On with Kara Swisher - ACCESS with Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger

Episode Date: January 1, 2026

Happy 2026 from all of us at On with Kara Swisher! We’re ringing in the new year with an episode of ACCESS, a new tech insider podcast from the Vox Media Podcast Network that’s hosted by two highly connected tech journalists, Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger. Each week, Alex and Ellis have revealing conversations with Silicon Valley’s most influential leaders, from the tech titans of today to tomorrow’s most interesting entrepreneurs. On this episode of ACCESS, they speak to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev to discuss the rise of prediction markets, juggling priorities as a public CEO, and much more. For full video episodes, subscribe on YouTube Follow ACCESS on Instagram and TikTok. Follow Alex's ⁠Sources newsletter⁠ and on ⁠X @alexeheath⁠. Follow Ellis at ⁠Meaning⁠ and on ⁠X @hamburger⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odu for free at Odu.com. That's ODOO.com. Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. Happy New Year. We're off for the holiday, but we still got something special for you today. We're bringing you an episode of Access, another great Vox Media podcast. It's hosted by Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger, and it features conversations with Silicon Valley's most influential leaders. On this episode, they're talking to Robin Hood CEO, Vlad Tenev, about the rise of prediction markets, his priorities as a CEO, and more. Alex and Ellis always ask smart questions, so don't go anywhere.

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 shitheads 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. 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 three Facebook events in one week. Yeah. 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. Yes. Since toting around a 10-year-old travel pro suitcases like no remova i think as you said alice at least getting away suitcase and i think you were you were 100% right about that if anyone is listening uh forming forming my christmas list yeah uh hint hint it was great we uh we had some good partner meetings uh and then we did our first live show with uh the fine folks at google ventures uh that interview is going to air next week uh that was great what did you 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 like the Donald Trump Jr. Like 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. So you're right, Alex. I was squinting at that. a little bit. Yeah. But I thought it went 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 CEOs normally dodge. I don't want to spoil too much. But I thought it was a pretty good convo. 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 forgave you. But we brought it back around and they loved us by the end of it. Yeah. I think for me, what it showed is that we should do live more often. Like 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, very excited about that to discuss a lot with him. But there's some other news in your world this week, right? Yeah. I had a big launch for a company I'm advising and have been helping since they were an iny-bitty-baby startup a couple 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 years ago being very vertical, specific, kind of in the way that, like, Harvey, as we talk about 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 derogatory 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 100 million Americans like real estate agents contractors, plumbers, truck dispatchers who like work on their phone

like phone phone not like FaceTime audio I'm on calls yeah 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 answer at all yeah

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 Maxine, 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 photo shoot 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 jo the plumber or uh 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 eight percent 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-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-centered 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, probably needs it more than we do.

Yeah, it is funny when you go to SF. We're at Shaq 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 overhear 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 a day, over-subscribed, rounds full, you know, just like things that would feel meamy or like something on a TV show if you were outside of San Francisco, but it was so normal. And I like leaving and coming back. I am going back tomorrow for another AI conference, Cerebro Valley.

Shout out Eric Newcomer. It's a great AI conference. But I like leaving and going because it gives me a little bit of an 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 Franciscans feel when they come to L.A. 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 uh just the opposite of gcd is uh what we experienced at

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 uh coffee shop called the mill and there's mike creaker 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? Yeah, so I guess I got a bit of... Yeah.

Yeah, we make an eye contact a couple times. Shout out Aziz. Did you get him to subscribe? Oh, I played it cool. I played it cool. So what are you going to tomorrow worth going to San Francisco twice in one week? Yeah, I mean, it will have been over by the time this comes out. But Eric Newcomer, who does a great newsletter on Substack newcomer and podcast, does this Cerebral Valley AI Summit every year.

This is like the third year I've gone every year, I think. And he has a bunch of great AI founders, investors, all 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 company. conversation shifted. Like, I think the last time I went, everyone was paranoid about the scaling laws and has AI hit its limits. You know, this was, I think, you know, it was way before GPT5, 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, uh, the temperature is. I imagine it's going to be a lot of AI bubble stuff, uh, this time. Um, but yeah, I'm going to go back for that. And, uh, I mean, Lord willing, right? I tweeted this the day we left for SF, protect flighty at all costs. It actually went pretty viral because, you know, the 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 3 a.m. last night. So it would 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 immense. 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. So what does one say I would love to add you as a source on signal like where are you where do you add someone these days? Yeah I mean signal is where it gets real. You know sometimes the best sources you never have that conversation. It's just a natural thing. It's like falling in love, you know? 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 at 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.

No, you didn't. 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. So 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. Okay, so you may have heard. New York City gets a new mayor this week, 34-year-old

Democratic Socialist, Zoran Mamdani. Maldani's election was one of the biggest wins for the left in 2025. But since then, he's been quietly going about a new task, trying to make sure his sweeping campaign promises can actually happen. An agenda that will freeze the rents for more than 2 million rent-stabilized

tenants. Make buses fast and free. And deliver universal child care across our city. I'm a little skeptical about how he's going to get everything done. I think that's what a lot of people are. Promise so many things. Yeah, like free buses, you know,

I was seeing and all of that, the promises promises. Can this new kind of politics succeed? Or is this from Donnie's high point, the days before he gets into office? On this episode of Today Explain from Box, we sit down with New York City's mayor elect, and ask him directly. Is he for real? That's this week on Today Explained. 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. I mean, 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. So back to business, you know. And we've got a product event coming up in early December just in a couple of weeks. So kicking, that's starting

to kick into 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 Cal She, HQ in New York with Tarek last week for the New York mayoral race watching them, the dashboards kind of live and seeing how that was playing out on 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 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'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've pointed out, they've turned out to be pretty remarkably accurate, especially when compared against alternatives, which are just opinions 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, you 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's 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 the traders are actually creating this ecosystem, which has much broader mass market value and appeal. I want to know what Ellis thinks about this. I have a lot of things that I love about the idea of prediction markets and some questions. But Ellis, 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 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 empirically demonstrated. I think there have been studies put out there that, you know, the accuracy is quite high,

even one month before the event closing date. So obviously, as you get closer, the accuracy typically improves, but what surprised me was, I saw some numbers that, you know, 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 onto, you know, the informed decision and the trade. And so if you're putting money on something, it indicates that you have, you don't just care about it. You're not being flipping. You're not answering a poll. But, 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 was 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 Kalshi when I showed up, there was a CBS crew there, and they had just called a race, and then Kalshi 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 dream.

journalist hat is, am I getting, like, fleeced here somehow? Like, is there someone making money on this other side that has, uh, information that I don't? Because this does feel relatively unregulated, right? There's not like SEC oversight. Is there of, 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 can 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 sports books haven't 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 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. But 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 those feel like two pretty different things. Yeah, I mean, those are under sort of separate teams.

So 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. Oh, just even like the vision for the company. 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.

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 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 started clicking in their heads that this is now my financial account, right? I do all of my finances here. We saw a similar effect with the credit card. You know, when someone became a primary gold card user with a 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've 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 conflicts from 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, 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 border 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 replicate this. I mean, I think that company was making a lot of about how retail shouldn't be

trading options and they were kind of against it until they launched it until they launched options trading and

classic comms tactic and now they're incentivizing another incentivizing by giving you your 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

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 Robin Hood 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 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 it's a 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 markets business, was like sports only, and we recently started rolling out to other categories like economics, technology, politics. 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. Tail wins. You got all the words. I love the word tail wins, actually. I think I picked that up from my CFO. It's like 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 risk. You know, residents. I mean, maybe you submit some information about yourself to a 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 fire contracts, wildlife. That's the whole purpose. That's how this industry started, right? Is people hedging 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 hedge in some cases. And so, yeah,

not to say that there's not going to be stakeholders that are going to fight prediction markets. You're already seeing it. 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 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 market's 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. 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 activity is actually crucial to the proper functioning of all of 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 in something that's a little yolo. Like, could you guide people more that way? We actually do a little bit.

I mean, for example, when you have a leveraged ETF 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 using the products of our competitors that don't do those things. 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, at the time, it was like, oh, 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 statism 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 icky? I think we're generally pretty conservative about those things. I mean, obviously there's There's always a gray area where there's discussions, but we benefit. I mean, if you look at Robin Hood as a business, our revenue scales with assets under custody. And so the healthy customer relationship for us is someone whose 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 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 burn business where people put money in and then their account goes to zero like this is a compounding asset business I'm just I'm a product person I'm just I'm just 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 are 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 our 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. 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 head. for me to understand why the world needs this. And I know you're, you know, crypto is a big thing for Robin Hood. 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. On public companies, outside the U.S., 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 U.S. 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 U.S. is actually just access. Now, within the U.S., it's a little bit more incremental. And so I think adoption will be slower. I think tokenization of public stocks will be an XU.S. phenomenon first.

As we've demonstrated, I mean, we've gone live with it, XU.S., right? But in the U.S., it's a little bit more incremental. You're going from 24-5 trading, which we offer, to 24-7. you've got instant settlement which means that a game stop situation can never happen again so that's a that's a nice benefit for me maybe less so for 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 and self custody which and this is maybe slightly contrary interest to see but you can make it so that your stocks can just easily leave your brokerage. Like 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 U.S. And there's problems because even if you're accredited and you want to transact in private shares, your options for doing that in a simple and easy way 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 kind of a manual process where you're sending docu signs to people 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 have to build a whole exchange from the ground up that 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 nimbism going on with companies to this idea when you go to them and you're like, let me put your stock on the blockchain. They're not huge fans. 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 no. I think eventually it'll happen and we're looking to accelerate it, but I mean, we we know which way this is going to go. 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 in 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 okay

we'll we'll do we'll do Vlad a favor we'll give them you know one percent of the IPO two percent 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 your 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 these instruments. But I do want to be an innovator in that. So I worked very hard and I pounded the pavement. 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 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 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 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 ones You have over 20 direct reports How do you think about all that? I've got a great

Great GMs, a great team, the core Robin Hood 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, you know, market correction, you know, the crypto market and the SVB crisis. So we've gone through some ups and downs. and I think Yeah, 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'm becoming more of a Luddite as I, as we keep rolling out more business. 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 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. 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 tear. I know. I wish we did the interview a week ago. When you were the top? Well, there's still weeks left in the year. But do those lows... Let's recheck it. It might have changed today. I don't

know. We'll recheck it. Also, on the last earnings call, I caught the joke about you had like a CEO award that kicked in because of the stock gains and I think your salary is going back to like 40K or something. Is that right? Yeah, pretty much. I think this was a un, not a lot of people caught this, but I had some grants back in 2019. We were a private company that had share price targets of around $50 and $100. And, you know, 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 that was the cause for our our mix our miss on tax expense and employee bonus rule was what's your bonus

okay cool um how do you keep yourself grounded in a moment like this especially when you're going into next year um you are full on founder mode uh this i'm sure your board uh 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, 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 shitheads again,

uh, 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, um, that's just what we sign up for. Who didn't want to talk to you before? Who wants to talk to you now? Let's name some names. I mean, honestly, I don't know. Nope. I didn't get too many podcast invites, uh, back in that's fair. That's fair. Well, we're glad to have you on. We met over a year ago. I don't where the stock price was, but it was early on in the predictions markets thing. It was before the U.S. really opened up. Before the election. 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 actually, yeah, we should actually just go to that. The social network thing, I think Elis and I are both fascinated by me as someone, well, we both covered social networks and then Ellis worked at one, but you're rolling this out. It's not fully out. But are you really taking on finance Twitter here? Is this the goal? You're going to go toe to toe with Elon 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. If they felt like it was too boring, yeah. We should add that. But Open Door last week actually live streamed their own earnings in our app. So 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 can solve the verification problem to make sure people aren't faking their trades and posting inaccurate information. And the more assets we add, so now with prediction markets and options and futures and

equities. You can imagine 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 we get that, I think it could be the best source of business and financial content out there. You know if this works. You are going to get the call from Elon 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

the best way is to integrate that into one experience? It's definitely a compelling package with social 24-7 markets. I think I saw the top replies to one. your tweets about, you know, these kind of always on markets idea 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 don't even bet any 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 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 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 kids spent more time investing and learning how to trade on, on Robbins. I don't think I would feel as bad because, you know, it's just there's social media, there's YouTube, there's Minecraft, and better than shrimp Jesus, doom 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 am worried about. It's just like digital addiction. So, uh, I don't, I don't have all the answers. 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, 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. Um, And, you know, when the smartphone came out, it was just the 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 ornate each earnings. I'm expecting more spectacle. Are we going to get a pre-earnings walk-in where you're, you've got the designer bag, the jacket, you know, the shades. Final countdown is playing? Yeah, final countdown is playing?

Are we going to, 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. Where 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 you're you're somewhere near the beginning of the series but if you have a

good quarter it's sort of like interviewing LeBron after the Lakers win he's got a little bit of swagger you know he's thanking his teammates he's looking good maybe he's wearing his his shades if the Lakers lose and you're interviewing LeBron he's got the towel on his head maybe he throws some shade on his teammates, but it's informative and entertaining either way. So if they could make it so that an NBA postgame interview is worth watching, we should be able to make earnings worth watching as well. I mean, it's not easy, is it? 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 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 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 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 it more.

And I think in the same way, if people are more interested in their finances, they'll engage with or finances more, and you'll get great outcomes as a result. Well, next time, if you walk out with the shades on and the pre-game walkout, we'll know that it was a good quarter, right? Well, I've tried the shades thing. Actually, if you saw my France event, I wore AIDS. Now, there was a debate about this, and 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 fine. 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 AccessPod, including YouTube,

where we have full video of the show and time code 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.compan. You can find my newsletter at Sources.com. Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producer is Shiraz Dumay. See you next week.

Bye. You always got to do the bye, don't you? Thanks for listening to this special episode of Access. Happy New Year. We'll be back with a new episode of On on on Monday.