereum. You can swap them in pools. Uniswap has some very active pools on Robinhood Chain.

You can do collateralization, lending, and borrowing. You get a picture of what it could look like if we replaced it all with software.

So, when you say swapping, does that mean that, let's just say, I have $500,000 worth of gains in a stock that I could swap that stock for another, keeping my cost basis without realizing a gain?

The tax situation depends on where you are, right? Every one of these 120 countries has slightly different tax treatments, so I can't really speak generally to that. But, yeah, all you have to do is create a pool. If someone creates a pool exchanging a stock token with a crypto, you can just swap them directly.

We started out using a stablecoin, USDG, which is the stablecoin that we partnered with Paxos and a few others to launch. That's the core stablecoin of the chain. But then all the developers created all kinds of unique pools that we didn't even think would exist, and all kinds of protocols where, for example, if you hold a memecoin, you just get stock tokens airdropped to you.

They've connected memecoins, core cryptos, and stock tokens and composed them into unique products that we wouldn't have anticipated creating. We probably wouldn't have thought to make them ourselves. Robinhood Chain is this combination of a developer platform with financial primitives, like high yield and stock tokens, that we're going to add to, and I think the combination of those 2 is going to lead to a lot of interesting things.

Not to mention, it was built for AI agents, too. A lot of people have been rolling out APIs and command-line interfaces.

I'm just imagining if you tried explaining this to Warren Buffett.

What he would say—if this is even something he would understand.

I mean, I think to most consumers who aren't developers, the value proposition is really that if you're in 120 countries all over the world, and you have a smartphone and an internet connection, you can trade tokenized representations of these stocks 24/7 at relatively low cost and with a great user experience.

But then, even if you're a U.S. resident, you can be trading outside of trading hours all day. It effectively opens up the optionality of an investor.

Yeah. So, right now, they're not available in the U.S., but there has been movement to enable tokenization here, and I think eventually it will happen. It's just that the delta in value is much smaller.

In a lot of these places overseas, they don't even have functional banking systems, so they can go right to tokenized stocks, and it's a huge leap, right? Whereas in the U.S., you already have Robinhood. So going from Robinhood to 24/7 is comparatively minor.

It would be like going from your very fast train to a high-speed train, right? An expensive shift. A lot of the existing train operators aren't keen to make the investment, and you can already get from New York to D.C. in 2 hours. So shaving it to 1 hour maybe isn't the biggest delta.

I think that's why the rest of the world is leading here, and the U.S. is probably going to be a late adopter of some of these technologies.

15. Sponsor: Shopify

What do you think the other brokerages fail to understand about investing in 2026?

I think the other brokerages suffer from just being large. I think there are a lot of players in the space, right? There are the incumbents that are big, and they have tens of trillions in assets.

But, yeah, I think we ship much faster and we're more modern, which means that we've been able to capture a younger customer base that is growing wealthier over the next couple of decades as opposed to aging out. So, we're kind of the beneficiary of this great wealth transfer over time.

So, if you were a paid consultant to the other brokerages, what would you tell them?

I think, to some degree, it starts with talent. If you want to build really great products that are competitive and 10 times better than what's already out there, there needs to be a talent reset. You have to make sure really good engineers, designers, product builders, and people who understand AI are in the company.

I would probably find 1 area. These companies are giant elephants, right? You can't eat the elephant in 1 bite, as they say. You have to—

Take it 1 bite at a time.

You eat it very slowly. So, I'd probably find 1 area that was maybe small and kind of circumscribed away from the core, and try to inject a ton of talent into that 1 area. Run it kind of standalone, separately, and see if that can provide a road map for how we can do a technology transformation for the entire company.

16. Bubble Valuations, Korean Stocks, and Alarm Bells

If we get a beachhead in 1 area and we're able to hire special forces—elite talent—there, then we put more into it and see that grow until eventually the entire company is rebuilt with a stronger foundation.

In terms of the broader economy, are you worried about valuations?

I think in some sectors, alarm bells have started ringing. I'll give you an example. We get a lot of feature requests from our customers all the time, right? For the longest time, international stocks were not in the top 10. Some people wanted international stocks, but a month or two ago, every question I would get in an interview was, "When are you going to add Korean stocks?"

That's what everyone wants. Nobody wants prediction markets or crypto. We just want Korean stocks. I don't know if you guys experienced this.

Mhm.

Very familiar with what's going on.

Or were you some of the people who were asking for them?

Probably Jack.

I'll invest in anything.

Yeah. And, by the way—

As long as they do options on Korean stocks, I'm in.

And, by the way, we will add Korean stocks. But the fact that we were hearing from so many people at the same time does raise the alarm bells a little bit about what's going on there. Sure enough, yes, there was just—

What are you seeing today that's starting to ring some bells?

Yeah. I have to be careful here because I don't want to give people investment advice. To be fair, traditionally, our customers are innovation-first. We were among the first to invest in electric vehicles. They're obviously into crypto and AI, even though direct exposure to AI labs is difficult, and we're fixing it with Robinhood Ventures.

You've got the semiconductors, and now you've got a lot of people talking about energy, right? Chips and energy as a category create a very complicated balancing act to play, because on the one hand, it is kind of obvious: If you assume people are saying, "Well, if AI demand continues to grow, of course that's going to impact chips and everything in the stack underneath it."

On the other hand, what you have is the traders. This includes anecdotes of hedge funds that are just buying chips because they know, "Hey, even if I don't need this chip myself, I'll be able to resell it at a higher price."

Whether something is undervalued or not kind of depends on many of these factors. I could see it tipping in 1 direction. If a lot of the supply is being bought by speculators, that's when you can get into trouble with even something that has fundamental growth potential, like chips in an AI environment.

17. Do Corrections Actually Hurt Young Investors?

Do you think that a high stock market right now is actually bad for people in their 20s and 30s?

Everything, I think, is an opportunity in a sense. Back in 2020, when we had a big crash right around COVID, you saw our customers actually buying, and you looked at the customers of the other discount brokers and they were selling. That was the big story.

Our customers were buying because they were younger. They had a long-term horizon, and they saw it as an opportunity. They were still fundamentally bullish about the country, all of the things that were being built, and what the stock market offered. They showed that through their activity on the platform, in a sense.

A lot of people say, "Do you worry about stock market corrections?" I don't worry about them as much because we've seen in the past that having younger customers means they take corrections as opportunities. That doesn't mean that I want a correction, or that I even want a sustained period of slightly lower prices. That can be very challenging to the economy and to people.

I think everyone generally should just want things to go up smoothly, up and to the right, but that's not the reality. I think every market environment, if you're a trader, presents opportunities that you can capitalize on, and if you're a long-term investor, it can be hard to predict these things and time them.

We offer great tools for tax-advantaged investing. I think we have the best retirement products on the market, where it's really targeted toward putting money in and not withdrawing for many, many decades. I think dollar-cost averaging and passive management are better at Robinhood than at any of our competitors. A lot of our competitors don't even offer good tools for these things.

18. The Prediction Markets Gambling Criticism

We're continuing to invest and incentivize. A lot of people criticize us because they think we incentivize active trading and prediction markets. If you look at what we actually incentivize in the product, it's retirement. Retirement gives you a 3% match if you're a Gold member and you make a contribution. Those are the types of products that we've directly incentivized and had success incentivizing.

What do you say to the people who criticize that it's leaning too heavily into prediction markets, which might be considered too close to gambling?

Yeah, we get that criticism. Of course, you mentioned the switcher and being able to customize it. We get the criticism in both directions, actually. We have people who just don't want to see prediction markets, and for that, we have personalization and all the initiatives we have—not just to let you disable it, but also to make sure that we show you the content you want to see in the app when you want to see it.

It's a big priority, not just with prediction markets, but also as we add more products and features. We have to solve the problem of you simply not being aware that we offer a great feature that you can benefit from. There are both sides: “I don't want to see this product,” with prediction markets being a great example, and, “I want to see it more. It's too buried in the product. I don't want it to be three taps away. I just want to see what's going on right now.” I think personalization is an answer.

The other thing we've been experimenting with is, in some cases, if the experience is really very different, we break it out into a separate app, which is what we did with banking. If you want a banking and card experience, you can have that in the banking app. If you want a more trading-first experience, you have the main green Robinhood app. If you want full crypto, the Robinhood Wallet has a DeFi-native experience.

What do you think the critics are getting right that you could improve on?

I think making things cohesive and making the purpose of the company and what we stand for more understandable is a fair critique. We hear that a little bit. Everyone always wants features, and it's hard for me. The Korean stocks—I think they're right. I think we probably should have Korean stocks, as well as stocks from every single market. There's just a bunch of stuff that we haven't gotten to yet because there's always more and more to build.

The way that I think about this is that there are 3 buckets of things. There are infrastructure improvements that just make the existing experience better, like faster performance, a better, nicer, cleaner UI and UX, and reliability, so that we can handle traffic spikes better and things like that. We've made tremendous progress there, even in the past year.

Then there's the category of what's available at other brokers that Robinhood doesn't have. That's a big category. Up until recently, it included trust accounts. International stocks are available at some of our competitors. You've got things like fixed income, if you want to buy direct bonds, and mutual funds. There are a lot of things that we don't offer that are sizable parts of customers' portfolios.

Then there's this third bucket, which I think can be easy to overlook. Not a lot of people have products here, but it's whether we can innovate and be first to market with new products, relative to our peer set at least. That's where things like prediction markets, Robinhood Ventures, Robinhood Chain, and Robinhood Earn come in. We also want to put things in there that are completely unexpected.

We were talking about agentic trading. Nobody big—nobody nontrivial—is working on agentic trading besides us. We're just figuring that out.

19. The California Billionaire Tax

Slightly off topic, are you ever worried about the billionaire tax here in California?

I try not to think about it very much. California has this interesting, referendum-based structure where, if you get enough support, even if the governor, local politicians, or the people support or oppose something, you can get it on the ballot anyway. I think we have a prediction market on this.

So you could hedge yourself in a way.

Technically, I could, although that's not one of the deepest markets. I think it's showing as a minority, so hopefully that holds.

What would change in your life if there was a billionaire tax?

A couple of things. First, I think the real risk isn't to me personally, although obviously it would not be amazing. It's to the ecosystem here.

I think the real risk is that it could be an own goal for California because there have basically been 2 industries that California hasn't just been leading the country in, but has been leading the world in many cases. One is the entertainment industry, Hollywood, and that's just gotten decimated in the past 10 years. A lot of it is policy decisions—own goals, not giving incentives to people to shoot and film or to hire people locally. So then they're flying to Atlanta, Canada, or Eastern Europe.

It's hard to break this network, but I think what's happened in Hollywood has shown that the network can be broken. If you have filming and studios moving elsewhere, eventually the talent, directors, and actors move elsewhere. Then you get to a point where they're not even having the award shows in LA because nobody lives there anymore.

I think there's a real danger of that. Could that happen to the technology industry? I think it was looking fairly bleak for technology in San Francisco during COVID. People were talking about moving to Texas and Florida, and AI kind of resuscitated things.

But I think what happened in LA shows that we shouldn't take this for granted.

Yeah. But what the real risk is, I think nobody's going to want to be taxed every single year, 5% of their wealth. These taxes do tend to start very, very popular, but then eventually they cover everyone.

Over time, I think you could actually get to a situation where the lost revenue from people paying moderate taxes, but doing so consistently, is much higher than the one-time hit of taxing someone once and having them leave the state. A lot of people have already left the state, actually, before the initial taxation would hit. Even the threat of this happening has been so severe that some people have bailed in relatively large numbers—pretty significant taxpayers.

If a billionaire tax passes, on a personal level, what would that do to you? Would you just be forced to sell some of your stake in your company?

I think it depends a lot on implementation, and some of it hasn't been precisely—

Laid out.

Laid out, yeah. But I think a lot of people would be forced to. The bulk of my wealth is Robinhood shares, so on a cursory reading, I think a lot of people would have to sell shares in their companies.

20. How Vlad Personally Invests

Do you keep your Robinhood shares in Robinhood?

No.

Too many eggs in one basket.

No, no, no. It's not because of that. It's just because, currently—

You get a 3% AATS transfer fee to some other broker.

That's—I’m saving it for a rainy day.

My shares and the shares of our employees are administered according to special requirements for employee stock purchase plans and what's called 10b5-1 plans. I can't just freely trade my Robinhood shares. I have to trade them under a specific plan that's filed in advance because of material nonpublic information.

Yeah, that makes sense.

There are companies that deal with this, and it's a B2B thing. I could actually create a deal with a pre-IPO company to manage their ESPPs and their 10b5-1 plans, and I become the vendor.

Do you trade on Robinhood?

I do. You'll wake up, check the app, and make an investment. But what's interesting is that when you sign up for Robinhood, you have to check boxes that no one else does.

When I'm signing up for a new brokerage, I say, “No, no, no, no. I don't know anyone who's a 10% owner in a company or this or that. I'm not affiliated by any means.” I say no to all those disclosures, but you actually have to say yes. How does that change things from a personal-investing perspective?

I have to be really careful trading individual stocks. I think ETFs are pretty simple and pretty clean.

Crypto, for a while, I was doing a lot of crypto because I love crypto, right? I love trading. I love being in the trenches with people. A lot of trenchers. I don’t post on Reddit anymore, sadly.

Anymore? Okay. Yeah, at one point I was a Redditor early on in my Robinhood journey. I think I got off Reddit.

But yeah, crypto has been kind of nice because it’s a fun trading product. Futures was nice when we launched it, and prediction markets as well. But individual stocks—there are a lot of restrictions.

What crypto do you have and own?

Again, I don’t want to get into recommendations, but I have a pretty diversified portfolio, to be honest with you.

Are you bullish on Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is singular in a lot of ways, which makes it special. It was the first asset. It was the original memecoin, right? The brand of it is quite strong because you can create lots of Bitcoin imitators, but nobody can ever take the position of being the first and most trusted. It’s the main coin that companies think about as they’re building out crypto treasuries to diversify against inflation and do all sorts of things.

Long term, I’m bullish on Bitcoin. I think it is singular, and I think that gives it an advantage over comparable coins. But I can’t tell you if it’s going to hit 1,000,000 or anything like that.

21. Crypto Custody and Security in the AI Era

One thing I want to ask you is that recently there was a Bitcoin hack with the cold wallet, and Bitcoin was stolen. How do you make sure that, if I deposit Bitcoin on Robinhood, that cryptocurrency is safe? On your end, how do you make sure there couldn’t be a hack, or that there isn’t an employee who just makes a mistake, types in a wrong little number, and something gets out there?

I think there’s what’s called defense in depth with these things. Without getting into the exact details of our crypto custody infrastructure, because there are a lot of hackers out there, you don’t want to have too much of your crypto easily accessible to people. In fact, the lion’s share of it should be in cold storage, where you have to go and get pieces of paper, ideally. That’s not exactly how it works, but it should just be not connected to the internet and highly secure.

So that way, even if there was an issue with the hot wallet, it covers a very small minority of crypto assets.

Then you have to constantly make sure that you’re hardening your infrastructure and watching out for and preventing possible security breaches and incidents. That’s very important in this environment because you have mythos and fable and the AI tools are

If there is a vulnerability, you can’t rely on it being just hard to find or being too expensive.

Before AI tools, it used to be that you wouldn’t have to worry as much because you had to worry about state-sponsored actors that would go after the softest, largest targets.

Yeah.

In reality, there are banks that hold trillions of assets that have a relatively poor cybersecurity posture, so they’re just being attacked everywhere. But now it’s so cheap to spin up another bot that you really have to make sure there are no holes.

I think you have to do that with penetration testing, internal red teaming, and also by using the AI tools themselves to scan and attack you like they were an adversary. We invest a lot in this, and we’re fortunate to be at the frontier of a lot of these tools and to actually spend a lot of resources and a lot of our mind share securing all these things.

22. Raising Kids, Manufacturing Hunger, and Health

I think the surface area is always rising. Right now, we have Robinhood Chain, all of our DeFi products, and, of course, the traditional business as well as crypto. Investing in security is a huge priority.

What are your personal goals outside of Robinhood?

I’ve really been focused on teaching my kids math. I still think math is important. I want to get them to enjoy learning and be curious. Whenever I get time to spend with them, which is never as much as I would like, I try to talk to them about history, encourage them to do math, and see how they’re doing in school.

I think they have certain benefits that I didn’t have when I was a kid. They could get access to the best tutors. They could talk to anyone they want. My concern is always, how do you get the benefits of that without the downsides?

The downside of growing up as my kid is that stuff can be easy for you, and maybe there’s not the incentive that I had to be hungry, right? If I didn’t work hard, my parents told me very directly, “We don’t have the money to send you to college. Very likely, you’re going to have to get a scholarship, which means you’re going to have to do all these things.”

By the way, we were visa holders, so our status in this country was very uncertain. There was always the threat of, “Okay, if you don’t do well, maybe the family will have to go back to Bulgaria,” right?

I think there’s a little bit less of that, which is good in some ways, but it can also be hard to manufacture hunger if it’s not really there. I’m very proud of them, actually, because despite this, I think they’re growing up to be great humans.

Other goals? I think about my health. I’m getting a little older now, so I want to make sure that my body and mind are working well because I’d like to—

How do you do that? Do you do blood testing, CT scans?

I’ve done the full-body MRI thing. I do blood testing. I just try to work out regularly. I’ve been getting into sauna and cold plunge and contrast therapy.

I’ve also been trying really hard to have a routine before I go to sleep because it’s too easy for me to get into the thing of being on my phone or iPad, looking at the company Slack, or reading documents until literally the last moment before I close my eyes.

Yeah.

My phone just whacked me in the head in bed. What I’m trying to do now is journal a little bit for 10 to 15 minutes and then read a physical print book for 15 to 20 minutes before I go to sleep, so things can wind down a little bit.

What kind of books do you read, and have you noticed an actual benefit from journaling?

I have noticed a benefit from journaling. One thing is that journaling, for me, has a little bit of structure to it. I write a little bit about what happened in the day, or sometimes I do Sunday journaling, where I think about the whole week—the week behind me and then the week ahead. Again, that breaks my rule of not thinking about the past. I do think about the past, but just in a way that helps inform what I want to do in the future, either today or the following week.

What I like to do is think about the period in question. What went well? I write those things down. Those make me feel good. What could have gone better? Then I say, “Okay, if I had to do some things this week, here’s the list.”

The list can be quite long, right? It’s like, “I want to get 10 things done,” but then I sort them based on what’s most important. I look back on the last one and see how I did. Certain things I carry over. Other things I say, “Hey, I actually finished this. This is awesome.”

Then I have a list for the week ahead and the day ahead. When I wake up the next morning, I look it over, and I feel really good starting my day. I think what can be a source of stress is just being completely input-driven. You wake up in the morning and you’re like, “Let me look at what other people want from me. What are the fires? Are there any emergencies? What are people texting me about?”

The risk is that you just don’t get the important things done. I think this at least forces me to think about what the important things are and make sure I’m aware of whether they got done or didn’t get done. It helps them get done as well.

That’s interesting, to be more output-driven. It’s like signal and noise. It’s like it’s always said in all of these different ways: One of the main sources of happiness is feeling like you’re in control of your own destiny.

Translated to this, it’s basically, “What must I do for myself and for my business?” as opposed to, “What fires do I need to respond to?” You’re no longer in control of your life if all you’re ever doing is responding to things and external stimuli. There’s a fire over here on this side of the business, so let me tend to this, as opposed to, “Here’s where I’m at. This is what I’m going to do, and I’m going to push for this.”

Yeah. I think a big source of unhappiness is to feel like things are out of your control even though they aren’t. Some of my fondest memories, looking back, are when I went through some kind of crisis, went through the crisis, and thought back about what was going through my mind at that time.

And now, with the benefit of distance, I'm like, “Oh, that was a really interesting time.” It almost seems fun in retrospect because now I appreciate it. But at that time, I was really stressed out, right? I wasn't enjoying it at all and wasn't sleeping. I think about how much better it would have been to actually enjoy it or be in a state of flow at the time. Even though a lot of crises are something that happens that you have to deal with, I think even those things are under your control at the end of the day, because whether you're happy or not, motivated, or in a state of flow really depends on your mindset as you're processing these things.

In terms of raising your children, do you feel like math is more important than social skills, or are social skills going to be more important in a world where AI could do just about any math imaginable?

Did you see that Peter Thiel thing? He was asked about this a couple of years ago, and he said that at the time, AI was getting really good at writing, right? You could just one-shot a history essay with a simple prompt. The conventional wisdom was that math skills were going to be very, very important, but people should be worried about writing essays or copywriting.

He said, “Oh, no. I'm much more worried about the math people than the word people.” For the longest time, word people were dominant in society, but only recently has math been a prized skill set. By and large, he basically put the reason for this on wokeness, right? Math is egalitarian in the sense that you could actually test different populations for mathematical ability, and you have outliers no matter what your income is.

But for verbal ability and words, and how well-read you are, it does skew quite heavily toward people who have higher net worth and socioeconomic status. So, for the past 50 years or so, maybe even a little bit longer, the general trend has been toward being more egalitarian and more progressive. The math people have gotten an advantage, but maybe that could be reversing.

Yeah. We were speaking with Chris Camillo yesterday, who was telling us that he wants his kids to be well-traveled, interesting people who are good at networking, because in a world with AI, he thinks that in-person relationships and conversations are going to matter more than they ever have. If a person is really well-traveled, has interesting stories, and knows how to relate to someone else, that'll be irreplaceable by any sort of program.

I think my point of view is a little bit different. I still think math is very, very important because my experience is that math generalizes. If you're really, really good at solving theoretical math problems—and I don't mean just multiplying together big numbers; I mean abstract theoretical math—it's a pure form of problem-solving. That pure form of problem-solving can generalize to all kinds of business situations.

I studied math. I was pretty good at it. I never studied business, but I felt like being better at math trained me to think better, and thinking better helps you in business and so many other things. I do think it's helpful, and I think that being better at thinking and thinking clearly helps you as you're networking or creating relationships as well. The things needed to be better at math help you become more curious, so I view it as very fundamental.

That's in part why I also started another company a couple of years ago building AI for math—what I call mathematical superintelligence. The bet there is that if you build a system that's really, really good at math, it can basically be really good at any economic activity, starting with coding, which is the closest. It can probably write you a better history essay eventually as well.

How has your perspective changed over the last 9 months since we last filmed?

23. What's Changed in Nine Months

Well, I've shipped Social, as per your recommendation.

You're very welcome.

You asked me before what products people aren't talking about enough. I still think that even though there is a policy discussion on private markets, we have to do more to spread the word that this asset class is now available to individual investors. I think we've been trying to do that through various means, but I don't think we're at the point where it's had its full mass-market moment. These are undiscovered little gems that only relatively few customers know about.

Agentic trading is another example. There's a lot of policy discussion around it, and the folks who are extremely sophisticated are aware of it, but it's still 100,000 customers. It's not at—

10 million customers. So, there's a lot of room to grow there.

Yeah. And I think now, personally, probably the first time we spoke, Graham, was in 2021, right? That was 5 years ago?

Yeah, I think so.

I think I've gone through this journey of being a newbie, a young person in this industry, to now being in the middle, right? I'm still young enough to understand what Gen Z is doing and saying, even though I really can't figure out TikTok yet. I haven't made much progress there.

But now I'm kind of old enough to be thought of as an industry person. I think this middle area is interesting for me because I can hang in Washington, have a policy discussion, and be taken seriously, maybe in a way that 25- or 30-year-old Vlad wouldn't have been. But I'm still in touch with all of the folks on social media, all the folks in the trenches, and the ability to bridge both, I think, is unique given where I am in life. I'm just trying to enjoy that and take advantage of it.

Yeah, I do have to say you're doing an incredible job. I think the last time that Jack and I were here, we both left thinking, “Oh, my gosh, your passion”—the fact that you would come on a podcast and talk with us openly for 2 hours, and nothing was off-limits, and you just allowed that—I think speaks volumes. After that, I was like, “Oh, man, I am bullish on Robinhood.” I really am, but I think it's because of you specifically.

It's not necessarily Robinhood as a company, but because of your passion and your enthusiasm and how into it you are.

So, I think that goes a long, long way. The exciting thing about Robinhood is that I become more bullish and excited as the years pass because the mission itself becomes much more expansive and much more interesting. Now we're talking about things that are on a civilizational scale, like how we can increase the ability of billions of people to own stocks, own private companies, and own real-world assets.

I think that's a really, really hard problem. To actually move the needle on that, you need to do lots of other little things that are very hard to do. You have to engage and entertain people because, inherently, these are boring things. You're never going to get everyone unless you make it a little bit more engaging as well.

If you were consulting our podcast—our business—what do you think we could be doing better? So, a little reverse interview.

Let's see. How many viewers are you guys at now?

Total subscribers are 1.63 million on YouTube, but it's way more—

Across all platforms—millions.

How many viewers per episode? Probably, on average. There is some volatility there, but on average maybe 300,000 to 400,000 people listen to every episode.

That's the long form. And that's the long form, but then on top of that, we have distribution. We have clips and shorts, and we're on every social media platform. Last year, we did 1.2 billion views across all platforms.

Okay. And what is your north star? If you wanted to be remembered for one thing—one contribution—for the podcast, what would that be?

That's really the guest selection. We just want to have really inspiring guests who could teach our audience something and show them a different perspective that maybe they hadn't considered before. For me, it's just getting the best guest possible who we want to have a conversation with.

Got it. But is it that you want to get to 100 million subscribers? Does that matter? Getting to 1 billion subscribers, getting 1 billion views per podcast—is that an anti-goal?

No. I think at this point, in terms of growth, growth is sort of something that will ensue from our other goals, which are to talk to interesting people, be as objective and fair as possible, and be entertaining, fun, and funny, but also educational.

If you had to think—and you don't have to say me; obviously, I know that it's me—but besides me, who was the best episode that you—

You have had? It's hard to say “best” because we've been doing this for 6 years, so we're picking between hundreds of people. The most memorable episode was Dr. K, who's a psychiatrist, oddly enough, who's been trained in Eastern and Western medicine.

That was fascinating. We also love talking to Ben Mallah, the commercial real estate guy; Kevin O'Leary; Chris Camillo; and TheStradman, who's a car guy. We just have so many—every person we talk to, we're super, super, super excited—

—to have them back on. Papa John, you know, that was absurd, being able to talk to him at his house. And string theory.

He's really into string theory. Papa John likes string theory.

Yeah. He brought it up unprompted.

Wow.

Yeah. We had no idea what to do, but it was fun.

String theory is—

Please don't. [laughter]

Where we're getting at is that we feel like we have so much potential and such a big, impactful platform that we just don't know what's next. We're good at this, but we feel like there's something more—something extra—that we could be doing, and we don't know what on Earth it is.

Also, to be frank, I think we're severely undermonetized. Realistically, to be able to get 1.2 billion views in the finance space—

I just want to focus on this. I don't really want to focus on a business or something to redirect viewership to, or more sales. I want to focus just on content. But also, I think that a lot of other people, if given the maximal amount of marketing that we're able to provide, basically for free, would be able to turn a greater profit.

Yeah, I think that makes sense. If you think about these shows—the best ones, where you felt that you've done the best work—is it based on views, comments, how the audience has resonated with it, or is it more like, “Hey, that was a really good conversation for me. I loved being a part of that”?

It's got to be both. I look at the metrics, and I'm very analytical about the data. I say, “This underperformed. Why?” Then I try to improve it, because if it underperforms, I think that means the audience didn't watch enough of it and clicked out. Why did they click out? Why did they not like that? But personally, I also enjoy the conversations.

Yeah. I think I can tell it's a labor of love for you guys—that you really care about it and are trying to get better. It's really engaging, and I think that comes across. I enjoy watching it.

If I had to give one area for improvement, I think the north star of having really interesting guests that you guys want to learn from, and that you think the audience could learn from, is probably one that you'd hear from a lot of podcasts. Lots of podcasts just want to have fun guests and have great educational content.

I guess the answer to the question of why I would watch Graham and Jack versus those other shows could use more differentiation. What is the one thing that people will get here that they won't get anywhere else?

I'll give you an example. I listen to the Acquired podcast, and I just don't think anyone else does exactly what they do. If I get another episode of that, I know exactly what it is: a 4-hour thing where those guys are having fun and chatting, but it's a 4-hour deep dive on 1 specific company. I kind of know the formula, and I think it's differentiated in that sense.

For you guys, it's a little bit of finance and a little bit of pop culture, but I think a sharper differentiation might be something I would consider.

We always try to tie everything into finance a little bit with some guests. Obviously, it's sort of impossible, and we're just excited to talk to them. But we generally dial it back into some form of: Where are you investing? Do you own equities?

Or the philosophies on business. Everyone we've had on is successful in their own right, in their thing, and we think about what we could take away from that.

Yeah.

But it is still relatively vague. I couldn't tell you a specific claim, like, “We want to get as many people into retail investing as possible.”

I think that the finance aspect is an interesting direction. I remember the clips I've seen of you guys that really resonate are where you talk finances with a successful person that you wouldn't normally associate with finance. Who was it?

Killer Mike.

That was our goal years ago. We wanted to break into the mainstream and make talking about finance a more available, ubiquitous thing. We wanted to have Leonardo DiCaprio on. This was a couple of years ago: Bring on people who are celebrities, musicians, yada yada yada. Ask them, “How much do you make selling out Madison Square Garden?”

Who actually gets paid out from this? What are you doing with this money? What are your intentions with it?

That's what we wanted. But it's also very difficult, because we'll bring someone on the show and then heavily debate beforehand: Should we lead in with a question or a phrase saying something like, “Robinhood moved 3% today, meaning your personal wealth grew by this amount”? That is directing our audience toward that north star.

At the same time, it could put you on your heels. It could make it seem like we're out to get you, or like we're just another one of those podcasts that want to lob cheap shots.

Yeah. No, yeah. I think you guys do it in kind of a nice way. I never felt like it was out to get me or aggressive.

I think there is a delicate balance, right? If you want to get into deep questions that are not what you would hear on other podcasts, a lot of executives are probably trained, to some degree, not to answer deep questions.

Sometimes we also forget. We're like, “Shoot, I have to say a number. If I say the wrong number, we'd have to edit that out or issue a correction.” So there can be an incentive not to really remember numbers, right?

Yeah.

24. What the Other Brokerages Don't Get

I think what I've seen other people do that's kind of interesting is, in real time, start browsing the web or show something. “Hey, I found this funny tweet”—pop that up, almost as a visual source. I think that can make it a little bit more dynamic, interactive, and entertaining.

25. Why Companies Should Build Podcasts, Not Buy Ads

Here's another thing, and this is by no means a pitch, but I think so many companies could benefit from having an unlimited marketing funnel behind them of organic marketing—not paid, not just a sponsorship, and not running an ad, because that appears as an ad or a sponsor.

If the full power of the Iced Coffee Hour were put behind some sort of fintech company, or some huge finance newsletter, business, platform, or something like that, where consistently you have 1 billion views every year that's also growing, and you have the trust and faith of the brand behind a company, it would be worth 20 times what we're making on an annual basis. It's not even close.

You don't see companies actually trying to create legitimate podcasts. For example, we talked to JPMorgan about it, and they spent $2 billion on advertising this year. We were like, “Yeah, but what about organic social media reach, where there's more trust behind it?” Why are companies not doing that? The overhead is cheap relative to everything else, and it's an added element of trust and authenticity.

Yeah, I think that's right. We've dipped our toes into media as a company for a while. We acquired MarketSnacks, if you guys remember. That was something like 8 years ago. It became Robinhood Snacks, and there was a podcast.

Robinhood Snacks was a podcast with Nick and Jack, and they later went off, with our support, to launch another thing, TBOY, right? So they have a podcast now. I don't think it's as big as the Iced Coffee Hour, but they've been working on it.

We had Sherwood Media as well. I think that's evolved over time, and I think we see huge potential in connecting our customers with really good content. I don't think too many people have nailed it. I think Bloomberg has done a pretty good job of combining financial services and data with content, media, and distribution, but they've been kind of unique.

Our thought is always: How much of it is curated versus providing a platform for the best content from all over the world to live on Robinhood? I see more potential in the latter, because it's probably unrealistic for the best content to be created first-party.

Instead, what we should figure out is how to empower folks such as yourselves who are basically entrepreneurs, probably don't want to work for a big company, but want to create great content and monetize it. How can we actually be a conduit for that great content, no matter where it's made, to find its way to Robinhood users as cheaply as possible?

I think that's going to be the winning long-term strategy, because we want customers to get the best content. We're unlikely to be able to employ everyone who can make it. We also probably don't want really good external content creators to feel like we're prioritizing the editorial stuff.

It sounds very similar to Elon Musk's approach: “I'm not going to buy ads from anybody. I'm just going to make the product so loud that you can't ignore it.” People will inevitably talk about any sort of Tesla launch because it's such a groundbreaking thing.

Yeah, I think it's simpler in many ways because you get to be a neutral platform.

You can just work on building the best tools possible. And then, I think it's simple to understand for creators on the platform as well. Whenever we're building network products—which we have at least 2 new ones since the last time we spoke, Robinhood Chain and Robinhood Social—we end up thinking about how to make it as attractive as possible for a creator or a developer to be on the platform.

26. Rapid Fire

And it's really just giving them the best tools, making them understand that the goal is for it to be neutral and for it to be a meritocracy, and there's no hidden agenda or hidden favoritism that can tip the scales one way or another and get you demonetized without you understanding why. So it's still super early. I mean, both of these things are month 1, but we are spending more time thinking through these problems.

Rapid-fire questions. What do you have to say about the biggest investing myth?

I think what people don't understand is compound interest. And a lot of people say, “Don't start investing until you have money saved up and you know what you're doing.” And actually, I think it's the opposite. The earlier you start, the better off you'll be.

So, with Trump Accounts, you could start at age 0. We've taken it to its logical conclusion, which is, I think, the right place: investing at age 0. Yeah.

Are you the largest depositor on the Robinhood app?

No.

Who outside of yourself is the best product builder?

I think Spotify has done a really nice job. I think Spotify is a great product. I'm sure you guys would agree, but it's just—

They're great.

I love using it. Yeah. What does Robinhood look like in 10 years if everything goes perfectly?

I think that Robinhood should be helping you with every investment, everything that you own, whether it be digital through our smartphone or physical. Maybe you'll be using our Robinhood credit card at a Robinhood grocery store.

Driving a Robinhood car.

Driving a Robinhood car. Maybe you'll be checking time on our Robinhood watch.

A Robinhood plane. Yes. And you'll get free burgers at our fast-food restaurants.

Robinhood Wellness Centers, free cold plunge.

I like that. What will surprise everybody by 2035?

One of the things that I'm really pushing is private markets. And I think the degree to which we can democratize that and make that accessible will be surprising to people. I mean, 2 hot takes: I think there will be more software engineers and more lawyers in 2035 than today.

Okay. Well, that's just dangling the carrot, huh? [laughter]