ROBINHOOD'S CEO VLAD TENEV ON GAMESTOP CONTROVERSY, WALLSTREET, & CHANGING FINANCE

this episode is sponsored by greenwood my graduates from my school being forbes backdrop backdrop backdrop [Applause] all right guys welcome back eyl silicone valley edition billionaire edition the third time yeah yes yes yes very rare so shout out to mark cuban and mike novogratz those are the two previous billionaires that we've had on but this is a much younger situation much younger gentlemen so and you might be familiar with his company perhaps perhaps so vlad tenef i say your last name correctly you did oh thank you i get very nervous about that people put butch my name all the time so i'm very conscious about that so um thank you for having us if you guys aren't familiar ceo of robin hood robin hood revolutionized the game when it comes to investing um brought millions of investors into the fold that previously were not investing yeah i think the number is like 20 23 million right now new investors or total total investors but over the pandemic the number was like ridiculous yeah like it was every day somebody comes up to me and asks me to look at their portfolio and at least 80 percent of the time when they pull it up it's robin hood it's good to hear glad we're we're serving people yes and recently went public in july um with a current valuation somewhere around 40 billion dollars uh give or take yeah yeah so this is going to be an interesting conversation we're going to go a deep dive and true ewo fashion um so first and foremost thank you for having us we appreciate it thanks for being here yes yes um all right so let's get into this you are a bulgarian immigrant i know both of your parents worked at the world bank so coming to america going to stanford university um which is you know one of the premier universities in the world yeah especially when it comes to tech probably the number one place for people that are looking at uh do tech i know you had a couple of other businesses previously um you had but it started in 2010 but then started 2011 kronos i think was the last business that you had but what made you have the idea and start robinhood in 2013 like where did that come from yeah well it it was uh it was definitely a journey so i would say when i got to stanford even though stanford was a university that you associate with entrepreneurship um i wasn't really i didn't come from a particularly entrepreneurial family i was interested in science and math growing up so i thought i would be a professor so i went to stanford to study physics and then i transitioned even more kind of theoretical than physics into math where you literally have a chalkboard and a couch and that's what you work with right and then i actually went to grad school after graduating ucla ucla i did i did grad school i was in a math phd program that i ended up dropping out of but my sort of i didn't really know what i was going to do with my career but kind of my default path was to be a math professor it's pretty much what you do with with a math degree because i i really enjoyed um what appealed to me was creating something which in the case of being a mathematician would be you know like a new theory or something that hopefully hundreds of years from now into the future if you're lucky they would teach to high schoolers or other students so i went there you know expecting to be a research mathematician i met my co-founder who i started all these other companies with and he was also on the same path started physics and then transitioned to math and then um 2008 when we graduated and i went to grad school and he got a job in the financial industry kind of on a whim the stock market crashed right so you had lehman brothers going belly up and the entire uh the entire market changed and so uh probably somewhat foolishly if it sounds kind of silly to say it now but at the time that seemed like the the best time to start a financial company right when the financial system crashed everybody starting over yeah i mean it was in a way leveling the playing field with the playing field it was a changing of the guard right like the era of i don't know if you guys um have ever seen old movies of you know traders people trading on the trading floor yeah uh you know probably trading trading places like wall street wall street trading place is one one of my favorites is that that's old 80s from the 80s okay um they they did do a a sequel a couple years ago but uh yeah basically you see those scenes of like the trading pit and the people with the with the paper tickets flying around and uh that really changed in the 2000s especially after 2000 to 2008 there were no more people with paper tickets no more manual trading everything went completely electronic and so our previous two businesses we kind of created in the wake of that so we saw an opportunity as markets were going electronic to uh to start a software company that basically built the technology and the software to support fully automated trading um and so that's what chronos was it was basically a b2b a business to business enterprise software company we built the technology and we licensed it to financial institutions um who couldn't really compete you know they were they wanted to get into fully automated trading but they were still using kind of the the people on the phones or or the desks and so we found a little bit of a niche there and then as we were building that business and and growing it and scaling it beijing and i both kind of recognized that you know while we saw a path to making making it a big business and growing it to millions in revenue we just weren't that passionate about about the end the end result of running a big enterprise business and the way we describe it is you know our customers were already rich i mean they were institutions they had money and we were kind of helping them adapt to this new environment giving them better technology but what we really were after was building a consumer product and actually improving the lives of of everyday people uh and you know we started thinking like 20 years from now what would we still want to be doing if we you know got back from from work after a really hard day what would make us proud of of what we were delivering to people and um through kind of building our previous company kronos we realized how everything worked how you know a trade would be processed how it would be cleared and settled and all of like the the regulatory stuff around that and then um we kind of asked ourselves well if these institutional customers that we have are doing millions of trades and we have the technology to support that what's to say that regular people can't access that either and why are regular people still paying ten dollars every time they they want to make an investment i remember those days i i always tell the story when i opened a skytrade account and it was like seven dollars every trade yeah i'm like man wasn't that long ago yeah yeah so what the first company was solaris is that am i saying that right yeah so when i was doing the research and it feels like we took the the trading part of solaris we had the institutional side and we said okay i said we because i'm like we're in this together right yeah but you guys uh saw what you could make you were inside the institutional side saying like we've already these people already rich and you birthed with you what you're known for now is that is that kind of how it worked well we we had we saw what our customers were able to do what a trade looked like for an institution the cost structure behind it which was essentially zero you know they were placing some of these some of these customers are placing you know billions of dollars in dollar value of trades per day you know millions of trades per day and they couldn't do that at uh if it was seven dollars a trade right so the cost structure was fundamentally different so yeah then then it's natural and you know i remember at the time also watching um watching uh all of steve jobs's keynotes for the apple events and uh he had he had rolled out the ipad the first ipad at around that time and this was like while we were in the thick of like building out our enterprise product um we sort of saw uh we were i still remember watching that keynote and just thinking like how awesome it is to to roll out a consumer product and to actually have you know everyday people wanting what you're building and to just just serve them rather than serving businesses and and having to do enterprise sales it's just fundamentally different so we we wanted to do that and then we saw an opportunity and when we got the idea for it's just the simple value proposition right um paying zero dollars per transaction instead of paying seven dollars and kind of making it mobile because nobody had done that really in the past all the other brokerages that allowed you to to invest on mobile they basically took their web pages and kind of shrunk them down they were still complicated they were they weren't really built for mobile you couldn't sign up on mobile you still needed your computer um so we saw when we got that idea we knew it was a big idea and we knew that you know if we just brought it to market that uh it had to work assuming we executed well it was a brilliant idea and it's something that i'm surprised nobody thought about because it's like that's what i when i think of robin hood i think of two things user interface it's extremely user friendly even on the option side which can be complicated yeah it's made it extremely user friendly and um it doesn't cost anything which now everybody kind of has adopted that model but if you're not familiar with it it wasn't always the case like that wasn't always the standard like you said it used to be like seven dollars per trade or five dollars per trade or something like that that adds up over the course of time so those two key elements were like the foundation the user interface and having it free yeah well i think there were a couple of other things there i think the user interface and being mobile first were important i think the cost structure is fundamentally important and if you think about it if you are someone that's just getting started hasn't invested before and you have a hundred dollars you know it's kind of a it's it's a big step to say i'll put a thousand dollars towards something if you're just getting started that's kind of a big commitment but ten dollars a hundred dollars you could theoretically start with that but if you're paying seven dollars per transaction that was just not possible like it would the fees would eat into every trade and it would be impossible to diversify as well so if you want a portfolio with seven different stocks you know that's seventy dollars or fifty dollars if you wanted to make those seven transactions so it was actually impossible um or very very difficult to get started with small amounts of money but um i think the other thing also was you look more broadly and now people talk about fintech as kind of a space as a it's a big industry you know lots of fintech companies cryptos now becoming a a bigger and bigger thing but when we got started people weren't really starting financial companies very much i mean you look at google trends sometimes i do this if you look up fintech there was like nothing up until 2015 right and then you've seen a a steady increase uh and now you know tons of fintech companies across insurance across spending saving yeah you know people there's a lot of a lot of innovation and investors didn't used to invest in it i mean when we were first getting started and we tell people we wanted to create a regulated brokerage that would scare a lot of people off it'd be like we haven't seen that before you know we're funding consumer apps and you know you don't want it you don't want to be regulated that's what they tell us you definitely don't want to be regulated because that's just going to be really hard you're not going to be able to innovate and you know the only regulated companies are these companies that are 40 years old and have you know billion dollar marketing budgets so i think just the the decision to build a regulated brokerage at the time was a it was kind of contrarian right we were like we're not going to stay away from this we know that you know to do that is going to be hard and because it's hard not that many people have done it recently um and you know we think we think there's something there and we kind of understood that process too of what it meant to be regulated and operating in a regulated industry from our previous experience and we knew that it wasn't as scary as you know people people initially thought you just kind of had to figure it out and work through it like any other any other problem or constraint let me let me ask you this as far as a lot of people that listen to our platform are aspiring entrepreneurs or young just getting started so number one i heard was always funding so you know we see where robin hood is now obviously you know like i said 40 billion dollar valuation but it didn't always start like that so can you walk us through the process of funding did you sell fund did you get money from family i'm assuming angel investors came in at some point but can you kind of just walk us through that hey ernest did you know that the black community has 2.7 trillion dollars of spending power are you ready to see what you can do when you combine and recirculate our resources to expand the pool of black excellence i know i'm ready and that's why we've partnered with greenwood the in-demand black owned digital banking platform greenwood's namesake was founded in 1906 built from the brilliance of black dreamers looking to create a self-sufficient community in the greenwood district of tulsa oklahoma aka black wall street today greenwood is a digital banking platform with the mission to strengthen the black dollar using the same community reinforcement strategies of the original greenwood district and it's powered by a best-in-class mobile app that allows you to bank from anywhere so earners if you're ready to build a new legacy of black economic achievement go to bankgreenwood.com eyl and sign up to be a part of the new greenwood community that's bankgreenwood.com uil don't wait don't hesitate head over there now yeah so there were a couple of different uh we we had a long period where we had just raised some seed money so uh that started in like 2012 2013 and we probably raised in aggregate about three million dollars in seed capital and that was probably the hardest outside investors outside investors yeah lots of them lots of small investors um we were actually you could find uh robinhood on angel list in 2012 or or 2013. you go on the wrong sites yeah so um you know talk to a lot of people a lot of people were skeptical um but there were some people that made uh early bets into the business and kind of uh kind of took that bet so um index ventures invested in our seed round and then a bunch of subsequent rounds too so that was uh john hammer who led the seed round led the a round as well and is still on our board through ipo we had google ventures we had tim draper uh from draper fisher jervisten yeah um yeah lots of uh lots of angel investors so you got a big you got big names out the gate yeah um well because that's a big name yeah so he came towards the end of our seed round but yeah it was still very early so what was that process like because i'm thinking generationally at the time you're in your 20s telling them about a product that's revolutionary to our generation for sure is simplistic in its design but these guys are traditionalists so what was that like in a sense traditionally because they've been in the financial industry for years never seen anything like this i feel like when we talk about technology anything that's new people are rigid and yeah they're hesitant toward it so what was that like even explaining it to get the seed from it i mean i think that um the people that got it there were some people that got very excited about it and you know i think they they looked at the quality of the team and that we were really passionate and um and and basically you know wanted to give it a shot right away then there's people that needed a little bit of convincing and you know they talked through the the business model and they really had to understand it and then there's people the majority of people that just sort of like wrote it off for one reason or another either they looked at the competitors and said there hasn't been a new brokerage in a long time you'll never make money you'll never get customers uh you two mathematicians we don't believe you can build a consumer product that's good so there's a lot of reasons why i think a rational person would say no i mean fintech as a category didn't really exist back then either but yeah there were people that got excited and and really passionate angel investors that supported us and gave us the funding and i think another thing that made it hard is because it's so regulated the traditional um lean startup methodology where you kind of like test out the messaging and test out whether the value prop of the product resonates with customers uh that didn't really work so we had to actually get all the regulatory approvals and the license before we could start marketing a brokerage product because it was so regulated so it's a little bit of a of a chicken and egg problem because we needed the funding to get the license but you know people would be hesitant to give you funding if they thought that there was a risk that you wouldn't get the license to be a broker so at the end of the day you know we had to talk to a lot of people i think i said on a podcast i mean this was obviously an order of magnitude uh rough approximation but we probably talked to 75 investors or more to to raise the three million dollars yeah it's like uh ryan said why listen 99 knows before we got out yes yeah well how important was the network obviously going to stanford there's no other better place to go so were a lot of those relationships built from stanford or i mean your parents would work for the world bank too so did did you have where did you get those relationships to even approach angel investors we had to build them from scratch because even though we had gone to stanford we were kind of um we were like in the math department and people don't start companies out of the math department here comes the matting again neither beijiu or i spent a lot of time you know we never did internships at google or facebook we didn't you know go to the cs department we took some cs classes but it wasn't like you know nowadays i think there's like a machine at stanford where you know if you're in the cs department which right now is the most most popular one but back when back when i was there it was before the current kind of like startup friend cs computer science computer science yeah so people were majoring when i was at stanford the number one major was human biology which was basically pre-med and then there were a lot of people that were interested in like investment banking and they would go into finance and i think computer science was probably a third or fourth so it was growing but you know nowadays stanford number one i think is is very integrated with like venture capital and they even have like startup accelerators where you could apply and uh and they can help you out but you know when you're a mathematician you're not you're not really you're not really spending time doing any of that so we had to build the networks from scratch and you know we were in new york actually for our first two companies and at that time there was no there was not a lot of venture capital in new york i mean now it's probably a little bit better but in the early 2010s late 2000s there were maybe like a handful of of investors in new york um so we moved back to california to to start this business and so we were really starting from scratch you know we're coming to a new place and didn't really have the luxury of uh of the stanford network and that's why you know we we hustled we met investors we we tried to like go two degrees of separation so we would ask friends if they had any friends that were that were investors we went on angel list where angelus is a website with that list all angel investors yeah it's a platform it's a platform you can create um for earlier stage companies generally you can create a profile as a startup and then they help you connect with angel investors and uh i think there's also recruiting so some people look for look for jobs and you can you can hire a little bit out of angel list as well now you said something about having the team a strong team is the team the network that you found at stanford or these are people that we just kind of along the journey said you know what you're great at that we'll find you here how did you build the team yeah it's actually very unconventional so because we didn't have because we weren't really in computer science um i couldn't call up my friends that were that were computer science majors and get them to join right so we did it in a sense very traditionally we would get a booth at the career fair so it was actually you know a bunch of the big companies but you could you could get a booth if you're an alumni and you're incorporated i think it was like seven hundred dollars and we would collect resumes and actually you know beijing and i would man the booths ourselves with our t-shirts and handout swag and a lot of our really really great initial employees were just from the stanford career fair and people they skipped career day all the time yeah yeah valuable lesson you never know let me ask you this there's always a way to i think if you if you're scrappy enough there's a way to to make it happen i think not a lot of people would think about going straight to the career fair but for us because we never had internships at these companies our only experience to like getting a job was the career fair so it was sort of like the first thing that came to mind oh of course that's how we want to hire people let's just figure out how to how to get one of those booths i got my first job at a career fair did you yeah it was had to they was like interviewing you in the booth it was like this education expo and i was sitting there you get an interview and they'll tell you to come back to the school i bombed the first one and i was sitting waiting for my friend to do the next one and i was like i need a job and the guy was like you need a job come talk to me and like that's how i got my job that's how people are getting hired as teachers these days i'd be very i was hurt 15 years ago you listen in new york city children you should be very disturbed if they go to public school um so let me ask you this it seems like this is happening very quickly so at what point do you get the app up and running and actually have a product that people are actually downloading and starting to use yeah good question it does seem the way when i talk about it here it it seems like it happens very quickly but it it took years right like we first got the idea so we moved back to california from new york uh during the chrono stays in 2011 end of 2011 and uh we get the idea for robin hood february 2012. who comes up with the name actually my my wife came up with the name great name my girlfriend at the time now wife and she was trying to explain to her friends what i what i was doing and um she'd be like oh well you know my boyfriend vlad he's in finance and then they'd kind of grow and they'd be like i think i was some kind of investment banker or something and then she'd say no no no you know they're kind of the robin hood of finance they're trying to build something new for for the little guy and so then um beijing and i had a couple of ideas for the name and we we asked some of our employees but um both of us just kind of liked robin hood with we thought that it stood for something you know something very powerful a powerful idea and you know i think jeff bezos says that the name is probably like three percent of it but sometimes that three percent is the the difference between doing very well and and not so pretty happy with with how it ended up and i do think that you know we're trying very very hard to stay true to your mission stands for yeah yes um okay so and what what year does robin hood actually get up and running and out to the public yes we get the idea 2012 um we spend a lot of time getting the licenses we launch a wait list december of 2013 and then the app hits the app store in beta december of 2014. so about a year after the waitlist and maybe uh a year and a half two years after we get the idea two and a half years actually and then public launch march of 2015. so at what point do you guys start to market because it feels like i never i didn't really remember seeing like robin hood commercials it's just one of these things that everybody just had robin hood overnight so like what was the marketing plan for robin hood to just become as popular as it become well so um it's largely been word of mouth uh from from the very beginning and in december of 2013 what we launched was a wait list so basically you could sign up for the wait list we would let you know when we could onboard you when we could onboard you onto the product and the waitlist kind of gives you early access to the product so um the wait list itself i think you could think of as marketing although the idea was we wanted to kind of create um a slow and steady way to onboard people in the order that they were most passionate about the product so get the people that are most excited to to try it access first and that way we could get high quality feedback um and yes of course um we did just like interviews so cnbc pretty early on bloomberg those kinds of places wanted to interview us because it was uh it was a simple to understand idea right commission free trading people kind of knew that trades cost seven dollars so how are these how are these uh these people doing it for free and uh you know we were able to get close to a million people on the wait list in in a year which was a lot of pre-launch i mean for a financial product probably among the the biggest pre-launch wait lists in history at the time and then once it comes out it's just wildfire just start spreading like wildfire yes we knew when the waitlist was uh was live that people were interested in it um so we kind of had our we kind of had the wind at our back since the waitlist launch and then uh when it when it went live i mean it was it was pretty consistent i mean we grew pretty consistently um people people were interested in the idea and then that's when kind of the iteration engine started so we would i think one of the one of the interesting things you learn is that in a consumer product you get a lot of customer feedback and so you listen to the feedback and we really built a process from the very beginning of you know going to people's houses in some cases watching them use the product having them come to our office seeing you know what they were struggling with what their pain points were and then um and then kind of reasoning from first principles to figure out how to solve them so a bunch of our early products like robinhood instant robin hood gold um they solved customer pain points and we would see as soon as we rolled them out that you know we'd grow a little bit faster the business would improve and then you know that really built the product development process that we have today when so when you built the app and you had the design team were you very super intentional about saying i want to make this appealing to a younger audience because if you look at your demographics now right 18 to 40 is that's the sweet spot for robin hood users so were you thinking all right we're gonna get we're going to start younger with a younger audience here's how we'll do it this interface it's user-friendly it'll be appealing to young audiences that was at the initial thought when building the interface i think the initial thought was that we would target a younger customer and um it wasn't it wasn't necessarily because um you know we didn't want to a target target people that you know were more experienced or older it's just that as we thought about it um we thought that there were people that were underserved and it was people with less money and people that you know didn't already have a brokerage account and also juxtaposed that with like people who are mobile savvy and um you know they were mobile savvy and were likely to be early adopters of of new financial products so you kind of like zero into the younger demographic uh in any case and not to mention we were building we were building it ourselves right and we were in our 20s at the time so we wanted to build something that we could use and could appeal to us and also could appeal to you know to a broader demographic so let me ask you this because there's always hiccups and there's always problems but i think it's important that people actually know the truth so obviously i heard about the gamestop situation yeah um and you you spoke about that but our audience might not have been on those platforms that you've actually articulated what happened so can you explain because we actually got caught not with robin hood another brokerage we won't name but we got we got caught with that um where we put a put yeah on gamestop oh you did it yeah and then put one crazy and in one day we were up upwards of forty thousand five hundred percent yeah and we tried to sell it and it we couldn't sell it and then we ended up losing money on a long story short so i sympathize with people that couldn't sell their game styles positions because it just so happens that we were one of those people yeah like i said it wasn't robinhood it was another it was no that's good to hear so a lot of people that you know just got into investing they would they wasn't sure exactly what happened can you just kind of explain what happened when you had the halt trading i believe right you halted selling and buying a robin of gamestop for a day or two just the um yeah we had to to halt uh opening positions so it was uh it was any any position that sort of increased risk so for example since we don't allow shorting um it was you couldn't buy the meme stocks because you know if we had a loud shorting it would be you couldn't open short positions as well but that's why it was the buy side and then in options since you guys mentioned that opening up options contracts whether they be on the long side or the short side was was not allowed either but uh you could always throughout the process you could always close out your existing positions so uh we we didn't we didn't disallow you know selling a stock if you had it or selling a put or a call or just couldn't buy you couldn't open new positions okay for the time period that that we restricted the the trading and you know really what it was was um i call it a five sigma event so i think one in 3.5 million i mean we've never seen anything like that before yeah which is basically um you combine social media and the financial markets the idea of uh you know people getting together and banding together all to buy a handful of stocks uh you know gamestop amc and and a few others and yeah these people um essentially made the purchasing of the stocks go viral on social media and so it went viral in social media but then sort of spilled over into the into the financial markets because people would download brokerage apps you know robinhood went to number one on the app store during that time period overall which is very rare for a a financial product because you're number 15 right now so in finance i think yeah yeah this was number one overall ahead of like tick tock and snapchat instagram everything um and i think the markets just uh what ended up happening was the markets weren't built for that too much stress being put on the markets yeah so the collateral requirements the deposit requirements went uh went up and a lot of this is covered i had to give a testimony to the house financial services company yeah your hair was a little shorter then it was a little bit i had to clean it up but i've let it grow out since then yeah yeah um yeah i got a lot of a lot of uh criticism for my haircut so you you yes so you said like i don't i don't know who lord valiant is gonna look that up prince valiant or something so in front of congress you said it wasn't really you had enough for capital but it was it was not enough liquidity for the immediate collateral well it was it was basically um you know the the requirements were growing exponentially so certainly we had enough to meet our capital call that thursday um and we met our our deposit requirements but if you're number one on the app store it's it's sort of uh how far could it continue yeah so you know robin hood security is our clearing firm a lot of other brokers ended up with the same issue um a bunch of other brokers essentially had to had to come up with the same thing um but uh since we were since we were vertically integrated and we had our own clearing firm um it was all inside robin hood so robin hood securities had to make the decision to pco the the stocks and the options for all these things and then we went out and raised billions of dollars to try to unrestrict them i'm going to ask you about that but before i asked you about this i saw this is great i haven't i used to be a financial advisor and i haven't heard this term in a long time but when i was reading it the t plus two timeline yeah and um you were saying that that's problematic um well hey can you explain what that is for people and why why is that something that needs to be changed i know you said that this should be something that should be done immediately and not yeah two days so yeah this is a very sort of uh arcane thing but um i'll try to i'll try to explain it in as easy terms as possible so uh yeah imagine robin hood is like a ice cream store right instead of selling stocks we we sell people ice cream and you know you're a customer you want your ice cream you go to robin hood and the current financial market situation would be basically as if we take your money we put it in a safe for two days um then we give you the ice cream uh but then we take uh we take our corporate money right our corporate cash and you know give it to our suppliers so you know you think we just take your cash give your ice cream and it's very simple like that but we actually have to lock up the customer cash uh just in case something happens with the bank transaction like it's it's reversed to control for you know what's called the liquidity risk and the market risk um and then we have to use our corporate cash to fund the purchases and you know the the corporate cash is is finite so people ask a lot of times why can't you know i have my thousand dollars why can't i just use my thousand dollars to buy this stock well for the the way that the settlement system works we have to lock up your cash keep it safe for two days and only then um only then can we use it to give you your stock and in the interim period we have to put up our own firm cash so obviously in a situation where these where the buying activity just goes parabolic um there's limits to how much corporate cash we can we can actually provide and so what going from t plus two to t plus zero would do is allow us to essentially immediately do that that transaction so we wouldn't have to put up corporate cash for two days we could actually exchange uh exchange the cash in the shares immediately i don't know if the ice cream analogy really helped hopefully maybe hungry so i'm interested in your thoughts about meme stocks because again this is one of the things that revolutionary right there weren't meme stocks before before we heard him about robin hood and it was like okay well this is synonymous well this is the easiest place to get it and so this is kind of a twofold thing because yes more people are involved right i don't know how many people access should i get gamestop just randomly like in the supermarket people like i'm in gamestop on the gamestop yeah it does bring more people but they're newer investors not always educated in a sense but the more customers that you have it does help business so what's your thought on the meme stocks um first and then i thought to myself since it's kind of become the home of the mistakes because of the accessibility of how quickly we can get access to these positions yeah we've seen amc we've seen gamestop but now you're a publicly traded company what are your thoughts about like if that happens to robin hood stock itself like what are your thoughts there well i would say um if you look at the products that robinhood rolls out um my personal opinion is that you know we'd like to encourage long-term habitual investing it's you know over time compound interest and compounding of returns as i'm sure you guys you guys uh tell your listeners a very powerful force einstein i think called it the eighth wonder of the world yes compound interest so just time in the market and time spent um investing over a long period of time really really adds up and so that's why we encourage long-term investing through recurring through fractional diversification through fractional shares and then of course education making sure that you know we provide content not just to our customers but to the broader world through robin hood learn through in-app through snacks and and all of our other properties so uh i tell people and it's on our website now robin hood's a safety first company that's our top value what that means is it means service reliability right it means uh education it means all the safeguards so you know we warn you if a stock that if if you're looking at if what a stock you're looking at is leveraged if it's a leveraged gt etf or etn if uh if it's experiencing unusual volatility and then we provide all of the information and the data that you might need and of course on top of that it is self-directed so if you want to make a decision to buy into a recent ipo or something because it's um you know popular on social media you're you're free to do so but we do want to make sure you have all the information and that we give you the tools to encourage that long-term habitual wealth building so you said something that was very interesting you said it was like one and uh 3 million or 3.5 million yeah but being that we're in a new age and these things can continue to happen now because these reddit groups and different things that nature are not going anywhere social media is only getting bigger more and more young people are getting into investing so what if this happens on an ongoing basis and it doesn't become a one in three million what if it becomes a one in ten one in a hundred yeah what's your what's your plan of action to not have that happen again well i think um immediately you know raising the over 3 billion certainly helped provide a cushion um but of course there is some there is always a limit to how much firm cash um that any broker would hold so you know if 100 million or a billion people theoretically wanted to buy the same stock at the same time i don't think the system would be able to handle that to handle that currently so we would need some some changes to the underlying infrastructure of the markets maybe because that's where tv regulation changes a little bit to help in that situation well yeah i think uh the industry has already said that they would support faster settlement which is a big a big thing so t plus zero i think would take a while that's real time settlement but one day settlement gets us about half of the way there so i think steady improvements um steady improvements in uh in the infrastructure are going to be helpful yeah you you mentioned you raised 3.5 billion that's extremely um interesting because it's like most of the time people would think that that hurt your business but you actually raised and you actually got a lot more customers actually after that too so what was your strategy was it like just face it head-on don't run from it acknowledge what happened and then go to investors and say this is why we need more money to prevent these things from happening well it was kind of simultaneous right we were raising the capital while we were explaining to customers and the broader public um what was going on and yeah it was sort of like solving any hard problem you have to just you have to make sure that uh you put the right people on it and we have we have a great team you know great folks in operations engineering meanwhile engineering is trying to keep the the service up dealing with all the influx of customers and all the activity so you know everyone was working very very hard at at that time it was like all hands on deck close to 24 7 without a break for for a very long we were just speaking about that i'm thinking to myself like we were living it as retail investors but what was that moment or day or week like for you as the co-founder of this company that has been since we said social media wall street bats has gathered people and you're like the social media of investing what was that day like for you it was a little stressful it was a little stressful you think normally that you know if you're number one on the app store overall it's sort of like a great thing but um yeah it's also you know we were very cognizant to make sure that we wanted to be there for for our customers and you know it's uh on the one hand having so much activity that you know you need to raise additional capital to to facilitate the trading is a good thing on the other hand you know there was this like you know not being able to um having to restrict the trading for customers you know um that was disappointing a lot of customers were disappointed and there were a lot of false narratives you know you saw them all over the internet to this day a lot of them exist you know of collusion with hedge funds and you know people people are i think really interested in collusion they like to think that people are colluding um so having to kind of dispel that narrative and say well actually we're just like doing what we could to operate within within the regulatory framework and make sure everything was was done properly um but yeah despite that i think uh i think the the false narratives are sometimes so compelling that they just like keep going yeah people would rather be believe a lot in the truth it's more entertaining yeah yeah yeah let me think that's true speaking about that um when you when you spoke in front of congress i believe one congressman had actually they said well it's free to trade but they spoke about the sell order flow market makers and yeah getting a piece of the spread and they were trying to say like well it's not really free to trade because the market makers are making money and it's money every time somebody makes a transaction so what do you say to that well well they're talking about payment for order flow which is one of the which is our main source of revenue and what i would say to that is payment for overflow is not new i mean it existed when people were paying seven to ten dollars per trade as well the broker would just make seven to ten dollars and then in addition they would make the it was an additional cost the payment for order flow yeah so yes we do generate revenue but at the same time it's never been a better time to be a retail investor and you know it's it's highly regulated it's um it's uh it's it's been regulated for a very long time and basically there's there's rules so a lot of people say you know why don't you send your orders to an exchange why don't you send it to the nasdaq or the nicey why are market makers executing the orders and market makers provide competition for the exchanges and there's actually rules that say in order for a market maker to execute your order they have to actually beat the exchange price or beat it or match it and so as a customer generally you're getting a better price through a market maker market makers are still for-profit businesses so they generate revenue and you can think of payment for order flow as a rev share a share of the revenue that they make with the broker so we think it's it's uh it's a fantastic model i mean it's led to commission free trading it's led to the lowest possible cost of trading for consumers out of all developed uh out of out of all time and um you know it's led to the us markets being the most vibrant capital markets for retail investors in the world so we're uh you know we stand behind the business model 100 and i think that people debate it and have been debating it for a long time in large part because it's very complicated to understand and i actually didn't understand it in detail when i started trading i didn't know what it you know when i bought my first stock i didn't really know what a bid ask spread was you know there there was a process of learning through some of those things so we've been we've been trying to educate people and share information about the revenue stream and uh and you know explain it a little bit better it's important because it's one of these things where when people are confused then they can think that something is bad or it just automatically goes negative that's why explaining um is beneficial because i think one once people have a full understanding of something most people will say okay everybody deserves to make a living this is america like you can make money yeah it's it's when like you say when people are confused and i feel like the financial industry for a long time has confused people like you said just the bid to ask spread like all of that stuff if you don't have background knowledge on it it's very confusing and your perception can be swayed in any direction depending on who's telling you the story yeah i think that's true it's the same it's the the the simple lie and the complex truth again right um when the truth is complex as the financial industry is people um believe and you know people are also used to financial companies being rent seeking and taking taking advantage of people so they're very very leery of that yeah you remember the financial crisis of 2008 and you know the way that that felt right um a lot of people lost their houses a lot of people lost their jobs the government came in and and sort of bailed out a lot of these companies nobody really got punished and there was a lot of distrust i think that lingers from that time period i mean you you you remember the occupy wall street protests where people are just a little bit skeptical about whether the old guard financial industry is actually working for them and i think some of that a lot of that sort of persists to this day yeah so i just want to go back really quick because we talked about bid and asking so a lot of people are new to investing and so when they see bid and ask i'll try to explain it like this like the ask like if you went car shopping right the ask is what they're asking you to pay for the bid is what you're willing to pay for it and so when there's a difference in it that difference let's say somebody back plays the market price or the ass price that difference between the bid is that's what's going to the brokerage is that what you're saying yeah okay yeah so like i'll just break it well it's actually the bid in the ask um not all of that goes to the brokerage it's actually split three ways right some of it goes to the market maker some of it goes to the customer which is what's called price improvement over over the nbbo and then a small portion goes to the brokerage and bloomberg's done um bloomberg intelligence i think recently had an analysis and the portion going to the brokerage is typically much smaller than the portion going to the customer and to the market maker as well and the customer actually gets the the bulk of it as price improvement according to that study let me ask you this you're the first person that we have spoken to that has taken the company public and you just did it recently so i have a few questions congratulations thank you oh yeah congratulations for sure um okay so was that always your idea to go public or what at what point did you realize no longer am i gonna have a private company this makes sense to take it to the public markets um i think i think we realized um once we got to a certain level of scale and then once you get to that scale you realize oh this is a capital intensive business you know we have these capital requirements we have these deposit requirements and this we're growing very quickly and you know accessing public markets is just a great source of funding for the business i think it it was also pretty clear that it was mission aligned and we would like to uh figure out a way to allow our customers to be shareholders and the self-referential nature of robinhood kind of a stock market company going live on the stock market just just made sense so i think all those things together made it um made it sort of the the reasonable thing to do but the way we think about it also it's kind of a i mean it's kind of just a a financing event if you think about it we already because we're so regulated have to share a lot of detail about our revenue and our operations with the public um and so probably the delta between robin hood being going from private to public and your typical other technology company is is a little bit smaller so there are certainly changes but a lot of a lot of our activities and revenues were already transparent and shared on a quarterly basis yeah one of the things that i've heard you speak on and be very proud of is having a large allocation of shares allocate for retail investors was that something that you as a team said you know what we're built for the people we want to have people involved was that part of the thought process when making that decision yeah yeah i think that was that was an easy decision because you look back to our mission democratize finance for all and it's really all about giving things that were previously accessible to um relatively few select rich people and making them available to everyone so like the original product commission free equities trading that aligns with it commission free options trading very much aligned with it as well things like high yield savings and so when we got to the ipo i think it was clear that hey why not you know rather in addition to kind of taking our own company public why don't we try to democratize ipos as well and that's why we launched a new product ipo access which actually launched before our own ipo we launched with a few other a few other companies and then that's really become a mechanism to give retail consumers on equal terms access to ipos as the institutions so they could get in at the ipo price and you know get get access to those which would have previously been available only to high net worth individuals or institutions or underwriters i want to ask you about that i was going to wait till later but as you brought it up let's talk about that that's very interesting can you explain that a little bit more so what what what exactly when does it exactly allow people to invest like right when it hits the stock market right before it hits the stock market like what's what's the details on it yeah so typically um the ipo allocation happens before it hits the stock market so the underwriters and the company agree on a listing price and uh robinhood currently acts as what's called a selling group member so we're allowed to give people a portion of that allocation we we give that to the community so they get in at the ipo price typically that price is set um the day before the stock actually starts trading and uh and you know once it's it's trading that price that price is a different price yeah so it could it could be like 20 the day before then 35 dollars when it actually opens it could be four hours and there is some risk obviously it's not always going to be yeah i mean lower yeah it could be it could be higher yeah but um that's great that you're doing that and um that's something that i think is really going to change the game i think that's a game changer it's a game changer i want to ask you also is there any plans of so we just got into the angel investing world ourselves um a good friend of ours john henry shout out to him he got an insurance company named loop and uh we put some some money into that and a few other companies so as we're learning more about these things we realize that stock market extremely important important engine to build wealth but when you talk about real real massive returns it's done more so on the angel side like even way before a company even thinks about going public and there are some platforms you know crowdfunding but the large companies all-star companies they're not on those crowdfunding platforms so have you ever thought about finding a way to have regular people in a crowdfunding type of thing but being able to form a syndicate to invest in early startup companies yeah so typically historically what's been the impediment there is just the accreditation requirements so um for a long time in order to invest in you know a hedge fund or venture capital fund or private uh private company that's non nonpublic you had to be an accredited investor which has either a net worth requirement or an income environment requirements for wealthy people now recently i think it was with the jobs act yeah president obama yeah there was a reg a plus which allowed some private companies to allocate some portion per year that they could raise via equity crowdfunding from general public i think initially it was 50 million now it's 75 so there are mechanisms still a little bit complicated um but i think there is an opportunity there i think generally how we think about it at robin hood is selection is important people want access to different investable assets so we started with stocks then a lot of demand for for options a lot of demand for cryptos as well has led us uh let us to offer those on the platform so i think we'll we'll continue to add um to add more things and you know there's there's lots of different assets out there that are things that people want to invest in that we don't offer i want i want to before that can we just briefly go back to the bringing the company public what are some difficulties i just want to give people like just a quick overview because not a lot of people are really familiar what it takes to actually take a company public i know there's regulation is filings you have to have the underwriter that actually underwrites the situation i'm going to start an answer for them stressful [Laughter] can you just give people a crash course in taking the company public uh let's see um so one thing that i've i've been told is interesting but i didn't get to experience is actually going to all the offices of the different investors and like meeting them in person so i was kind of in the in the limbo period you know kobit is very much still a thing but we ended up traveling to new york and we wanted to kind of get into the get into the zone as much as possible so yeah it was funny rather than doing it at home and completely over zoom as uh as a lot of people did we went to we flew to new york and did everything in zoom out of the underwriters offices so we're in these conference crazy basically for like 10 hours a day bring my blue tie in um so yeah it was it was a lot of work uh it took a lot of time um but you know at the end of the day it was also uh when when all was said and done and and we priced and we listed and we got it over we got it over with you know it was it was pretty cool to be there with the team in person to be in new york where beijing and i got started as entrepreneurs and where i actually arrived as an immigrant to this country um when i was five years old jfk yeah with my aunt uh my aunt who was in her early twenties 20s and then you know seeing my parents at the airport i hadn't seen my dad in i think a year and a half at that point i hadn't seen my mom in six months so it brought back it brought back those memories and it was just a nice little moment along the journey you know um and a lot of people think oh you know the ipo that's that's kind of the end right that's that's the the end goal but it it didn't feel like that because obviously um well we had earnings a couple weeks later so getting ready for that but i just think uh there's so much left to build right robin hood's still a u.s company we're still offering investment products but we don't have ira accounts we we don't have the ability for you to have a individual retirement account so there's even within investing in the us there's a lot more that that we have to offer yeah i was watching so july what was the july that you guys ipo officially july 28th 28th 29th so when you i think you were supposed to get listed at like 10 o'clock but that it took like maybe until 2 o'clock before i felt like the public was allowed what's happening during that time and as a i mean as a retail investor i'm looking at like what's the co-founder thing about is it underwriting going on what's happening between the time when you're supposed to ipo on the date and the time it actually goes public i think there were just like uh yeah it's still it's actually not a fully automated process so there's like shares that are being exchanged and some kind of largely administrative things but uh yeah during that day that that was all sort of the the accounting finance and legal teams and you know my co-founder and i were we're at the nasdaq uh i think it was just like lots and lots of interviews and then the the opening bell ceremony so you know my my understanding is um yeah even though i i wasn't in there that pretty typical to have especially with a large retail allocation a lot of different investors for actual facebook took a long time i felt like i was the actual shares i was watching the stock prices go up and up and up and i'm like we're gonna get it at 16. no it's at 34. nope it's going to open at 36.35 is that 45 now exactly exactly increase um so let's look before you go to that because i know i know you want to go to the crypto situation but you said that you reported earnings now that seemed pretty quickly usually companies report after an entire quarter did you guys even have a quarter before you reported earnings well um i think it's it's kind of on a it's it's on a there's a there's a range so because we went public near the end of the second quarter uh there was actually you know a relatively short amount of time uh between sort of going public and then reporting the the second quarter like a small glimpse yeah okay so i think uh a lot of a lot of the information for that quarter was shared in the s1 so you know there was uh there was a little preview in there but it was more just uh the turnaround from kind of the ipo to the to the earnings release which takes preparation was was pretty short yeah so let's talk about the future cryptocurrency um when we think about cryptocurrency in america coinbase comes to mind but you guys have some interesting news that you just recently um at least as far as i believe a crypto wallet coming obviously dogecoin is available on your platform um it is yes and became very very popular a few months ago who's the go trailer who's really the dough trailer you know i thought this this dog room i i thought that that might have did something with those but i understand that it was around before before the dogecoin craze i got a nominee that i'm thinking of could be the dope shop who's the nominee we'll talk about that after does he have long hair it depends on who he's talking to you know you never know so where where is robin hood moving in the crypto what's your plans for cryptocurrency well so up until this year uh there was actually a relatively small team at robin hood working on crypto so we've been hiring a lot and you know we announced two uh two new product features recently so the crypto recurring investments and the crypto wallets uh which the waitlist for the wallets launched last week and then i think on the same day we announced crypto recurring out to 100 of customers so i think the the value that we add um to crypto the reason why people enjoy using robinhood it's kind of two things one is the simplicity and kind of the the ease of use of the product and then of course the fact that we're commission free so we're actually very proud of and we've been benchmarked a number of times by third parties you know you can see influencers that use multiple platforms and uh we compare very well people generally get more crypto for their for their money on robin hood versus versus our platforms and those benchmarks so um yeah i think with wallets uh people have people want to consolidate so they they in some cases have crypto and a lot of platforms and want to bring it all in one and uh some people also you know have their hardware wallets they want to self-custody their crypto uh and you know they have their their ledger nanos or or other devices and so we we allow for the ability to do that or in some cases participate in kind of these uh these defy ecosystems off platform so it'll unlock that and then the crypto recurring a lot of these other platforms they're charging you multiple percent per transaction and with recurring that adds up even more right it's like three percent four percent every transaction now you're doing it on a weekly basis it can be very expensive and so robinhood recurring really leverages our commission free commission free value proposition because you can now recur without having to worry about about a significant commission uh every single time yeah as far as technology i feel like you guys have been ahead obviously you started that as the app but i wonder how you feel about competitors are you watching what they're doing and saying oh we can add that i feel like that's what we saw in instagram like any time there would be a social media site yeah instagram will say okay thank you for creating that we'll do it better and so recently [Music] no pun intended um uh recently uh coinbase said that they are allowing uh customers to direct deposit their checks into their accounts and even have it convert into cryptocurrencies of their liking what is that like because i feel like they're obviously going to be probably a main competitor in the u.s market um so how does that work with competition in this space i mean i think um and a lot of respect for for that company and brian great entrepreneur great company i think again our value proposition for customers is that we we want to offer you a great price we want to be the best value for your money and we want you to think of of when you think of robinhood to automatically say this is going to be the best customer experience and i'm going to get the the best value and you know i think that with the wallets launch it's also important for us to encourage our customers to practice good safety hygiene so enabling things like multi-factor authentication enabling you know transaction monitoring for where they're sending their cryptos um and you know i think uh i i think if if we can sort of own the uh the user experience and own the fact that we could be the the best value for your crypto we feel we feel really really good and other than that it's of course we'll pay attention to competitors and see if they happen to be serving customers in some ways better and learn from them but largely the north star is always that direct customer feedback so you know sitting with customers going to their houses bugging them really annoying them until they they tell us uh yeah they tell us more and more about what's bothering them and how we can serve them better i'm gonna say i'm gonna say this not just because you're sitting here yeah when we were starting our crypto journey we we downloaded right but not even for stocks was for crypto just because the live ticker it was like the little heartbeat and you could watch the price yeah like it was like an 80s video game i'm like okay this is more up to date it was it was a more of an accurate depiction of what was happening in the crypto space because we know it was very volatile at that point we weren't even going to sleep it was like we got to watch this so it's very yeah it's very it's very user friendly yeah it's meant to be fast for the interface to load quickly for you to get the information that you need uh as quickly as possible and of course when if you do want to make a transaction for that transaction to be to be smooth and for you to get a lot of value from it so those are a lot of the design principles and really to to meet people to meet people where they're they are and to align with kind of the spirit of of crypto so it is 24 7 and you know it's dynamic and sort of moving at all times and you know i think the the the sort of uh retro future interface sort of affords to affords that as well i think that's one of the things that bloomberg had a piece on it uh i don't even heard the word of before they said it the gamification of investing and it was almost like in a negative context it's almost like you guys have made it too easy what do you say to that well i think it has been difficult for for a long time um i think i we reject the the sort of analogy of investing to a game we know investing is very very serious but at the same time you know it should be accessible to people uh there's nothing wrong for people to enjoy investing right or to have fun doing it right i think if people don't they just wouldn't do it and that's not good for for anyone my sport then yeah so you know we're all about accessible intuitive design and making making the design better and making our customers happier and i don't think that has anything to do with gamification your mission statement is democratize uh investing [Music] and your robin hood which the story of robin hood you took from the rich and gave to the poor um how are you staying true to that mission statement and do you ever worry like you know now obviously your publicly traded company and you're part of wall street where you was once like you know [Music] wall street's antagonist now you're part of wall street so how do you feel about that like how do you feel about staying true to your core mission statement well we are still in silicon valley so uh um i i think yes we we are a public company we have shareholders but you know i wrote in my letter that you know we're not a company that's gonna sacrifice the long-term well-being of our customers to make our quarter or for for any other short-term gains so it's a very long-term focused company and there is a lens so our top value i mentioned earlier safety first our second value is participation is power and so participation is power means at robinhood the rich don't get a better deal so if you're if you're a normal customer you don't get you don't get better customer support you don't get higher quality service you don't get lower prices the more money you have in your account and i think ipo access is a good example of that because not only do we put retail customers on a level playing field with the institutions but every customer regardless of how much money they have or how valuable they are to robinhood gets an equal an equivalent sort of odds and an equivalent shot to participating in in the ipo so it's it's ingrained in our values and it's something we consider whenever we build products and it's cultural in the sense that you know if people do feel like we're encroaching on a decision that favors wealthier customers rich people um if it's like a a non-participation as power decision you'll see people advocating very fiercely against it and kind of rejecting it culturally and i think it's one of those things that we're we're very proud of as company builders that it's sort of ingrained in the fabric of how we operate i like that participation is power we already say safety first is that that's been our model since then yeah that's our model safety first extremely important um the best office is a good defense there you go the best defense is a good offense too though this guy's good two it's been an honor before we leave i want you to have an opportunity to say anything that you would like to sell i would love for you to talk about the educational resources we talked about that briefly but you guys definitely have a podcast which is near and dear to our heart and you have i believe courses on investing right and you like teach people about investing on the platform yeah we have a couple of different uh areas where you can learn about investing so increasingly we're finding uh ways to put digestible content in the app but we also have robinhood learn with the goal of um taking you from kind of the basics of what is a stock what is an etf all the way to more advanced options trading and and different strategies there um and then uh and then snacks as well so you know each of those things were we're making a lot of progress in and um you know recently uh we we partnered with operation uh operation hope and became the the sort of first broker to sign on to the investors bill of rights and you know uh standing up for in investor education financial literacy is something very important for us we'd like to see that taught at earlier in earlier ages it's funny you say that i don't know if you know our background but you know that's why we started in the classroom teaching financial literacy yeah uh troy used to be a teacher so we used to have a program where we actually taught financial literacy and that kind of led to what we're doing now but the classroom is always near and dear to our hearts so financial literacy is right up our alley obviously so it's great to see you guys doing that if we could ever work together on that that would be amazing man but absolutely you know in fourth grade i remember taking a financial literacy class and you know some of the lessons there because they're so simple stay with me to this day like i remember they they taught me you know it's basic things like when you're writing a check start all the way on the left that way you know nobody can take the check and put like one in front of the number and you know it's so crazy because i feel like in america that was one of our lessons yeah depending on what school you go to depending on where you live your experience is going to be vastly different so you said you learned how to write a check in fourth grade we were teaching we were teaching 14 year olds 15 year olds um financial literacy and one of the lessons was we had a mock check and we we said if anybody can write a check correctly we didn't give a hundred dollars something like that surprising i would report for the whole table for the whole time yeah make fifty dollars if you add it up long story short nobody was able to do it wow nobody not one person the reason being is that they were never taught yeah so it's like you said you learned it in fourth grade so and it stuck with your whole life unfortunately a lot of people never taught not just how to write checks they never told about real estate they never told about stocks they never taught about anything so now they're just fumbling through life making a ton of mistakes but they were never taught financial literacy it's still mind-boggling to me why financial literacy is not a core curriculum in every single school across the country it's optional more and more schools are starting to pick it up but there's still a lot of schools where financial literacy is not taught financial literacy was never taught in any school that i went to my whole entire life including college one school [Music] well the biggest yl university called the biggest the biggest school so so yeah i say that to say that it's extremely important the message of financial literacy to not only be spread in the private sector but in the public sector as well and for schools to start adapting financial literacy at the young age and make it mandatory i feel like it's just as important as math and reading is right up there amen couldn't agree more it's certainly been you know as a mathematician uh more practically useful in in some ways than uh any of the advanced math that i took in grad school yeah we've been saying that yeah i'm like i'm not gonna use my pythagorean theorem yeah yeah yeah well um what would you like would you like to sell people anything else that we didn't cover that you want to let people aware of or any new developments i know you got 24 7 customer service coming so with some final words you would like to leave the people with yeah well i think 24 7 customer service are um is something incredibly important for us uh something that you know goes hand in hand with safety first right we have to make sure that we not only provide a high quality service that's available to customers when they need us the most but that when they have issues where we're there for them so proud to be live uh across all issue types um with uh with customer support and we're gonna continue to to go where our customers take us and uh and strive to deliver new products that are that are in line with with our values and build the safest and most culturally relevant financial product in the world safety first ladies and gentlemen first lesson troy housekeeping items yeah i'd first like to say uh welcome to our newest eyl team member nora can we clap it up here real quick how also like to shout out all our earners on patreon.com you know so proud to pay program uh and all our people at eyl university our team is growing not just their students but the actual uh staff our family is growing um so shout out to everybody shout out to over the 10 000 earners that are in uil university and shout out to the entire merch team bam smitty the entire crew man uh you know exploring some new colors this year it's it's that time of year to get the new season involved so shout out to y'all you know how we play this love is love yes so shout out to nora i know she's been working tirelessly with mike to make this happen and uh thank you and thank the whole robin hood staff for the hospitality very welcoming um beautiful campus very glad to be here zen yeah very still invited here yes you can't you just can't walk in no i'm just saying sometimes we gotta hey they're like we want to talk to you guys yeah yeah so um thank you again for the hospitality anytime it's been a pleasure and um we will see you guys next week later you don't know who we know yeah my graduates from my school being forbes backdrop backdrop backdrop [Applause] bye

Channel: Earn Your Leisure

Views: 14,612

Rating: 4.8842845 out of 5

Keywords: earn your leisure, business, finance, citadel, ROBINHOOD, Vlad Tenev, GameStop, IPO, Vladimir Tenev, Investing, Stocks, Stock market

Id: lIgMkTkjdDM

Length: 80min 54sec (4854 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021

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Computershare DD series- The Infinity Squeeze

Running list of resources for DRS around the world: * Running checklist of Brokers' DRS instructions * A 3 part series with detailed Broker-by-Broker instructions * IRA and Roth IRA- Yes you can!! * International Apes from 200+ countries can transfer their shares * And can buy directly through CS once the account is established * International Apes' Guide to the Galaxy

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[u/ApeLikeyStock]

And, by the way, if RH is reaching out specifically to this demographic, it’s all the confirmation you need to realize that the market is designed to funnel wealth from the poors to the chosen few on Wall Street. Vlad is just looking to be the middleman and take his cut as the wealth trickles up. Fukers.

[u/Specific-Lie2020]

Oh, Vlad... just because you repeat a lie doesn't make it the truth.

[u/ApeLikeyStock]

TLDL: Vlad blames social media for the fools on Wall Street shorting GameStop getting their own balls caught in their own zippers.

[u/Ill_Cardiologist3909]

Took him a bit to find his words and clearly he was very nervous at the beginning but then he remember the lies and everything is back to normal :)). I will DRS the shit out of this rat.

[u/DaddyWarbucksh]

Vlad lied to ALL investors back in January. And he also lied to Congress and the world under oath. So saying he lied to black investors sounds incorrect IMO