The Iced Coffee Hour - Robinhood CEO's Shocking Prediction On Stocks, The AI Bubble, & Gambling Controversy | Vlad Tenev

Episode Date: August 23, 2026

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We're building a financial super app. Are you setting them up in a situation where the odds are stacked against them to actually make money? A lot of people criticize us because they think we incentivize active trading and prediction markets. that's when you can kind of get into trouble. Get this, the richest 1% controls more wealth now than at any time in more than a half century. Alarm bells have started ringing. There's a small circle of wealthy insiders that's benefiting from all the growth.

How much has AI changed the game? Humans overseeing agents, seeing how many you can actually employ, including when you're sleeping. So do you think, though, with Robin Hood, eventually you could have just a few people running the entire company? Um, it's... that's just dangling to carrot, huh?

Vlad from Robin Hood, thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour. Great to see you guys again. Last time you sat here, you still drove a used car. Since then, your app Robin Hood has grown $125 billion with a B dollars in assets under custody, which is 50% in one year. Today, Robin Hood stock is up 3%. With some people are like, oh, 3%, whatever, whatever, whatever. maybe I'm up $3,000, you're up $150 million or whatever, just in one day. I have to know,

are you still driving a used car? I can afford a new car now. No, yeah, I had a used 9-11 turbo S last year. It was kind of a holdover because I had ordered a new GT3, which is a very fun car. and so now I drive that. So I have a GT3 touring, manual transmission. The thing cooks. Do you have a long commute? No, not too long. I mean, much shorter now that I got this new car.

Yeah, anywhere from 10 minutes to 20 minutes, depending on traffic. Now, when you walk into Porsche, do they just give you any car that you want, or do you have to kind of play the game a little bit to work your way up? A lot of brands reward loyalty. So if you're loyal to a particular car. are maker or a dealership, they take care of you. And not a lot of them just, I mean, some, some do this differently, but I think for a lot of them, they do actually value loyal customers relative to just a random famous person reaching out to them who wants something.

So to answer your question, I don't think it has helped me very much. I kind of had to wait over a year just like everyone else. So as the CEO and founder of Robin Hood, if not the stock price, what is the metric that you obsess over every day? I don't think there's one metric really because, I mean, Robin Hood works on many things. We have lots of businesses. Increasingly, my job is kind of, I have folks that effectively function as CEOs of their businesses reporting to me. And if I had to think about what idea or what concept is associated most with Robin Hood, what we can own, it's really ownership. This idea of a world or a future with relatively few owners is inherently fragile.

And can we actually make broad ownership a reality? Can we make it so that, you know, more people own equities and also all the other assets around us? So one thing that I have been talking about recently is percentage of households in America that own equities. So right now that's something like 65%. Before Robin Hood came along, it was in the low 50s. I think we meaningfully contributed. And now the question is, can we get to 95% plus, which I think, think with initiatives like the Trump accounts, with our work on private markets, it makes that

increasingly likely. And can we also force the rest of the world to catch up, which is where things like tokenization come in. Can we actually make it so that it's really easy for the best stocks and other real world assets from the U.S. to be distributed globally so that everyone can kind of benefit from all the great work we're doing here? Now, how much of that, though, is an ownership problem and education problem or just a most people don't have enough money problem. Yeah, that's a problem too. Most people don't have enough money. And I think that's where forced ownership or default ownership has been really impactful. Like one of the things that really moved the needle in the U.S. was the employer-sponsored 401K, where if you have an employer

and they have a 401k program, effectively it's like free. money to participate and get the employer salary match. And that by itself moved ownership by tens of percentage points. And now you see countries all over the world trying to replicate this. Trump accounts is ownership by default too. Every single child born in this country gets a thousand dollars funded by treasury. And then now you're seeing philanthropists like Michael Dell, Ray Dalio, sponsoring their states. Michael Dell obviously is a much bigger sponsor. where he targets lower income zip codes all over the country. The solution to a lot of people not having enough money is making it by default and having sort of like these employer and government sponsored programs coupled with with philanthropy to help the ones that are kind of living paycheck to paycheck or have less means to own stocks as well.

So in order to grow $125 billion in assets. under custody in one year. I mean, that's just honestly unfeasible. Like, I can't even imagine that. That is, congratulations on the success. I'm curious, you can't just say, okay, well, we're going to grow in assets under custody. Like, there's, and then grow. Like, there are certain things that you have to do in order for that to ensue. And so I'm curious, what are the things that, like, the main things you focused on that have made that big of an impact on your company. Well, we have sort of three ways that we're furthering ownership. And really what assets under custody is as a measure of how well we're succeeding. If more assets are on the platform, then that's more

things that people are owning. The first thing is serving our active traders. Active traders still very much the core of the business. A lot of the asset growth is just people bringing in money so that they can trade different things. So if we make the assets that we offer great, and if we have a great options trading experience, great equities trading. We've added futures more recently in prediction markets as well. People will bring in money to trade and they'll tell their friends about it as well. So we've seen a lot of growth there. And you can you can also look at our market share across all of the core assets, the volumes. We hit lots of records in Q2, which we just reported on, you know, record and equities trading. And that's really the engine, right? Equities is our core

business, what we started with. And, you know, last quarter people were trading more equities in Robin Hood than back in 2021 when we saw GameStop, which was also like a crazy high period, right? So organically through compounding of our business, we've exceeded that sort of like peak options trading, all time high. We're now the top options trading platform in terms of retail market share. So we've surpassed all of the. the incumbents who keep just combining with each other. So the task at hand gets harder, but we've crossed over into number one in options. And then futures and prediction markets have been super high as well. So I'd say that that's one bucket. The second bucket is just,

how can we be your financial home for life? So it's this idea of lifelong ownership. Can we get someone from when they're born to teenage years to college, first job, when they have kids, can we help them with all their financial needs as well, all the way through to like, uh, inheritance event. So we've been building things to fill out that entire life cycle. Trump accounts and custodial being a great example, but also recently we've added trust accounts, which make it really easy to, if you have a trust on board into Robin Hood. We've got joint accounts. So if you have a spouse or partner, you can bring them into Robin Hood as well. And Robin Hood banking has been huge there. That's been scaling really, really rapidly,

billions of assets, really high direct deposit attach rate. And that's really about can we get someone to put in their paycheck into Robinhood? And that allows us to help them do things like how much of your money should go into retirement, how much should go into your self-directed taxable brokerage account, how much should go into strategies. So it's kind of been putting together all the pieces so that we can actually serve all of your financial needs and that if they're at Robin Hood, you benefit rather than having them dispersed among lots of other banks and kind of siloed. How much of that is just the deposit bonus where I see crazy bonuses, like 3% on crypto, 1%

for retirement accounts. I think I've even seen 1.5% on something. The deposit bonuses help, but it's a minority of it. I mean, I think we share numbers on, you know, what percentage of ACATs, for instance, come in via deposit incentives versus otherwise. And, you know, it's a good chunk of ACATs activity, but still ACATS is kind of a minority of the overall money moving in and out of the platform. Congrats on launching the AI investing. As soon as I saw you guys launch that, I was looking over Twitter or X, and I saw it everywhere. Everyone was talking about it all over Reddit.

Congrats on that. That I felt like was a huge leap forward in terms of what brokerages are able and willing to do. I'm curious, how does a deal like that actually come to fruition? And with AI investing agents, are people actually making money? Yeah. So we don't really have a partnership per se. Basically, I think what you're referring to is we launched two things, agentic trading and agentic cards.

And what that allows people to do is if you have your Claude Code or your Codex or your other AI agent, you can access the Robin Hood tools. And the idea is anything that you can do on your phone with Robin Hood, you should be able to have your AI agent do through kind of the paved path of the MCP server. And so we launched with equities trading. And since then, we've expanded into options. we've announced crypto, so that's coming soon. And we keep adding little tools here and there. Like recently, we rolled out the ability to see your tax lots. So for those that can use AI agents and are reasonably sophisticated, it gives you kind of the power of Robinhood at your disposal.

And what data are you seeing with people that are using AI agents to invest? Like, are they making money? Are they losing money? How does that work out with broad data? I don't really look too closely at their returns. But we're getting a lot of people trying it out. We've had over 100,000 people actually create agentic accounts and they're driving decent volume. And they're doing really sophisticated things.

Like, you know, they're pulling together all kinds of data sources from all over the Internet and kind of combining it into strategies. I'd say my background is from algorithmic trading. So before I started Robin Hood, I would write trading strategies. And it was an incredibly challenging thing because you'd have to be a programmer. You'd have to worry about all sorts of things. And you needed really deep integrations with legacy financial companies to even get access to the markets. Because back then you couldn't trade. trade through a normal broker. They were charging you $10 every trade. So I think what's happening

is it's making that power, the ability to trade algorithmically much more democratized. But there's still challenges. For example, sometimes these agents themselves aren't optimized for trading. They'll tell you, I don't want to trade right now. I don't think this is a good idea. And then you really have to work hard to make sure it does the thing you want to do. But what if it's trying to save the person from losing money. And it just sees something, it's like, hey, this is a bad trade. Most of the time when they don't trade, it's not actually for that reason. I think it's just, it doesn't want to. It just doesn't feel like it. Yeah, it just doesn't feel like it. Didn't have coffee that morning. Yeah, it's like, you know, I recommend that you actually open up your

Robin Hood app and put the trade in that way. Yeah, because I don't think that trading activity is in the training data. Like, you don't have like a gentic. trading traces like you would programming traces. So this is just a new thing that hasn't been done before. Given the way things are going, though, do you think eventually financial advisors are going to be obsolete? Really quick, I just got to say that if you're running your business out of your personal bank account, you are one bad client away from a real problem. We're talking your personal savings, your home, everything you own is on the line. That, of course, is why we're partnered with Northwest Registered Agent. For $39 a month plus state fees, they form, you

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Just go to Northwest Registeredagent.com slash ICH today to get started. It's Northwest Registeredagent.com slash ICH or click the link down below in the description to get your LLC filed. Thank you so much to Northwest Registered agent for sponsoring this episode. Given the way things are going, though, do you think eventually financial advisors are going to be obsolete? I think there's always going to be some need for humans. financial advisor provides very different services. It's kind of like a consigliary to you, right? And it's someone that is responsible and can help you make life decisions.

A lot of people have financial advisors and they're like almost a member of the family. I think in that sense, some people will always want a human. I don't know if that type of like close emotional relationship is going to be replaced by AI. I think right now people are using AI to sanity check certain things. And, you know, they say, okay, is my advisor? Are they telling me something that makes sense? But there's like a human need that makes it really, really hard to trust machines for everything, because at the end of the day, you want someone to be responsible.

And I think it's hard to have the AI take responsibility. In fact, you know, if you can own something, if you're a fiduciary, it's a different bar. Yeah, but even if someone is held responsible for something, it doesn't necessarily fix the actual problem if they make a mistake. Like, I've had mistakes made before for myself, and it's like, yeah, they might make a problem. But then actually correcting that problem is more work than just dealing with the problem. Yeah, I mean, at a certain level, you're always responsible for your own financial decisions, even if it's like, hey, I've hired, if it's an advisor, I've hired this advisor, I choose to keep working with them. So it's my responsibility as well. I think still a lot of people just don't want to think about it. You, you know, you come across a lot of people and a lot of them have made money and they say, I just want to spend very little of my time thinking about. about finances and they're not, they're probably not gonna prompt a clot agent

or open AI. They just wanna a person that takes that entirely off their plate. I think the more likely scenario is you'll see fee compression in that industry. You'll see fee compression because basically for a while, there have been two models. There's been kind of robo advisory, which is asset management,

but you don't actually have at your disposal the full comprehensive estate planning, financial planning, tax planning. It's just very siloed toward financial advice and investment management. And then you have full service financial advisors that kind of take over. They're a person that abstracts all of your finances, including budgeting and spending for a lot of people. And, you know, the robo advisor market has kind of consolidated around something like 25 basis points of your assets. So a quarter of a percent of all of your assets are charged as fees typically. Some are more, some or less. And full service financial advice has been in like the 1% plus range.

And if I had to guess, probably there's some middle ground where on average, as more AI tools come in, start to blur these two, I think it'll probably consolidate to somewhere in between. Really quick, I got a fun story here. I uploaded my entire portfolio to Claude about a week ago. And I said, rate my portfolio, tell me everything I'm doing wrong or any improvements. It gave me a whole list. And believe it or not, it saved me $16,000 a year after tax. Because it said one of the funds that I was holding was paying a slightly higher expense ratio than a nearer. identical fund that I could buy from Vanguard. And it said if you sell this fund, you could realize it was a very small loss, realize this tax

loss, move it into this other fund that has a lower fee. And that fee works out to $16,000 a year. I did it. I mean, I researched myself in addition to that, but that pointed in the right direction. It's like, wait a second. That's such a no-brainer. I didn't think of that. I just wasn't paying attention.

There you go. 16 grand a year saved. Yeah. And I think for some, for a lot of things where it's, it's really clear cut. It's super, super useful, right? Like, yeah, if you have a fund with a high expense ratio, and there's a similar fund with the lower one, of course, that's a, that's a straightforward one. Or, you know, if you've got cash in a savings account, earning zero percent, and there's this other account here that can get you north of three, of course, the rational

thing is to move all of that cash. A lot of that doesn't even need a, to be honest. It's just a very, very simple algorithm to just see, you know, if you have funds that are underutilized and can be moved elsewhere. So a lot of our investors ask us about this like cash sorting AI idea, which is, you know, in the future is the AI just going to move your cash to places that have high interest. Oh, eventually you'll lose track of that. Oh, gosh, imagine if it just my thought is that's not even AI. You can just have a screen that says, well, and we try to do this. Hey, we offer 3.5% APY. You could be, you know, you could be making incrementally tens of thousands of dollars per year just by doing this. And despite the fact that those products exist, people still like their legacy banks. And, you know, banks still have trillions of assets that are earning almost zero because, you know, the inertia and the, you know, the inertia and the, you know, the, the. And. strength of that relationship is so high. Do you think investing will fundamentally change when everyone is using like an AI investing agent

and these AI agents can tap into all publicly available information instantly? And so like it automatically just knows. Like is that sometime down the time horizon? If so, like how long? Or do you think that's just not even feasible? There's lots of different investing behaviors. I don't think that someone who is bought. Buying a stock of a company that makes a product they use is going to be all of that,

all that affected by AI. If you're like, I use the iPhone, great product. I believe in it. I want to own some Apple stock. AI is unlikely to change that investment behavior significantly. What are you going to ask it, right? I mean, maybe if you're really kind of having second thoughts and you're not sure whether it's a good one, you'll ask some questions.

But by and large, I think that that's, um, that's durable. Active trading, I think active trading is going to look significantly different. A lot of active trading is now geared towards technical analysis on charts. AI tools will certainly augment that quite a bit. And then you can bring in more data sources. Passive long-term investing and portfolio construction.

Yeah, I don't think it'll change very much because in that particular, example, it's really about making an infrequent asset allocation decision. And maybe you'll have more data communicating the decision and what's going on, which is what we're doing with Robin Hood products, like what's going on in your portfolio? Why do we make those changes? But I think fundamentally, the asset allocation process has been automated and streamlined pretty well. And I don't think there's juice there. So yeah, it's really trading. I think trading is where you're going to the biggest change and the biggest disruption, which is why we're focused on agentic trading first. What about for productivity within Robin Hood as a company? How much has AI changed the game?

I changed it very deeply. I mean, I think our AI adoption is close to 100%. If you're a software engineer and really software engineers are building all the products. I think the the workflow has shifted from, you know, humans writing the code and humans reviewing the code to generally humans overseeing agents and those agents are writing the code and reviewing the code. And your job as an engineer is shifting to making sure your agents are well managed and seeing, you know, how many agents you can employ and can you keep them busy all the time, including when you're sleeping. So do you think, though, with Robin Hood, eventually you could have just a few people running the entire company from home? It's not our goal for sure. I think sometimes we do

we do think about these things. But I think that someone still has to be running the agents. And at the end of the day, it's like my financial fiduciary point. It's hard to imagine a world where a human is not like responsible for decisions. Yeah. And so I think we've been we've been focused on doing more with the teams that we have and in giving people more leverage. But yeah, less focused on just reducing headcount. What's the biggest mistake that you've made over the last year? You know, I'm sure I've made lots of little mistakes. I think my, my approach to things is really just how can I move forward? Like, I don't like thinking about the past very much.

I think we can kind of get stuck relitigating decisions, but really it's it's about, okay, where are we now? You know, I even, in some cases, prefer to be behind and to be an underdog because I think it gives us something to work towards and to really push on. I mean, the past year, if I had to think about what we've done, okay, for active traders, we've launched prediction markets. And that's a interesting business for us because usually we're not the first to launch a new asset class. You know, equity trading was a thing for multiple decades, even electronically before Robin Hood came along.

We improved it. We brought it to the smartphone. We brought it to zero commission. But, you know, we didn't, we weren't early to it. Crypto trading, we weren't particularly early either. I mean, we launched in 2018, which was early relative to the Tradfai companies, but a lot of crypto-native companies started in 2012 or even earlier. BitStamp, which we acquired was, you know, and I think the longest continuously running cryptocurrency. So we were, we were not the earliest there. Prediction markets, we were one of the first to roll out that product. As soon as they got legalized for the presidential election, we were kind of there within weeks with a product. And then we had to really expand it over time. And, you know, it's it's grown to hundreds of millions of annual revenue or fastest growing business line of all time.

So active traders, we've done well. banking has been a really quick rollout. I think that the challenge that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about is now that we're doing all of these things, how can we make sure the core experience is coherent? And we've been investing a lot more in personalization in making like the app clean. And, you know, I can say, well, maybe I should have thought more about these problems earlier, but a year ago, we probably didn't have so many new products shipping. That's what I've noticed as a daily user, probably hourly user of Robin Hood app. Every time I log on, it's like there's more things to swipe through.

And a lot of the things I'm not using, but what I find really interesting is you guys launch the prediction markets, but then people could just email customer support and then say, hey, can you like remove this from my account? And I know people that have actually gotten that removed from their account, both for the simplification and also because they don't want to be involved with prediction markets, which I found really interesting. You guys were able to, like, engineer the app for a specific user experience, which is like, I mean, like, I don't know of, I can't name another company that can, that would do that. Yeah, yeah. And now at first, it used to be customer support. And now you can actually like flip a switch if you want prediction

markets to nacho sports. And also a lot of our core surfaces, it used to be that, You know, Robin Hood had only a couple types of accounts. We had, you know, your brokerage account, crypto, retirement, spending. Each of those accounts were kind of their own tab. But not a lot of, not everyone used retirement, not everyone used crypto. And there's another problem of what we added 13 additional accounts, right? So we had to completely redesign things around this idea that, you know, every tab in the app should, have a use case for every customer. So now we have like investment, watch list, search account. And

it's taken a lot of iteration to find the solution that is optimal because every change you make affects tens of millions of existing customers. So it's highly consequential. I do want to say just because I absolutely loved this, not that it will necessarily lead to any conversation, but I love the fact that you can open up multiple individual investing accounts. Yeah. Like ever since you guys had that, Like, it has completely changed the game for me because now I don't have one strategy in one account and, you know, like, or multiple strategies all consolidated to one account. Like that and the UI for it is like from a user experience phenomenal. I am curious, though, on the personality trait of not of not litigating prior decisions. Do you think that that's an essential trait of an effective CEO? Not necessarily. I think a lot of people, a lot of, and I should make it seem, I shouldn't make it sound like I don't really think about, you know, what happened in the past. Of course, we do post-mortems and reviews and things of that nature. But I think a lot of people just, um, AI is going to transform your business. Look, we've all heard this, but if you've actually rolled it out in your company, you know how this usually goes. You make the investment. Everyone gets on board. and a few months later, no one's using it, including you. Well, thankfully, today's sponsor, Superhuman Go is actually built the stick.

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Thank you again to Superhuman Go for supporting the podcast. Live in the past and spend, you know, 80% of time worrying about things that have already happened and a little bit less time thinking about, okay, what do we do now? I try always to think about the current state and what my options are rather than saying, oh, if I had changed this six months ago, things would have been different. And I think it's also impossible to a certain extent to think through what would have happened if you'd done something differently in the past because there's just so many inputs in those decisions. You know, like it's a trap sort of. It's a trap.

And yeah, things are the important things are never clean in the sense that, oh, if I had just like made this one decision differently, my entire life since that point would have been, would have been different. A lot of people say that you are one of the most effective CEOs and founders alive today, which I, I mean, you see it all overacts. Wow, that's humbling. Well, it probably feels cool to know that. If you were to distill that job description down to one thing, I could see it being problem solver. And so, I mean, would you agree with that sentiment? Running a podcast is honestly a lot more work than people may think from sponsor contracts and invoices and clipping. It piles up so quickly.

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different apps trying to remember where something is. Plus, since nobody has to learn anything new, everyone on the team ends up using it. It's the easiest way to get AI into your business. So if you're finally done paying for tools that nobody touches, give Superhuman Go a shot. To find out more, just go to superhuman.com. Again, that is superhuman.com or click the link down below in the description to get started. Thank you again to Superhuman Go for supporting the podcast. A lot of people say that you are one of the most effective CEOs and founders alive today, which I, I mean, I mean, you see it all overacts. Well, that's humbling. Well, it probably feels cool to know that. If you were to distill that job description down to one thing, I could see it being problem

solver. And so, I mean, would you agree with that sentiment? I think it depends on the company. I think the job kind of changes dramatically, depending on what you're responsible for. So I'll give you an example. If the company is small and you're the CEO and you're just trying to like ship your one product to customers and make sure it works. The job is really how quickly can I ship code, right? That's essentially the problem. If you think about it on a base level, problem solver probably does fit, but problem is a very broad term. So small company, how much code can I ship? And I went through this evolution myself,

because when I started at Robin Hood, I was writing a lot of code. Then you kind of get to a point where, okay maybe we have to do two products at a time and it's not just shipping them but marketing them designing them right and and there you're kind of leading a small team of engineers and maybe dealing with a couple of domains that aren't really in your core competency and i think the challenge there is how do you stay close enough to the work that's being done by the folks that you're managing and also learn enough to be useful about these other domains that you're not an expert in, right? And a lot of times it's just can you put in the hours and sort of like the mental effort

to learn about things that aren't your core competency? A lot of engineers don't really have an interest in learning about marketing or legal or ops. And I think it's limiting because... If you don't know anything about the domain, how can you actually make improvements, right? You have to know enough to like realize what's working, what's not working, what you can change.

And then, you know, at every layer of scale, it becomes, yeah, it becomes harder in a sense because you have more groups of people working on things that you're less directly involved in. And there it's about building systems. Okay, how can I, efficiently, if I wanted to spend like five minutes on something, how can I get the best and highest signal five minutes possible? What are the tools to do that? Do I have the metrics? Do I have customer

verbatums? Do I have just like AI tools that are plugged into the right data so that you can actually make every second that you spend on something as like high signal and useful as it could be? And so that you're not kind of making decisions based on anecdote. So a lot of it is building these systems, organizing things effectively so that you kind of know the person to ask or to probe if something's going wrong or you have a question and also spending time on the right things. That's fascinating. I mean, effectively, you just distilled down the blueprint of like building a huge company and like how to organize your life as an operator or executive. If you were to identify one trait or belief that a lot of operators have that are not working at maximum

efficiency, like something that's sort of holding them back. What similarity do you see among those people? Like what should the primary question CEOs, operators, executives should be asking themselves in order to become more effective? I think one is being able to get into the details of every team, every work stream. And a lot of people just rely on assessments of people in management, right? But sometimes it's really helpful to get both ends, both ends of the barbell, so to speak, you know, the senior executive's view of a situation and also the people on the ground. Because you could have the problem of like, if something breaks,

somewhere up in the chain and bigger organizations, this is a problem. If you have like individual contributors, managers, directors, senior directors, you know, if something's broken in the chain, you could get bad information about what's happening. So that's why I find it very helpful sometimes to go as close to the ground as possible. You know, look at the code, be able to look at the code, look at the actual copy that's shipping to the website, talk to people who are individual contributors or interns. I spend a lot of time talking to interns. And so I think being able to get extremely deep into the details is important.

Not a lot of people do that. And that goes to the work. I think the other thing is just hiring well, making sure that the people around you, in my case, it's like the general managers and the functional leads are incredibly strong. And I think I've been fortunate to evolve to a place where it's just

I've incredibly capable people that are running really big businesses and growing alongside the businesses that they're running. You know it's a hilarious parallel to draw there like staying close to the problem? So we have a friend, his name's Ben Mala,

and he buys huge commercial apartment complexes or just commercial real estate. Like he just bought a new place that's like hundreds of units. And he gets, his son to move into the complex, to be close to the problem, to know what it's like to actually be a resident at the complex, to know where to make improvements, where to spend money to have the highest possible return on quality of life for the residents there. Yeah. And that's kind of similar to

what you're saying here. It's like you need to talk to everybody in the food chain. You need to get like the executive opinion as well as like the person who is actually going and like, you know, assembling the product's opinion. Yeah. And also you need to talk to the food chain. You know, the customer. And it's both the customers that are loud on Twitter, the ones that are loud on customer support, which are not always the same. You need to look at what the Redditors are saying, you know, on the on the different subreddits, but also there's a lot of customers that are quiet and it'll just silently stop using the product and aren't going to go talk, talk about it on social media or write in a support ticket. So you have to figure out how to get to those

customers too. I think it really helps to be obsessed with your business, right? And to really feel like, you know, every little problem is just going to be on my mind until I figure out a way to solve it. And, you know, if I figured out a way to solve it and it's actioned, then I can kind of put it away in a little drawer, check up on it later. But I think something I've noticed about myself is I spent a lot of time obsessing about every little detail. And I think in some cases, that can be annoying and sort of not ideal for maybe staying calm and having great mental health, but I think is actually really, really good for the business. What's the next thing you want to do that regulation currently blocks?

Oh, is a great question. I'm sure the regulators will love that one. Yeah, I mean, I think generally we've had really, really strong constructive relationships with the regulators, particularly in the last couple of years where, yeah, they've been they've been much more keen to support innovation. I think a couple of things that have been sort of like fresh new issues. And, you know, one of the other things we're doing now is we're starting to think about how we can push change in. in all of these policies, um, rather than just being a participant in them, right? Uh, PDT rule, you guys might be familiar. That rule change came in. We're very supportive of that.

So this is a rule where if you don't have $25,000 in your account, there's restrictions to day trading. Yeah. Yeah. So that being repealed was very, very good because essentially what it did was a penalized customers that, uh, didn't have a lot of money. in their accounts, which a lot of customers start with us, so they don't have a lot of money in their accounts. And they get into these situations where the intent of the rule was probably to

prevent them from making rash decisions. But then you get into a situation where, you know, if you like want to close your position for a risk management reason, it gets flagged as a day trade, then you get restricted. And you basically have to make that decision. You intend to do it. And you turn to another broker because actually the other weird thing about this rule is it's on a per broker basis. So if you're a patterned day trader somewhere, you can move your account elsewhere. And then you sort of start from scratch. So that was a great positive change. A couple of other things that I'm quite keen on.

One, accredited investor. And since we last spoke, we've really been pushing on the idea that, private ownership is kind of the next frontier of our mission for various reasons. But the main one, like there's a lot of disruption by AI. A lot of the top AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, for instance, are private. They're going into the trillions of dollars of valuation. And there's a small circle of wealthy insiders that's benefiting from all the growth. It's not broadly distributed.

So our solution to that make it easy to own. these companies or get exposure to them. And in the U.S., we have Robin Hood Ventures, which essentially you can think of as a basket of private companies. Right. And we have Robin Hood Ventures Fund One, which started with late stage pre-IPO. OpenAI is actually in that fund. And it gave a low-cost vehicle for investing and getting exposure to private companies. And kind of on the heels of RVI, we started RV2, Robin Hood Ventures Fund 2, which takes another angle. It's still a basket of private companies, but rather than them being ultra late stage, immediately pre-IPO kind of companies, we went to the opposite side of the spectrum, and now we're giving exposure to

seed in series A, which is the earliest stage of capital formation. So rather than tens and hundreds of billions valuations in these companies. Robin Hood Ventures Fund, too, typical valuations are in the tens of millions. How do you pick those companies and what if they don't want to be a part of them? Yeah, great question. And this is one of the things we figured out this year. We have taken the position that if a company doesn't want to be in Robin Hood Ventures, we generally won't force them.

So every deal that we've done for Robin Hood Ventures, So, and this isn't true of some of our competitors, in which they're a couple. Some of our competitors will go in and do the second layer SPVLP interest and, you know, then announce it. And then you've seen the company come in and say, actually, we don't know anything about this. Not ideal. So with Robin Hood Ventures, we've taken the position that we go direct with the company's blessing in all of these cases. And that's true of all the deals that we've done thus far.

And I think this was not an obvious one, right? Because there's a tradeoff. What you really want is the access, but you also are creating a new product and you want that new product to be accepted by the stakeholders in the industry. What if we take it a step further and we say that everyone gets access to these privatized companies, then wouldn't it be that they're really wealthy people just get in even? sooner. There's always a cat and mouse game in the sense that the wealthy always figure out how to get better things. And so our job is never done, right? Then we have to, we have to keep working to get even earlier access. And then they get in a little earlier too. But I mean, look, Robin McIntyre to seed series A. That's like pretty early. It's hard to get earlier. And we're partnering with YC for that

fund. So I think we'll prove out the model of seed and series A funding for retail. Now, the problem with these things is these are still baskets, right? And what we're hearing from customers is maybe I like these three companies, but I don't like these other three. So I think the end state is going to be investing and trading for those that want to individual private names so that they feel pretty close to what trading a public stock on Robin Hood would feel. And that part needs both continued product innovation and also reform of accredited investor standards, which now limit direct investments to private companies to high earning wealthy people.

Is there any other product that you wish existed? Like, for me, I wish that you guys had or someone created a Venmo where we could send each other stocks. Like instead of sending Jack a hundred bucks, he'd be like, yo, here's $100 of Google. Yeah. And, you know, last time you guys asked me for Robin Hood Social, right? And I said, oh, well, maybe we'll have something to announce in the future. You know what he said to me. The audacity of Graham to say this. He was all, you know, didn't we say something about a Robin Hood Social last time? And then they launched it. And I was like, if you think that because you suggested Robin Hood Social that they launched this thing,

It was like, yo, let's do it. Let's do it. Launch it. Yeah. Yeah, no, I thought it was funny because obviously it had been in the works. You know, we didn't just whip it up. Broke his heart. We didn't just whip it up in a couple of weeks from when we had that conversation to Hood Summit when we announced it.

But, yeah, there's always sometimes I get asked about things in the works. And I really want to like spill the beans right there. But then I'm like, oh, well, we have these events. We're launching things. So if we just keep guessing, you just wouldn't say no. You can tell based on my reaction, probably what's in the works or not, even though I try to keep a very, very calm poker face. But, you know, Robin Hood Social has done well. And now, I don't know if you guys are seeing it, but people have started cross posting Robin Hood Social screenshots on X.

Yep. Yeah. And they're like, what's going on in this community? And that's bringing in more. People need to be verified, by the way, because my profile is up there. And I think people think that I'm a scammer on Robin Hood Social. because they don't have a checkmark. Like, there's no way to verify that is actually my name.

Graham underscore Stefan. Okay. I'm at JLS SELBY. Follow us on Robin Hood Social guys. Oh, well. Yeah, but that means someone else is going to create one that's very similar. And then they're going to like start like scamming. I don't know.

We'll have to figure this out. Okay. Yeah. I mean, the one thing that we think works really well with Robin Hood Social is the fact that the trades and the portfolios are verified. And, you know, now we have P&L widgets and all of these. things. So in other social media platforms where people are sharing your trades, you don't really know whether they're BSing or they could be faking the screenshots. With Robin Hood Social,

we kind of take care of that verification as part of the platform, which I think has like had a really nice, it's a positive and also a differentiated aspect. But yeah, we'll obviously have to solve this. AI is going to transform your business. Look, we've all heard. this, but if you've actually rolled it out in your company, you know how this usually goes. You make the investment, everyone gets onboarded, and a few months later, no one's using it, including you. Well, thankfully, today's sponsor, Superhuman Go, is actually built the stick. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that sits right on the side of your browser, ready to help with any task you're working on. It's actually from the makers of Grammarly, and it works inside the

tools and sites your team already uses. Whatever's on your screen, an email, a dock, a website, it already knows what you're looking at. You're not opening new tabs, pasting stuff in or explaining yourself from scratch. All you have to do is ask, and it'll summarize a long email, thread, draft you a reply, or prep you for a meeting without you spending hours. It also searches across all of your tools, so you're not clicking through five different apps trying to remember where something is. Plus, since nobody has to learn anything new, everyone on the team ends up using it.

It's the easiest way to get AI into your business. So if you're finally done paying for tools that nobody touches, give Superhuman go a shot. To find out more, just go to superhuman.com. Again, that is superhuman.com or click the link down below in the description to get started. Thank you again to Superhuman Go for supporting the podcast. Verification problem for the profiles as well. Is there any financial product that's not really being discussed, though, because as someone who's so on the pulse with customer demand and just broad investing data, there has to be

like whispers of some sort of investment style. Like no one thought five, maybe 10 years ago that we would have AI investing agents. Yeah. Right. But someone may have. And I feel like you would probably be the person of all to ask, like, what could the future of finance look like something we may not even be talking about right now in five to 10 years? Is there some sort of product or service or like something else? Yeah, I mean, Robin Hood Chain, I think is a good example of what the future could be if we could like rebuild the infrastructure from the ground up. I don't know if you guys are familiar with Robin Hood Chain. It's basically the hottest chain in cryptos. right now. We rolled it out a couple of weeks ago. And it's been top five in Dex Volume. The TVL,

total value locked, has been growing tremendously. And one of the benefits is it has stock tokens, which are tokenized representations of stocks that are available for customers outside the U.S. for now. But, you know, they're still available in 120 plus countries around the world. And if you're on Robin Hood chain and you have stock tokens like Tesla, Nvidia or others, you actually can do everything with them that you can do with another on-chain crypto. So you can send them to people on-chain, just like you would send Bitcoin or Ethereum. You can swap them in pools. Uniswap has some very, very active pools on Robin Hood chain.

You can do collateralization, lending, and borrowing. So you get a picture of what it could look like if we kind of replaced it all with software. So when you say swapping, does that mean that let's just say I have $500,000 worth of gains in a stock that I could swap that stock for another, keeping my cost basis without realizing a gain? The tax situation depends on where you are, right? Every one of these 120 countries has slightly different tax treatment. So I can't really speak generally to that. But yeah, all you have to do is create a pool. If someone creates a pool exchanging, you know, a stock token with a crypto, yeah, you can just swap them directly.

So we started out using stablecoin. So USDG, which is the stable coin that we partnered with Paxos and a few others to launch. that's like the core stable coin of the chain but then all the developers have created all kinds of unique pools that we didn't even think would exist and in all kinds of protocols where for example if you hold a meme coin you just get uh stock tokens uh air dropped to you right so they've like connected meme coins core cryptos and the stock tokens and compose them into into unique products that yeah, we wouldn't have anticipated creating. We probably wouldn't have thought of to make ourselves.

So it's Robin Hood Chain is this combination of developer platform with financial primitives like high yield and stock tokens that we're going to add to. And I think the combination of those two is going to lead to a lot of interesting things. Not to mention, you know, late, it was built for AI agents too. So a lot of people have been rolling out APIs, command line interfaces. I'm just imagining if you would try explaining this to Warren Buffett, like what he would say. Like if this is even something he would understand, it would say, no, this is just. I mean, I think to most consumers who aren't developers, the value prop is really, if you're in 120 countries all over anywhere in the world, if you have a smartphone, internet connection, you can trade.

tokenized representations of these stocks 24-7 at relatively low-cost and great user experience. But then even if you're a U.S. resident, then you can be trading outside of trading hours all day. Like, it effectively opens up the optionality of an investor. Yeah. So right now they're not available in the U.S., but there has been movement to enable token here. And I think eventually it will happen. It's just the delta in value is much smaller. It would be like, you know, in a lot of these places overseas, they don't even have functional banking systems. So they can go right to tokenized stocks and it's a huge leap, right? Whereas in the U.S., you already have Robin Hood. So going from Robin Hood to like 24-7 is comparatively minor. It would be like,

going from your very fast train to a high-speed train, right? Expensive shift, a lot of the existing train operators aren't keen to make the investment, and you can already get from New York to D.C. in two hours. So shaving it to one hour maybe isn't the biggest delta. And so I think that's why the rest of the world is leading here, and the U.S. is probably going to be a late adopter of some of these technologies. What do you think the other brokerages fail to understand about investing in 2026? Now really quick, I got to say that everyone has a business idea that they've been sitting on.

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Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash ICH. Once again, that is Shopify.com slash ICH. One more time at Shopify.com slash ICH with the link down below in the description to get started. What do you think the other brokerages fail to understand about investing in 2026? I think the other brokerages suffer from just being large. I mean, I think there's a lot of players in the space, right? There's the incumbents that are big and they have tens of trillions in assets. But yeah, I think we ship much faster and we're more modern, which means that we've been able to capture a younger customer base that is growing wealthier over the next couple of decades as opposed to aging out.

And so we're kind of the beneficiary of this great wealth transfer over time. So if you were a paid consultant to the other brokerages, what would you tell them? I think to some degree, it starts with talent. Like if you want to build really, really great products that are competitive and 10 times better than what's already out there, there needs to be like a talent reset. And you have to make sure really good engineers and designers and product builders, people that understand AI are in the company. So I would probably find one area and these companies are like giant elephants, right? You can't eat the elephant in one bite, as they say. You have to you have to just take it one bite at a time.

You eat it very slowly. So I'd probably find one area, which maybe was small and kind of circumscribed away from the core, and try to like inject a ton of tax. into that one area, run it kind of stand alone separately, and see if that can provide a roadmap of how we can do like a technology transformation for the entire company. And so if we get a beachhead in one area and we're able to hire special forces, elite talent there, then we kind of like put more into there and see that grow until eventually the entire company is rebuilt with a stronger foundation.

In terms of the broader economy, are you worried about evaluations? I think in some sectors, alarm bells have started ringing. I'll give you an example. I mean, we get a lot of feature requests from our customers all the time, right? And for the longest time, international stocks was not in the top 10. I mean, some people wanted international stocks. but, you know, a couple, maybe a month or two ago, every question I would get in an interview was, when are you going to add Korean stocks? That's what everyone wants. You know, nobody wants prediction markets or crypto. We just want Korean stocks. I don't know if you guys experienced this. Very familiar with what's going on. Or were you some of the people that were asking for them. Probably Jack.

On dust and anything. And by the way, as long as they do options. On Korean stocks, I'm in. And by the way, we will add Korean stocks. But the fact that we were hearing from so many people at the same time does raise the alarm bells a little bit of like what's going on there. And sure enough, there was just. So what are you seeing today starting to ring some bells? Yeah, and I have to be careful here because I'm not, I don't want to give people investment advice. And also, to be fair, traditionally, our customers.

are like innovation first. So we were among the first to invest in electric vehicles. They're obviously into crypto. AI, even though, you know, exposure directly to AI labs is difficult and we're fixing it with Robin Hood Ventures. You've got the semiconductors. And now you've got a lot of people talking about energy, right? So I guess chips and energy as a category, you have. you have a very, very complicated balancing act to play.

Because on the one hand, it is kind of obvious if you assume people are saying, well, if AI demand continues to grow, of course, that's going to impact chips and everything in the stack underneath it. On the other hand, what you have is the traders. And this includes, you know, there's been anecdotes of hedge funds that are just buying chips because they know, hey, even if I don't need this chip myself, I'll be able to resell it at a higher price. And whether something is undervalued or not kind of depends on many of these factors.

And I could see it tipping in one direction. And, you know, if a lot of the supply is being bought by speculators, that's when you can kind of get into trouble with, you know, even something that has fundamental growth potential like chips in an AI environment. Do you think that a high stock market right now is actually bad for people in their 20s and 30s? Everything I think is an opportunity in a sense. Back in 2020, when we had a big crash right around COVID, you saw our customers actually buying. And you looked at the customers of the other discount brokers and they were selling.

And that was the big story. Our customers were buying because they're younger. They had a long-term horizon. And they saw it as an opportunity. They were still fundamentally bullish about the country. and of all the things that, you know, were, we're being built and what the stock market offered. And they kind of showed that through their activity on the platform. In a sense, a lot of people say, well, do you worry about stock market corrections?

I don't worry about them as much because we've seen in the past that having younger customers, they, they take corrections as opportunities. Now, that doesn't mean that I want a correction or I even want, you know, a sustained period of slightly lower prices. That can be very, very challenging to the economy and to people. I think everyone generally should just want things to go up smoothly up and to the right, but it's not the reality. And I think every market environment, if you're a trader, presents opportunities that you can capitalize on. And if you're a long-term investor, it can be hard to predict these things and time them. So we offer great tools for tax-advantaged investing.

I think we have the best retirement products on the market where it's really targeted towards putting money in and not withdrawing for many, many decades. And I think dollar cost averaging and passive management is better at Robin Hood than at any of our competitors. A lot of our competitors don't even offer good tools for these things. but we're continuing to invest and incentivize. A lot of people criticize us because they think we incentivize active trading and prediction markets. If you look at what we actually incentivize in the product, it's retirement. Retirement gives you a 3% match if you're a gold member and you make a contribution. So those are the types of products that we've really directly incentivized and had success incentivizing.

Now, what do you say to the people who criticize that it is leaning to have? into prediction markets, which might be considered too close to gambling. Yeah, we get that criticism. And of course, you mentioned the switcher and being able to customize it. We get the criticism in both directions, actually. You know, we have people that just don't want to see prediction markets. And for that, we have personalization and all the initiatives we have, not just for you to disable it, but also to make sure that we show you the content that you want to see in the app when you want to see it.

So it's a big priority not just with prediction markets, but also the more different products and features we have. We have to solve the problem of you're just not being aware of us offering a great feature that you can benefit from. So, yeah, there's both, I don't want to see this product, prediction markets being a great example. also I want to see it more. Like it's too buried in the product and I don't want it to be, you know, three taps away.

I just want to see what's going on right now. And I think personalization is an answer. The other thing we've been experimenting with is in some cases, if really the experience is very, very different, we break it out into a separate app, which is what we did with banking. So if you want like a banking and a card experience, You can have that in the banking app.

If you want a more trading first experience, you have like the main green Robin Hood app. And if you want full crypto, the Robin Hood wallet has like defy native experience. What do you think the critics are getting right that you could improve on? I mean, I think that making things cohesive and making the purpose of the company and what we stand for more understandable is a fair critique. We hear that a little bit. Everyone always wants features and it's hard for me. I mean, the Korean stocks, I think they're right. I think we probably should have Korean stocks as well as stocks from every single market.

There's just a bunch of stuff that we just haven't gotten to yet because there's always more and more to build. And the way that I think about this is there's kind of three buckets of thing, right? infrastructure improvements that just make the existing experience better, like, faster performance, like just better, nicer, cleaner, UI, UX, reliability so that we just can handle traffic spikes better and things like that. And we made tremendous progress there, even in the past year, actually. There's the category of, like, what's available at other brokers that Robin Hood doesn't have. And that's a big category. Up until recently, it's trust accounts.

International stocks are available at some of our competitors. You've got things like fixed income if you want to buy direct bonds, mutual funds. There's a lot of things that we don't offer that are sizable parts of portfolios of customers, right? And then there's this third bucket, which I think can be easy to overlook. Not a lot of people have products here, but it's just like, can we innovate and can we be the first to market with with new products relative to our peer set at least and that's where things like prediction markets uh robin hood ventures entirely net new product things like robin hood chain and and robin hood earn like we we also want

to put things in there that are completely unexpected agentic trading we were talking about nobody nobody big nobody non-trivial is like working on agentic trading besides us Like, we're just figuring that out. Slightly off topic, are you ever worried about the billionaire tax here in California? I try not to think about it very much. Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's one of those things where, yeah, I mean, California has this interesting kind of referendum-based structure where if you get enough support, even if the governor or local politicians or, you know, the people.

support or are opposed to something. You can get on the ballot anyway. I think the we have a prediction market on this. So you could hedge yourself in a way. Technically I could, although that's not one of the deepest markets. But yeah, I think I think it's showing it as a minority. So hopefully that does hold. What would change in your life if there was a billionaire tax? Well, a couple of things. One, I think the real risk isn't to me personally, although obviously it would not be amazing. It's to the ecosystem here, right? So I think I think the real risk is it could be like a own goal for California because there's basically been two industries that California hasn't just been leading the country,

but has been leading the world in many cases. One is, is entertainment industry, Hollywood. And that's just gotten decimated in the past 10 years, right? And a lot of it is policy decisions, their own goals, not giving incentives to people to shoot and film and to hire people locally. So then they're flying to Atlanta or Canada or Eastern Europe. And, you know, it's hard to break this network, but I think that what's happened in Hollywood has shown that that network can be broken.

And if you have filming and studios moving elsewhere and then eventually the talent and the directors and actors move elsewhere. And then you get to a point where, you know, they're not even having the award shows in, in L.A. because nobody lives there anymore. So I think there's a real danger of that. Could that happen to the technology industry? I think it was looking fairly bleak for technology in San Francisco during COVID. People were talking about moving to Texas, moving to Florida. And AI kind of resuscitated things. But I think what happened in LA shows that we shouldn't take this for granted.

Yeah, what the real risk is, you know, I think a lot of people will, nobody's going to want to be taxed every single year, 5% of their wealth. And these taxes do tend to start very, very popular, but then eventually they cover everyone. Yes. And over time, I think you could actually get to a situation where the lost revenue from people paying moderate taxes, but doing them consistently, is much higher than the one-time hit of like taxing someone once and them leaving the state. And a lot of people have already left the state, actually, before the initial taxation. would hit. So even the threat of this happening has been, has been so severe that some people have bailed in relatively large numbers. Yeah. Pretty significant taxpayers. If a billionaire tax passes on a personal level, what would that do to you? Would you just be forced to sell some of your stake in your company? I think it depends a lot on implementation. Some of it is, uh, yeah, some, some of it hasn't been precisely laid out, laid out. Um,

Yeah, but I think a lot of people would be forced to, I mean, the bulk of my wealth is Robin Hood shares. So on a cursory reading, I think a lot of people would have to sell shares in their companies. Do you keep your Robin Hood shares in Robin Hood? No. Yeah. Too many eggs in one basket? No, no, no. It's not because of that. It's just because currently... You got a 3% ACATs transfer for you to some other rates. It's like, oh, well. That's a I'm saving it. for when, yeah, for rainy day.

No, because my shares and the shares of our employees are administered by, there's like special requirements for how to administer employee stock purchase plans and what are called 10b-5-1 plans, which is I can't just freely trade my Robin Hood shares, right? I have to trade them under a specific plan that's filed in advance. Yeah, because of material non-public information. This is regulatory. Yeah, that makes sense. So there are companies that deal with this, and it's like a B-to-B thing.

Like, I will actually create a deal with, you know, a pre-IPO company to manage their ESPP, to manage their 10B5-1s. and I become the vendor. Do you trade on Robin Hood? I do, yeah. So you'll like wake up, check the app, make a investment. But also what's interesting is when you sign up for Robin Hood, you have to check the boxes that no one else does, right? Yeah.

Like when I'm signing up for a new brokerage, I say no, no, no, no. I don't know anyone that's a 10% owner in a company or this or that. Like, I'm not affiliated by any means with like, like, I say no to all those disclosures. But you actually have to say yes. How does that change on a personal investing way? I have to be really careful trading individual stocks. I think ETFs are pretty simple and pretty clean. Crypto.

For a while, I was doing a lot of crypto because I love crypto, right? I love trading. I love like being in the trenches with people. Are you posting on Reddit? I don't post on Reddit anymore, sadly. Any more, okay. Yeah, at one point I was a, I was a, Redditor early on in my Robin Hood journey. I think I got off of Reddit. But yeah, crypto has been

kind of nice because, yeah, it's a fun trading product. Futures was nice when we launched it, prediction markets as well. But yeah, individual stocks, yeah, there's a lot of restrictions. What crypto do you have and own? Hey, by the way, really quick, if you want extra content just like this, as well as early access, and a bonus post show posted every single week. Feel free to join as a channel member to get immediate access to all of that, as well as early access to everything else that we post,

along with priority responses to all of your comments. So if that sounds cool, feel free to join. Would love to have you on board. Thanks so much. We'll get back to the podcast now. What crypto do you have and own? And again, I don't want to get into recommendations, but I have a pretty diverse.

portfolio, yeah, to be honest with you. Are you bullish on Bitcoin? You know, Bitcoin is singular in a lot of ways, which makes it special. It was the first asset. It was the original meme coin, right? The brand of it is quite strong because nobody can ever, you can create lots of Bitcoin imitators, but nobody can ever take the position of being the first and most trusted. it's the main coin that companies think about as they're building out crypto treasuries to diversify

against inflation and do all sorts of things. So, yeah, long term, I'm bullish on Bitcoin. I think it is singular. And I think that gives it an advantage over comparable coins. But yeah, I can't tell you if it's going to hit a million or anything like that. One thing I want to ask you is that recently there is a Bitcoin hack with the cold wallet. and Bitcoin was stolen, how do you make sure that if, let's say, I deposit Bitcoin on Robin Hood, that that cryptocurrency is safe and that on your end, there couldn't be a hack or that, like,

there's an employee who just makes a mistake, who types in a wrong little number and like something gets out there. I think there's defense in depth, what's called defense in depth with these things. So without getting into the exact details of our crypto custody. infrastructure, because there are a lot of hackers out there. You don't want to have too much of your crypto easily accessible to people. In fact, the lion's share of it should be in cold storage where you have to go and get pieces of paper ideally. And not exactly how it works, but it should just be like not connected to the internet and highly secure. So that way, even if there was an issue, with the hot wallet, it covers a very small minority of crypto assets.

Then you have to constantly make sure that you're hardening your infrastructure, you're watching out for and preventing possible security breaches and incidents. It's very, very important in this environment because you have mythos and fable and the AI tools are, if there is a vulnerability, you can't rely. on it being just hard to find or it being too expensive. So that before AI tools, it used to be that, you know, you wouldn't have to worry as much because you had to worry about these state-sponsored actors that would go after the softest, largest targets.

Yeah. And in reality, you know, there's much, there's banks that hold trillions of assets that have poor, relatively poor cybersecurity posture. So they're just, you know, being attacked every. But now, you know, it's so cheap to spin up another job that you really have to make sure that there's no holes. And I think, uh, you have to do that with like penetration testing, internal red teaming and also, uh, using the AI tools themselves to scan and attack you like they, like they were an adversary. So I think, um, we invest a lot in this and, um, we're fortunate, you know, to, to, to be at the frontier of a lot of these tools and to actually spend a lot of resources and a lot of our mind share in securing all these things. And I think the surface area is always rising, right? Now we have Robin Hood chain. We have all of our DFI products. We have, of course, the traditional business as

well as crypto. So investing in security is a huge priority. What are your personal goals outside of Robin Hood? I've really been focused on teaching my kids math. I still think math is important. Getting them to enjoy learning and be curious. So whenever I get time to spend with them, which is never as much as I would like, but I try to like talk to them about history, encourage them to do math, see how they're doing in school. I think they have certain benefits that I didn't have when I was a kid. I mean, they could get access to the best tutor They could, you know, talk to anyone they want. And my concern is always, like, how do you get the benefits of that without the downsides?

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which means you're going to have to do all these things. And by the way, you know, we were visa holders. So our status in this country was very, very uncertain. There was always the threat of, okay, if you don't do well, maybe the family will have to go back to Bulgaria, right? Yeah. And I think there's a little bit less. of that, which is good in some ways, but also it can be, uh, it can be hard to like manufacture

hunger if it's not really there, right? But yeah, I'm very proud of them actually because despite this, I think they're, um, yeah, they're growing up to be great humans. Uh, yeah, other other goals, I think about my health. I'm getting a little older now. So, um, I want to make sure that the body and the mind is, is working well. How do you do? How do you do? How do you do? that do you do in blood testing CT scans? I've done the full body MRI thing. I do blood testing. I just try to work out regularly. I've been getting into like sauna and cold plunge and contrast therapy. I also have been trying really hard to have a routine before I go to sleep. Because too easy for me, I get into the thing of like being on my phone or my iPad.

and just looking at the company slack or reading docs till literally the last moment before I close my eyes. Yeah. Like my phone just waxed me in the head in bed. So what I'm trying to do now is journal a little bit for 10 to 15 minutes and then read a physical print book for, you know, 15 to 20 minutes before I go to sleep so that, you know, things just get to wind down a little bit. What kind of books do you read? And have you noticed an actual benefit from journaling? Yeah, I think I have noticed a benefit from journaling.

You know, one thing is journaling for me, I have a little bit of a structure to it. So I write a little bit about what happened in the day or sometimes I do like a Sunday journaling where I think about the whole week, the week behind and then the week forward. So again, breaking my rule of not thinking about the past. I do think about the past, but just in a way that helps me inform what I want to do in the future, either today or the following week. What I like to do is I think about the period in question, what went well, I write those things down, those make me feel good, what could have gone better. And then I say, okay, if I had to do some things this week, here's the list. And the list can be quite long, right? It's like I want to get 10 things, but then I sort them based on what's the most important.

And then I look back on the last one, see how I did. And certain things I carry over. Other things I say, hey, I actually finish this. This is awesome. But then, yeah, I have a list of the week ahead and the day ahead. And what happens is when I wake up the next morning, I kind of look it over. And then I feel really good starting my day.

I think what can be a source of stress is just being completely input driven. And you kind of wake up in the morning and you're like, let me look at what other people want from me, right? What are the fires? Are there any emergencies? What are people texting me about? And then, yeah, the risk is you just don't get the important things done. So I think this at least forces me to think about what the important things are and make sure that I'm aware if they got done or if they didn't get done. And it helps them get done as well. That's interesting to be more output driven. It's like signal and noise. It's like always said in all of these different ways. And they say one of the main sources of happiness is feeling like you're in control of your own destiny. And that translated to this is basically like what must I do for myself and for my business as opposed to what?

what fires do I need to respond to? It's like you're no longer in control of your life if all you're ever doing is responding to things and external stimulus, oh, well, there's a fire over here on this side of the business. Let me tend to this. As opposed to like, here's where I'm at. This is what I'm going to do. And I'm going to push for this. Yeah, I think a big source of unhappiness is to kind of feel like things are out of your

control even though they aren't. Even, you know, some of the, some of my fondest memories looking back are when I went through some kind of crisis, right? And I went through the crisis and I think back about what was going through my mind at that time. And, you know, now with the benefit of distance, I'm like, oh, that was a really interesting time. It almost seems fun in retrospect because now, now I appreciate it. But at that time, I was really stressed out, right? Not enjoying it at all, not sleeping. And, you know, I think about how much better would it be to actually have been enjoying it or be in a state of flow at the time, even though a lot of crises are something happens that you have to deal with.

But I think even those things are under your control at the end of the day. Because whether you're happy or not or motivated or in a state of flow really depends on your mindset as you're processing these things. In terms of raising your children, do you feel like math is more important than social skills or are social skills going to be more important in a world where AI could do just about any math imaginable? Did you see that Peter Thiel thing? He was asked about this a couple years ago and he said, well, you know, at that time math or, AI was getting really good at writing, right? And you could just one shot a history essay with just a simple prompt. And so the conventional wisdom was, okay, the math skills were going to be very, very important.

But gosh, writing essays or copywriting, be worried about that. He said, no, I'm much more worried about the math people than the word people. because for the longest time, actually, um, word people were dominant in society, but only recently has math been, um, apprised skill set. And, um,

yeah, by and large, he basically put the reason, uh, for this basically on wokeness, right? Because math is egalitarian in the sense that, you know, you could actually test different populations for mathematical ability and you have outliers, no matter what your income is. But for verbal ability and words and, you know, how well read you are, it does skew quite heavily towards, you know, people that have higher net worth and socioeconomic status. So the past 50 years or so, maybe even a little bit longer, has been,

generally the flow has been towards like more egalitarian, more progressive. And so the math people have gotten an advantage. But yeah, maybe that could be reversing. Yeah. So we're speaking with Chris Camillo yesterday, who's telling us that he wants his kids to be just well-traveled, interesting people who are good with networking. Because in a world with AI, he thinks that in-person relationships and conversations are going to matter more than they ever have. And if a person is really well-traveled who has interesting stories and knows how to relate to someone else, that'll be irreplaceable by any sort of program. I think my point of view is a little bit different. I still think math is very, very important because my experience is math generalizes. So if you're really, really good at solving theoretical math problems, and I don't mean just like multiplying together big numbers, I mean like abstract theoretical math. It's a pure form of problem solving. And that pure form of problem solving can generalize to all kinds of business situations.

I mean, I studied math. I was pretty good at it. I never studied business. But I felt like being better at math trained me to think better. And thinking better helps you in business and so many other things. So I do think it's helpful. And I think that being better at thinking and thinking clearly helps you as you're networking or creating relationships as well. The things needed to be better at math help you become more curious.

So I view it as very fundamental. Yeah, which is in part why I also started another company a couple years ago building AI for math. what I call mathematical superintelligence. And the bet there is if you build a system that's really, really good at math, it can basically be really good at any economic activity. Starting with coding, which is the closest, but probably it can write you a better history essay eventually as well. How has your perspective changed over the last nine months since we last filmed?

Well, I've shipped social as per your recommendation. You're very welcome. You asked me before, what products are people not talking about enough? I still think even though there is a policy discussion on private markets, we have to do more to spread the word that, hey, this asset class is now available to individual investors. And I think we've been trying to do that through various means. But it's not like, I don't think we're at the point where it's had its full mass market moment. So these are kind of undiscovered little gems that only relatively few customers know about. Agentic trading, another example.

There's a lot of policy discussion on it, the folks that are extremely sophisticated or aware of it, but it's still 100,000. It's not at 10 million customers. So there's a lot of growing there. Yeah. And I think now, you know, me personally, I mean, probably the first time we spoke, Graham was 2020. right, that was what? Five years ago. Yeah, I think so.

Five years ago. I think I've gone through from this journey of being kind of a newbie, a young person in this industry to now kind of being in the middle, right? Still young enough to kind of understand what the Gen Zs are doing and saying, even though I really can't figure out TikTok yet, haven't made much progress there. But now I'm kind of old enough to, I guess, be thought of as an industry person. And I think this middle area is kind of interesting for me, right? Because I can kind of hang in Washington, have a policy discussion and be taken seriously,

maybe in a way that 25 or 30-year-old Vlad wouldn't have. But I can, I'm still kind of in touch with, you know, all of the folks on. social media, all the folks in the trenches and the ability to kind of bridge both, I think, is unique given where I am in life. And I'm just trying to enjoy that and take advantage of it. Yeah, I do have to say you're doing an incredible job. And I think the last time that Jack and I were here, we both left thinking that, oh my gosh, your passion, like the fact that you would come on a podcast and talk with us openly for two hours. And nothing was off limits. and you just allow it.

Like, that I think speaks volumes. And after that, I'm like, oh, man, I am bullish on Robin Hood. Well, that's great to hear. But it's, I think it's because of you specifically. Not necessarily Robin Hood is company, but because of your passion and your enthusiasm and how into it you are. So I think that goes like a long, long way. I think the exciting thing about Robin Hood is I become more bullish and excited. as the years pass because the mission itself becomes much more expansive and much more interesting.

And now we're talking about things that are on a civilizational scale. Like how can we increase the ability of billions of people to own stocks, own private companies, own real world assets? And I think that's a really, really hard problem. And to actually move the needle on that, you need to do lots of other little things right. that are very hard to do. And you have to engage and entertain people because inherently these are kind of boring things and you're never going to get everyone

unless you make it a little bit more engaging as well. If you were consulting our podcast, our business, what do you think we could be doing better? So a little reverse interview. Let's see. How many viewers are you guys at now? Total subscribers. 1.63 million on YouTube,

but it's way more across-off platforms. How many viewers per episode? Yeah. Probably on average, and there is some volatility there, but on average, maybe 300 to 400,000 people listen to every episode. Okay. And that's the long form. And that's the long form, but then on top of that, we have distribution.

So we have clips and we have shorts, and we're on every social media platform. Last year, we did 1.2 billion views across all platforms. Okay. And what is your North Star? Like if you wanted to be remembered for one thing, one contribution for the podcast, what would that be? That's really the guest selection. We just want to have really inspiring guests who could teach our audience something and show them a different perspective that maybe they didn't consider it before. And so for me, it's just getting the best guest possible who we just want to have a conversation with. Got it. But is it like we want to get to 100 million subscribers? Does that matter? getting to a billion subscriber, getting a billion views per podcast. Is that, is that like an anti-goal? No, I think like at this point in terms of growth, like, I think growth is sort of something

that will ensue to our other goal, which is like talk to interesting people, you know, be as objective as possible and fair and be entertaining and fun and funny, but also, you know, educational. If you had to think and you don't have to say me, obviously, I know that it's me. But besides me, What was the best episode that you have had? It's hard to say best because we've been doing the six years, so we're picking between hundreds of people. But most memorable episodes would be Dr. K, who's like a psychiatrist, oddly enough, who's been trained in Eastern and Western medicine.

And that was fascinating. Also, another one, we love talking to Ben Mala, like the commercial real estate. Kevin O'Leary is fantastic. Chris Camillo, Stradman, who's like a car. We just have so many, everybody that, virtually every person we talk to, We're like super, super, super excited. We would like to have him back on. Papa John, you know, that was absurd to be able to talk to him at his house.

And string theory. He's really into string theory. Yeah. Papa John likes string theory. Yeah, he brought it up unprompted. Wow. Yeah, we had no idea what to do, but it was, it was fun. Yeah, string theory is, uh, please don't.

Where we're getting at is that we feel like we have so much potential and we have such a big, impactful platform that we just don't know what's next. And we're good at this, but we feel like there's something more, there's something extra that we could be doing, and we don't know what on earth it is. Also, to be frank, I think we're severely under monetized. Like, realistically, to be able to get 1.2 billion views and in the finance space. In the finance space, like, I don't think that we're, like, I just want to focus on this. I don't really want to focus on like a business or something to like redirect viewership to or more sales. I want to focus just on content. but also in doing so, I think that a lot of other people have given the maximum amount of marketing that we're able to provide basically for free, they would be able to turn a greater profit.

Yeah, I think that makes sense. Yeah, I guess, and if you think about these shows, the best where you felt that you've done the best work, is it, do you judge it based on views or comments or how the audience? has resonated with it or is it more like, hey, that was a really good conversation for me. I loved being a part of that. It's got to be both. Yeah. It's got to be both because I look at the metrics and I'm very analytical about the data and I say, oh, this underperform. Why?

Yeah. And then I try to improve it because if it underperforms, I think that means the audience didn't watch enough of it. And they clicked out. Why did they click out? Why did they not like that? But for me personally, I also just enjoy the conversations. Yeah. I mean, I think that I can tell it's a labor of love for.

for you guys that you really care about it. You're trying to get better. It's really engaging. Yeah, and I think that it comes across. I mean, I enjoy watching it. I think that if I had to give one area for improvement, I think that the sort of like North Star of having really interesting guests that you guys want to learn from and you think the audience could learn from

is probably one that you'd hear from a lot of podcasts. Like basically lots of podcasts, just want to have fun guests and have it be great educational content. But I guess the answer to the question of, you know, why would I watch, you know, Graham and Jack versus those others could use more differentiation, right? like what is the one thing that they'll get here that they won't get anywhere. I'll give you an example.

I listen to Acquired podcast and I just don't think anyone else does exactly what they do. You know, if I get another episode of that, I know exactly what it is. It's like a four-hour thing where those guys are having fun and chatting, but it's like a four-hour deep dive on one specific company. I kind of know the formula. And I think it's differentiated in a sense. Yeah. And your guys, it's a little bit of finance, a little bit of pop culture. But I think a sharper differentiation might be something I would consider.

We always try to tie everything into finance a little bit with some guests. Obviously, it's sort of impossible and we're just excited to talk to them. But we always do generally dial it back into some form. of like, where are you investing? Yes. You know, do you own equities? Or are their philosophies on business? Like, everyone they've had on is successful in their own right in their thing.

And what could we take away from that? Yeah. But it is still, you know, relatively vague. Yes. Like, I couldn't tell you a specific claim like, oh, well, we want to get as many people into, like, retail investing as possible. I think that the finance aspect is an interesting direction. And I remember the clips that I've seen of your guises that really resonate are where you talk

finances with a successful person that actually you would normally associate with with finance like that uh who who was hoagie yeah clavicular that was our goal years ago was like we want to break into the mainstream and make like talking about finance a more available ubiquitous thing like we wanted to have leonard leonard that was right like this was a years ago yeah like bring on people that are celebrities musicians yada yada yada hey how much do you make selling out madison square garden like who actually gets paid out from this? Like, what are you doing with this money? Like, what are your intentions with it?

Like, that's what we wanted. But it's also very difficult because, like, we try that. Like, we'll bring you on the show and then we'll heavily debate beforehand. Hey, should we lead in with a question or a phrase saying something like, oh, Robin Hood moved 3% today, meaning your personal wealth grew by this amount. Like that is directing our audience towards that North Star. But at the same time, it could put you on your heels a little bit. It could make it seem like we're out to get you or like, we're like, we're, just another one of those podcasts that want to pocket watch.

It's like cheap. Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah, I think you guys do it yeah, in kind of a nice way. Yeah, I never felt like it was like out to get me or aggressive. I think that there is a delicate balance, right? You want to get into deep questions that are just not what you would hear at other podcasts, but, you know, a lot of executives are probably trained to some degree to not answer deep questions. And sometimes we also forget, right? We're also like, well, shoot, I have to say a number.

If I say the wrong number, you know, we'd have to edit that out or issue a correction. So there can be an incentive to not really remember numbers, right? But yeah, yeah. And I think what I've seen other people do that's kind of interesting is real time, just like start browsing the web or show something. or, you know, hey, I found this funny tweet, pop that up almost as like a visual source.

And I think that can make it a little bit more dynamic, interactive, entertaining. So here's another thing, and this is by no means a pitch. But I think that so many companies could benefit so much from having an unlimited marketing funnel behind them. Yeah. Of like organic marketing. Like not paid, not just like a sponsorship, not running an ad. because that appears as an ad. It appears as a sponsor. But like if the full power of the iced coffee hour was put behind some sort of fintech company or like some sort of, you know, huge,

like finance newsletter or business or platform or something like that, where consistently you have, you know, one billion views every year that's also growing and you have the trust and the faith of the brand behind a company, it would be worth 20 times what we're making on an annual basis. And it's not even close. You don't see companies, like, actually try to create legitimate podcasts. Like, for example, we talked to John Morgan about it. And he spent $2 billion in advertising this year. And we were like, yeah, but what about like organic social media reach where there's more trust behind it? Like, why are companies not doing that? The overhead is, it's cheap relative to everything else. And there's also an added. Yeah, it's an skill issue. It's an added element of like,

like trust and authenticity. Yeah, I think that's right. And you know, we've, we've dipped our toes in media as a company for a while. We acquired market snacks. If you guys remember, that was something like eight years ago, became Robin Hood Snacks. And there was a podcast. Robin Hood Snacks was a podcast with Nick and Jack. And they later went off to with our support launch.

Another thing, T-B-O-Y, right? So they have a podcast now. I don't think it's as big as the iced coffee hour, but they've been working on it. We had Sherwood Media as well. I think that's evolved over time. And I think that we see huge potential in connecting our customers with really good content. AI is going to transform your business. Look, we've all heard this.

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Register today at PMCF1. walk.ca. And I don't think too many people have nailed it. I think Bloomberg has done a pretty good job of combining financial services and data with content, media, and distribution. But they've kind of been unique. And, you know, our thought is always how much of it is curated versus providing a platform for the best content from all over the world to live on Robin Hood. And I think I see more potential in the latter because there's just, it's probably unrealistic for the best content to be created first party. So instead, what we should figure out is how to just empower folks such as yourselves who are

basically entrepreneurs, probably don't want to work for a big company, but want to create great content and monetize it. How can we actually be a conduit for that great content, no matter where it's made, to find its way to Robin Hood users as cheaply as possible. I think that's, that's, that's, that's going to be the winning long-term strategy because we want customers to get the best content. We're unlikely to be able to employ everyone that can make it. And so, and then we also probably to get really good external content, don't want them to feel like we're prioritizing the editorial stuff. It sounds very similar to like Elon Musk's approach.

of like, I'm not going to buy ads from anybody. I'm just going to make the product so loud that you can't ignore it. Effectively like that. Like, people will inevitably talk about any sort of Tesla launch because it's just such like a groundbreaking thing. Yeah. I think that it's simpler in many ways because you get to be a neutral platform. You can just work on building the best tools possible.

And then, you know, I think it's simple, understand for creators on the platform as well. Whenever we're building network products, which we have at least two new ones since the last time we spoke, Robin Hood Chain and Robin Hood Social, we end up, you know, we're thinking about how to make it as, as really attractive as possible for a creator or a developer to be on the platform. And it's really just giving them the best tools, making them understand that the goal is for it to be neutral and for, you it to be a meritocracy. And there's no like hidden agenda or hidden favoritism that can tip the scales one way or another and get you demonetized without you understanding why. So it's still super

early. I mean, both of these things are like month one. But yeah, we are spending more time thinking through these problems. Rapid fire questions. What do you have to say about the biggest investing myth. I think what people don't understand is compound interest. And a lot of people say don't start investing until you have money saved up and you know what you're doing. And actually, I think it's the opposite. The earlier you start, the better off you'll be. So with Trump accounts, you can start at age zero. So we've taken it to its logical conclusion, which is, I think, the right place. Investing at age zero. Yep. Are you the largest depositor on Robin Hood app? No.

Who outside of yourself is the best product builder? I think Spotify has done a really, really nice job. Yeah, I think Spotify is a great product. I'm sure you guys would agree, but it's just... I love using it, yeah. What does Robin Hood look like in 10 years if everything goes perfectly? I think that Robin Hood should be helping you with every investment, everything that you own, whether it be digital through our smartphone or physical.

Maybe you'll be using our Robin Hood credit card at a Robin Hood grocery store. Driving a Robin Hood car. Driving a Robin Hood car. Maybe you'll be checking time on your Robin Hood watch. And a Robin Hood plane. Yes. And you'll get free burgers at our fast food restaurants. Nice.

Robin Hood Wellness Centers. Free cold plunge. I like that. What will surprise everybody by 2035? You know, one of the things that, I'm really pushing is private markets. And I think the degree to which we can democratize that and make that accessible will be surprising to people. I mean, two hot takes. I think there will be more software engineers and more lawyers in 2035 than today. Okay, well, that's just dangling to carrot, huh? All right. Well, you guys heard it here. We'll explore more of that next episode. Thank you so much for watching this episode.

Thank you, man. Thank you to Vlad for coming on the podcast. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you, guys. Really appreciate it. Until next time. There's nothing to stop some music like the word billionaire. Do you have a billion in the bank?

I'm a billionaire. A real one. What was your business? Alan, one of the largest law firms in North America. I hunt money. I fish for money. Income and wealth disparity in the U.S. are at all-time high levels. Nobody wants to say, look, here's a real reason.

I'm a lazy slug. What do most people get wrong about your business? I am the most authentic person you're ever going to meet, but I'm very, very street smart, and my social IQ is off the charts. So how did you become a liquid net worth billionaire? If work is work, you're friends. I love to work because I don't lose.

They lose. And when somebody f***ed with me, I f-back. Two and five Canadians will hear. Hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer.

Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca.