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Episode: 20VC: Robinhood's Vlad Tenev on Founder Mode | Building 8x $100M Revenue Lines | Lessons from Raising $5BN and the Gamestop Saga | The Future of Artificial Intelligence, Wealth Management and Home Ownership
Author: Harry Stebbings
Duration: 00:52:29
Episode Shownotes
Vlad Tenev is a Co-Founder and CEO of Robinhood, the commission free stock trading and investing app with a market cap today of $20.7BN. Over the incredible 11 year journey Vlad has raised over $5BN from some of the world’s best investors including Sequoia, a16z, DST, Ribbit and Index. Before
Robinhood, Vlad started two finance companies in New York City. In Today’s Episode with Vlad Tenev We Discuss: 1. Surviving a Scandal: The Gamestop Saga: What was the single hardest element of the sage for Vlad? What did the sage teach Vlad about how to tell stories effectively? What did Vlad not do in the period that he wishes he had of done? What did he do that he wishes he had not done? What advice does Vlad have for any founder going into a crisis? 2. Founder Mode and The Biggest BS Myths of Leadership: How does Vlad analyse and assess Paul Graham’s “Founder Mode”? Where is Founder mode right? Where is it dangerous? What canonical leadership statements and lessons does Vlad most disagree with? How has Vlad changed most significantly as a leader? 3. 8x $100M Revenue Lines: Scaling a Juggernaut: What have been the single biggest challenges of scaling 8 lines of revenue each with over $100M in them? What have been Vlad’s biggest lessons on when and how to release new products? Why did Vlad decide to abandon the Europe launch? Was it right with the benefit of hindsight? What did Vlad not invest in with Robinhood that he wishes he had of done?
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_00
So now Robinhood has eight business lines that generate 100 million a year or more in revenue. And that's up from, I think, three a few years ago. And some of them benefit from higher rates. Some of them benefit from lower rates.
00:00:16 Speaker_00
I do think Robinhood is actually stronger in a declining interest rate environment than in a rising.
00:00:22 Speaker_01
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and oh my gosh, I was blown away by that. Eight lines of revenue with over $100 million in revenue. Incredible. I'm so excited to welcome Vlad Tenev to the show today.
00:00:34 Speaker_01
Vlad is a co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, the commission-free stock trading and investing app with a market cap today of $20.7 billion. And over the incredible 11-year journey,
00:00:46 Speaker_01
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00:03:46 Speaker_01
You have now arrived at your destination. Vlad, dude, we've known each other for a while. I'm so excited to have you in the studio. Thank you for joining me.
00:03:54 Speaker_00
Well, thanks for having me. It's good to meet you in person and be here in person.
00:03:57 Speaker_01
You know, it's so lovely to do it in person.
00:03:59 Speaker_01
I want to go from like, you know, a very cheery, happy start to actually kind of a reflective one, which is, I think we were just talking about the celebratization of CEOship, seeing people on television, seeing the strong leader and everything just looks up into the right.
00:04:12 Speaker_01
And I think we are shaped a lot by our past. When you think about your past, what challenging moment do you think defines who you are today most?
00:04:22 Speaker_00
Being an immigrant, moving from Eastern Europe to the US, that was probably one of my earliest memories, right? When my family actually, right after the Berlin Wall fell, had an opportunity to move to the US.
00:04:36 Speaker_00
Very little travel was happening from Bulgaria, which is where I was born, to the Western world. These people from University of Delaware came and were impressed by my dad, who is a professor of economics in Varna, Bulgaria.
00:04:50 Speaker_00
He got an opportunity to come to the U.S., but of course, we didn't have the money to send the whole family. So it was like, him coming by himself for a year, just trying to make it work, trying to build a stable foundation.
00:05:05 Speaker_00
And then my mom came a year after him. I was living with my grandparents and like they were taking me to school and I didn't see my dad for about a year and a half, my mom for at least six months.
00:05:17 Speaker_00
And my aunt, who I think was a teenager at the time, she was like into grunge music. She loved Nirvana and Soundgarden. She took me to America on what was my first plane flight.
00:05:29 Speaker_00
And I remember when I kind of landed at JFK, JFK is kind of the, it was like the new Ellis Island, right, where the migrants would first come. I landed in JFK and I saw my parents and I hadn't seen my dad for a year and a half.
00:05:46 Speaker_00
It was almost like meeting strangers in a way. And I was just like very shy, took me a little bit of time to open up. I was hiding behind my aunt's leg, just sort of like peeking with one eye out. Being, being apart from my parents, I think was tough.
00:06:01 Speaker_00
but also had the benefit of making me independent and, you know, moving around to different schools, going from the school in Bulgaria near my parents' apartment to the school near my grandparents' apartment to being dropped in kindergarten in the US without speaking any English.
00:06:20 Speaker_00
And it was a little bit terrifying. Like, you're just in this new place, you can't even speak the language, you're in school, It was a little bit scary at the time, but it taught me to just adapt to different situations and to be very flexible.
00:06:33 Speaker_00
And I think that's helped me much later in life.
00:06:35 Speaker_01
You know, I've interviewed 800 of the best founders over the last decade. And the single biggest commonality in the most successful founders is a high frequency of moving in childhood.
00:06:45 Speaker_01
You're forced to assimilate with different environments, different cultures, different people, make new friends, enemies, whatever that is. That's right, yeah. It's a really interesting trait.
00:06:53 Speaker_01
Can I ask you, when you think about moving there and America being the land of opportunity that it was, do you think it's still that land of opportunity? I think this with the UK, like, does the best talent want to come to London?
00:07:04 Speaker_01
And the answer for me is no. Do you think America is the land of opportunity that it was when you went?
00:07:09 Speaker_00
I think so. And for me, entrepreneurship didn't really become a viable option until relatively recently. I grew up on the East Coast. People weren't really starting technology companies on the East Coast.
00:07:24 Speaker_00
To me, as I've kind of gotten older, I moved to Stanford, California.
00:07:29 Speaker_00
Really because when I was a kid and my family took our first road trip, once we got in a little bit of money and my parents felt comfortable taking vacations financially, they took me to California for a road trip.
00:07:41 Speaker_00
And I remember being in San Francisco one morning and this was in the summer. So I had to buy a jacket because it was just like too cold to be outside. We took the 45 minute drive to Stanford, California to check out the campus. It was like 85 degrees.
00:07:55 Speaker_00
Perfect. The students were, like, sunbathing in the main quad. Everyone just looked so happy and, like, they were having a great time. And I wanted to be a lawyer at the time. I had seen A Few Good Men, which was a Tom Cruise movie.
00:08:08 Speaker_00
And I was like, man, that's cool. Like, I want to be that guy. And I had this photo of me in front of the law school.
00:08:15 Speaker_00
But yeah, I wanted to go to Stanford because because of that feeling that I got, it wasn't because I wanted to be an entrepreneur or that I wanted to be in Silicon Valley.
00:08:24 Speaker_00
So to me, it's felt more and more like the land of opportunity the older I get.
00:08:29 Speaker_00
And I think now, even with COVID, when there was this narrative of people moving away from Silicon Valley, going to, you know, Miami or places like that, Austin, Texas, now it's feeling like
00:08:42 Speaker_00
the energy is sucking people back in you know there's artificial intelligence companies palo alto silicon valley right in the epicenter of that big tech companies are continuing to innovate so it still feels like the hotbed of innovation for sure someone said to me the other day on a show that great leadership is about being a conductor and to be a conductor you must turn your back on the crowd when you think about that statement when have you turned your back on the crowd most significantly
00:09:08 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think that's an interesting question. You know, I was reading the Rick Rubin book. I don't know if you've come across it.
00:09:16 Speaker_01
I have. I've actually just been gifted it if I haven't read it.
00:09:18 Speaker_00
Yeah, I was gifted it also. And, you know, it was just sitting on my coffee table for a while, but something compelled me to pick it up. And it's all about artists and how they create.
00:09:28 Speaker_00
And I think he does a great job of distinguishing an artist from a business person. One, I think his thesis for what makes a great artist is that you don't really care about who's looking at your work. You're building something to make yourself happy.
00:09:44 Speaker_00
So really, the customer for an artist is yourself. If you're proud of the work and it expresses what you want to communicate at that point in time, it's a great work.
00:09:53 Speaker_00
And you almost have to, like, divorce that from whether it's commercially viable or whether anyone likes it.
00:10:00 Speaker_00
And even when you're kind of like showing people your work of art, you have to be really careful not to listen to them too much because good art almost like alienates as many people as it makes really happy.
00:10:15 Speaker_00
So if you're not like alienating anyone, probably everyone just feels somewhat neutral and it's not going to be memorable.
00:10:21 Speaker_00
Yeah, business is a little bit different because I think there's an element of art to designing a really good product and you have to be proud of it.
00:10:29 Speaker_00
And to some extent, you're building it for yourself, but you also keep in your mind what's useful to a customer and what they can benefit from.
00:10:39 Speaker_00
So in terms of this conducting analogy, I don't think you can turn your back on the crowd completely, or at least not through all stages of the life cycle of building a product.
00:10:51 Speaker_00
I think that you kind of start with an inspiration and an idea in the best cases has come from within. We've been fortunate to build several kind of really, really good products at Robinhood.
00:11:03 Speaker_00
And I think the, the initial idea, the spark came from within and it didn't come from customer research or a lot of feedback, but I think customers play a much bigger role in refining the idea.
00:11:14 Speaker_00
And actually like we ping pong ideas off of customers use the feedback to adjust the interface. And sometimes it changes it quite a bit, but there's a little bit of like art, a little bit of.
00:11:26 Speaker_00
of business in creating a new product that I think is really interesting.
00:11:30 Speaker_01
Do you think you alienate people enough? And what I mean by that is actually when you think about business, you're Nike or you're Adidas, you're Apple or you're Samsung, you're McDonald's or you're Burger King.
00:11:40 Speaker_01
I know you guys have Taco Bell and some Chipotles and other things, so I'm not going to comment because I don't know the comparisons there. Right. But you are like for or against the brand. Do you think you alienate enough?
00:11:52 Speaker_00
I think we could probably alienate more. I think that it's hard to alienate because people are naturally sensitive to criticism. It hurts more to get sort of like a piece of biting criticism than it feels good to get praise.
00:12:08 Speaker_00
creates a natural tendency to avoid alienating people. And you have to almost like exert influence if you want to have your product or your marketing or your message be compelling. It's a very tough thing.
00:12:23 Speaker_00
And to some degree, it has to start at the top of the organization. But I think for myself, I can take more risk.
00:12:30 Speaker_00
So what I try to do is whenever possible, if there's someone whose vision I believe in, even if I disagree with it, I try to let them try things and be bold and have a perspective.
00:12:44 Speaker_01
One of my biggest weaknesses is I really care what other people think. and I'm actually quite sensitive and it really hurts when I see shit on any social media about me. You said about sensitivity there.
00:12:55 Speaker_01
I spoke to so many of our mutual friends and they told me actually that you're an introvert and in the nicest way that you're a maths nerd. Seb would love, by the way.
00:13:03 Speaker_01
But are you sensitive and how do you think about building that muscle to withstand the criticism that comes?
00:13:11 Speaker_00
I wouldn't say I'm an introvert. If there's actually one thing that I struggle with on a personal level, it's like being alone. I get a little bit uncomfortable being alone. And, you know... Why is that? I don't know.
00:13:27 Speaker_00
I think that maybe it comes from childhood. I'm an only child. When I grew up, I actually spent a lot of time alone. My parents never were able to afford a babysitter until I got older and didn't need one, right?
00:13:40 Speaker_00
So as a kindergartner, I would walk home from the bus stop to my apartment. I had the key in my backpack, you know, the latchkey child. This is very rare now. I've been told you can't really do this in 2020. People are more protective over their kids.
00:13:56 Speaker_00
But I would let myself in, do my homework, call my parents at work or they would call me to make sure I got home OK, play with my friends sometimes. But a lot of times I was just sort of like alone.
00:14:07 Speaker_00
And then when I got to college, it was always like living with roommates or with a bunch of people. in a house. When I'd go out places, I would have, you know, a lot of friends with me.
00:14:19 Speaker_00
So, you know, sometimes I hear about people doing like solo traveling or living by themselves for an extended period of time. And it feels like somewhat foreign and actually kind of scary to me. So my area of discomfort is less being with other people.
00:14:35 Speaker_00
I get energy from other people and it's more like
00:14:39 Speaker_01
I find the hardest time alone night time, which is when the lights go out and you're kind of in bed with your own thoughts.
00:14:45 Speaker_00
Yeah.
00:14:46 Speaker_01
You know, you have a much busier life than me, but it is busy now is the only time when it's like silence.
00:14:52 Speaker_00
Yeah, not usually in my house. I usually have multiple crying kids.
00:14:56 Speaker_01
It changes a lot. I totally get that. I was chatting to Mickey and he said, listen, he said you were in the best CEO version of yourself right now. But that was in large part, I think, because of the experience you had over the last few years.
00:15:09 Speaker_01
He said one you've got to ask is GameStop was a tough period for him as a leader. What did it teach you about telling stories?
00:15:16 Speaker_00
Yeah, that is a tough one. And I think to your point, you mentioned the introverted thing. I think before GameStop, to some degree, I was like never really comfortable in a media setting.
00:15:30 Speaker_00
I think this is a little bit different because this feels more like a conversation. But like you're on, you know, CNBC or Bloomberg or one of these shows and you have three to five minutes.
00:15:40 Speaker_00
You have this like artificial situation where you have to deliver soundbites. You can't really explain yourself. That one was during COVID. So all of these interviews that at least I'd normally be in a studio for are happening over my Zoom connection.
00:15:55 Speaker_00
Very little sleep. And it wasn't just the night before the GameStop fiasco. It was probably like the month leading up to it. where volumes were just going vertical, the crypto markets were exploding as well. And we were a major player in that.
00:16:09 Speaker_00
Robinhood was the number one app in the app store. And my feeling at the time was everyone was sort of like, wow, you should be really happy.
00:16:17 Speaker_00
You're the number one app in the app store ahead of Instagram and TikTok, not just financial app, but everything. And inside, I I had to like juggle the happiness of that, that moment, but also just like the fear that something could happen.
00:16:32 Speaker_00
I don't know what, and it could go off the rails. It was almost like too much growth. And so all of this was happening at the same time. And you're running all these threads in your brain, like, I have this issue. I want to dispute this point.
00:16:46 Speaker_00
I want to like appear confident, like I'm on top of things. And I had that not really going for me because, you know, I was 32 years old at the time and I hadn't done much media and I looked rather young.
00:17:01 Speaker_00
I think that whole episode sort of like aged me. You know, I look at pictures of myself in 2020, I look much younger. My big takeaway is I think you almost have to, like, clear out all of those voices in your brain.
00:17:14 Speaker_00
And when everything goes away, you can actually get much more clarity about how to communicate. And I think storytelling is a big part of that.
00:17:21 Speaker_00
I mean, if you clear out your brain and remove what you think you should be saying or what messages you want to convey, I think what's left is the stories.
00:17:31 Speaker_00
I tend to picture things in my mind when I think about GameStop, I think about like being cooped up in my little house and not really being able to eat for days because I was just like pacing around.
00:17:44 Speaker_00
Small kids at the time, they were just kind of running around and it was just like a very unsettling period.
00:17:50 Speaker_01
What would you have said differently when you review kind of what you did say? What did you say or not say that you wish you had done the opposite of?
00:17:57 Speaker_00
I did a clubhouse with Elon Musk on Sunday. Thursday was when the GameStop trading restrictions were first put into place. And then we were a little bit nervous about sharing all of the details.
00:18:12 Speaker_00
Part of it was we want to make sure we didn't get anything wrong because if we got anything wrong, then we would have to correct it. And that looks bad. That tends to... I mean, you've got people into all sorts of conspiracy theories, right?
00:18:25 Speaker_00
And people thought there was this whole collusion narrative with Citadel that ended up being disproved. And so we wanted to make sure that we communicated everything correctly and we didn't leave anything out or make any mistakes.
00:18:38 Speaker_00
That made us communicate a little bit later than perhaps I would have liked, but it came out in pieces. It was like one detail here, the other details there.
00:18:48 Speaker_00
And then it was Sunday when I kind of gave the full play-by-play on a clubhouse being interviewed by Elon Musk. And of course, in all the lawsuits and litigation that followed, all the other details came out over the following several years.
00:19:04 Speaker_00
But I think in hindsight, not saying anything until giving the entire story of how everything happened, I think would have would have probably worked better. I felt this pressure to get out there and communicate as early as possible.
00:19:18 Speaker_00
But I think in hindsight, taking my time a little bit and just saying like, hey, we're working through solving the problem. I'm going to release a statement or get out there as soon as I can after cleaning up the mess.
00:19:31 Speaker_00
I think that probably would have been a little bit better.
00:19:33 Speaker_01
Who do you call when the lawsuits are dropping, when the shit is really hitting the fan?
00:19:39 Speaker_00
Lots of lawyers. But who's the friend? What was really interesting was I started getting phone calls from all sorts of people that maybe I wouldn't have had an opportunity to talk to.
00:19:50 Speaker_00
You know, people were connecting me with Elon Musk before, but he kind of wanted to give me some advice on how to handle the situation. I talked to Zuck, Mark Benioff. The one benefit was... Amazing network expansion.
00:20:02 Speaker_00
These guys were like, Hey, you know, I, I saw this on, on, on TV. I really think you could have done a better job on that Sorkin interview. And here's what you should do next. And, you know, it was interesting to have those discussions.
00:20:15 Speaker_00
It was like brainstorming on brand marketing, business strategy, business model with, with some of these folks in a very kind of very unique time.
00:20:24 Speaker_01
You mentioned some incredible founders there. You are yourself an incredible founder. What did you make of PG's founder mode essay which went incredibly viral recently?
00:20:33 Speaker_00
My take on it, I think it's a little bit like a horoscope in the sense that it was so vague in general that everyone kind of thinks that it's relevant to them. It's like, oh yeah, that's me. I'm in founder mode, not manager mode.
00:20:48 Speaker_00
And I think that's why it resonated with people. You can paint your own picture, but it kind of feels like it's talking about you. Every founder that I talked to was like, yeah, you know, PG really gets it. This is exactly how I operate.
00:21:02 Speaker_00
Every manager or executive was a little bit offended, you know. So, yeah, it was packaged well, but I think it captured a feeling.
00:21:09 Speaker_00
I don't think it was like if you're looking for a tactical guide to like founder decision making, I don't think I don't think there's much in the way of specifics there.
00:21:17 Speaker_01
How did you think about kind of refinding the culture? And when do you think it broke?
00:21:22 Speaker_00
It kind of broke a little bit at the beginning of COVID. What were the signs that it broke? Well, there were a couple of things that happened simultaneously that were very difficult. I think one of them was just going remote fully.
00:21:36 Speaker_00
And then the second thing was we went through a gigantic hiring burst. I want to say we were under a thousand people at the end of 2019. So right before COVID, I think right around a thousand, maybe a little bit under. And then in 2022,
00:21:52 Speaker_00
January of 2022, when we finally announced that we were a remote-first company after a couple of years of ambiguity, and we were about 4,000 people, so we sort of like over-forexed in a fully remote setting, and we were opening up offices everywhere.
00:22:09 Speaker_00
How many are you now? Between two to three thousand. So you overhired? We overhired. Yeah. Part of it was we were kind of responding to the issues that we had in 2020, which were huge amount of growth, influx of customers.
00:22:23 Speaker_00
I mean, our revenues went up like 4x in a year from right around 250 million to about a billion. At the time, it was fun, but it was also a little bit disconcerting because I was like, well, We haven't really done anything.
00:22:36 Speaker_00
You know, this thing happened. Now we're growing. And I think if you're not careful, there's a tendency to think that you're doing a great job as a leader. I mean, revenue is going up. People are using my product.
00:22:48 Speaker_00
All these other companies that maybe were hit hard by covid are doing poorly. Does that mean I'm a better chief executive than the chief executives of those companies?
00:22:59 Speaker_00
I think at the time I was getting some positive feedback, but there were things that were breaking that we had to deal with as well. I think what was kind of not very fulfilling to me was we didn't really ship that many products in 2020 and 2021.
00:23:11 Speaker_00
We were just kind of trying to keep the train on the rails because we were dealing with infrastructure issues, historic volumes, lots of load, customer support. We had to grow.
00:23:21 Speaker_01
What did you not do that you wish you had done?
00:23:24 Speaker_00
In hindsight, since we're in the UK, we decided to abandon our efforts to expand to the UK that year. I remember this. Yeah.
00:23:34 Speaker_01
Because you were planning and it was publicly known that you were planning it and obviously me being in the UK, I was excited for it.
00:23:39 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah. We announced in the UK, we went to friends and family, maybe about a thousand people, and then COVID hit. So it was like March of 2020. I remember having to make a decision.
00:23:51 Speaker_00
It was like, we need all of the resources we possibly can get on the US side. You know, we have this new business in the UK. I think it was a tough decision. I thought about it a little bit. Why did you make it? And I went back and forth.
00:24:05 Speaker_00
I think at the time, it seemed like, I mean, the US business was so big and it was growing so fast, it was going through an inflection point. And it felt like we had to put everything that we possibly could on making that work and shoring it up.
00:24:20 Speaker_00
And the UK just seemed like it would be hard and it would be distracting and I couldn't even travel there most likely. It was sort of like easy to abandon. And we didn't abandon it fully. I mean, we kept the license and then we went live.
00:24:36 Speaker_00
What ended up being three years later when we finally launched earlier this year. Yeah. But sometimes I think about that. And of course, always difficult to. Was that a mistake to not do it then?
00:24:46 Speaker_00
I think it's hard to compare against the counterfactual which you don't have.
00:24:51 Speaker_00
Certainly, it would have been the right decision if we ended up having some massive infrastructure issue in the US had we not allocated the resources and we had another big problem.
00:25:02 Speaker_00
In a world where we could have done both, I think learning to be an international company a couple of years earlier probably would have been a good thing.
00:25:10 Speaker_01
I don't know how to say this without being too direct or blunt. Why is Europe and the UK interesting to you at all? Compared to the US market, it's tiny. You look at competitors here like free trade, which are botany, average and best businesses.
00:25:24 Speaker_01
Why is it interesting for you?
00:25:26 Speaker_00
I think from the very beginning, we had a vision that Robinhood would be a global company, that wherever you are in the world, you'd be able to download our app from the app store, have access to the best financial products anywhere.
00:25:42 Speaker_00
You could fund with your local currency or cryptocurrency or whatever the easiest way is you could invest your money you could spend it send it to people so we could help anyone with any financial need and i think as a technology company we feel like we have an advantage to doing that.
00:25:59 Speaker_01
What have you decided to not do most recently that was a hard decision it's a constant game of trade offs.
00:26:06 Speaker_00
Yeah, there's lots of things that are great ideas in our space that we know will work, but we haven't gotten around to them yet. So, for example, earlier this year, we launched amazing margin rates.
00:26:18 Speaker_00
We were frankly not very competitive with our margin product in the U.S. up until recently. And then we changed our rates. We were able to do that because we made a lot of investments in risk management. So now we have the best rates.
00:26:31 Speaker_00
But if you think about the things that we offer, great margin rates, 24 hour access to the markets, also particularly relevant in the UK, there are things that institutions want to.
00:26:41 Speaker_00
So if you're a hedge fund, for example, you also want 24 hour access to equity markets. You want access to crypto. Not a lot of them can get that easily. You want access to low margin rates. And the institutional market's a very big market.
00:26:57 Speaker_00
We could take a lot of our infrastructure, adapt it to institutional. We don't have to rebuild a ton of the technology. Similarly, you look at a company like Fidelity, a big asset manager in the U.S., they have a big 401k business.
00:27:11 Speaker_00
So that's also a B2B business. You're helping startups and larger companies manage their employee retirement plans. That's a good compliment to our retirement offering. So that's something that comes up. Servicing registered investment advisors.
00:27:26 Speaker_00
That's a big market. Individuals that manage money on behalf of other customers.
00:27:31 Speaker_01
You mentioned kind of funding through crypto that one of your ambassadors said, the hard question depends if you want to go hard, Harry. One should ask is why are you not bigger on crypto?
00:27:41 Speaker_00
Well, on retail in the U.S., we're kind of like close to the same size as Coinbase. We charge a lot less, so we have less revenue. But in terms of volumes and retail volumes, it's pretty close.
00:27:55 Speaker_00
So, you know, even though we started later, we've generally grown market share quite substantially. We weren't originally offering crypto. That was kind of an area we moved into.
00:28:06 Speaker_00
So we didn't, we didn't launch at the same time as, you know, some of the original crypto companies, but I think we've been picking up market share and building the product, getting more aggressive over time.
00:28:18 Speaker_00
We have the Bitstamp acquisition and that's a global company. That's actually one of the OG exchanges. So I think we're going to continue to invest, but I'd say we've done quite well in crypto relative to most of our competitors.
00:28:31 Speaker_00
You can tell Mickey that one then.
00:28:34 Speaker_01
You mentioned the acquisition there. I think it's a constant question for technology leaders today, which is, you know, do we build it ourselves? Do we partner? Do we acquire?
00:28:42 Speaker_01
How do you think about that build by partner decision-making process when adding new products or enhancing existing?
00:28:50 Speaker_00
We've made some great acquisitions in the past. Which has been the best one? The one that has led to the most interesting new product.
00:29:00 Speaker_00
And, you know, I guess to some degree it's still early, so I can't quite declare full victory, but but we feel pretty good has been the credit card. We bought a company called X1. They had a really nice credit card product right around the SVB crisis.
00:29:15 Speaker_00
Credit companies had quite a bit of trouble. The banking system in the U.S. was very, very strained. That hit credit startups perhaps the hardest.
00:29:24 Speaker_00
So we were able to acquire X1, and that led to the Robinhood Gold credit card, which I think if you look at the reviews and how initial customers are using and enjoying the product, the reviews are better than free trading.
00:29:41 Speaker_00
The best initial feedback that we've gotten on any product that we've rolled out.
00:29:45 Speaker_01
single reason why you think it's been a success?
00:29:48 Speaker_00
Three reasons. One is the economics. So 3% cash back on all categories across the board. The second is the digital experience. You can create these virtual cards, one time use cards that people really like. And then the design of the card is really nice.
00:30:04 Speaker_00
It's a solid gold card if you refer ten friends. How spicy am I allowed to be Vlad?
00:30:10 Speaker_01
Because like Revolut have had these features for years. My question is, and I look at this, like Revolut is a $45 billion company now, and I think it'll probably be a $100 billion company, and people will shit on me.
00:30:21 Speaker_01
And then we look at the biggest competitor in the US, and it's $15 billion with Chime. I don't mean that badly to Chime, but that's a pretty high valuation applied to Chime. Where's the mismatch?
00:30:31 Speaker_01
Why is it the US has not delivered in a way that a European company has with that
00:30:37 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question. I'd say Revolut has done well in Europe. They learned how to go international very quickly because, you know, it's not just the UK business, but it expanded into Europe and other markets. My sense is U.S.
00:30:53 Speaker_00
still early for them, right?
00:30:55 Speaker_01
No one's cracked U.S. Monzo couldn't, Revolut are trying.
00:30:59 Speaker_00
The value prop of cross-border spending is a very relevant value prop in Europe. You know, you have a lot of travelers that need pounds here, need euros when they go over to the mainland. They have a good solution to that.
00:31:13 Speaker_00
Now, whether the sort of like investing side is working particularly well, I'm not sure. I don't really have any data there.
00:31:21 Speaker_01
I'm just intrigued. Is the investing product a better entry wedge and anchor product than a current account?
00:31:28 Speaker_00
I think both work. It kind of depends on what timescale you look at things by, right? I was reading the Amazon book and eBay initially was a much larger company than Amazon.
00:31:41 Speaker_00
And they kind of thought it was very silly that Amazon would build their own fulfillment centers and run their own warehouses. And if you're just kind of a software layer connecting buyers and sellers,
00:31:53 Speaker_00
Yeah, the perspective was like, that's a much better business, much higher margin. But like Amazon did something that was very hard and very difficult to replicate.
00:32:02 Speaker_00
And I think it took, in their case, 20 plus years, but eventually that started compounding You can also look at NVIDIA as an example. I mean, NVIDIA started in the early 90s.
00:32:15 Speaker_00
It was sort of like the last Silicon Valley company that wasn't really doing software and they were still a hardware company. So it's this strange kind of alien thing. And 30 years later, they kind of started taking off.
00:32:28 Speaker_00
Sometimes it's difficult to judge these things in the first five to 10 years or in the case of Robin Hood, the first one year.
00:32:35 Speaker_01
What one to two things do you need to do to be a hundred billion dollar company?
00:32:39 Speaker_00
A couple of different vectors of getting there. One of them is being number one in the active trading space. So winning the active trader market. I think just that is a large space. You have Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade.
00:32:55 Speaker_00
The combination is kind of the market leader right now. They've got very little international presence, but they serve active traders pretty well. We've been growing our market share. Options was up 20%, close to 20% last year, equities up 14%.
00:33:07 Speaker_00
So we are on the path to being number one. and we're getting net inflows, that's going to require a bunch of things, but I think that's kind of our core business. So it's a predictable path.
00:33:21 Speaker_00
The second opportunity and the one we're putting more and more focus on, but it's sort of like an arc that'll play out over five plus years, say, that would be being the place where millennials and Gen Z keep the majority of their assets.
00:33:37 Speaker_00
I think that one is interesting because There's over 70 trillion of assets that's going to be moving from silent generation and baby boomers down to Gen X, millennials and younger.
00:33:49 Speaker_00
And we've got more millennial customers than our main brokerage competitors put together.
00:33:53 Speaker_00
Same with Gen Z. If we can actually build a better service for them, make it a no brainer to move their accounts over, we get a portion of that 70 trillion of assets that are going to be in motion.
00:34:07 Speaker_00
not a very large percentage of that is needed for us to significantly increase our revenues.
00:34:13 Speaker_01
It's a totally weird one. Do you think it's bullshit that people should buy their own homes? And what I mean by that is that, you know, the American dream of, oh, you buy your own home the minute you can. And actually, that's kind of the wealth effect.
00:34:22 Speaker_01
And actually, you know, young people actually have a lot more cash and they spend it on Taylor Swift concert tickets, which for thousands of dollars each and Chanel handbags for thousands of dollars each because the house is just so far out.
00:34:32 Speaker_01
It's too expensive. Is that a good thing in some ways or not?
00:34:36 Speaker_00
I mean, I think it depends on whether you're viewing it as an investment. If that's sort of like your way of investing, there's probably more efficient.
00:34:47 Speaker_00
I mean, if you think about real estate, you're paying a lot of taxes depending on where you live in the U.S. The taxes on property can be north of one percent, and that's big every year. That's kind of layered on.
00:34:58 Speaker_00
There's commissions every time you buy or sell. It's like five percent. And then you add, you know, maintenance fees and insurance and all of those things. And if you kind of look at it as an investment, it starts to kind of affect the returns.
00:35:15 Speaker_00
You compare that with investing your money in Robinhood. You're not paying any commissions on equities. You can diversify globally. I wrote a piece one time about how investing and access to capital markets is like the should be the real American dream.
00:35:30 Speaker_00
Everyone should be doing it like they were talking about homeownership decades prior.
00:35:35 Speaker_01
I think it was Bill Ackman who said on our show that we should give... I'm forgetting the number, which is kind of the most important part.
00:35:41 Speaker_01
But I think it was like every newborn baby should be given X amount of money that is put into the S&P, and they're able then to take ownership of that over time. That is the secret to ownership of the American economy for the next generation.
00:35:55 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think that there's a couple of people that are working on that, right? Venture capitalists, Brad from Altimeter, I think it is. Yeah, I think it's a noble pursuit, you know?
00:36:07 Speaker_01
Can I ask a bit of a strange one? You mentioned NVIDIA. You're a public company CEO. Do you feel that you have to have an AI story?
00:36:14 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think that's an interesting question. I think any time you see a new trend or something that everyone's talking about, it's always good to ask, is this something that is real and can deliver tangible value or is it a fad?
00:36:29 Speaker_00
Am I just like thinking about it because I hear about it on the news?
00:36:33 Speaker_01
We could have talked about NFTs if this was two years ago and like, how would we store our NFTs in Robinhood? And you could make a big faux pas by being like, we're all in.
00:36:41 Speaker_00
I think NFTs came up and there have been several phases in the past where NFTs have done very, very well. I mean, you look at crypto kitties back in 2017. It was kind of the first NFT boom. Everyone was buying a kitty and everyone was talking about it.
00:36:58 Speaker_00
And then, of course, the apes and all the other things back in the last boom, OpenSea and whatnot. We looked at it at that time because Robinhood had a big crypto business, and we just decided that it didn't make sense. Right.
00:37:13 Speaker_01
And for AI?
00:37:14 Speaker_00
And crypto is probably the more general example.
00:37:16 Speaker_00
Obviously, we entered crypto, but for us as a financial company, I think we do view it as an asset that our customers want to trade and a fundamental technology that could change the financial system more on an infrastructure level.
00:37:32 Speaker_00
AI, I think, is going to be a powerful platform shift, and we've lived through a couple of them.
00:37:38 Speaker_00
I think Robinhood in its current incarnation went through a few platform shifts and really that helped distance ourselves from the companies that owned the space before we came. One of them is cloud, one of the first cloud-based brokers.
00:37:53 Speaker_00
When we got started, it was very unusual. I mean, we were talking to our counterparties for execution, for clearing. We said, Hey, we don't have servers in our colo. We're going to use Amazon. And they were like, we don't think that's secure.
00:38:08 Speaker_00
And it's funny how things have gone in 10 years. Now the idea of like not trusting Amazon web services for hosting your server seems laughable, but back then it was a real thing.
00:38:18 Speaker_01
But I mean, this question actually is coming back in regards to AI, which is like a lot of large enterprises, like I'm not giving open AI my data. And so that is actually becoming an increasingly prevalent question again.
00:38:28 Speaker_00
I think there's details like that that have to be worked out. But the point that I was laboriously getting to was I think AI is going to be a huge technology shift that's going to change our space, going to change the financial services.
00:38:41 Speaker_01
But do you need to have anything today saying, oh, we are doing X with AI to make ourselves sexy?
00:38:48 Speaker_00
We're looking at several ways in which AI products could help our customers. And I do think that AI is going to change financial services.
00:38:58 Speaker_00
And I think the products that work, this might be a little bit of a hot take when a lot of people ask like, well, which AI products? You probably think of this as an investor. Like, what am I going to invest in? What's going to get traction?
00:39:10 Speaker_00
I think to me, if there is right now an existing market of people paying a human to do a service for them that AI could replicate at much lower cost, I think that's a real business.
00:39:23 Speaker_00
And you can think of that outside of financial services with like self-driving, right? There's Uber, there's Lyft. I pay someone to drive me to somewhere that's a valuable service that you can attribute value to.
00:39:36 Speaker_00
If a car can do that without the driver, and I would be willing to pay possibly just as much. It'll cost less over time, but there's a value to that. So I think that'll be successful.
00:39:47 Speaker_00
In financial services, customers pay for financial advice and they pay a lot of money, very valuable. On the low end, it's sort of like 2% of your assets under management. On the high end, it's like half a percent.
00:40:01 Speaker_00
And that scales to hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases.
00:40:05 Speaker_01
If you can replicate the service, do you think you can replicate the service when you think about nuance, ambiguity, risk profiles, preferences, how they change at different times?
00:40:15 Speaker_00
There's a couple of different things there. One is the asset allocation algorithm side of it, taking a risk profile and recommending a portfolio that doesn't actually require AI. And a lot of advisors are, you know, using software to do that.
00:40:31 Speaker_00
the real value is kind of in this concierge service. I mean, if you have a wealth manager or a family office, they can kind of like abstract your entire financial life for you. They take care of your budgeting.
00:40:42 Speaker_00
They take care of your trust in an estate. They take care of your insurance. They help you with any legal things managed well, simultaneously. And these are expensive financial professionals.
00:40:53 Speaker_00
If you can deliver that type of service to the mass market, to people that don't have, you know, millions of dollars, I think that would be very valuable. And I think AI, you'll see it impacting the space in two ways.
00:41:06 Speaker_00
One is a tool to existing advisors. I mean, some people aren't going to be comfortable trusting a machine with all those things, but it can help an advisor serve more clients simultaneously.
00:41:18 Speaker_00
And then some customers will be comfortable with a full technology solution as long as it does more than just the asset allocation.
00:41:25 Speaker_00
And so I think you will see that in the next couple of years really start taking off and good products have recently become possible with like the latest models that can reason and make better decisions.
00:41:37 Speaker_00
The models are likely going to get better and better. I think you'll start seeing them replace more traditional knowledge workers.
00:41:43 Speaker_01
one final one just on market which is like when you think about like interest rate changes volatility it's a really hard business for you in the way that actually your business can change so much dependent on something completely outside of your control which is like interest rate changes will drive a mass amount of buying or pull back did you just get comfortable with that
00:42:00 Speaker_00
The best way to actually compensate for that is diversifying the business. So now Robinhood has eight business lines that generate a hundred million a year or more in revenue. And that's up from, I think, three a few years ago.
00:42:17 Speaker_00
So we've got eight unique business lines that are nine figures a year, and some of them benefit from higher rates. Some of them benefit from lower rates.
00:42:25 Speaker_00
For example, when rates are low, money tends to move from interest on cash and kind of yield products, low risk products into equities, crypto and options. When rates are low, margin is more compelling.
00:42:38 Speaker_00
So you tend to see increases in your margin book and we're getting more. We've gotten more competitive there. So we've been growing our market share.
00:42:45 Speaker_00
I think over time, I do think Robinhood is actually stronger as in a declining interest rate environment than in a rising. But over time, as we continue to diversify the business.
00:42:57 Speaker_01
You get a smoothing out of revenues.
00:42:59 Speaker_00
We'll get a smoothing out of revenues, just like, you know, diversification helps smooth out investment.
00:43:06 Speaker_01
There's a reason why we have 30th seed, my friend. Listen, I'm going to do a quick fire with you. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Sure. What book written before 1965 would you most recommend?
00:43:19 Speaker_00
I actually recently, if I had to think about what I've been reading, The Story of Civilization has been very interesting. Have you read that one? No. By Will Durant and Ariel Durant. It's very good. Probably in the early 60s or late 50s.
00:43:33 Speaker_01
I don't tend to read things longer than a tweet, but give it a go.
00:43:38 Speaker_00
You can have AI summarize it for you. There we go. How has becoming a father changed you as a CEO? It's made me more patient. Having small children tests one's patience. You're used to kind of like getting what you want largely.
00:43:52 Speaker_00
And if you don't, there's really a rational explanation. But with kids, you don't get that as much. They really want what they want and they have tantrums if they don't get it.
00:44:02 Speaker_01
You can't get angry at them also. And they throw yogurt at you. I mean, it's not like you can like shout at them.
00:44:07 Speaker_00
I mean, you can try, yeah, but they've got me beat in the throwing yogurt side of things.
00:44:12 Speaker_01
What's been the biggest near-death experience for the company that you remember? When I say near-death experience, you go, oh, that time.
00:44:18 Speaker_00
I mean, GameStop is up there for sure.
00:44:20 Speaker_01
What moment was it? Was that there was a call in the middle of the night when your phone was in another room because of your sleep hygiene?
00:44:26 Speaker_00
Yeah, exactly. And that was a very short lived, short lived experiment to try to sleep better and not be as addicted to technology.
00:44:34 Speaker_01
And so your wife wakes you up and says, hey, there's a phone call for you.
00:44:37 Speaker_00
Yeah. And it's like, we got this we got this bill in the automated clearinghouse system for three billion dollars. Yeah, that was terrifying. Do you go back to bed? No, I didn't sleep for probably 72 hours after that.
00:44:54 Speaker_00
I got my workout in Friday, the Friday afterward.
00:44:58 Speaker_01
Do you still work out when all of that shit hits the fan?
00:45:02 Speaker_00
I mean, I miss my Thursday workout. But Friday, I got back into it.
00:45:06 Speaker_00
I think after the immediate crisis was like resolved that Friday afternoon after the market closed, it was like, you know, the temperature went down from like 110 to probably like 102. And it had been increasing steadily.
00:45:21 Speaker_00
So that was that was a nice little break.
00:45:23 Speaker_01
If you're like, no, I went back to bed. Yeah, I remember seeing my sleep pattern and I dealt with it in the morning.
00:45:28 Speaker_00
It's very easy and remote work to just end the Zoom call, right? And then the entire problem goes away. It's all in the computer.
00:45:36 Speaker_01
Why do you not think people should care about who you vote for?
00:45:40 Speaker_00
I think that for a similar reason why you shouldn't really care too much what stock someone on the Internet is buying. It's useful as a signal, but I think people tend to like copy what others do too much.
00:45:54 Speaker_00
And I generally think people should think for themselves. I mean, the whole point of Robinhood as a product is that We're building a tool for you to make your own decision as an individual.
00:46:03 Speaker_00
And fundamentally, people are smart and needs and technology can help them if they're willing to make their own decisions and take control over their own money.
00:46:13 Speaker_01
But ultimate one, what have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months?
00:46:17 Speaker_00
We were talking a little bit earlier how the entire culture of the company reverted. I don't think I got a chance to finish what happened after we sort of like got into a bad state during COVID, but we announced that we were a remote first company.
00:46:31 Speaker_00
I immediately regretted it. And then we had to pull that back and ask people to come to the office.
00:46:37 Speaker_01
Why did you regret it? You just saw straight away productivity down.
00:46:40 Speaker_00
I mean, I didn't even see productivity down, but, you know, we were kind of struggling with this decision for a while for many years.
00:46:49 Speaker_00
And have you ever sort of like decided to flip a coin on something because you were tired and, and you didn't know what you didn't know what to do. And you're like, you know, I'll flip a coin.
00:46:59 Speaker_00
And then when the coin is in the air, you're kind of like, man, I hope it lands on heads. That's how I ended up getting married. No, I'm joking. It was a little bit like that.
00:47:09 Speaker_00
It was like as soon as we made the decision, I had the feeling that it was a mistake.
00:47:13 Speaker_01
It's a good way to test your true conviction of like, well, let's see what happens.
00:47:17 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think people have different feelings about this is a very hotly debated topic. But I do believe that there's a value in much like reading a book that's still relevant after 50 years. Remote work is a pretty new thing.
00:47:31 Speaker_00
Humans have been like building relationships and working together in person for thousands of years. And I don't think that that's going to go away instantaneously through technology.
00:47:41 Speaker_00
I think that that's a it's a pretty high bar to kind of declare that the dominant new working style.
00:47:46 Speaker_01
I completely agree. In the UK, we're all back to all in person. But final one for you. You've done many different interviews. People see you on TV a lot. What do you think someone listening doesn't know about you that you kind of just wish they would?
00:47:59 Speaker_00
I think the one lesson you can call it storytelling or or what have you.
00:48:04 Speaker_00
I think that it's helped me be happier, be like a happier human and probably a better leader to sort of like think less about what other people think about me, because I think it can be pretty distracting.
00:48:17 Speaker_00
And I think it's natural to be aware of what others think about you. But if you're not kind of rubbing at least some people the wrong way by your existence, you're probably not doing anything interesting.
00:48:31 Speaker_00
You're probably not being sufficiently interesting. And I don't think the goal is actually to like be interesting to other people too. But I think it's that to have a point of view and to change things.
00:48:43 Speaker_00
I've gotten much happier if once I've sort of like stopped caring about what others think of me to such a degree.
00:48:50 Speaker_01
Yeah. I've so enjoyed doing this in person. Thank you so much for sitting down with me. It's so lovely to make it happen finally in person. So I really appreciate it.
00:48:59 Speaker_00
Yeah. Thank you for having me.
00:49:01 Speaker_01
I just want to say on a personal note, Vlad has been a great friend, a great advisor to me personally, and always just been incredibly supportive when there's been nothing in it for him.
00:49:11 Speaker_01
I always think you see the measure of a person when they have nothing to gain, and how they respond and act in those times, and Vlad is truly one of the greats.
00:49:19 Speaker_01
So a very special man, and I'm so grateful to him for giving up the time to be on the show today. If you want to see more, you can of course find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC, that's 20VC.
00:49:29 Speaker_01
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