Tokenization, Agentic Trading, Harmonic: Robinhood's Mission to Expand Ownership with CEO Vlad Tenev

Prediction markets are an evolution of news. You can see what’s happening and what’s likely to happen in the future through the odds.

What is your reaction to the revolution in math that’s happening with AI today?

It’s too centralized, right? It’s AI companies with their big data centers and employees using secret models to do all this work.

Do you think people will let agents trade for them?

Agentic trading clearly has product-market fit. We’re seeing really strong adoption. More than 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts with us.

Many of these things you describe, institutional traders have—

Yeah.

—the ability to do this, but it’s expensive and sophisticated. If that’s democratized, what does that mean?

Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Vlad Tenev, the founder and CEO of Robinhood. We talk about what Robinhood is today as a financial conglomerate trying to expand ownership in the economy, from tokenization to prediction markets, to how AI agents will trade for everyone in retail. We also talk about Harmonic, his effort to make a math super intelligence, and whether there can be distributed discovery in science rather than centralized. Welcome, Vlad. Vlad, thank you so much for doing this.

Thank you for having me.

Everyone knows Robinhood, but it has also evolved a ton as a company. Can you put it in context for our listeners? Describe it today.

We do a lot of things. We’re live in some form or another in over 120 countries. If I had to sum up Robinhood in one word or one idea, it would be ownership. I think we’re the ownership company—the company most associated with that.

Why does ownership matter? On an individual basis, people want to own things. It’s the tried-and-true route to financial freedom and financial independence. If you’re an asset owner and accumulate assets over time, it’s the best way to build your wealth. There’s an individual element to it that’s very important, whether you’re trading, accumulating assets, or investing in venture.

The things you own also say a lot about your personality. They almost become part of your identity. Whether it’s a car collection, collectibles, cards, or your stock portfolio, there’s a lot of individuality to it.

I think there’s also a collective benefit, in the sense that a society without broad ownership is inherently very unstable. It’s a fragile society. If more people own things, they’re more bought in, have more stake in the outcome, and become defenders and protectors of the system. Especially now, when people are pushing back against society and things feel a little fraught with AI and all this disruption, giving people the ability to own companies at earlier stages is increasingly important.

That’s what ties together all of our things, from Trump Accounts, which is ownership at age zero, to Robinhood Ventures, ownership of private companies before they go public. Tokenization is ownership gone global. How can we make all the people outside the U.S.—people in more than 120 countries who sometimes don’t even have functional banking systems—part of this economic fabric of society?

That’s how I think about it. We started off as a simple app to buy stocks on your phone with zero commissions. Then we expanded into an increasingly global financial conglomerate that allows customers to own things across a wide variety of surfaces and asset classes.

You might be the only large financial company I think of as a missionary organization, with the other being Vanguard or something like that. Can we talk about how you got here? I learned recently that you studied math under Terrence Tao and worked in HFT. Neither of those sounds like being a missionary for people, if I may say that. How did you discover this mission or come to it?

Rewinding even further, I was born in Eastern Europe in the late ’80s, on the brink of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the lifting of the Iron Curtain. I immigrated to the U.S. after my parents. My dad had an opportunity to come study for his master’s at the University of Delaware, and he was able to take advantage of that and stay in America full-time. My mom came about a year after him, and I came about six months after her.

It was a pretty unique experience. I didn’t see my dad for a year and a half, or my mom for six months, when I was a small child. I lived with my grandparents. A large part of the reason was that we just didn’t have the money to send the whole family, and we weren’t sure my dad would have a long-term future in this country. We thought maybe he’d come back after a year or two. He did quite well and was able to send for my mom and then me.

My last year in Bulgaria, in 1991, the inflation rate was something like 170%. My early memories were of the rolling blackouts and my family huddled around the battery-operated radio, listening to what was going on. I could see the lines for milk and eggs at the bodega from my window. The milk came in these big plastic bags. You’d get bananas from other communist countries one week a year. The Cuban bananas, I remember, were just amazing.

Wow.

Then I came to the U.S., and there were bananas everywhere, right? But they weren’t as good. Even after I moved, in 1997, Bulgaria had the unfortunate distinction of having the highest inflation rate in the world. It was something like 2,000% annualized, and they were just adding zeros to the currency every couple of months.

From that point, I developed an understanding of money. I had to be very independent. My parents were always talking about it, and we had to send money to my grandparents back home as they dealt with this inflation crisis. My grandparents actually kept their assets in copper cookware. There was a closet in my grandfather’s house where he kept it. He worked as a doctor in the shipbuilding and naval industries, so he was on a boat a lot of the time. He had contacts at the port, and as soon as he got his salary, he would exchange it for copper cookware. It was the first real-world asset I encountered people investing in.

Like stocked—sorry, stocked like pans?

Exactly.

Yeah. Okay.

Just in the closet, you had—

Mm-hmm. Holds value.

Yeah.

Yes.

Pots and pans. They were much better than the local currency at the time. I grew up understanding what happens in a broken system, where you don’t have free markets and healthy capital markets.

I’d say I pretty quickly discovered that, academically, I was quite strong, and also independent. That was basically by choice. My parents couldn’t really afford babysitters or after-school activities or any of that stuff. They were both working multiple jobs, and my dad was a full-time graduate student.

When I was in kindergarten, at five years old, I would walk back from school by myself. My parents would tell me, “Okay, go to the neighbor’s house.” We lived in apartment buildings at the University of Maryland. “Knock on the door. Your neighbor will watch you for a couple of hours.” Then they realized, “All right, our son’s going through this complicated ritual to get home. We might as well just give him the key.”

Pretty soon after that, I would let myself in, do my homework, go outside, and play with my friends. I was very independent. There was always pressure to succeed and do well in school, probably for a couple of reasons. I was good at it, so everyone around me was saying, “Do more school. Skip grades. Do better in math. More math.” The teachers would meet with my parents and say, “Your son is really good at math. You should put him in this thing.” I think that was one of the benefits of growing up around the University of Maryland, a very academically oriented community. They would try to identify kids with potential and accelerate them.

The other thing was that my parents would sit me down and say, “Look, the financial status of this family is very insecure. We’re not making any money, so you’re going to have to get a scholarship if you want to go to college. To get a scholarship, you’re going to have to do very, very well in school. Also, we’re visa holders here.”

Mm-hmm.

“So if we lose our jobs, we’re going to have to get sent back to Bulgaria.” There was all this pressure to succeed academically. For me, my math PhD program eventually became a kind of challenge.

What’s the hardest thing? How can I do better at the hardest thing? It was almost a competition with myself and with my parents, who were also very academically strong. “What was the hardest subject for you at school, Dad?” “Chemistry?” “Let me do really well at chemistry.”

Or, what was the most advanced math that you did? I think math has this ladder of achievement. It’s almost like playing a really good video game: you always know what the next hardest thing is. It’s almost about how quickly you can get to algebraic geometry or algebraic topology, and whether you can learn that earlier and understand it.

What appealed to me when I got to grad school was the idea that if you create a new mathematical theory, maybe you’ll be remembered for a really long time. Just like kids in school learn Gauss and Riemann and all these greats, maybe kids will be learning about your work hundreds of years from now. That was what appealed to me.

Given that background, you should also explain what Harmonic is as an effort. What’s your reaction to the revolution in math that’s happening with AI today?

1. AI Changes the Math Pipeline

On the one hand, it’s very exciting and somewhat predictable, because the rise of AI models, together with the ability to verify their outputs, has led to a kind of automation of the math pipeline. I think it’s really exciting. The tools are powerful, and math is changing so quickly. Math as a field hasn’t changed very rapidly at all in thousands of years.

When I was in grad school, most of the work was still being done in person with chalk and a chalkboard. There was no collaboration. People weren’t even using computers. Now math has converged with coding. Mathematicians are using the same tools: version control and Lean for verification. The field is accelerating very rapidly.

About a year ago, Harmonic, a startup I co-founded a couple of years ago with the goal of building mathematical superintelligence, created a model called Aristotle. It was one of 3 models that got a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. After that, we rolled it out to the public, and people used Aristotle to tackle unsolved math problems. It was used to solve these Erdős problems, and other mathematicians were using it for new results and so forth.

Then I started thinking a lot about the future of math and how these tools should be used. For me, it’s very important that the tools I build—not just Harmonic, but also Robinhood—empower individuals. The one thing I don’t love about this latest wave of AI models solving math problems is that it’s too centralized. It’s AI companies with big data centers and employees using secret models to do all this work. What’s more attractive, and what would ultimately win out as a model, is rolling these things out, putting them in people’s hands, and having users make interesting discoveries and inventions.

I’m probably a pretty fundamental believer in decentralization as a philosophical premise, and I would love to believe that’s true. A lot of people who work at large centralized AI companies would say, if I may push back a little, that this is cope, and that centaur play will just be outclassed by more compute in an agent loop. Do you believe that’s true? What will be the productive human input in math?

I think there are 2 separate things. One is the role of the individual mathematician, and the other is whether this is going to be a product that people use or whether the AI labs are going to be producing the products. I have thoughts on both, but the second one is much more interesting.

A world where the AI labs make all the discoveries on a proprietary basis, with OpenAI or Anthropic data centers just running code managed by their employees, is a world where they’re vertically integrating, producing all the drugs and selling them to people, making all the mathematical and physical discoveries, and publishing all the papers. If all of that is happening and owned by the AI labs themselves, I think that’s a bit of a dystopian outcome, and unlikely to happen for a couple of reasons—not just technological and market reasons, but also because if that happens to a significant—

Social reasons, yeah.

—degree, people will lose their license—

It is not acceptable.

—to operate.

Yes.

Right?

Yeah.

I think it’s much more—I think you could have the same outcome, with the Navier–Stokes equations being proven or the partial Riemann hypothesis, or any one of these things, and it will be much more accepted if it was a random layperson using—

It might be celebrated.

—GPT-6.

Yeah.

I think for sure. I think that’s how it’s going to happen. That’s the likely scenario a year from now. You also have the confounding factor that a lot of the people going into these AI labs are former researchers, and they’re excited by doing research. I think they’re confused as to why this is being poorly received. From their perspective, it’s, “I’m a researcher. I was brought into a research organization to do research, and now all these academics are mad at me.”

I’ve said this to people who work at the companies: I think it would have been much better if they found some mathematicians and collaborated with them, so it didn’t seem like there was this dark, data-center dystopian future where one company was going to make all of the scientific discoveries.

Can we talk a little bit about both the new ways you want to extend ownership as part of Robinhood and how Robinhood is intersecting with what’s happening in AI? Maybe we can start with what you guys are doing with tokenization, or your vision for it.

2. Tokenizing Real World Assets

Tokenization is a new innovation, and the idea is similar to stablecoins. The way a stablecoin works is you take some dollars or treasuries, put them in a wrapper, put them in a box, and then mint and burn tokens against the box. The traditional assets stay custodied at a traditional institution, like a bank, and then the tokens can trade freely on DeFi. They can move anywhere around the world, trade in fractional amounts, and be swapped in different protocols or lending pools. That opens up a ton of possibilities.

They have software characteristics.

Yeah. You can extend that concept to any real-world asset. We’ve done it with stocks: you can put stocks in a box and mint and burn tokens against them, and they can trade all over the internet on blockchains like software. You can do it with private companies. Instead of a stock, it’s an SPV with private company shares. It behaves the same, with some slight differences around redemption and things of that nature. You could do it with art, collectibles, or real estate.

We’ve been playing around with tokenization and experimenting with it for many years. Last year, we had an event in the south of France where we launched stock tokens, which are tokenized versions of U.S. stocks, in Europe. But they weren’t fully DeFi-enabled. If you were a European customer using Robinhood, you could trade them, and they felt very much like real stocks, but you couldn’t send them out on Ethereum or another blockchain and put them in pools or compose them with other smart contracts.

This year, we took it one step further. We relaunched stock tokens with fully DeFi-enabled characteristics, and launched them in conjunction with Robinhood Chain, our new blockchain built for real-world assets. Robinhood Chain has become one of the fastest-growing—I think the fastest-growing across a lot of metrics—blockchains in history. We’ve seen an explosion of developer activity. I think we recently announced that it’s the number one chain in developer activity, too.

Developers have taken stock tokens, which have become like Legos, and started building all sorts of interesting smart contracts, NFTs, and pooled assets. For example, they’ll take a meme coin and link it with a stock token. This is just month-one and month-two activity. I think these financial primitives, as the foundation of a developer platform, will become really big. What’s more exciting to me is that Robinhood Chain is a way to enable the long tail of countries.

So people in countries that don’t have highly functioning capital markets or financial systems, like places in South America or Africa, can now get exposure to U.S. markets at incredibly low cost. In the same way that stablecoins became the default way for people in these countries to get access to dollars, stock tokens and products like that will be the default way for all of these people to get access to U.S. equities.

May they have access to not just copper pots, but wealth creation.

Exactly. And private companies. The vision for Robinhood Chain and tokenization is to take all the things that work on Robinhood, put them on-chain, and make them available to people in all these countries.

One thing I’ve learned is that we’re new to operating a blockchain and on-chain smart contract products. A lot of the criticisms Robinhood has received are that we’ve been called a “corpo chain.” We’ve been told, “The best blockchains are managed by these organizations and consortiums, and everything’s decentralized. You guys are a corporation managing a chain. How is that going to be as good?”

Maybe you sacrifice a little bit of organizational decentralization purity, but what you get is focused leadership and someone—or some group of people—with a very clear direction, pushing things forward. I also think it’s good to have Robinhood-backed products on the chain. A lot of chains take the approach of letting a thousand flowers bloom and letting developers build everything. We love the developers, too, but having primitives like stock tokens that we back, which people can trust, creates more interest in building on them.

People know Robinhood backs them. They’re legitimate. It’s a trusted brand, and people know we’re not going to go away. That gives them much more confidence to build than if it were just a team of 2 or 3 engineers somewhere offering these primitives.

Is there an example of a composition on stock tokens that you think should exist, or that has already come from the ecosystem and excites you?

One thing I’m thinking about is how we can take some of these derivative products, like options. Can you make really nice, smart contract-native options contracts? There’s been a tremendous amount of innovation in traditional markets that’s been stymied, to some degree, by how hard it is to move off mainframes onto more modern systems, and by all the counterparties that rely on the system being predictable and slow-moving.

A big part of it is just providing the primitives and letting developers put them together in new ways. I don’t want to presuppose what developers will come up with, because I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that stock-token-linked NFTs or stock-token/meme-coin pairs would become a thing. I had no way to foresee how quickly those things would grow and become real.

It’s not necessarily ownership. What is your perspective on prediction markets?

3. Prediction Markets Become News

I actually think prediction markets do tie into ownership, because a lot of people have unique knowledge and ideas, and hot takes on things that maybe not everyone knows. You might be an expert in AI model development. We have lots of contracts that let you speculate and hedge on which AI model will be best this week, this month, or this year. Before prediction markets, the way to monetize that knowledge was highly indirect.

Mm-hmm.

Maybe you could trade derivatives on Google stock or NVIDIA stock.

And imprecise, yeah.

Yeah. There’s something important about being able to monetize your own knowledge more directly. It’s one of the reasons we announced that we’re planning to launch KPI contracts.

For a long time, if you were studying a company and had a pretty good idea it was going to beat earnings—EPS or revenue—in the past, if you bought the stock or an option on the stock, the company might beat earnings and the stock might go down for some unrelated reason, like guidance. KPI contracts now let you trade the EPS print, the revenue print, or any of the other KPIs that might matter to a company.

I think there’s an aspect of being able to monetize your belief and hedge more precisely. For example, there’s a “Will the California billionaire tax pass?” contract, which I think is a useful hedging instrument for some people. Not me personally—I’m not hedging with it—but one could.

The other thing is that I think prediction markets are a new source of information. In their pure form, they’re an evolution of news. What does news look like in the future? I don’t think it’s The New York Times, but it could be something like it, with a front page, a business section, lifestyle, culture, and sports—and sports is a big part of it. You can see what’s happening and what’s likely to happen in the future through the odds. A lot of people don’t even trade these things. They just like to open the app and check out—

That’s me.

—what’s going to happen. Yeah.

Do you think people will let agents trade for them? When, and what’s the impact of that?

4. Agents Take Over Trading

We launched a product earlier this year that’s basically a Robinhood MCP. We call it Agentic Trading, and we have an Agentic Credit Card as well. In the broader realm of agentic finance, I think there are 2 things that have product-market fit. One is Agentic Trading, very clearly: having an agent execute your trades and carry out a strategy for you. We’re seeing really strong adoption. More than 150,000 customers have opened Agentic Trading accounts with us in the few months since we launched it.

If you look at the tool calls, they’ve been following this smooth exponential curve. The last number we announced was something like 30 million tool calls per day. Agentic Trading clearly has product-market fit.

We started by just having an MCP, and a couple of weeks ago at our HOOD Summit event, we announced Robinhood Agents. That takes things one step further: the harness and the entire UI are now inside a Robinhood account. If you’re a Claude Code or Codex user, you can think of it as a tool like that, optimized for trading. You can run loops and say, “Every day, execute a run of my strategy, rebalance my portfolio, and look at opportunities.”

We have skills, so you can do a portfolio rebalance or all sorts of other things. We have agent apps, too. We launched an app store where you can, for example, connect to a source of satellite data. If you want to create a strategy that counts cars in retailers’ parking lots, or something of that nature, we’ll make that available. I think we’ll look at all the capabilities that coding harnesses have and see how we can provide clean, trader-native versions that make it really easy to be an active trader.

Amazing. What do you think the impact of this is on either participant mix or financial infrastructure? Many of these things you described are things institutional traders have the ability to do—

Yeah.

—and it’s expensive and sophisticated, right? If that’s democratized, what does that mean?

That’s really the north star of the product: Can we put the capabilities of a hedge fund or a sophisticated algorithmic trading firm into the pockets of normal individuals?

In the same way that a sophisticated grad student in computer science, or something, could write a trading strategy, and with even more effort deploy it, get rack space in a data center, and connect it to the exchanges, can we streamline all aspects of that? In the same way that it’s become easier for anyone to be a software engineer, Robinhood Agents and our MCP can make it easier for more people to be quant traders.

I think the outcome is that there will be more trading activity. At first, it’ll be concentrated in a relatively small group of sophisticated people, but their trading activity will likely increase quite substantially. Over time, it’ll filter to more and more of the population.

Coding is a good analogy. There are lots of people who code, and the first to adopt coding agents saw their output multiply.

But now there are people who wouldn’t have picked up VS Code or Cursor before, but someone showed them how to use Claude or Codex, and now they can build a website really easily. So it’ll lift the tide across the board.

I believe the desire to make software or automate things is much broader than I did before coding and agentic coding happened. But wanting to make money off a belief feels like a much more universal thing.

Yeah, and I think that as it becomes easier, a lot of people have ideas, right? If you can take an idea and turn it into a strategy with as little friction as possible—if we can get it to approach the friction of just buying a single stock—then I think a lot more people will do it.

There may not be an answer to this question, but is there an obvious way financial infrastructure or risk management needs to change in reaction to this?

I don’t think so. I’ll tell you the safeguards we have on day one. Right now, you have to create a new, separate account that’s segregated from your main Robinhood balance. You can create an MCP account or an agentic account, and you have to move money into it.

For customers who choose to have trade approvals, you have to approve your trades by default. But you can turn that off so you can run the strategy—

Dangerously skip permissions.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah.

Well, actually, it’s not as dangerous as that because it’s not like it can go into your other accounts and—

It’s not my core code base.

—and move money for you.

Yes.

So it’s sandboxed—maybe not quite air-gapped, but pretty close. We refined a lot of the infrastructure for the sandboxing and the harness in-house at Robinhood.

So far, I think it’s not a huge percentage of the market. The reason I don’t see any clear, massive overhauls as necessary is that high-frequency trading has been a thing for a really long time. Markets went fully electronic about 20 years ago, and everything from the exchanges to many of the brokers has conformed to this new reality: most workflows are algorithmic trading happening in data centers in New Jersey, rather than what a lot of people still think happens, with paper tickets and floor traders in a trading pit.

I don’t think it’s clear that anything fundamental has to change with regulation. But as it gets bigger, which I don’t doubt it will, we might run into special cases where we need more regulatory clarity.

I was thinking more from an infrastructure perspective. If you use coding as a proxy, I didn’t think it was obvious—maybe we all should have—that CI/CD was going to completely fall over in the face of orders-of-magnitude growth in code generation.

Oh, yeah.

That was my question. We’ve had HFT—

Yeah.

—but if everybody is a high-frequency trader, that feels like new load.

Yeah, there are a couple of different layers in the stack, right? We should expect our on-chain stack to be slightly different. That already has MCPs. We have our on-chain tools, and I talked about Robinhood Chain being the best chain for real-world assets. It’s also the best chain for AI agents.

Mm.

We’re seeing a lot of agentic trading there. On our CeFi, or centralized, offerings, we have a lot of end-to-end control over the entire system. We have our databases, the code the strategies are running on, and the sandboxes. We build a lot of those tools, and we have to optimize all of that.

Once it gets through our system, you get to places like the market makers, which are all extremely sophisticated software shops. You’re talking about Citadel, Jane Street, and Jump Trading. These are low-latency, high-frequency folks, so I’m not so worried about them scaling to meet the demand. Then you have the exchanges, which have really optimized their APIs to handle huge volumes because of pressure from HFTs and algorithmic trading.

That said, I think agentic trading is still a low percentage of total trading. I don’t think we’re going to be at the point imminently where agent-mediated trades are a double-digit percentage of activity. I think we’ll have some time.

Given you’re such a strong believer in ownership, and then democratized ownership, as important to societal stability and opportunity for people, I think there’s a sense that the AI revolution isn’t broadly owned. Do you have an idea of what the solutions here might be? Maybe you can talk about Trump Accounts as well.

5. Who Gets to Own AI

Yeah, and I think we identified this problem last year. It’s a couple of things. First, all of the major innovative AI companies are private, with some exceptions. You can look at Nvidia and Google, but those companies were already quite big before they really got into this new phase of AI. If you wanted to invest in a large language model a couple of years ago and get exposure to OpenAI or Anthropic, you were basically out of luck as an individual investor.

I think there are a lot of reasons for that. One is that it’s gotten really easy for high-growth, successful companies to raise money in the private markets. They can raise capital at massive scale, and that didn’t used to be the case.

At massive scale, yes.

Back in the ’80s, a company like Microsoft—and even in the ’90s, with Amazon—went public at valuations in the hundreds of millions. Individual investors who got in during the public offering could make 1,000x. Now, if an AI lab goes public at a trillion or two trillion, an individual investor at the IPO would need the company to get into the quadrillions to make that type of return. Crazy. I think that’s unlikely. Maybe it could happen, but I think it’s going to be much tougher.

Instead, the gains keep getting concentrated into a smaller and smaller group of venture capitalists or institutional investors. Then we wonder, why are people upset about data centers? If I’m an individual, I don’t benefit economically from any of this activity. In fact, you could say, “It’s threatening my livelihood, my job. It’s polluting my neighborhood. They’re making all this noise.”

Juxtapose AI with something like crypto. It’s not like everyone trading crypto makes money. Right now, Bitcoin is—what is it?—$85,000. If you bought at $120,000 a couple of months ago, you’re down. 2022 and 2023 were rough for the crypto industry, to say the least. A lot of people lost money in those years. But in 2024, they came out in full force and swung the election in a meaningful way, I think.

If there’s even a hint of regulatory overreach for crypto, you have an army of people blasting social media, messaging their congressman or woman, and fighting every inch of it. I think a big part of that is that crypto had broad ownership by individuals from the beginning, and institutions are almost coming in late. AI is different.

So what do we do about it? We launched two things. We believe everyone should be able to invest in private companies, and I can’t convince companies to go public earlier very effectively, even though I try sometimes.

Neither can I.

We do have our IPO channel. We’re an underwriter, and we’re active in that pipeline. Individual investors should benefit from private companies and be a huge shareholder. That’s really the vision behind Robinhood Ventures: how can we make it an anomaly not to have individual retail investors as a big constituent of your seed and Series A cap table? They should actually be at the earliest possible stage.

With Robinhood Ventures Fund I, we have an innovative structure. You can think of it as a publicly traded venture capital firm. We used our IPO channel, which is the largest retail channel for IPOs, to raise capital in an IPO from Robinhood customers—individual retail investors—and then used that to invest in startups.

The fund is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, so it trades just like a stock. Robinhood Ventures Fund I holds late-stage private companies. OpenAI is in the fund, along with a couple of other companies, fintechs, and a lot of AI companies, including ElevenLabs and Crusoe, which we recently announced.

So that was ultra-late stage. Then we asked ourselves, well, how can we go to the extreme and give people exposure to seed and Series A? That’s where the idea for Robinhood Ventures Fund II came from: partnering with YC and using a structure to give people exposure to the earliest possible stage, where the risk is highest but the opportunity is also greatest. That’s the fund Rich Aberman is running for us.

Then we have tokenization of private companies, which solves that problem in a different way, but right now only outside the U.S. The North Star is: Can we get a private company to be real-time tradable 24/7 in fractional quantities, just like a stock or crypto? You should be able to trade Anthropic 24/7 in low-dollar amounts, with some degree of high-quality ownership, at least as good as owning an LP interest in an SPV, right? And that should be available to everyone.

That requires pushing on a bunch of things in the U.S., accredited investor rules being one of them. But we’re highly motivated to lead that and make it happen.

That was my question for you: If you are, for example, a venture capitalist with a portfolio you think is going to make money in private companies, then some people will have a choice of LPs. There are institutions, and there are your friends you can make money for. Obviously, there are rules around QP and accreditation around taking retail interest. Your view is clearly that some of those rules need to be updated.

Yeah. There was an initiative by the SEC, announced last week, to allow a separate path. They directed FINRA, the primary broker-dealer regulator, to create an accreditation exam where an individual can get accredited by taking a two-hour exam at a testing facility. And I think that’s—

Versus it being asset-based.

Versus it being asset-based, or there’s also the option to be affiliated with a financial firm and have a Series 7 license. But yeah, it’s a knowledge-based exam, and I think it’s definitely a positive step. I think they’re doing stuff.

But the goal would be to make it lower-friction, because how many people are going to go sit for an exam at a testing facility? I think more work needs to be done, and we’re going to be at the forefront of continuing to push for that.

I think the main argument against this evolution of the rules would be some sense of protection against fraud and paternalism. How do you think about that?

For our customers, we spend a lot of time talking to them and figuring out what they care about. One of the things they care about most, and agree with, is the statement, “I should be in charge of my money, and nobody should tell me how to spend or invest my money.” When we ask our customers, “Do you agree with this?” there’s overwhelming agreement.

That’s not to say they’ll personally want to do every type of risky, speculative investment, but they don’t think it’s the government’s place, or anyone’s place, to tell them what to do with their money broadly. Of course, people should be absolutely clear on what these products are, so we should make sure to tell you what it is and give you as much information as possible.

I think about this: Am I going to tell you not to invest in the hot IPO? IPOs are risky, for sure. Meme coins, even. Meme coins have perfect regulatory clarity. If you want to buy a meme coin, you are free to do so. The SEC even wrote a letter saying, “These are not securities; they’re collectibles.” Clear the way.

So I think it’s silly from a couple of different angles, not the least of which is that meme coins are completely fine in any amount, but private companies—

It’s not rational from a pure risk-orientation perspective to restrict private companies.

Yeah, I think that’s right. People are smart, right? There should be some sensible regulation. I’m in favor of that. But I think we’ve just gone too far, and the conditions that made the accredited investor rule necessary no longer hold.

These rules are from a time before the internet. You couldn’t even get any information. And now there’s an influx of information about everything, particularly private companies, and AI models that can scour and synthesize it for you. So I think it makes a little bit less sense now.

Can you talk about what Robinhood is doing to support Trump Accounts?

Yeah. This was our way of serving our country, which we’re very proud of. Robinhood was selected as the sole initial trustee and broker for the Trump Accounts, and we’re working with BNY, America’s oldest and most storied bank, and with the Treasury and the IRS to make this program happen.

The idea behind it is: Can we get every child, from birth, to own a chunk of the U.S. economy through the S&P 500, through a low-cost, diversified ETF? Every child born from January 2025 onward, for the next 3 years, gets $1,000 seeded by the Treasury. Michael and Susan Dell, through their foundation, added another $6 billion-plus for children in lower-income ZIP codes.

A bunch of other people are following, like Gwynne Shotwell, who committed a donation of SpaceX shares. Brad Gerstner, who was the brains and architect behind the program, pushed it forward and also made a really big donation to the citizens of Indiana and their children.

We’re powering the infrastructure and building the app. We love it because I think it’s the best thing for getting household stock ownership from 65% to 95%. When it’s successful, I think it’ll lead to a much more stable and prosperous society over many decades. Our goal is to make this the best product the government’s ever launched and the most enduring, positive aspect of President Trump’s legacy. That’s our goal.

It’s an amazing effort. Sign your kids up. So, a last question for you. Andrew Reid, who we both know well, described you as a strange combination of unlimited IQ and the steadiest possible hand when working with the vagaries of the financial markets, PR, and large user bases.

Yeah.

How do you keep your levelheadedness or cool? What advice do you have for the many business leaders who listen?

I think going through a lot of challenges as a child just made me very used to going through challenges. I had a very supportive and amazing family, great parents, but we were in this together. We all immigrated to the U.S. at the same time, and I wasn’t a child who was given things. It was almost like you’re a member of this family, and we all have to figure this out. I had my part. They had their parts.

I was obviously their child, but I was treated with a lot of autonomy, almost as an equal, from a very young age. We come across a lot of business challenges at Robinhood, at Harmonic, and in all these things. But when you step back and say, “All right, does it compare to the threat of deportation?” And we talk about inflation here of 5% and freak out about it. What about the 2,000% inflation we went through as children? Sometimes I think about that with my own kids.

Do you create challenges for them?

I try to construct challenge, but you have to construct it, right? It’s a little bit harder, and they get a lot of positives. They could have tutors. They could go to all kinds of museums that I didn’t have.

They have safety.

Yeah, but they have safety. I think there’s something very important about having to struggle and endure. I try to create that environment as much as possible, but I think I haven’t figured it out. I think that’s a big part of it, and also, as we were talking before, it’s a good bit of nature versus nurture. Maybe I was just born like that, and I don’t know how much of it is the environment either.

I think the advice for other leaders is just the optimistic take that whatever challenge you’re going through will make you more level in the future.

I think Bezos said this, right? The best approach to all of these challenges is to just grow thick skin. You can control that about yourself, but you can’t control the outside world. If you can actually do that, I think it seems to be a big superpower that not everyone is capable of.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Vlad. This is great.

Thanks for having me.

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