Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev on predicting the future

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We have to remind ourselves to not get complacent. I try to remind our employees of that as well, and I'm saying it to the employees as much as I'm saying it to myself, right? Like, I know inevitably I've been through so many of these cycles. There's going to be a time in the future where everyone thinks we're shit heads again. Hopefully, less acute than times before, and generally I believe the trend will be up, but, you know, it's always cyclical to some degree, and that's just what we sign up for. It's access. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, we're back, baby, from San Francisco, Day Trip, Feeling Fresh, Feeling Alive, at least I think I am, maybe more so than you, Ellis. Ellis Hamburger? What's up? Yeah, I'm not quite as well-practiced as you are yet, Alex, with the, like, go to the three Facebook events in one week, all three separate day trips. This was my first San Francisco day trip. It was fun. I liked it. It wasn't a day trip. You spent the night with your brother? Yes, technically, but it was like 24 hours, I guess I would say. That's a day. I need, we established, I need a cooler suitcase, since toting around a 10-year-old travel pro suitcases, like no remover, I think, as you said, Ellis, at least getting away suitcase, and I think you were 100% right about that, if anyone is listening, forming, my Christmas list. Yeah. Hint hint. It was great. We had some good partner meetings, and then we did our first live show with the fine folks at Google Ventures. That interview is going to air next week. That was great. And what did you think of the first live pod experience? It was fun. I mean, I'm not much of a stool guy. I don't love to sit on stools. I don't know. I don't want to do the Donald Trump Jr. hyper-straight sitting on the stool posture, but I also don't want to slouch, you know what I'm saying? I was also holding my daylight tablet, which was misbehaving a little bit, and I could not get Android to increase the size of the font on the screen. You were right, Alex. I was squinting at that a little bit. Yeah. But I thought it won't well. I mean, it was a good vibe. Our guest, Winston Weinberg of Harvey, which for the life of me, I cannot remember that name. It was a lovely guest, and yeah, I guess we'll see how the audio and video look and sound. First time we've done that thing live. Yeah. AI for lawyers. I appreciated his candidness on things that CEO's normally dodged, I don't want to spoil too much, but I thought it was a pretty good combo. And you know what? We got like three or four Google digs in at a Google Ventures event, and they loved it. So I say that's a win win. I think we scared some of the Google ventures, folks, a little bit with our first question about the worst advice Google ventures I've forgave you, but we brought it back around and they loved us by the end of it. Yeah. For me, what it showed is that we should do live more often. I think when you and I are together, it's just way easier to pick up on little things and interject, and some of the most fun moments are when you can just react in the moment, you know, and it's just so much harder virtually. It is. I mean, with virtual, all I've got is like, are you marginally opening your mouth to indicate that you may want to speak? That's all I've got in terms of body language. We've got Vlad Tenev, the CEO of Robin Hood on the show, coming up very soon. I'm very excited about that to discuss a lot with him, but there's some other news in your world this week, right? Yeah. Had a big launch for a company I'm advising and have been helping since they were in an indie baby startup a couple of years ago. They were actually one of my very first clients at meaning back when they were called M1, and they've been building in stealth, which isn't quite as common these days. But the reason for that is because they've been evolving the product from something similar to maybe what granola and some of the other note takers were offering a couple of years ago to being very vertical specific, kind of in the way that like Harvey, as we talk about on that, on that next episode is building for lawyers. I think we're starting to see that creating the right interface for different audiences takes something from being a rapper, which as you say on the show is like used to be a drivatory thing to actually being a potential smash hit. And so essentially what beside is is it's kind of like they rebuilt the phone and the messages app with a new phone number for you for people who work on their phones all day. Like as they wrote on their blog, there were like a hundred million Americans, like real estate agents, contractors, plumbers, truck dispatchers who like work on their phone, like phone phone. Journalists. I'm audio. I'm on calls. Yes. Journalists as well. And yet they can answer less than half of the calls that they get just because they're working all day. I have too many sources calling me Ellis. I can't. I can't answer a call. Yeah. Yeah. So it's kind of like a combination of an AI receptionist with an AI note taker that deeply gets to know you. And apparently it's taken off. Yeah. They just raised $32 million. And so yeah, I'm excited to have Maxi and the CEO on the pod in a few weeks. Yeah. I think my favorite thing about their launch today, though, is they did like fashion photoshoot with like less glamorous users. I guess I would say like in tech, I mean, we just got back from San Francisco and like every single billboard is for like your chief people officer. Yeah. Like how about the grandma who runs the winery or the, you know, Joe the plumber or someone who does insurance or something like that, like these are people who probably need the tech more than we do to increase our to do list efficiency by 8%. People who like can't stand the busy work that they have to do all day every day. And so yeah, I like that they're trying to build for a different customer than the average. Yeah. I saw your tweet. What is grandma's centric design? I just like the idea that everybody in tech always talks about user centered design, but the user is usually like a designer in San Francisco that they're designing for. See I'm bullish on grandma center design. I actually think AI is like absolutely perfect for this. Like grandma doesn't know how to vibe code nap or even what that means, let alone create her own receptionist for like her, her small business. But with this software, you can essentially tell the AI how you want to answer the phone. What questions you wanted to ask, have it input it all into a document or a form for you, and then it's done. It's like, is that not the dream of like natural language programming or coding? And for an audience that like I said, uh, probably needs it more than we do. Yeah, it is funny when you go to SF or check 15, which is this new buzzy kind of co-working space in the ferry building where GV was having the live pod taping. And man, the stuff you just over here in there, it's like, yeah, this is such a bubble. You know, like I was walking to the bathroom and it was multiple people talking about their VC funds, you like you'll walk by on a day, oversubscribed, rounds full, you know, just like things that would feel Mimi or like something on a TV show, if you were outside of San Francisco, but just so normal, I like leaving and coming back. I am going back tomorrow for another AI conference through Brovallee, shout out Eric Newcomber. It's a great AI conference. But I like leaving and leaving and going because it gives me a little bit of a outsider's perspective, even though I'm there a ton, and I still am routinely like, I can't believe this is actually this place. I mean, maybe this is how San Francisco's feel when they come to LA and they go to a coffee shop and it's people talking about their script or something, right? Like every city has this microcosm, but just the opposite of GCD is what we experienced at the ferry building, I think. Yeah, I mean, if you're into this stuff, it's pretty fun, right? Like I remember my first trip as a reporter to San Francisco and I went to this coffee shop called the mill and there's Mike Krieger, like the co-creator of Instagram just like doing something on his laptop. And you know to us, those kinds of people are celebrities, right? And then on the plane ride back today, I'm on the plane with Aziz Ansari and Queens of the Stone Age. Are you serious? Yes. So I guess I got out. I got a flip. Yeah. You know, we make it eye contact a couple times, shout out Aziz. Did you get him to subscribe? Oh, I played it cool. I played it cool. At least, so what are you going to tomorrow worth going to San Francisco twice in one week? We'll have been over by the time this comes out that Eric Newcomer, who does a great Nizzler on Substack Newcomer. and podcast. Does this cerebral valley AI summits every year? This is like the third year I've gone every year I think and he has a bunch of great AI founders and investors. I'll get together for a big powwow and there's a bunch of like networking and it's a really good for me just temperature check on the state of the industry. It's fun to look back at each year when I do my recap to see how the conversation shifted. I think the last time I went everyone was paranoid about the scaling laws and has AI hit its limits. This was I think it was way before to GPT-5 but it was like are we going to keep getting gains out of training and you know because it's also like a bunch of researchers are there and so it's always fun. I'll be curious to see what the the temperature is. I imagine it's going to be a lot of AI bubble stuff this time. But yeah, I'm going to go back for that and I mean lord willing right. I tweeted this the day we left for SF protect flighty and all costs and actually went pretty viral because you know the flights are flights are rough right now and if you are not a flighty user they're not sponsoring us but shout out flighty. It is a great out for tracking your flights. It actually saved me from being stuck on the tarmac until about 3am last night. So move my flight up because of the tarmac tracker it's got so that's a great app. Really great app. How many hashtag sources are you hoping to come out of this event with? Do you have like a quota for each event you go to? No, I'm going to see existing sources. I always make new ones. You know I really think pounding the pavement so to speak is the returns are very hard to quantify in the near term but very real in the long term. It's almost impossible for me to point to the impact of all of this in real life networking that I have always made a concerted effort to do like the impact of it on my career but it's been a mess. I mean it's obviously easier when you don't have kiddos and your flights make it on time. So we'll see but for now I'm going to do it as long as I don't keep getting sick. What does one say? I would love to add you as a source on signal. Where do you add someone these days? Yeah I mean signal is where it gets real. Sometimes the best sources you never have that conversation. It's just a natural thing. It's like falling in love. It's like falling in source. Sure. Yeah. Can you give us a pickup line for making a new source? I usually lead with like something I've heard. It's not a line but I lead with like a little gossip to try to stir the pot. You know you can't just be a taker. You got to be a giver. Yeah that's actually interesting. That reminds me back when I feel like back when I was a snap sometimes you would say something to me like oh I heard blank and you wouldn't even ask me a question but what am I going to do just sit there and then I just start talking. Not that I shared anything exactly what you were doing. Yeah but it is a good strategy because no one wants to like be awkward when someone says something and they share something interesting and like it makes you want to say something back. Sometimes the best question is not a question at all. Perfect. Okay well let's ask Vlad some questions. Shall we kick it to Vlad? Yeah let's kick it to Vlad. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Learn more at Accenture.com/Spotify. You think you know a browser but Gemini and Chrome that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. Vlad good to see you. What's a post earnings week like for you? I'm curious especially lately. It's only Tuesday when we're recording this but what's it been like? It's just back to work. I think we spend very little time actually digesting the earnings. We know them ahead of time so pretty much that same day we're back to work working on what's the next product we're shipping. Now we're towards the end of the year so we're finalizing the product roadmap and the financial plan for next year. Back to business. We've got a product event coming up in early December just in a couple of weeks so kicking that's only to kick in the high gear. I think where we'd like to start though is prediction markets because it's something that everyone's talking about. I think a lot of people are starting to experience it for the first time through the context of sports betting but elections. I was at Calche HQ in New York with Turek last week for the New York mayoral race watching them the dashboards kind of live and seeing how that was playing out in prediction markets. It was really interesting to see how early everything was getting called and how definitively it was getting called before traditional media and I know you have a lot of thoughts about prediction markets and how to relate to the future of media but for people who are new to this idea of prediction markets can you just kind of take a step back and help us understand why you think the world needs this, why this is a I've heard you call it a new asset class is that right? Yeah it's definitely a new asset class. They're also I've called them truth machines. They're they're actually a mechanism for discovering truth when you're talking about the future and what I mean by that is it's not there's all sorts of times where we want to know what the likelihood of something happening is presidential election probably the best example what's the likelihood that you know Trump or Harris would have won the election the New York City mayor was a recent one what what's the likelihood that you know AI will achieve superhuman performance we have all these questions and you know this is a mechanism where it's not a guess it's not a poll but it's a real price set by market actors with real skin in the game and as you pointed out they've turned out to be pretty remarkably accurate especially when compared against alternatives which are just opinions or or polls and I think the reason this is needed is there's so much information out there right now I mean it's easy to create content and to share one's opinion on the internet social media has enabled that at large scale and you're just flooded with content flooded with opinions and it's become much more difficult to actually sort out what's reliable and what's not back you know 30 to 40 years ago used to have Walter Cronkite in the CBS evening news and you basically knew that if Walter Cronkite was telling you something that not only should you believe it but everyone else around you was probably watching it and would believe it as well and and now that sort of like uniformity a shared of shared belief and opinion is gone and I think prediction markets are a digital and financial answer to that it's kind of like social media and financial markets coming together to give you really reliable forecasts about the future I think as a trading product it's interesting because a lot of people talk about you know it as a trading product and you get these questions about well is it just gambling is it trading but what you have is the traders are actually creating the information and the information is digestible by a much wider audience so actually the vast majority of the people that are touched by prediction markets are those that just want the information and the folks that are trading and generating that information and doing the work are a minority of the participants and I think that's what makes it super interesting because you know the traders are actually creating this ecosystem which has much broader mass market value and appeal I want to know what else thinks about this I have I have a lot of things that I love about the idea of prediction markets and some questions but Alice what do you make of this I have a lot of questions but first I'm just so fascinated in this idea of accuracy why would they be accurate I realize the incentives are there but why are they accurate would you say if they're kind of taking the temperature of what people think well it's it's a it's empirically demonstrated I think there have been studies put out there that you know that the accuracy is quite high even one month before the the event closing date so obviously as you get closer the accuracy typically improves but but what surprised me was I saw some numbers that 90% of the time they get it right, even if you look one month before the closing of the event, which frankly surprised me the degree to which they're accurate. I think that they're accurate for many reasons, probably the most important of which is people are actually putting money on the informed decision and the trade. And so if you're putting money on something, it indicates that you don't just care about it. You're not being flippant, you're not answering a poll, but that's probably the best expression of belief that I can come up with at least. My skepticist hat is that I don't know who's on the other side of the trade. If I could see who is making all of these bets, I think I would trust it more. I mean, I trust the results. I mean, you're right. The majority of what I've seen, especially in the context of elections, is they do call it really early. I mean, I remember at Calche, when I showed up, there was a CBS crew there, and they had just called a race, and then Calche had called it like an hour before. And that's pretty common. And so, you know, you see the results, but at the same time, just my journalists hat is, am I getting like fleeced here somehow? Like, is there someone making money on this other side that has information that I don'ts? Because this does feel relatively unregulated, right? There's not like SEC oversight. Is there of insider trading or even a concept of insider trading? Because like, as a journalist, I sometimes get non-public material information or report it about companies, right? Like, what is the next Gemini model coming, right? There could be a prediction market for that. If I get it confirmed and I report it, I could make a lot of money theoretically. I haven't looked into this. I haven't done it. I'm not saying I would. But I'm just saying it feels like this is a Wild West that doesn't have any regulation. And I'm wondering how you feel about that. Well, it's not exactly the Wild West. I mean, these are CFTC federally regulated products. It is a new product. So there's a lot of questions that I think as an industry, we have to figure out. But, you know, it's more often compared to sportsbook on the sports side. And I wouldn't say that the sportsbooks have it exactly figured out either. And there's a lot of advantages to it being brought into a federally regulated realm because, you know, we have the machinery to do market surveillance, to do transaction monitoring. I mean, there's lots of stuff that you have to do when you're monitoring securities transactions. There's pipelines for reporting. So in my opinion, the best companies that are set up to do this are financial services companies that or the stakes are so high that they've we've had to build machinery to monitor transactions and to look out for market integrity over many decades. I was looking through your app store screenshots and I believe that the prediction markets for some sports betting is like the very first screenshot at this point. How do you kind of prioritize the product development internally, you know, between something like this and then you've also got these products for like working on your, you know, IRA or something like that. How do you focus your internal team on where things are heading? So it feels like two pretty different things. Yeah, I mean, those are under sort of separate teams. So it's not a it's not an exact tradeoff. I mean, we have to worry about prioritization and tradeoffs on a business level. And that's what I spend a lot of my time thinking about just even like division for the company. Those two those those feel like different paths conventionally, I would say. Well, the vision for the company is to become your financial super app. And what we mean by that is, you know, for a long time, Robin Hood was people's secondary financial account, right? But so I would say it probably does fit into the secondary financial account vision, but we don't want to just be your secondary financial account. We want to be your primary and secondary. So we believe that Robin Hood can be the place where all of your assets and all of your dollars are are held. And we can process all financial transactions. And what we've seen is that as we add new products, a lot of times engagement and usage of our existing products increases. So when we launched retirement, for example, there's a big question internally about whether retirement was going to cannibalize our trading business. And the argument makes some sense theoretically, right? Some people have a certain amount of money. If you believe that, you know, that money's going into Robin Hood. And maybe before it was going into the individual brokerage account, now if half of it goes into the retirement account, maybe we would end up hurting ourselves because it would now be going to a place where we would monetize it less. But actually that didn't end up happening. And what we saw was that the folks that were using retirement actually increased their activity in their individual brokerage accounts. They used us more because it's it started clicking in their heads that this is now my financial account, right? I do all my finances here. We saw a similar effect with the credit card. You know, when someone became a primary gold card user with with the credit card, we saw a positive impact to brokerage. And again, same reason. I'm a gold member. I'm doing everything with Robin Hood. Let me look around and see if my gold membership actually gets me any other benefits. And if those other products are good, I'll give Robin Hood a fair shake and probably first shot at my business. I think when you've spent as long and as much time as you have on trying to build trust as you built all these things over time, I think it makes a lot of sense that that aggregate value, you know, would be increased. The customer's consideration for each new product would be higher than it would have been. Had it would have been a separate app. But I saw an ad today in the Wall Street Journal that said, if you're looking for a broker that's not also your bookie, we invite you to try public. A different perspective on maybe some of the like conflicts from the the producer of this product point of view. Do you have any response to that? Yeah, that's a funny one. One of the differences between traditional sports betting and prediction markets is that the trades are happening on an exchange with buyers and sellers. And so there's no house that is incentivized to have customers lose, right? So that's sort of the retort to the specific bookie comment. The other thing is a lot of these brokers, you have to understand there's a competitive marketplace here and not everyone can match our product velocity and how we serve our customers. And obviously the business has been going very well, not just prediction markets, but, you know, last quarter we had record net deposits into the platform. Retirement accounts have just been on a huge influx of assets, 25 billion plus gold card had half a million plus card holders. So the ecosystem as a whole is very, very strong. Now prediction markets are the fastest growing business we've ever had. And I think we've seen these criticism before. But what's happening under the hood is our competitors are working as hard as possible to like replicate this. I mean, I think that company was making a lot of hay about how company help, you know, retail shouldn't be trading options. And they were kind of against it. And then of course, until they launched it, until they launched options trading and classic comms tactic. And now they're now they're incentivizing, another incentivizing by giving you contract rebates and things like that. So I think this is just people have their interests. If I was in their position, I probably try to have some kind of media strategy that stems the tide and prevents them from losing customers. And I do think there's a legitimate like some customers just don't like to see it. And some customers don't like all the products we offer. So there's a little legitimate challenge that we have as we add more products, how do we make the experience cohesive and how do we make sure that we only show to customers what they want to see. And I think that's going to push us towards solving some really interesting challenges with, you know, personalization and machine learning and making sure that actually your Robinhood experience is what you want it to be. And we're giving you the products that, you know, you're most suitable for and that you want to engage with. And I think we're in the early days of that. There's there's a lot more to do there. I think on the last earnings, you said that the prediction business in October was bigger for you all than the whole last quarter combined. And I've been doubling quarter over quarter. So what is driving this? Is it mostly sports? Is this just speed running all the sports betting companies? Or what is it really fundamentally? I mean, sports is a big chunk of it for sure, but we're also seeing engagement across in non sports categories. For a while, our prediction market business was like sports only. And we recently started rolling out to other categories like economics, technology, politics. ticks. Now we have over a thousand contracts. And one of the things we believe is that the non-sports landscape is going to evolve very, very rapidly. And there's really interesting things that you'll be able to do that haven't been built yet. But yeah, sports has been a huge driver. Also, anytime we roll out a new product, it takes time for customers to understand it. A lot of people have never heard of prediction markets. It's a little bit more technical and arcane. And, you know, the dynamics are different than what they're used to with traditional sports books. So as they become familiar with it, as there's more events that they hear about, as we get a little bit better at incorporating it and integrating it into the product experience, which I think there's a lot of room for us to improve even further, we see growth. And I think there's tailwinds as well. I don't think that there's so many ways we can continue to improve it and make it more useful and better. Look at you. You're a veteran public see already, tailwinds. You got all the words. I love the word tailwinds, actually. That's it. I think it's not up from my CFO. It's like a, it's a romantic. It's like you're a sailor out at sea, you know? Yeah. Any particular contracts you hope to see personally in the near future? I'm really interested in contracts that are more personalized. And what I mean by that is not that, you know, you'll be trading a contract on Alex's status or whatnot, but really that, you know, let's say you were concerned about flood or fire risk in your primary residence. I mean, maybe you submit some information about yourself to our transparent market and you get a real-time price for market makers. And I think you can imagine that that could be disruptive to the insurance industry, right? Like there's no reason why I have to pick up the phone and, you know, have these giant companies pricing my risk in a opaque way when, you know, the entire financial market with all of its liquidity and everyone plugged in can can kind of do that. I mean, regulators are going to come crashing in on this if it gets to that level, don't you think? Well, I think you already see it with weather contracts, precipitation. You have it sort of in a generalized sense. There's, there's fire contracts, wildlife. That's the whole purpose. That's how this industry started, right? As people hedging their, their risk. Now, why does it have to be only available to farmers and people running large institutions when individuals would like to have certain risks that they're legally required to, to hedge in some cases? And so, yeah, not, not to say that there's not going to be stakeholders that are going to fight prediction markets. You're already seeing it. But, but I think the power and the efficiency is just undeniable. What you were saying about farmers and, you know, hedge funds and stuff having access to this already made me think about. I wonder if this is something you have felt leading the company is you often get criticized, I think, for, you know, quote unquote, gamification or bringing these things to the masses that potentially have negative externalities or could get people, you know, down a bad path if they get too levered or whatever. And then frequently, I think the other side of it that I hear from you and others is also, well, look, like this, this was already available, but it was for a select few. And so kind of, it seems like the mission you've had since the beginning is democratizing. I mean, I know that's been that was the thing that you would say. But like the prediction markets idea is, I think, taking what, yeah, farmers hedge funds, what they already do and bring it to everyone. And that is disruption in the classic sense and it has positives and negatives to it. No, I mean, I'm sure you're also thinking about like, yeah, there are going to be unforeseen externalities of this at scale, right? Yeah. And by the way, there's no leverage in our prediction markets currently. So they're fully cash collateralized. It's a longstanding criticism of every financial market that they're speculators. But I think I mean, when you look about, when you look at the futures markets, when they became accessible to retail several decades ago, it was the same thing. You know, people were trading grain and oil and orange juice futures and pork bellies. And, you know, there were speculators in there. And a lot of people had concerns about that. Every financial market had speculation. But I think the thing most people don't understand is speculation is actually an important part about it's necessary for the functioning of these markets. You can't just have people hedging. You can't just have arbitrage. Even if you read the intelligent investor by Benjamin Graham, you know, one of the seminal books of value investing, he talks about how speculation is actually integral to the proper functioning. So I don't think we can get rid of it. Now, I don't think everyone should be speculating and certainly not with a huge chunk of their capital. But, you know, we believe in markets. And so I think this, this activity is actually crucial to the proper functioning of, of all the markets. Would you ever bake that idea into the products where Robin Hood says, Hey, like you can do this, but just FYI, you're about to put 40% of your portfolio and something that's a little yellow. Like, are, could you guide people more that way? We actually do a little bit. I mean, for example, when you have a leverage DTF or, you know, a similar high risk instrument, we let people know, you know, this is something that's, that's leveraged. It's not for long term holding. We also, you know, indicate if something's like gotten to a point of large volatility, like we give those little alerts. If a company is bankrupt, you know, or has filed bankruptcy. So there's examples where we definitely let customers know. I think it's also a delicate balance because if you're an active trader and you know what you're doing, we don't want to put so many frictions in your way because then you'll just get annoyed and start, you know, using the products of, of our competitors that don't do those things. You know, the, the state of Massachusetts was like historically very protectionist about this stuff. So I don't know if you guys remember there's a story about how they banned their citizens from participating in the Apple IPO in the 80s. You know, this is risky. Most people shouldn't be. And I think in general, it was from a good place. But then imagine multiple decades later, this is like an example of, it's sort of a negative example of nanny's stateism gone, gone completely wrong. I mean, you've prevented people from like exercising their point of view and in hindsight, making a lot of money. Yeah. I think that's true. But I also feel like there's a big difference between like an outright ban and like those commercials you see on TV that say we're going to give you $500 for free if you bet five that know that when someone shows up, they're probably going to lose it because that's the only way that they can make that offer. You know, how do you think about that stuff when you see it on TV or maybe even when PMs come to you with ideas that you know would work, but might feel a little like. I think we're generally pretty conservative about those things. I mean, obviously there's always a gray area where there's discussions. But we benefit. I mean, if you look at Robinhood as a business, our revenue scales with assets under custody. And so the healthy customer relationship for us is someone who's account balance monotonically increases over time. So, you know, it doesn't bother us if you're allocating some of your portfolio and you're trading options, you're trading futures, you're trading prediction markets. But we're actually quite aligned with our users in the sense that like we benefit as their account balances grow and their relationship deepens with us. And that's kind of how we've been successful. If you look at asset growth on the platform over time, it's not a churn and burned business where people put money in and then their account goes to zero. Like this is a compounding business. I'm just, I'm a product person. I'm just so fascinated by, you know, this kind of conceptual idea that maybe you bring some money into a product and there's two buttons there. One is to put it in retirement and one is to put it on the packers. You know, if times were ever tough, you could see a world where someone comes and says, Hey, let's make the packers button a little shinier or a little bigger or make it number one in the rankings. And that's what I think brings some interesting decisions, being a platform that includes both. So yeah, your job is not an easy one. Yeah. And I think that historically, it's been very difficult for a regulated business to actually make recommendations at that level, right? Because the areas where you could make recommendations are pretty circumscribed. You know, there are all kinds of things govern making a recommendation to open a new account or how much money you should invest in a certain thing and also The solution to that is not to get away from it. We make recommendations, but they have to be in specific areas where we make it clear that, yeah, we're telling you, we have a fiduciary duty, we think that, you know, you should invest in this. The result? Learn more at Accenture.com/Spotify And that long article you've had open for weeks. Ready to make anything online makes sense? Another thing I know you're thinking a lot about is tokenization, and I know this is a big priority. You've tokenized, quote unquote, a lot of companies so far. You want to do more. As someone who is even, you know, versed in these topics, it's a little heady for me to understand why the world needs this. And I know you're, you know, crypto is a big thing for Robinhood. It's a huge business. This has, you know, synergy with that. But explain it to me like I'm a middle school or like why in the world are you trying to tokenize companies? Yeah. Um, on public companies outside the US, it's quite difficult to get access to public companies. A lot of people don't have a traditional broker that's available in their country. But they do have crypto firms. So crypto firms have become the gateway to get access to US dollars. I think in the same way tokenized stocks will become the gateway to US assets. There might not be a local broker that is low cost. But if you get the stocks on the blockchain, you get certain benefits like 24/7, instant settlement, better economics on stock loan and borrow. But the main thing outside the US is, um, is actually just access. Now within the US, it's a little bit more incremental and so I think adoption will be slower. I think this will be, I think tokenization of public stocks will be an X US phenomenon. Uh, first, as we've demonstrated, I mean, we've gone live with it X US, right? But in the US, it's a little bit more incremental. You're going from 24/5 trading, which we offer to 24/7. We've got instant settlement, which means that a game stop situation can never happen again. So that's a benefit for me, maybe less, for most people, uh, I think stock loan and borrow could be disrupted. It's a very opaque, uh, lending and borrowing market for shares, um, that I think could be improved. And you have some, uh, benefits of portability itself custody, which, and this is maybe slightly contrary interest to say, but you can make it so that your stocks can just easily leave your brokerage, like you're, you're not going to be dependent on a broker. You can transact and trade tokenized stocks as long as the blockchain is up. So private companies are a different story, very hard to get access to even in the US. And there's problems because, um, even if you're credited and you want to transact in private shares, your options for doing that in a simple and easy way are, are pretty manual. And the alternative trading systems that exist that try to provide real time matching generally don't have very much liquidity. So you could be waiting quite a while before you could make a trade and when you do make that trade, it's, it's kind of a manual process where you're sending docu signs to people. If, if you guys have done that, not a ton of liquidity in the secondary market, unless it's like a really hot name. Yeah, but if you plug it into crypto technology and I wrote a piece on this in the Washington post a little bit under a year ago, you solved the liquidity problem because you're plugging this into a network, a global network where, you know, you've seen meme coins get billions of dollars of liquidity within a few hours. And I think, I think blockchains have shown that they've been very effective at directing and aggregating liquidity to assets that people actually want. So you don't, you don't have to build a whole exchange from, from the ground up, but you can leverage the existing usage and liquidity on crypto. That makes sense, but I've heard you also say that there's this digital ninviism going on with companies to this idea when you go to them and you're like, let me put your stock on the block chain. They're not huge fans. You, you first, I think, pitched this with open AI and SpaceX. I don't think they took to it too well. Do you find that you're still meeting a lot of resistance here or are you optimistic? Where are you at now? I think eventually it will happen and we're looking to accelerate it, but I mean, we, we know which way this is going to go. It's, it's very, very clear. We have a product IPO access, which we launched for our own IPO in 2021. And our own IPO was for its size, the largest retail allocation at the time at, you know, north of 20%. And we had some other companies use it as well, who are willing to go on the journey with us. But by and large in 2021, when I had this product, it took a lot of cajoling and, and a lot of just like asking for favors to, to make sure retail gets access to these IPOs. And we got, when we would get the allocations, they were pretty small. It was like, OK, we'll, we'll do, we'll do Vlad a favor, we'll give them, you know, 1% of the IPO, 2% whatever. But there was skepticism, you know, executives were hearing from their bankers that is a bit of a strange thing. And if you're an executive taking a company public, most of the time, it's just, let me get through this so I can focus on my business. I don't necessarily want to be an innovator in providing retail access to, to these instruments, but I do want to be an innovator in that. So I worked very hard and, and I, I pounded the pay event. We got a good IPO suite. And then the market basically shut for a couple of years. And an interesting thing happened in the interim, I think it became more obvious to, to the public. It had been obvious to me for a long time, but more obvious to the entire startup community that public companies that have retail fan bases and followings get rewarded in some cases were pretty, pretty high multiples, right? You see Palantir, you see some others. And now when the IPO window opened, basically everyone's coming to us and asking us if they could have feedback on their retail strategy, how can they engage retail more? And, you know, large number of the IPOs that have been on consequence have come to us and actually listed on the platform. And in some cases, given retail, bigger and bigger chunks, and now they're talking about it. So I think the same thing's going to happen with private markets as well. We're kind of in the phase where it's a new thing. We're kind of the only ones that are, that are trying to do it. Nobody really wants to innovate when they're raising a financing ground. But the setup is very similar to IPO access, like it's, it's the same set of constraints. And my prediction is within the next two years, it'll probably be faster than IPO access, probably even one year, it'll be normalized and you'll have the best companies available to retail. Because they'll just see that having that retail fan base and the supporters as early as possible is going to be immensely valuable. You look at AI in particular. Where are the fans? I mean, it's a very popular technology. Adoption is very, very quick, but who's defending the AI companies in public? It's basically their investors and like the community of AI researchers. And the general perception, I would say if you're looking at, you know, what's happening in the media and even in public discourse, there's a lot of fear and uncertainty and it leans negative. I think there was an article talking about how this is like, at the same time, the fastest adopted technology, but also the least popular, right? And that's, I don't think that's a healthy combination because I think that if the public is against AI, it's going to, it's going to be a headwind, not a tailwind for the industry and for innovation. And I think the best way is to get people owning this stuff and not just have it go to the high net worth individuals and the institutions, but get it distributed to regular people. I think it will be good for the technology. And I think my opinion will, at some point, hopefully be a little bit more widespread. You're working on a lot of things right now. I saw you launch 10 new product suites in 2025. Curious how you're running the company differently now than previously. I feel like I heard that you don't have anyone on one's, you have over 20 direct reports. How do you think about all that? I've got a great, great GM's, a great team. the core Robinhood team, the people that are running the company making decisions. A lot of them have been around for a long time and gone through our share of crises together, right? Not just GameStop, but also the IPO and the subsequent market correction, you know, the crypto market and the SVB crisis. So we've gone through some ups and downs and I think how's your blood pressure? That's a lot of crises right there. I stopped tracking it. You know, for a while, I was very, I don't know if you guys felt the same. I was wearing my Apple watch and I was thinking about all this health stuff. And now I've gone very mechanical. I'm like, I don't want to see it. Yeah, I kind of know when I haven't slept well. So I don't need the device. I mean, I'm becoming more of a Luddite as we keep rolling out more business lines. But yeah, that's really the short of it. I think I have a great team around me. I think we're working well together. Culture is something you evolve over time when you make mistakes and you you fix them. And I think we iterate pretty quickly. I think you have to, but we're sort of not apologetic about being a company that wants to move fast and actually innovate. And yeah, you've seen some crazy lows and it feels like right now you're at this insane high. I think you're the second top performing stock this year. You're on this product terror. I wish we did the interview a week ago over the top. Well there's still weeks left in the year. But do those lows let's recheck it. I might have changed. Also on the last earnings call I caught the joke about your you had like a CO award that kicked in because of the stockings and I think your salary's going back to like 40k or something. Yeah, but pretty much I think this was a unknown not a lot of people caught this, but I had some grants back in 2019 and we were a private company that had share price targets of around $50 and a hundred and a year ago the stock was trading at I think in the 20s and then of course with the tariffs it dipped back down. So I don't think that we had forecasted all of those awards hitting, but here we are. There you are. So that was the cause for our mix or our Nissan tax expense and employee bonus to cruel. What's your bonus? Okay, cool. How do you keep yourself grounded in a moment like this, especially when you're going into next year. You are full on founder mode. This I'm sure your board trusts you immensely after this year, not that they didn't before, but how do you how do you ground yourself and keep looking around the corner for what could disrupt you, so to speak? Look, there's a we have to remind ourselves to not get complacent. I try to remind our employees of that as well. And I'm saying it to the employees as much as I'm saying it to myself, right? Hopefully less acute than times before and generally I believe the trend will be up. But you know, it's it's always cyclical to some degree. And that's just what we sign up for. Who didn't want to talk to you before? It was a talk to you now with some names of names. I mean, honestly, I don't know, I didn't get too many podcast invites. That's fair. That's fair. Well, we're glad to have you on. We met over a year ago. I don't remember where the stock price was, but it was early on in the predictions market thing. It was before the US really opened up or the election is, yeah, before that. And you were talking to me about it in the context of the media and how you were thinking about the media because you have a media arm. You're doing a social network now. And I hadn't really heard of it that way. And I actually, yeah, we should we should actually just go to that the social network thing. I think Elsa and I are both fascinated by me as someone. Well, we both covered social networks and then else worked at one. But you're you're rolling this out. It's not fully out. But are you are you really taking on finance Twitter here? Is this is the goal? You're going to go toe to toe with you on on this. I mean, maybe it's not the way we think of it, but the I think we have certain advantages. We have a highly engaged customer base that's rather large. We have the ability to build great technology. I mean, you might have seen where we've been live streaming our product events and our earnings with live video in the app. And we've been able to include interactivity as well. So we could run polls and different sort of like UI elements. I thought you were going to say the users could slime you or something if they felt like it next earnings. It's not like it was too boring. Yeah, we should have. But open door last week actually live streamed their own earnings in our app. So we've been we've been working on building this like earnings information and data ecosystem. You can ask shareholder Q&A. And I think the interesting opportunity for us is actually becoming the place where the ideas are generated and shared. And can we be the first place where you actually post something interesting that has like financial or business or economic content. And I think the advantage that we have is because we're going to be where the social network is and the transaction. We we can solve the verification problem to make sure people aren't you know, faking their their trades and posting inaccurate information. And the more assets we add. So now with with prediction markets and options and futures and equities, you can imagine the the stronger kind of that network effect would be like you could actually get diverse content. It's interesting. Lots of opinions. And can we become the place where you actually post first? I think that's going to be the challenge. But if if we get that, I think it could be the best source of business and financial content out there. You know if this works, you were going to get the call from me a lot. And he's going to go, what the hell are you doing? You know, that's coming. I don't know that that's the case necessarily. And I think to some degree, a lot of the big social media products are looking to add finance in there. So you know, rather than us just sitting around and getting disrupted, can we try to figure out what what the best way is to integrate that into into one experience? It's definitely a compelling package with social 24 seven markets. I think I saw the top replies to one of your tweets about, you know, these kind of always on markets idea. It was a bunch of memes of people looking very tired. Like I'm tired boss. You know, we all know this is fun. But it's also addictive. I mean, I I don't even bet me money on fantasy sports, but I had to stop because every single time I was on the toilet or up late at night and couldn't sleep, I'm looking at it. You know, I wonder what advice do you give to young people today to kind of come up with these new norms and modulate that behavior? You know, because it is fun. You feel like there's always more to learn, whether it's with stocks or or the prediction markets. Yeah, I think it's very, very tough for a young person. Now when you have so much, you're bombarded by a digital stimulus. And, you know, I recognize that I have a mobile app that people use, but I actually legitimately don't think, I mean, if my if my kids spend more time investing and learning how to trade on Robin Hood, I don't think I would feel as bad because, you know, it's just their social media. There's YouTube. There's Minecraft and better than shrimp, Jesus. Do them scroll. What we're saying? Yeah, I just think that it is a problem and it's something that I worry about. And I'd like to contribute to making it better, for sure, and eventually scale that. But yeah, if I had to think about like one personal cause that I legitimately really and worried about, it's just like digital addiction. So I don't have all the answers. But yeah, you said, yeah, you said as Robin Hood scales, you found yourself wanting to be more of a leadite. I mean, that's interesting, right? A lot of the founders who run these digital products and these platforms, you talk to them and it's like, you get drained yourself, right? It's a lot. Yeah, I think it's unnatural to be in front of a screen for so much of your life. And, you know, when the smartphone came out, it was just this superpower, right? The people that were good at using smartphones, I think, had an advantage. But now, you know, we're spending so much of our time on smartphones that it's become a tax. It's almost like, you know, if the person next to you is using it more, you're at a disadvantage. And I think it's unfortunate that technology kind of evolves in that direction. Well, maybe we can end it here. You're live streaming your earnings. You just did it at the Chase Center. I imagine these will get more or Nate each earnings. I'm expecting more spectacle. Are we gonna get a pre-earnings walk-in where you're, you've got the designer bag, the jacket, you know, the final countdown is playing. Yeah, final countdown is playing. Are we gonna is that coming? Or are we just going to do post post game? You know, the, the inspiration for earnings was an NBA post game interview. Right, right. We're or we thought to ourselves, okay, after, let's say the analogy is like game three of the NBA finals. It's not over. It's not game seven. It's actually your somewhere and you're the beginning of the series. But if you have a good quarter, it's sort of like interviewing LeBron after the Lakers win. It's got a little bit of swagger, you know, he's thanking his teammates. He's looking good. Maybe he's wearing his shades. If the Lakers lose and you're interviewing LeBron, he's got the towel on his head. Maybe throw some shade on his teammates. But it's informative and entertaining either way. So if they could make it so that an NBA post game interview is worth watching, we should be able to make earnings worth watching as well. I mean, it's not easy as it's like, how much can you really say that you aren't prepared to say? Well, I mean, we've been able to do quite a lot. Turns it turns out quite a lot. And it's been baby steps like we went on video. And now I'm at the point where if I'm reading a script, it's hard for me to not sound robotic. It's hard enough even without a script, to be honest. So I operate best when I just have like an idea of what I want to talk about, but the rest of it is kind of extemporaneous in a sense. So I think we've been able to make it more engaging while still obviously providing the necessary information and communicating the results well. And hopefully it leads to an investing public that's more informed because they're actually watching and listening to the earnings calls. And I think in order to do that, we have to make them a little bit more engaging. It's a nice microcosm of the Robin Hood product strategy as well. It's like, you know, yeah, if people are more interested in this stuff, they'll engage with them more. And I think in the same way, if people are more interested in their finances, they'll engage with their finances more. And you'll get great outcomes as a result. Well, next time if you walk out with the shades on in the in the pre game walk out, we'll know that it was a good core, right? That's good. Well, I've tried the shades thing. Actually, if you saw my France event. Oh, yeah. I wore. Now, there was a debate about this. And, you know, the folks that I was working were like, don't do the shades. If people can't see your eyes, it's untrustworthy. And they're not going to like it. And the funny thing was after that event, if you see the Twitter photos, the ones where I'm wearing shades, people are like, oh, he looks like a scammer. And then, you know, the ones without the shades were, were flying. So. Okay. That's bad advice. I learned that it's actually true. Yeah. Shades are no good. Shades are no good. Vlad really appreciate this. Thanks so much. Yeah. Always a pleasure. Thanks to Vlad for coming on the show. We're new here. So please follow, like, subscribe. You know what to do on all your favorite platforms of choice at at access pod, including YouTube, where we have full video of the show and timecodes. So you could jump around. If you like this episode, please leave a five star review or thumbs up and share it with a friend. It means a lot. You can find me at hamburger on Twitter and at meaning.com. You can find my newsletter at sources dot news. Access is part of the vox media podcast network. Our producer is Shiraz Dume. See you next week. Bye. You always got to do the pie. Don't shoot. booking.com is the easiest way from a day surrounded by noise to a state surrounded by nature. That's nice. Go on, book it. It's easy. booking.com booking. Yeah. Fall is the perfect time to refresh and reorganize your space. 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