This Week in Startups - The Incredible Double Interview: Superhuman and Robinhood | E2090

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

Today’s show: Jason interviews Rahul Vohra, CEO and founder of Superhuman, and Vlad Tenev, CEO and co-founder of Robinhood. This is a packed episode featuring founder tips, fun stories about how Superhuman and Robinhood got their start and much more!Timestamps:(0:00) Episode teaser(2:13) Product market fit and founder journeys(3:25) Jason's investment in Superhuman and market positioning(5:14) AI's role and features in Superhuman(10:25) Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(14:37) Targeting users and competitive advantages(22:23) Evolution and new features of Superhuman(20:52) Northwest Registered Agent. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(24:37) Tackling spam with Superhuman's AI(27:05) Custom auto labels and email classification(29:47) Vapi. Go to Vapi.ai and use code Twist200 to get $200 in credits(32:03) Superhuman's auto reminders and drafts(34:14) Vlad Tenev and the origins of Robinhood(39:31) Product design philosophies of Robinhood and Superhuman(49:29) Scaling design principles and investment decisions(52:31) Subjectivity in product design(55:14) Customer feedback in product development(1:00:00) Superhuman's subscription model and customer acquisition(1:05:11) PR strategies and news hijacking(1:12:06) Investment experiences with Robinhood(1:13:35) Navigating company valuation fluctuations(1:15:03) Influences on Vlad Tenev and new Robinhood desktop product(1:22:02) Company resilience and employee reorganization(1:25:52) Crypto regulation and startup mentality(1:30:05) Investment trends among Robinhood users(1:31:12) Retail benefits for startups and capital raising challenges(1:34:04) Accreditation for private investing and solutionsSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpLinks from this episode:Check out Superhuman: https://superhuman.com/Check out Superhuman’s blog post that details all of the new features Rahul went over in the demo: https://blog.superhuman.com/the-next-superhuman-ai/. Check out Robinhood Legend: https://robinhood.com/us/en/legend/Article “How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit”: https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/Check out Rick Rubin’s book: https://www.amazon.ca/Creative-Act-Way-Being/dp/0593652886Article on Bezos and Washington Post: https://www.newsweek.com/bezos-makes-big-change-washington-post-opinion-focus-endorsed-musk-2036618Media Bias Chart: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chartCheck out “Working Backwards” book about Amazon insights: https://www.amazon.ca/Working-Backwards-Insights-Stories-Secrets/dp/1250267595Check out Rahul’s article on acquisition: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rip-mailbox-founders-how-stop-worrying-love-being-acquired-vohra/Follow Rahul:X: https://x.com/rahulvohraLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulvohra/Follow Vlad:X: https://x.com/vladtenevLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vlad-tenev-7037591b/Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(10:25) Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(20:52) Northwest Registered Agent. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(29:47) Vapi. Go to Vapi.ai and use code Twist200 to get $200 in credits

Tell him the story. This is the, this is what I knew I invested in the right guy. We used to onboard every single person in person. And I did the first several hundred myself, including Jason. The very first thing I did when I sat down with Jason and all these other folks was, uh, so as a reminder, this is a paid product and no one gets it for free, not, especially not investors. That's how I'm going to keep this intellectually honest here on your feedback. It was like, what? And I was like, yep, time to pull out your credit card. Here's, his a little strike payment form, but it didn't please. And I sat there watching him,

his credit card. I did that hundreds of times. It was so great. Can you imagine you're the first investor in the company? It's a year later and he's finally ready to show it to me. So you log in it. Like I'm over the shoulder. And he's like, okay, now you take out your credit. You put it in.

I was like, yeah, okay. So how do I skip this? And he's like, no, no, you actually put your credit card in. It's a dollar a day. It's $365 days. And I'm like, oh, I was like, you know what? A moment of truth. This thing better say me a fucking hour a day on my email.

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you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. From LLC to trademarks, domains to custom websites they've got you covered. more privacy, more options, and more done, visit Northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist today. And VAPI. Add real-time AI-powered voice conversations to your apps or business in minutes, not months. Go to vappi.com. And use code Twist 200 to get $200 in credits. That's over 1,000 minutes in free calls.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. I'm your host, Jason Calcanus. And today we have an exceptional episode, two of my favorite investments. Superhuman and Robin Hood are run by Raoul Vora and Vlad Tenav. and they are on the podcast today, individually, with an overlap in the middle. And this is an extraordinary episode because I can always tell when it's extraordinary. These are two of the smartest people I bet on.

They've built two huge companies. You know these brands. And we talk a lot about products, product market fit, acquiring customers and their individual journeys. You're going to need to watch this with everybody on your team. You're going to need to take notes. You do not need to put this on high speed because you're going to want to really take detailed notes are running through an AI because there's so many founder lessons in here

the density of knowledge and advice is crazy this will be the number one episode of the year I predict buckle up everybody I'm super excited to have my friend entrepreneur over on the program I met him because I emailed over a decade ago info at reportive.com was a little

cool I was using in my Gmail that told me in my Gmail hey this person emailing you this is their LinkedIn and this is their Twitter, this new service that had come out, and I could very quickly follow them on the other services. And it grew into even more enrichment of the lead. I was just a nascent angel investor writing 25 or 50K checks. And Raul Ben did tour of duty over at LinkedIn. And I said to him, hey, please, if you, when you come up with your next idea, I promise me I'll be the first investor. He said, yeah, no, I would always contact you from doing the project. I said,

No, I want a literal promise from you. He looked at me like I was crazy, which, if you listen to this program more than 10 times, you know, is more accurate than not. And he agreed. One Sunday afternoon, he said, hey, Jake, are you around? I said, can't wait to hear the new idea. I'm getting bagels. Meet me here in Cow Hollow.

And he told me the story of wanting to take on Gmail with a product that was faster, better, and that he would charge a dollar a day for or so. And that it would be a new category, a category of referring. to as luxury or power user software. And you always know a great entrepreneur when future entrepreneurs pitch themselves with the same playbook. So I've got no less than 500 people who've applied to our accelerators and our fund, which you can do at launch.co, select apply and get a meeting with our team. No less than 500 people have said, we're superhuman for X, which is now short in the city of San Francisco and the wider entrepreneurial computing around the world as I'm going to make something

that is designed elegantly and for power users with that. Welcome, my friend, Raul. Amazing. What an intro. Thank you for having me back. You know, that intro is off the top of my head because I just know the story so well. And, you know, when you have a great hit and you have, you know, a great relationship with the founder as an investor, you know, you cherish it because it's fun. And it's been It's so fun to watch your career and get to, you know, play a minor role in it and be on the sidelines. And once in a while, you've got to make a hard decision and we talk, which is, you know, it just makes me feel great to be on the other side of those phone calls. I wanted to have you on today to get the update on superhuman, so many topics to talk about.

And you did actually a nice private discussion with our syndicate, the syndicate.com, and our angels last week. Thank you for doing that. That was a private conversation. But let's start with how AI is impacting your business. Everybody knows superhuman. It's elegant. It's fantastic.

You have a large number of users. You've raised a large amount of capital. And you're extremely, extremely focused. But you've made a bunch of AI announcements since you were last on. And we've been talking about, hey, how is email going to get impacted? I've had no less than 50 different AI companies tell me that they're planning on building. what you've already built. So let's go through what Superhuman has done in AI, how it's work, and then we'll get into what you've been released in recently. Absolutely. Okay, wow,

that's quite a tier. So let's split that then into two pieces. There's what we've done and what's coming. I think what we've done is, even by itself, pretty special. So for those that don't know, Superhuman is the most productive email app ever made. Our customers are getting to their email about twice as fast as before. They reply one to two days sooner. They say four hours per person every single week. Those customers are the latest startups coming out of amazing accelerators and incubators like Jasons, like My Combinator, all the way through up to some of the biggest companies in the world. We recently sold one of the big three management strategy consulting firms. I can't say which one. We have thousands of people there using superhuman, which is incredible.

And actually, even just a year ago, that would have been unthinkable. So very exciting to see all of that happening. what we've been doing over the last year or two is heavily investing in AI. We were one of the first to the game and started with what you might consider now to be surface level features, things like write with AI. So you can just turn a few ideas or a phrase into a fully written email. The thing that differentiates right with AI in superhuman versus what you might be familiar with in, let's say, co-pilot or in Gemini, is it genuinely writes like you. We all talk differently to different people, you know, with some people. were more structured and formal with others

were more casual and relaxed. And superhuman knows the difference. It knows how you write for specific people and we'll actually take a look at an example of that. So that's white with AI. We also have also summarized. You've probably seen this Jason at the top of your emails. So great.

Yeah, these one-line summaries. I love it. So you can get through your email really fast. And instant reply. So imagine waking up to an inbox where every single email already had a draft reply. You would just hit edit and then send. And then the last thing

be released in the past. But this is actually of the four things I've mentioned. This is people's most favorite thing is Ask AI. This is what I demonstrated on the podcast last summer. You can basically come in and ask a question. Sam Oatland talks a lot about how AI is taking increasingly large chunks of work and making it instantaneous or at least asynchronous. And the example that I showed last time was a very real example, which is every time we launch a feature, I read through the thousands of emails that we get back and I pick the best ones and I put them on a slide. And I put them on a slide and I present them to the company in all hands. It usually takes me 20 minutes, half an hour. It's kind of a lot of work. And with Ask AI, I can do that instantly. So that's all

by way of what we've already done. But last week, we launched our biggest evolution yet. These features are awesome. I love the summaries because sometimes people feel when they're raising money, they need to send me not only their pitch, but their life story, including the last three startup ideas they had and what it was like growing up in their small town. When I'm a venture guy, and stuff like, what's the idea? Do I have a conflict in the portfolio? And let's get right to it. So some of them are obvious. But, you know, it's always about the execution I find. And that's one thing that you have had a profound impact, I think, on my thinking and the industry's thinking, which is, how should this be executed? A lot of the ideas, listen, it's obvious that you should

make a summary of emails, but how do you execute it? And having a point of view about that, and understanding who is your customer. I think before we go to what the new stuff, I want to just pause for a second and talk about your philosophy on features and executing them well versus executing them quickly. There's been this big debate in our industry,

you know, ship fast, you know, break things. If you're not embarrassed by it, you obviously don't take that. You want to have refined features. So give me your thoughts on and how it might have changed over time. when you feel something's ready to be launched and how much time you put into it, how much time do you spend, you know, in the laboratory, maybe in a small beta test with a couple of users. What's the playbook for you now?

Well, it's funny that you say playbook because, and you mentioned execution, one of the things folks like to know about this podcast is I'm very excited to share my screen. Let's do something I've never done before. I'm going to share a slide from the series C deck, which I think is very relevant here. Founders, let's be real. Let's keep it a buck. Finding great developers is hard. It's like one of the hardest things you have to do in our industry, especially when you're trying to run and scale your startup.

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goes wrong, Lemon.io will find you a replacement developer, ASAP. A bunch of launch founders have with lemon.io and they have told me they've had a great experience. So here's your call to action. Go to lemon.com. I.com slash twist and find your perfect developer or an entire tech team in 48 hours or less. And twist listeners get 15% off the first four weeks. So stop burning money, hire developer smarter. Visit lemon.com. So it's funny you mention execution and Jason, you haven't even seen this deck, but you somehow knit the nail on the head here, which is we have this thing that we call our Joy formula. And I need to be careful of what slides I share, because this is genuinely our series C deck. But basically, you know, we have this saying internally, which is that what we make people feel is just as important as what we make.

And people have asked us for a long time, like, what are you actually making? And what it really is is Joy in the software form. And lots of the smartest spokes in Silicon Valley, of course, from. from Stripe, one of the best in the business, said, well, Google has hundreds, thousands of people working on Gmail and yet you were quickly, in some sense, easily able to build something better, why you just sat down and calmly built something better? It feels like that shouldn't work, so what's going on? And so I wrote him back and I said, we actually have a formula for joy. We figured out how to build joy and then massively distribute it and scale it to people.

And it starts with product design and engineering, but it's also in everything else that we do onboarding, delight marketing, and community. And Jason, what you were really getting at here is this 10x execution. So to make this sort of real and concrete for our watches and listeners here, let's actually take that auto-sumorized feature. Of course, every email client, every app has a summary feature. But if you are deep into these features, you'll know there's a tremendous spectrum and how well they work.

For example, in Gemini, in co-pilot, and both of those experiences, you have to ask Gmail or Outlook to summarize the email that you're looking at. And of course it takes some time. It can take a second, two seconds, two seconds, three seconds, depending on the length of the email and your network connection, which, let's be real, by that point, frankly, you could have just skims the message and have your eyes locked on to the most important piece. So what we do at Superhuman, and many people thought this was crazy, is we are pre-computing the summaries for every single email that every single one of our users receives. We're pre-compusing the replies for all of those things in their own voice, in their own tone. And that's just a massive amount of computation. Now, we can do that because we actually charge for our products.

And I'm a big believer in charging a good price for your product and delivering the best service as opposed to monetizing your users in other ways. But we can do that. And so that's what we do. This is a really good point for founders to consider, which is in a crowded space where there's many people going after the same users, which I guess Patrick is sort of noting there, like, how is this opportunity even exist? If everybody's making schlocky stuff and you elevate it, well, it will stand out even more. And the onboarding is another thing you get a lot of credit for. Everybody's stealing this, which is, you know, is this product right for somebody?

So let's talk about that for a second before we go to the new features, because I really want to educate the new founders who are listening. You are pretty militant about not letting people, use your product if it's not for them. So if somebody comes in and they want a Porsche or a Lamborghini or a Prius, these are three very different products at different price points with different, you know, offerings. A Tesla Model Y is faster than a Porsche in many instances, but that's not why people are buying a Porsche. A Lamborghini is slightly different, as you might know, and you can really start to parse this. They all get you from point A to B, but with different criteria. So how did you figure out what the criteria was for this joyful, luxurious, you know, luxurious software that is massively productive? And who should have it and who shouldn't? Because, gosh, you know, somebody comes in and they're like, yeah, I'll buy the car anyway. I don't care. But you just say, yeah, you kind of do need to care. So what were the criteria and how do you think about it? This is what I call strategy on a slide. So everyone should try and do this. This is really, really old, by the way. I don't know if it's legible, but this was done in 2017. And I think what I love about this is it's still.

relevant today. Like, this is still basically the strategy. And these are the rows I always advise. Have your strategy. Number one. Number two, whatever your competitive advantages are. And number three, what hypotheses or assumptions you're making? Because you've got to make so, right? So let's take a look here. Number one, position of superhuman founders and CEOs of tech companies with 25, 500 people, so definitely SMB. And look how niche that is, founders and CEOs of technology companies. Number two, deliver the world's fastest and most beautiful email experience. and then number three sell into those companies. And this has not changed today.

We're on step three of this very long but robust plan. Now, why did I know it was going to work? Well, because of, first of all, these competitive advantages, number one, I had high levels of access to founders and CEOs in Silicon Valley and to the media, the investors and the employees who influenced them. And so this is definitely a second time founder luxury, but having built a well-known company, having sold it to, to an even more well-known company, LinkedIn,

and then spending my two years at LinkedIn wisely, working hard, but also building my relationships, I was able to, if I needed to, by force of will and connection, get some of the most important people in Silicon Valley loving the product, which was the kernel that turned into onboarding. I was like, well, I'm just going to go and sell the first 500 of these people myself. Why not? It's a grind, but most people are scared of grind.

Let's go do the grind. So that kind of created the foundation. And then this is where you start to need to look at your competitors, in this case, incumbents. I mentioned this last Friday to the syndicate, but I like going up against incumbents. I like investing in companies that go up against incumbents because by the time you matter, it's generally too late. And even today, we don't matter to Gmail or to Apple. Like we'd have to be 10 times the size, maybe even 100 times the size, to truly matter competitively. And so, you know, we're a microbe or we're a virus on a microbe on the back of a fly.

Like, we're small. And that said, it's important to have a strategy that works. And I always point to Conway's Law. If you're not familiar with Conway's Law, it's basically that you can see the structure of the organization in the products that they make. If you look at Gmail, you can basically see the organizational structure of Google. And that means that they struggle with certain specific things. So Microsoft and Google both struggled with creating fast products. Not because they have bad engineers, actually the opposite, they have the world's best engineers,

but simply because the products are already at scale and entrenched. And similarly, they struggle with design, again, not because they have bad designers, but because the leadership of these products changes every two years, and they have to do a one-size-fits-all tool. So what if you just didn't do those things? What if you built it from scratch for speed? What if you had leadership like myself that isn't going to change for 10, 20 years? What if you don't build for a mass audience, then you can do something special.

And then you have your hypothesis row, and I have some examples down here. You can tell how old this slide is by how quaint these valuation numbers are. It's kind of funny. But this is the answer to your question, Jason. It's like I sat down and I just wrote down this strategy that I knew would work. And, you know, writing, I always tell people this, is clarity of thought. If you stop talking and you stop doing meetings and you force yourself, to write something down, and then other people read it,

and you know they've read it, and then you have a discussion that is, you know, sort of the highest level of cognitive processing. And over time, you can have what you think, your mental model of the world, which is what you're building there. It's just like sort of mental model. You're building the chessboard.

You picked a format, cleanly architected, and then everybody else can read and have a good discussion, as opposed to coming into a meeting and you're like, if you were looking at a chess board and a bunch of pieces on the floor, you'd be like, I have a pawn, I have a night. And like, then your perspective is coming from those pieces, not from, you know, somebody sort of setting up the board for the discussion, right? You're setting up the board for the discussion here as the leader of the company. And then people can take each move you've done and say, you know what, why are we going after CEOs and founders?

Oh, you have access to them. Oh, they trust you already. Oh, you're a second time founder. Oh, the product has virality in it. And If the CEO is using it, people look over the shoulder at what the CEO is doing. The CEO is the opinion leader of the company. Whether they've earned it or not, people are going to follow the leader. It's like literally why the term follow the leader exists. Let's take a look at what you built recently. And then I want to introduce you to a good friend of mine, Vlad from Robin Hood,

who is another investment I made before the products launched. That makes me look incredibly smart. Have you met Vlad before, by the way? No, but you know what? I come prepared. I have one of these with me. Oh, oh. I have an ask.

I'm going to have an ask for blood. This is incredible. This is like bringing together Michael Jordan and like Steph Curry to like meet for the first time. This is going to be incredible moment on this week in startups. All right, founders. Okay, digital nomads and my remote entrepreneurs. I need you to listen to me right now. I know you want to build that next great company.

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Everybody's interested in seeing what's coming out of your brain at this moment. Okay, so as we know, we set out to build the most productive email app ever made, and we have done that, but just being ahead of the pack doesn't mean you stop. We always ask, why stop here? We want to be over there. So last week's launch is our biggest evolution yet, and now, like truly great assistance, superhuman is going to be constantly helping you. Organizing your inbox, making sure you never drop the ball, drafting fully written emails on your behalf, and it can even execute complete workflows. end to end, so you don't have to. And I feel like I'm making a habit of live demos here on Twist, which is always super risky because I'm going to demo beast software. It might just break,

but you know what? Demo or die, as we would say in the business in the 80s, demo or die. We're going to do a number of things. First thing we're going to do is demonstrate built-in auto-labels, then custom auto-labels, then split inbox using custom auto-labels, then autodrafts and auto-reminders. It's going to be a lot, but I think it's going to be very exciting. I'm going to kick us off with this message to you, Jason. So we've just had the best year yet at Superhuman. We more than doubled multiple revenue lines over 2024. Amazing, true.

Shall we find some time to catch up next week? Just let me know. This is the inbox here inmate of the day. Beautiful to see. One of the first things we wanted to deal with was how much nonsense lands in people's inboxes today. In fact, over the last year or two, increasingly many people would come to me and say, hey, dude, what happened to your spam filter? Because I'm just seeing all of these marketing emails, all of this unsolicited sales, spam,

pitches I don't want to see. And most of them are really low quality. And I kind of blame you superhuman. And I would have to explain, I hear you, it's not me, it's Gmail, it's outlook. For some reason, they just seem to have stopped caring. starting to let all this stuff through. And it came to a head towards the end of last year where I'm like, you know, one of the being the user interface cuts both ways.

It lets you do everything. But you also get blamed for all the crap that goes on the platform underneath. Yeah. And so I decided to take matters into our own hands and we have now completely rebuilt all of that. And so what I'm going to show you are our built-in auto labels. So once you're off the beta, we have this new section, Superhuman AI over here.

and I'm going to go ahead and click on auto labels. Let's ignore the amazing stuff at the top for the moment. Focus on the bottom. We have four built in auto labels, news, marketing, pitch, and social. And this stuff has been life-changing. Let's actually take a look at why. Let's go ahead and start with marketing. So this is real.

This is my actual inbox. These timestamps are real. You see I receive a marketing email every one to two minutes, and it just goes on and on and on. And this is all just today. And what we're doing now is if you have important other turned on, we're sweeping all of this marketing stuff, app important, into other. And we didn't stop there.

We're also, because arguably Gmail and Outlook are theoretically doing that. What we're doing is what they weren't doing, which is if you're getting these pitches and as a CEO, as a founder, as an investor, you're getting 99% of low quality pitches all the time. It's the 1% that you really need to care about, especially when they come from people that you trust. but you're getting all these kinds of emails that you shouldn't need to see. In my case, particularly, it's a lot of people trying to sell software.

I do want to hear from people whose tools we are using. What I don't want to hear from is the army of... Yes. You know what I mean. SDRs who are putting you in sequences. Hey, you didn't get back to my last one. Wondering if it's a good time, please hit not interested if you're not interested.

And you're like, I see what you did there. It's a drought. All of these are swept out. Not to say that you don't want to look at them. We've put them in a place where you can very quickly just scan down this list and go, okay, that seems pretty interesting. But you don't actually have to go through it in your main inbox. There is now also a place for news and also a place for all of your social emails.

So great. So so far, so great. And you're training those across the corpus of users. So if, you know, I put the New York Times and Washington Post into news, you know from the corpus of data that you have that this is a news source or how do you know its news? Is that just an LLM is good at it? Yeah, this is one of the really interesting things, which is the way that we build quote-unquote intelligence or AI products, I think has just changed. It used to be you would train a classifier, and you can very easily do this with a simple classifier. But since we're processing every single email you receive anyway for things like also

summarize and instant reply, we just also asked the LLM, hey, is this news? Is this a pitch? You tell us. And it doesn't cost any more. It's just a few more turpies. It's so funny because you understand power user so well. As a power email user, a super router in the world, I create aliases. So when I sign up for something that's a shopping site or I sign up for a news site, I use a different email at calacanus.com.

I will use different emails like calacanus at launch.co is a group email when we send syndicate emails. You get the idea. So I built my own little hacks to build this. But man, if somebody could have just done this for me, that was, you know, 10 hours of my life over the last 10 years is building my own system to organize this stuff. and you've actually now built it for every user. It's so brilliant. Well, hold that thought because on a perfect segue, it's almost as if you read my mind,

you can make your own custom auto labels. So I have four that I've made here. This is exactly the kind of organization you're talking about, and this is just whatever you want. I think like many people, I'm kind of overloaded with social networks, and I just don't really pay attention to them anymore. The one last social network I pay attention to is Twitter or

If you DM me, I will see it. But if you LinkedIn message me, I got news to you. I just ain't going to see it. It's just too many. Now, the problem is, I sometimes receive really powerful messages via LinkedIn messages. And I just don't know which other ones to pay attention to. The problem is it's like less than a few percent. When people email me or when people send me a LinkedIn message saying they're interested in applying at superhuman,

I want to know. And you can see exactly that happened here. So this was actually marked social, a built-in auto label, and recruiting a custom auto label. So it was like, how, that's interesting. I'm going to go ahead and open that. Two tags. Andy, I'm a CS major graduating from UC Berkeley this May. And I opened this before to make sure I wasn't revealing anything.

I shouldn't. I previously entered at Amazon and Microsoft. My senior thesis is on how long-form email is on its way out. I'd love to hear your ideas on this too. Let me know if you're open to a chat. Of course I'm open for a chat. And this is something I would simply have missed before. This is the power of, in this case, combining a built-in auto label with a custom author label.

2025 is going to be the year that voice AI really breaks out. Voice AI is going to change everything. And this technology is perfect for building a chat bot or automating customer calls. And basically creating these next-gen voice experiences. But building with these tools is so difficult. It's just a bear. It's going to take your developers months to build and test anything even big. basic, unless you use VAPI.

VAPI, this is the fastest and easiest way to integrate voice into your products. It's just the most simple API you've ever used. It helps you build, test, and deploy voice agents in just minutes. And you can create ultra-realistic AI voices and customizable personalities. I like that part, all with real-time response speeds. You know, it'd be great. Maybe I just demo it, okay? Listen to this.

Hey, Jason, it's great to be on your podcast. Oh, okay, great. Are you interested in being the co-hosts of the podcast? I mean, I'd love to. Just imagine the banter AI and humans, the ultimate duo, but I think I'll stick to helping out with Bobby for now. All right. What's up in the startup world today? You know, we have so many things going on in the startup world, including AI. So I'm wondering if you have any tips for founders on how to create great AI experiences. Totally. I mean, first off, keep it simple. I focus on solving real problems for users. then make sure it feels natural. Good conversation dynamics are key.

Oh, and don't forget to optimize four speed. Nobody likes waiting for a response. What do you think? That sounds really good to me. Take care and chat soon. Gotta say, these are ready for prime time. And if you want to give it a try, and you can see, it works. Now you're going to give VAPI a try, VAPI.a.ai.

VAPI.A.I. use the code twist 200, TWI-S-T-T-T-T-U-HU-HRT to get $200 in free credits? That's over 1,000 minutes in calls. Great job to the VAPE team. Andy, I will be in touch. Thank you for the message and for beautifully illustrating this point here. Let's talk about how you can actually turn this into a stream of work that you can then work on. Before I do that, I'm even going to go back to your email and see if it worked, it did.

here's what I mean by works. It hasn't ought to a reminder. So I did this really quickly. I should have probably slowed down. I did not set a reminder on this email. But I clearly expect a response from Jason. And reminders are very powerful in superhuman. This is how most people use superhuman.

But what if you didn't need to set them? When this case, I didn't, and yet it just worked. Jason, I see you open the email. Hello, hello. Please don't reply because I'm going to demonstrate. Oh, okay. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, no, all good. I'm going to demonstrate what happens if you don't reply.

Now, normally this is going to come back on Friday. That is using a feature that we call auto reminders. You can set the default reminder. This is in two days' time on all messages that need a follow-up. What I'm now going to demonstrate is auto drafts. So let's actually say I want this email to come back in one minute. And in the meantime, I'm going to go ahead and get back to my inbox over here. Incredible. If you haven't used superhuman, I highly recommend it if you're CEO, VC, or founder. If you spend, I would say, one hour or more a day in your email box, then you qualify. If you spend three or four hours and you don't use this, well, you could gain back at a minimum, I think, 25% of your time. At four hours a day, one hour per day is 365 hours. 365 hours is about 15 to 20% of the work year. Imagine what you could get back if you had an eighth day of the week. Superhuman is the eighth day of a week that founders and CEOs and investors get back. How does that sound to you as a pitch if you're hearing my voice? Now, I'm not just saying this because I'm an investor in the company and it's going to return a multiple on my first fund.

And if I cleared my position right now, it would. I'm not clearing my position. Stop asking me, everybody. I keep getting, this is when I know the market's coming back, is when everybody's asking me to clear my position. Speaking of never selling the share, let me bring in my good friend Vlad, the co-founder of Robin Hood, welcome. You've never met my good friend Raoul from Superhuman, have you? I have not, but I've been enjoying the demo.

Good to meet you, Raoul, Jason. Always a pleasure. You saw Raoul hold up his gold card. I have the gold card as well. We got to get you. got to get you solid gold, my man. That was going to be my posseing ask. So let's just start with it.

I have one ask for you, Vlad. Can I get a solid gold card? So, um, is my, what, first of all, is mine solid gold? Let's see it. Can we, can we, can we, do you have, do you have it on you? No, I don't have, I got to get my desk. You would know if it's solid gold. I mean, you sent it to me in the YSL envelope, right?

It was in a New St. Laurent envelope and I was one of the first ones. So I would assume you sent me solid gold. If you didn't, we're going to have to have to have. a conversation after this. No, no, we definitely, yeah, if you got, I think, I think I managed yours personally. Raul, you must have, you must have just gotten it via being a gold subscriber. Is that right? Or did we help you with that one, too?

That is right. And in fact, this is, if I may pitch your product for a second, this is my first Robin Hood product. This is the thing that convinced me to sign up. I'm not the kind of person who trade today to day, but I am the kind of person who loves free money. And if folks don't know, this is 3% back on basically everything. So I was like, sign me to hell up.

It's a pretty great value proposition. Robin Hood, I was lucky enough to, I always like to tell the founder story. Vlad and I, we were both in Sequoia Circle or in the Silicon Valley, Palo Alto Circle. I was at Antonio's Nut House, which I think is defunct now in Palo Alto. Somebody told me it's shut down. It's defunct, yeah. Rest in peace. So I'm sitting there with my friend Adayo and Adio's college roommate, his name is Elon Musk.

And the three of us are sitting there. And Vlad walks in and he's like, hey, you know, Jake Al, blah, blah, blah, blah. He starts pitching me Robin Hood. And I have to say, two of the stories all I always tell people is how crazy both of your value propositions were, how non-consensus they were. Bro, how's this for a pitch? Vlad comes up. I'm a quad. Blah, blah, blah, bah. He's pitching me. I want to get young people to trade stocks. He said, Vlad, Vlad, Vlad. young people, you know, like people who are on their parents' Netflix account and live in the basement and won't buy a car and, like, they don't have a driver's size? And it's like, yeah, exactly, those people. And he said, okay, how are you going to get them to start trading for their future? He says, oh, that's the best part. It's going to be free to trade. I said, can I repeat back to you what you just told me? He said, yeah. I said, you want a bunch of people who have no commitment towards. their future to suddenly make a commitment and the way you're going to make money is by making it free. He says, yeah. And then I have this further conversation with them. And I'm like, well, how do you get those people? He says, oh, we're going to give them free stop in a company. You want to make it free, get people who are commitment phobic, and then you want to give them free shares in the company. That's your plan. He said, yes, that's my plan. And I said to him,

I'm in. And Vlad said something to the effect of like, well, the way you said it, back to me, sounded like it was a stupid idea. I said, no, it cost e-trade $400 to acquire a customer on CNBC. I remember this because they used to advertise on a gadget and in my magazine back in the print magazine days. If you can get them for a $3 share, you just save $3,37. He's like, exactly. I said, you know, if you get this generation addicted to this product, they're going to grow up and they're going to get pregnant, they're going to get a $529, they're going to start buying mutual funds. They may yolo into some crazy stock, but eventually it's going to happen. And you're both in the same fund.

We distributed Robin Hood at $14 a share, I think, and this is something with your fund, well, you're going to have to deal with, or you may have had to deal with when companies start going public. Have you had one go public yet and distributed a public yet? Probably about two years away, but selling is so much harder than buying. So I, you know, at the time, the concept was distribute immediately and let people make the decision. So I sent a note to everybody, I'm not selling a share in this company. Vlad's genius.

And his partner is brilliant too. Like, they know what they're doing. Don't sell. Because it was the bottom of the market, 22, I think, is something like that. Or, you know, I said, don't sell. Then it goes up to $60. This would have been like a 5X in that fund. It was like a $50 million.

It was a $10 million fund. This would have been a $4 or $5x on the fund. Instead, the fund's five on paper, but it would be like eight or something on paper. And then four realized instead of 1.5 realized or whatever it is. I don't have the exact number. So a lot of lessons there. Never sell a share. If that founder is brilliant a product.

And, you know, Vlad, welcome to the program. You're brilliant at product. Well, thank you. That means a lot. Yeah. And no, yeah, I'm glad. I'm glad. I'm glad to hear you say that. And no worries about distributing. You know, even LeBron James

misses an open dunk sometimes, you know. I want to ask you, Vlad, you know, Raoul is very considered and thoughtful, and he is really focused on world-class design. You also, world-class design. What's your philosophy on product design, if you could summarize it, because Raoul has been telling us a bit of his, you know, this 10x philosophy and being really thoughtful about it. Yeah. I mean, what I'll tell you is, you know, we, Bejou and I, when we started the company, we had to learn this stuff from first principles, right? And I actually learned a lot from him because in the early days, he did the design and I did the engineering. And neither of us, we weren't designers or engineers. You know, we were both mathematicians. So we met at Stanford

when we were in the physics department and when we were studying physics, we both became math majors at around the same time. And so a lot of the skepticism in the early days was actually, you guys are two mathematicians. You're talking about building an amazing consumer product, but we don't really have confidence that you know how to do that. Like, when's the last time you heard of two mathematicians building something?

So that was kind of the first round of skepticism before you get even into the fact that it's a regulated industry and the business model maybe was a little bit complex to understand how everyone else was charging $10, but we were going to offer this stuff for free. There was just skepticism about the team. And it was hard to hire as well because we were just starting from scratch. And so Bejou, what did he do? He bought a Wakeham tablet, and he was sketching user interfaces on Photoshop. And I was watching the Stanford iOS engineering courses on the Cal train at 2X speed on my way down from San Francisco to Palo Alto. That's how we learn how to do design and how I learned to engineer consumer products. I think what was so differentiated about Robin Hood at the time, Robin Hood did two things well that, that had,

hadn't been done before. One was introducing zero commissions and kind of proving that that could work. But the second was actually moving brokerage into mobile, which also hadn't been done. And I think we were, we made the right bets there because zero commission ended up being the industry standard and the brokerage moved to mobile as as primary. And actually every brokerage of consequence, every platform that lets you trade stuff had to resemble Robin Hood. in order to stay relevant. So to some degree, I don't want to take too much credit over the design. I mean, we had a great team of people.

Bejou obviously cared a lot about it. I think we had that culture set up from very early. But what I tell you is when I work with designers now, and you mentioned the gold card. I think the gold card is a product that hopefully, you can see there's a lot of intent. intentionality in the design of it, not just the physical card itself, but also the credit card app with the way that we do virtual cards, family features, the way that like the app looks and feels, it's kind of got this monochromatic gold vibe where we tried to deliver the feeling of using a luxury kind of high net worth product, but simultaneously make it accessible to the mass market. So we care a lot about this.

And when I meet with our designers and creative folks, who I spend a lot of time with, I kind of tell them two things. The first thing is everyone should be a craftsman and use the tools. And the tools are so good now. I mean, you have mid-journey. Design has been democratized and made accessible to a tremendous degree. And I think there can be a tendency,

is especially as organizations get bigger to have like your VP, your senior director, your director passing your feedback down in a big chain. And then there's like one designer at the end of it, an individual contributor who's doing the work. And what I tell people is everyone should be doing the work. There's no reason not to. Like, I love it when my designers and creatives take out Figma or take out mid-jury in a meeting and just start working on stuff.

And I try to encourage that myself by doing it as much as possible. So that's one thing. And then the second thing is, I think one failure case is when you have big teams of people and multiple creatives, you end up getting these big meetings. And you end up seeing design by committee, right? And everyone kind of like throws in their two sense of how things should be changed. And you end up getting something that doesn't offend anyone, which I think is not the recipe for getting the best design. I think the best design is opinionated. It's going to,

it's going to offend some people. And there's going to be like a lot of conflict around that. So another thing I tell people is, it should be opinionated. You know, if everyone has consensus, then then we're not there. You should, you should see it and have like an emotional reaction to it. And actually, we have to figure this out. If it, if it involves kicking people out of meetings, if it involves being explicit about like, hey, this one, I'm running with the vision. Maybe this other one you should. But I think what kills great design is sort of like large numbers of people designing things by committee.

And you have to fight against the grain to make it feel like a consistent, coherent vision, ideally from one person. So those are kind of the two things that I think are hard. and non-obvious that I think are necessary, and I emphasize as much as I can. So I'm just going to jump in a brief on that a little bit. First of all, by the way, Jason said, you are a genius, and I didn't know that you went to Stanford. I didn't know that you started in physics. Folks, anyone who starts in physics and says, this is too easy.

I want to do math instead. Oh, my God. So I was at Cambridge, and I was surrounded by very smart people, of course. I just computer science and then the physicists and the mathematicians, holy, moly. But then he decided, Raoul, to do the ultimate boss, which is trying to build a consumer product, which makes physics and computer science and everything else seem easy because now you're into just strict art and science and alchemy. Well, you know what it turns out? It's that that left brain, right brain thing, which Vlad, I sense in you as well. I find that relatively easy.

and maybe if you have a physicist mind or a mathematician mind, it feels that way. But Vlad, my question was going to be, I mean, you've had such a success. You've scaled your organization much further than superhuman is right now, and we hope to be where you are at some point. How have you scaled the teaching of design? So I think we've heard things like, don't design by committee. But the actual nuances of the craft, and what makes Robin Hood, Robin Hood, How have you taught those pieces to people? It's something that honestly I still struggle with sometimes, and I solve it by jumping in there myself.

I hired a president last year. I've gone from eight direct reports, the normal VP structure down to two. So I'm in there pushing pixels and writing coffee with everybody. How have you done it? This is such a good question. Yeah, professional development. Yeah. I mean, I think it starts with great people, people that you trust being in leadership positions,

where they have influence. We've gone through this as we've grown the company and the design team where, you know, the first go around, we hired some professional managers that, you know, we're kind of further from the work. But I think the balance we've reached is the people that are the best at the work whose taste we trust the most are in leadership positions. And then, you know, they're kind of pushing things forward. and you kind of supplement, I supplement that with being in meetings with them, being in jam sessions with them.

And meetings are not just forums where we review the work, but we actually do design in meetings and actually change things. With remote, it's been difficult. I think I always prefer to have people in one place where we can draw stuff and we can kind of go back and forth. And we've done some like multi-hour half-day jams in the past. But yeah, it's hard for me to compare against other companies. I've never worked at another company, but it's not a clean process. It's it's messy. I think sometimes we end up taking too long to do stuff and we redo everything and start

from scratch and everyone gets frustrated. So I'd always love for it to be cleaner. But I think Rick Rubin's book, I don't know if you guys have read Rick Rubin's book. It's very good. Yeah, I think, I mean, we're in the technology product business. So I don't think we're quite there in Rick Rubinland where, I mean, his thesis is like, it's good if you like it. And the artist is kind of a singular individual. I think we have to juxtapose that with.

It actually has to drive business results. There's metrics. It has to perform. Right. But I think there's a lot of truth in that book. You know, it takes slowing down. too, Raoul. So in our venture firm, I looked at how do we get my decision-making process that led to investing in both of your companies and how do we scale it, right? And at the time, I met people through

my network or I found a great product and I just emailed the person as in your case, Raul. I like to report if I emailed the info line. That was my original philosophy. You know, I was the picker. And people said, oh my God, you're such a great picker. And that's how I went from, you know, being the first scout at Sequoia with another kid named Sam Alton. He did Shripe. I did Uber. It was pretty funny. And then having my own fund. Then I went on to really focus on building systems as opposed to just having the goal of like, I want people to pick as good as me. Like, what is the system for doing that? And the system for doing that is actually understanding the founder's vision, right? And how does that occur? It occurs in a meeting, occurs with a demo. And

And then I broke down, what are the items that superhuman, HOM, Uber, Robin Hood, Wealthfront, what were data stacks, thumbtack, Athena, what were the things they had in common? And they were always, world-class design was one of the 13 attributes, world-class design. So that's one of the 13 attributes we put into our database system when we're vetting 20,000 applications for funding per year. Another one is product velocity. Another one is the team worked together before. Now, if you look at both of your companies, superhuman, you had people from the previous team, right?

So it was a serial team and it was a serial founder. Serial founder, Robin Hood, not a serial founder. I don't know that you had a company before it, but you were a serial team because you had worked together. We did, yeah. We had a company, but it wasn't venture backed and it was like a moderate failure. Great. So that counts, right? So you were a serial team, world-class design, and you had product velocity. And that last one, product

velocity, if a person can release product on a regular cadence, they're going to learn so much more than other firms. And so we just slowed down. And we've been working on this database and the system for, I don't know, now, three years. And it went from like five attributes to 13 of why we would invest. And then about 40 reasons of why not to invest. That could be minor things. Like there's a law suit, there's an accounting problem, there's a broken cap table. And those can be, you know, red flags or pink flags, as we say. But I think, Roel, building systems to have knowledge trickle down into an organization that was three people when I started, me and Ashley and Jackie to now 21, 22 people processing previously, you know, 2,000 companies a year, now 20,000.

That's the key is, can you build a system? So I wonder if you've built systems to take the knowledge and philosophy you have, Raoul, what is the system for getting it out of your head and into their hearts, you know, and into their instincts? Your instincts to their heart. I think systems work well. I mean, this is me talking about what I know less about. Obviously, it seems easier to describe somebody else's job. But as an investor also, we have not 13 apnoisse. I think we have seven or eight that we run through in our fund. I think where it gets really different when designing a product is it's so subjective and you're deliberately in some cases, like you said, trying to offend people or at least make sure that you haven't created something

dilute, which everyone said yes to. And it's the subjective stuff that I sometimes find hard to translate. And I can always do it in retrospect. So for example, I see a design and I'm like, okay, we're going to tweak it in XYZ way. My internal thought process is is I just know. I just know why we have to make the change. And when the team asked me why, I'm able to rationalize it, I'm able to say, well, this doesn't line up with that,

or there's not enough white space here, or, you know, we can't have transitions. Everything needs to be instant, which is one of the unusual choices we've made in our interaction design. And some of those are principles, but some of those are you just know, and I'm retroactively rationalizing it. And my hope was that after 10 years of doing that,

you know, you'd come up with 100, or 200 rules, retroactively rationalized rules, but there always seems to be a few more, some that aren't missing. And maybe we just need to keep on doing this. I love the transitions thing. Yeah, I care a lot about that. The engineers and design folks all know that, like,

when I see a spinner in the app, I just lose my shit. I'm like, how did the spinner get here? I'd rather the app crashed than to actually see it. But yeah, I think it's the small details. One thing I'd add, we still do All Hands Weekly as a company where, you know, I talk in front of the company, answer questions. I don't think very many companies at our scale do it. We definitely push for that. That's every Friday you do it. You have a little wrap up. Yes. And Jason has generously volunteered to MC my all hands.

You're emceeing my all hands in April or possibly earlier. Cannot wait to come and meet everybody and tell them somebody. of the historical stories. Let's talk about feedback. Feedback to overindex on. Feedback to ignore. When do you overindex? How do you collect information? How do you, let's start with, how do you collect information? What do you overindex on? What do you, what do you, you know, what's the word here? Overindex on and maybe dismiss. So we really over index on actual feedback from customers, both quantitative, like you're looking at the data of them using it and where they're dropping off, and qualitative, where we put prototypes or actual working product in front of customers.

UX research we did and we continue to do very early. What do I underindex on focus group style settings where you're asking people if they would use a certain product if only it existed or if only it had some some some feature that you're kind of describing generally. I think there's so many times where someone will tell you they'll use a certain product, but but they wouldn't actually do it if it came down to it. What people say that that they'll do doesn't always match up with what they do when you've got the product in front of them. So I think you have to be careful in some in some sense with focus groups and with people going over prototypes or value props.

Open-ended feedback can send you on a, you know, random side quest and the person would actually never use the product. And it's almost better to just build a prototype and actually have somebody use it or look at the data. Yeah, I agree with that. What do you think of getting feedback, and then over-indexing and ignoring? Well, as you know, I'm very opinionated.

on this topic and have written and talked about it extensively. If folks want to see that, check out superhuman, how we built a product market fits engine that's on first round review. I believe it is their most shared article of all time, which I'm very proud of. I'll do a very quick summary. It's quite detailed. But the quick summary is this is really hard, especially when you're in the earliest stages of an application or a company you're trying to find products market fits.

the risk is that even if you listen to your users or your customers, that it will give you a very kind of muddy, dilute view of what they want because they all may want different things out of your product. A really old-fashioned example, but this is the one that I originally read over a decade ago, is hopefully some folks remember that PayPal started as a mobile wage transfer money as opposed to a one. where the way to transfer money, imagine you're polling those two groups of users. They're just going to give you two completely different sets of feedback. And if you just start acting on it, let's say in a numerical order, you're going to end up building sort of a very messy, muddy products that lacks coherency and vision. So what do you do? Well, there's this guy called Sean Ellis, who actually coined the term growth hacker,

and he found that if you ask people a very specific question, How would you feel if you could no longer use the product? Give them three choices. Very disappointed, meaning they love it, somewhat disappointed or not disappointed, and measure the percentage that say very disappointed, meaning they love it. If you find that you get 40% or more people saying that, you have early product market fits. And he found that those companies, this is benchmarked against hundreds of benchback startups, those companies almost always find their way to at least some degree of success, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of success. So what I did was I took and built this algorithm or an engine around that to try and figure out who do you listen to.

Added a few more questions. Question next is, who do you think this is best for? How can we improve the product for you? And what do you think the main benefit of the product is? The main benefit is super important. So we asked this in the early days of superhuman. And obviously, predictably, we got all kinds of answers. But there was a contingent to people who were saying the main benefit is speed, keyboard shortcuts,

its focus, design, aesthetics, ultimately at speed. Like, this thing is just really, really fast. And if at the time I told you, yeah, I'm going to build an email app and the core value proposition is going to be speed, then Jason, you were like, okay, fine, I invest. But most people were like, no, that's a crazy idea. Yet, here we were with our customers, some of them are validating that. Now, the key thing is, and this is hard to do,

but discard, ignore the feedback from all the people who said the key value proposition, the key benefit of the product was not speed or whatever the main one is in your case. And by doing that, you can focus on the people who really get your vision. Now, there's more nuance, there's more detail, and you can actually turn this into a metric that you can optimize over time. But that is my quick summary of the method. Can I ask you a couple of questions? I tried, or I went through the process to attempt to onboard to superhuman as I was on my, way over here. And I noticed something, which I'm sure, based on what you just said, you have a very

nuanced take on, and it's subscription gating. So a lot of products, they put the subscription gate in different parts. Robin Hood has a subscription element to Robin Hood Gold, as you know. I noticed with superhuman, the subscriptions like right out front, you basically can't even see your email unless you already sign up. Is that something you guys. tested or was it that way from the beginning? Oh yeah, I did. I did actually. Tell him the story. This is the, this is what I knew I invested in the right guy. Yeah. Okay. So, um, so a little, a little bit of context and a little bit of history then to make the story make sense. We used to onboard every single person in person. And I did the first several hundred myself,

including Jason. And, uh, the very first thing I did when I sat down with Jason and all these other folks was, so as a reminder, this is a paid product and no one gets it for free, especially not investors. That's how I'm going to keep this intellectually honest here on your feedback. It was like, what? And I was like, yep, time to pull out your credit card. Here's a little strike payment form. But it didn't please. And I sat there watching him, his credit card. I did that hundreds of times. It was so great. Can you imagine you're the first investor in the company? He's, it's a year later and he's finally ready to show. it to me or whatever was six months later. I think we were at Cyclos getting espresso or something

in San Francisco. And he's like, okay, so you log in it. Like, I'm over the shoulder. And he's like, okay, now you take out your credit. You put it. And I was like, yeah, okay. So, yeah, how do I skip this? And he's like, no, no, you actually put your credit card in. It's a dollar a day. It's 365 day. And I'm like, it's kind of expensive. I was like, you know what? A moment of truth. This thing better say me a fucking hour a day on my email. Huh. It didn't. it did. But this is such a great onboarding device. And now so many founders, Vlad, come to me and Raul, they come to me and say, we're doing the Raul onboarding. And this is when you know you've hit a product note. People will say, we're Robin Hood for X, we're superhuman for Y. And then if

they can drill down and they know the product technique, like we're doing the give to get from Dropbox or Uber, you know, or the, you know, what Vlad did with, with shares, which by the I broke the give to get share thing. Did you know that? You got to, you maxed it out? I maxed it out because I would tweet, hey, if you haven't tried Robin Hood, it's fucking fantastic to whatever, quarter million people, a half million people. And when that happened, I would get a hundred shares. Now, these were like, you know, $3, $10 share. When I hit, I think, $250 or $500, I sent you a note. By the way, I broke the system. I guess there's a cap. And the cap was you could only get paid for $500, which I think was because people were hacking the

give-to-get system. So let's shift the discussion to acquiring customers. What role have you done to acquire customers? What's been the most effective? What did you think was the most effective and didn't work? And how do you think about customer acquisition costs broadly? Super important question. So in the early days, we had three pillars. And I always believe these pillars would work for us. Number one is virality. Number two is PR. And then number three was. thought leadership. So when it comes to virality, this is probably the least surprising, but with email one of the most effective. Email is one of the last few truly viral places where you can build a product. And it's the obvious stuff, like, for example, sent by a superhuman, which I think

30, 40% of our users actually have on. We've sent many, many hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of emails with that in it. And to this day, it still drives between 30 and 50% of site traffic, depending on the month. So that actually still works, surprisingly enough. But then there are some less obvious things. So like with Robin Hood, like with many companies, one of the biggest flywheels for driving new users is just users inviting other users, right? Whether it's to join their team or to be another individual subscriber. Here's the thing. As an email app, we get to literally sends the email as the user. So we punch through piracy inbox, we punch through focused inbox and outlook, we're right at the top

of the other person's inbox as a person's user. Yeah, so slick. So it's because the from, just so founders who are listening, understand this, because the from is not from Robin Hood or from superhuman, it's from that actual customer, you know, they are obviously friends with the person, so it goes straight through. It's so brilliant. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So that was puller number one. Puller number two, I think I said, was PR. PR. Yeah. So this is sort of generic advice, I think, for every founder that I give at the early stage, which is, depending on your industry, something will happen that is really news and noteworthy at some kind of a cadence. In the email industry, it's like, you know, maybe once a year there's some interesting email thing is going to happen. And I remember it happens relatively early in superhuman. Folks may remember the app mailbox. and that was a $100 million acquisition by Dropbox, and they popularized Swipe to Archive,

like a really, really great innovation didn't exist before that, believe us or not, now every single app has that, obviously. But Dropbox acquired them, and predictably, but sadly, a year and a bit later, they were shut down. I'm not going to get into the reasons why, but they were shut down. But I could see it coming a million miles off, and I was like, aha, this is my moment. Everyone is going to cover this very, very, very,

that outcome, burning of $100 million, and then that itself is going to start to trigger mainstream media to start writing about email all over again. And this happens once every few years. This is my time to shine. So I was like, okay, what do I have that is personally relevant to this story? Well, I sold an email company, but, you know, I sold my last one to 15 million, so no one really cares. It's really tiny. That said, I worked at LinkedIn for two years, and I think I have an extremely detailed and nuanced view of how to make an acquisition work really, really well. Even today, Reportive is still alive. It's part of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and for an acquisition to have survived 15 years is just super rare. So I know how to do it. I sort of created the foundation and the framework for that to work.

So what I did was I wrote what is to this day still one of the most shared articles on how to survive an M&A transaction. not just how to survive it, but how to thrive in one and how to make a real impact at the acquirer. And so I just piggybacked my article on their news, and that drove many tens of thousands of new sign-ups to superhuman. Tens of thousands. See, this is interesting. There's actually a term for it when I was a journalist. They called it news hijacking. And the PR industry now, it's kind of part of the playbook. You can get pulled into it, as Vlad did, inadvertently, without doing it or you can do it actively. You can do it passively, as Vlad did.

We'll get into that story in a moment. Or you can get, you can do it, you know, deliberately. And you see this now where people are like, oh, if you're talking about, you know, Doge, I have an expert at doing zero-based budgeting from the accounting firm of Lux, Lux, and Lux. And, you know, they can comment on it. And, you know, there's like helper reporter kind of services.

because Vlad PR played a major role for Robin Hood at various points, also for Uber. And sometimes even if it's, you know, the bad press is good press kind of situation, the number of signups for Uber every time something went wrong in an Uber, you know, an Uber accident, you know, anything, even with the company, the, I mean, I got to say this judiciously, but. no matter what happened, it moved Uber up in the app rankings. The number of people signing up for Uber on a bad newsday when everything was chaotic were the record days.

Glad, do you have any experience in this regard? I do, several. And by the way, I just want to just want a plus one mailbox. Mailbox, maybe you guys know this, but inspired the initial Robinwood wait list. We had close to a million people pre-launched. sign up for Robin Hood. And we introduced a mechanic where if you invite someone that joins the wait list and they accept, you get priority. So it was a it was a prioritized cue where if you invite successfully someone, you get bumped ahead.

Oh, right. I remember that. We talked about that when you were here in 2017, one of your first appearances you talked about that wait listing. And somebody productized that, I think. There's like a product you can buy now instead of having. Branch metrics. Yeah. Branch metrics.

Yeah. They came later and they told me, hey, the Robin Hood wait list was, uh, inspiration for, for a company, which I thought was amazing.

I'm sorry. Your question was PR. So I plus one on virality. Um, yeah, PR, um, yeah,

I mean, I think that just building the motion and knowing, um, how to do it. It's, it's earned me. right? So you don't have to pay. It's not like paid ads. And I think that I'm not sure how much it moves the needle quantitatively when you're at large scale. But and there might be some correlation where,

you know, founders that go and get press just tend to be founders that hustle anyway. It's like, I got to get users, get me users however I can, virality. I'm going to email everyone I know. I'm going to email all the reporters I know, you just try everything. And eventually by by by the nature of like trying a lot of things and being relentless, even if a small percentage of those things work, if you're just moving faster and iterating, it'll work quite well. We did we didn't have a lot of learnings in in PR. Maybe you're talking about the whole game stop thing.

But, but even before then like 2019, I remember this crazy thing that happened. We went viral on Reddit because there was a trader on Wall Street bets that discovered the infinite money, the Robin Hood infinite money glitch. I don't know if you guys remember hearing about this. I remember this. Yeah, the money glitch. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, he posted a video of him screencasting his infinite money glitch. And of course, you know, the team at Robin Hood was like freaking out. It's like, how many people do we have exploits? Like, how many people do we have exploiting? this. We got into action immediately. We were, we were like making plans to close the loophole, look at all other types of loopholes. And it was a trivial number of people that actually went through with it, right? Maybe like dozens or something. So it didn't end up being a thing. But everyone saw on Reddit and the internet that Robin Hood had an infinite money glitch. And they were like, oh, I can make infinite money using the SaaS. And so growth basically spiked up just from that. So, you know, we were, we were terrified of this thing. And then it just ended up, you know, benefiting us in all sorts of strange ways. Let me drop you off, Raoul.

This has been amazing. What a delight to have you both. And then, Vlad, I'm just going to ask you a couple questions about Robin Hood as we wrap here. Yeah. Thanks again, Raoul. Yeah. I'll hit you up about the gold card. And Jason, thank you so much for having me again.

I'm going to finish my onboarding. This is great. I'm going to have, I'm taking you both out for a stake when I'm in San Francisco. Well, this will be to be continued, this little tree out here. Hey, Vlad, I wanted to talk to you just about the swings and the value of the company and running a public company that comes down to like, I think I bought more. I tweeted it the other day. You know, I'm just such a fan of the product.

I make my decisions based on product, you know, founder and customer. And I love that you haven't sold a share. I mean, why sell a share in something I think 10 years from now will be worth 10x? Like, I think that you will be a trillion dollar company eventually. I'm talking my own book here, but it's a fraction of my overall net worth. So, like, I don't want to make it into bigger than it is. And I don't like to pump stocks or anything like that. But when I make a decision to own a company like Berkshire Hathaway, you know,

and Warren Buffett has a thesis, my thesis is the team, the product, the customer. Here you've got a team that I've always believed in that has executed at a high level since day one. You have a product that if you use it, you know it's delightful and best in class, and then you have third, a customer base that is growing and loves it. You see that from the Hood conference you're doing, but there is a reality. When this company went public, I think he went $67 a share then during this down draft and Silicon Valley Bank going down and went down to maybe nine or ten bucks. I bought more shares in the company when it was at $10 on my Robin Hood account. And, you know, here we are.

It goes back up 40, 50, 60. I don't look at it day to day. I look at the trend of, hey, the revenue is great. Customers are great. But you have to run the company through those things. How do you stay even keeled? And what do you focus on every day? When the company has shifted in value by 6x in the last three years, I think it's 6x.

Trout of Peak. It's obviously much easier on the way up than the way down. just psychologically for folks, right? Like the volatility is not the same. On the way up, everyone's feeling good. And, you know, what I worry about there is complacency, right?

It's like you think you're winning because the number is going up. And then the conditions being too complacent actually set up the scenario where if you're not careful, it could go back down again because you've got your foot off the gas. So I always try to temper. I mean, I think it's good to reflect and celebrate and actually see that we've been making progress or getting rewarded for the progress, but also temper that with an understanding that we've got a lot of work to do. And the job's not finished. You know, the job's not finished. You got to keep going. Yeah, that's the Kobe line, right? Job not finished. Yeah. Why would I be happy? I love that quote. And Kobe is just, is he like an inspiration for you? You're a Kobe guy? 100%. Yeah. I was, I was fortunate enough to meet Kobe. at an NEA event when, yeah, I think he came to Socelito at the Cavallo point. And, you know, we were, I think maybe a series C stage company.

This was back in 2017. And Bejure and I had a meeting with him, a business meeting. And of course, I just wanted to talk about basketball. I was a huge fan. And I was like, what's going to happen to LeBron? He said, LeBron's going to go to the Lakers. Oh, inside information. He had to trade, ready to go.

He knew. He knew it. He knew he knew LeBron was going to the, the, the Lakers. So, I mean, there's, but, yeah, that. But, yeah. But, he talked about it. And it's so sad that he passed away so young, because he wanted to make his third act, being an investor in companies and technology and company formation. And he was around the basket, applying his same discipline from what I understand,

to learning our crap in the way that he, you know, approach basketball. And there are these amazing stories of people. people like, he would invite them to a workout at 6 a.m. So people would be like, oh, shit, I got a workout with Kobe. Let's get there at 5.30. They would get there at 5.30. And Kobe would be sitting there having breakfast. And they'd be like, oh, you're having breakfast?

But he was like, drenched in sweat. And they're like, yeah, he had his first workout at 4 a.m. Yeah. His 5.30 is having breakfast. And you're coming to the second workout, mofos. This is, and he saw people, there was his other one. They were coming back during the dream team. And they're coming back into the hotel.

they went out to a club, and it's 4 a.m. And they're coming back to the club. He didn't go to the club. He was leaving the hotel to go to the gym, and they're crossing in the lobby. And this is in the off-season. And the people wonder why this guy just was such an incredible winner.

It just all had to do with effort. Yeah. Technique, effort, strategy, all of it, philosophy. And the systems he built, right? The system he built for success, you know, was studying the game, right? He studied it, and he was hard. You know, like,

and when you play with Dwight, Howard, you ever see that where he calls Dwight Howard Soft? He was super frustrated by Shaquille O'Neill's preparation for games. And he was super upset about Dwight's because sometimes the big guys in basketball, they fall back on their size, right? The physical attribute is what they fall back on. He didn't have that. He was 6'7 or something.

So he had to actually go with technique, not being 7-1. Tell me about the desktop product. This seems like you're like, I think most people who do desktop use Bloomberg or interactive brokers or something like that, right? These are like the super pros. But you started mobile first, and now you have the desktop up. How is it doing? What percentage of people use it? Why do this now in year 10? Tell me about the thinking and how it's gone. Yeah, yeah. It's going well. We announced at our last earnings call, the Robin Hood Legend, which is our first desktop product built specifically for active traders, was already at 50 million in revenue run rate. And it's after basically two months,

two months of being out. What does it cost? It costs nothing. No additional cost. So 50 million has been generated in trades from it or revenue from it. Yeah. Yeah. And that's basically just the transaction revenue. We're not even, you know, counting what may be incremental margin revenue or interest, which so, so yeah, we feel pretty good about that number. And obviously, if it's that way after two months, it's on its way to being a hundred million business in and of itself. And I call them cylinders. You know, we went from each, each hundred million dollar business line. I like cars, so is a cylinder for us.

So now we're a nine cylinder engine. When we went public back in 2021, we had, you know, maybe three cylinders, something like that, options, crypto equities. So the business has gotten much more, much more diversified. In 2021, we look back at the initial euphoria after we went public. It was a little bit of a weird IPO, or our stock actually went down on IPO day. So it was kind of a stressful day for me. And it went up, as you mentioned, to the 70s, the week after.

Yeah, it never felt real. I mean, I felt very fragile in a sense because I didn't feel like I had earned that valuation at the time. And the business wasn't diversified. It was very much relying on a zero-rate environment. And so you ask about, you know, the peaks and values. when we went through 2022, the higher rate environment, the business normalizing us having to adapt to not having easy money, not relying on that. It was very painful at the time, but it actually planted the seeds for us diversifying the business, becoming a stronger company, getting the team in a much leaner, better shape. And it's sort of like set up the foundation for us to be, for us to be successful last year and, you know, so far, so far this year.

If you think about it, you know, in this basketball analogy and as a player, you know, the big men, Shaquille O'Neal, you know, they rely on their dominance in the paint because of physicality. Okay, that's one dimension. But if Shaquille O'Neill became a decent free throw shooter, given the amount he had fouled, he would have been even more dominant. He never got that right. And now you watch today's game. You have somebody like Porzingis, Kevin Durant, Yolich, Yokeage, and, uh, Carl Anthony Towns on the Knicks. Carl Anthony Towns on the Knicks is a four or five. He's playing a five right now. He's the greatest big man shooter ever. I mean, his shooting percentage from three was like over 40% for much of the year this year. And so when you have a big man, imagine if Shaquille O'Neal hit a three. And then you start thinking about two-way if you can defend. And they call them what, three and Ds, you know, people can hit threes and who can also defend on the other side.

You're starting to get these players and then assists come in. And you got big men like Yokage who can act pass. and it's like, whoa, wait a second. Yokic averaging a triple double as a big man. I mean, I think I was reading somewhere that Yokic statistically is having the best season ever by any basketball player this year. That's crazy. And then you look at the guy and his physicality compared to LeBron compared to Kobe. You know, maybe he's even got another card he can turn over, which is imagine if he had LePron's support staff with him and he physically.

If he got Jack. If he got Jack, I mean, I'm not saying he's a dough boy or anything like that, but people do say that. Like, my God, look at him. He doesn't look like a basketball player. I mean, if he gets physically dominant, oh my God, he will be the best player in the history of the league. It would be absolutely crazy. So, and you know, it's interesting. I saw this as well with Uber when they had the Eats business and then COVID hit, you know, rides goes down, eats goes up. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And now you're resilient. What happened to Airbnb where Brian, you know, God, if we. We had Brian Chesky on this with me, you, and Raul, can you imagine? I mean, he's another master of, you know, just this whole alchemy of like figuring out product and how to run and scale a company and how to do the finance part. What an amazing, you know, journey they've had because he overstaffed a little bit like you did, probably. And then he cut and cut and got it really tight.

He does his two cadenced product releases a year. And but man, when they hit COVID, he told me on this very program, like, he wasn't sure about the future of that business. Like, they went to zero revenue. Can you imagine going to zero revenue now? The one thing they had in their favor was they were asset light. They didn't own the properties. And people have pushed him to start owning properties. Yeah, yeah. You're having exclusives on properties and he never did it. So they didn't at least have the hard cost of those things. But what do you think of Airbnb as a business? I mean, like his headwind became a tailwind pretty quick. quickly because actually I'd say, you know, back then March 2020 hit and everyone was freaking out. It was like shelter in place, don't leave your house. But then by, you know, by May, everyone was like, I'm kind of tired of being in my house. We did this. We're like, can we shelter

somewhere else? And then I think Airbnb became suddenly very, very attractive, right? So, That's so interesting, too. He turned the lemons into lemonade because we went from you can't leave your house to you can leave your house. You can get on a plane, but you can only have this many people at the house so you got to make a pod, right? What do you think of all this doge stuff? I'm curious because you had to, what was the peak employee count and when you did your reorg, what did you get to? And then when you look at what's going on in Washington, what do you think? So I think our peak employee count was probably end of 2021. We were at about 4,000 people. And we got down to maybe a little. bit over 2000. So, yeah, it was, it was large. What was the difference between the two staff sizes? Some people report that things are more efficient when you have less. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we saw that directly. And at that time, you know, we also reorganized the business. I went to GMs and business leaders who were, who are owning their PNLs. But we move much faster. We move much faster now. And I think, you know, the reality of it is it happened during COVID.

End of 2019, I want to say we were under a thousand people. We quadrupled basically during COVID. These people hadn't met each other in person. They were just on these Zoom calls. So there were a lot of confounding variables that I think would force us to not work particularly well together. So we ended up reversing all of that. And, you know, you see the product velocity, the performance of the company. we had to learn how to do this, but it's true what they say. I mean, I think that the company was

frankly overstaffed and we got ahead of ourselves. We got we got too loose. We were always a very lean company and we always strive to do more with less when we were private and we got a little bit away from that. So when I think about the federal government, and I've got a lot of friends that work at the federal government, you know, I'm in D.C. right now. I grew up here and, you know, they're very nervous right now, as they should be because they see what's happening. Yeah. But I think it's tough medicine. The country needs it.

I think the deficit's the biggest problem that we have right now. And I'm glad that the administration recognizes that. And it seems like the people are behind it. I think that the medicine is going to go down tough. But I think there's so much waste that. Pretty clear. You know, anytime you have. Yeah.

There's so much that needs to be cut. You're a nimble startup and you had waste. You know, so if you can admit it, I think we can admit it in the government. Let's end on crypto. We went from a regulatory environment where, you know, Gary Genser was like, we have a playbook here. We got rules here. Follow the rules. It seems reasonable in some ways. But the truth is these things, when you say crypto or a person says crypto, not you specifically, but when a person says crypto, that can mean a trading card in an FT. It could mean a Dow, a group of people investing money together, i.e. like a venture firm. It could mean a meme coin. It can mean a utility token

that gets burnt as you do usage. Man, there are so many different ways, you know, that you could be involved in this. So what should happen in crypto? What would you like to see? Because you have people trading on your platform. What would be a reasonable solution to what feels like to me, we had no rules, so it was too hot. Then we had, you know, followed the existing rules. too cold. Now we're back to too hot, in my opinion, with like the Malay coin, the Trump coin, whatever. You know, probably need a little more. What should David Sachs do? What should the future be? How should the SEC look at this? And what would you like to see because you were directly impacted by it? Yeah, absolutely. And I think what I'd love to see is there being a path to use crypto for securities,

for real world productive assets that generate revenue. I wrote an op-ed that was in the Washington Post, a couple weeks ago. And my argument was there's a lot of criticism, skepticism around crypto because all people are seeing are Bitcoin and meme coins right now. The reason for that is we're not actually allowed in the U.S. to connect crypto to things of value. So, of course, the easy things that regulators pass through are meme coins. And, you know, nothing wrong with meme coins. I think those are very, very interesting. But what I'd love to see is crypto technology. being applied to making it easier to invest in startups, eventually public stocks as well. The traditional financial system should move onto crypto technology as the next layer

of infrastructure beyond cloud. I think that's going to be a huge thing. We see the value of both because we have a large-scale crypto business and a large-scale traditional assets business. Crypto business is over an order of magnitude less expensive to run because, a lot of the central intermediaries like clearing houses, settlement, transfer agencies, those are all done by software on the blockchain. And it's simpler to operate.

And you can pass on the savings in the form of better prices and also better user experience for customers. Crypto runs 24-7 by default. There's fractionalization by default. I don't even want to begin to tell you how hard it is and how much we've had to work to get to 24-5 trading on equities with Robin Hood 24-hour market and, you know, how complex it is to make fractional shares for something like Berkshire Hathaway A shares happen. Like, these are some of the most difficult engineering challenges that just like happen for free

in using crypto technology. So you mentioned startups there. I'm a big fan, as you know. I invested in 100 startups a year. I have the largest syndicate in the world, 11,000. accredited and qualified purchasers. I'm glad to be on your show because hopefully I'm assuming this means we're still a startup, which I believe we are.

I mean, you have the startup mentality and never lose it because that's how you succeed. Only the paranoid survive and you got to keep focusing on product, team, and customer. Those three things you make it work. Tell me what your vision is for Robin Hood users doing what I do every day or maybe participating in my syndicate. if I had a great company like Superhuman and I wanted to share it with the Robin Hood user base. Are you and I going to be collaborating on something like that eventually? Yeah, I mean, I would love that.

I mean, I'll tell you this. You look at what our customers are investing in right now and what they're interested in investing in. It's very clear. We actually publish it. Tesla, I mean, I think back since 2019, Tesla was the most commonly invested in name on the Robin Hood platform. It was number one. Before then it was Apple, because, you know, Apple was the most innovative company. company back when we started Robin Hood. It was sort of in the wake of the Steve Jobs era.

So it was Apple for a long time. Then it became Tesla. Recently, it's Nvidia. So Robinner users love Elon Musk companies. Solar City was very, very popular on the platform before it folded into Tesla. Invidia is very popular now. They're investing in electric vehicles, quantum computing, AI, which you know, the proxy is is in video there because there's really not that much in the public markets that can give you AI exposure. SpaceX would clearly be very, very popular, if available, right? I mean, our customers love Elon Musk. They love Tesla. It's hard for me to imagine that, you know, SpaceX would not do well. And there's not too many opportunities to invest in AI in the public markets. Open AI is still private. Anthropic is still private. I think those would,

those would do very well also. And I think I think it's interesting. So the retail angle is is obvious for me. Why is it interesting on the other side for the startups and companies? So I think for late stage companies, it's useful because the employees want the liquidity. Some of them have been around for a long time. The employees are actually motivated to sell some of their stock and take some ships off the table. And some companies do that, you know, as programmatically already. SpaceX, I think, does it twice a year. Stripe does it once a year. And they have a very orderly process to, you know, let people cash in some chips. And I think they, they even do it on a certain percentage. So if retail wanted them, and there's like some destiny

ETF or something that got popular because it owned some SpaceX. And I don't even, I had the founder on here. I don't think they even was, it might have been their largest holding because of the valuation, but it's not like they, at time, I don't think they had a very cheap price on SpaceX. They had bought it, you know, at a very high price. And people want it so bad that they found a way because consumers are smart, like you're saying. The ETF ran up, right? The ETF ran up. Big time. showed you some of the demand. Yeah, that showed demand. Yeah.

Not logic, but demand. So I do think like later stage post IPO founders and management teams of startups aren't super motivated to do it because in a sense, you start competing with the startup itself for primary capital. So I think the employees at that stage are kind of the stronger pull for the other side of the market. on earlier stage, the entrepreneurs would love to have that product. You know, I remember when I started Robin Hood, we had a hard time raising capital. I mean, you were an early backer, but we didn't have that many believers in the early days. And you could get Robin Hood stock. You could invest in Robin Hood on Angel List at a $10 million valuation cap.

Crazy. And we pitched so many individual investors who were just, you know, normal people who'd worked a job, built up a nest egg, retired, they live in the Midwest. and we pitched them just like we pitched every VC and everyone who was interested, we gave them their allocation because we just, we had to take what we can get in those days. So, you know,

you're passing the cup around just trying to make enough to get the company off the ground. Yeah. And we had, I think Thumbtack was $5 million, Uber was $5 million, and superhuman might have been 10. Yeah. So, yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, I imagine if we had an easier way to, you just tap a button, you get access to global liquidity and, you know, retail gets access with appropriate guardrails and disclosure to early stage opportunities. As an early stage entrepreneur, getting my venture off the ground looking for capital, that would be a great product offering.

I am super excited about it. My best piece of advice to the SEC, I've made it clear to a bunch of my friends over there, create an accreditation test. Yeah. You know, and I use the example. When you go into Robin Hood, if you don't understand options and puts and these, you know, more elaborate devices, not just buying and selling a share, but shorting it and doing options trading. You do such an amazing job walking people through an education. Now, you don't have to do

that, but you do it. What if in the United States, just like you have to have a license to be a barber or a license to own a gun or a license to be a teacher or even drive a car and these tests are different, we should just have, and the SEC has been mandated this, they've just kind of slow rolled it and they're slow walking it. Just a three or four hour course on private company investing and, you know, interesting nuances to that diversification and preferred shares versus common shares, all that stuff. And you just take a 50 question test. The test could be 25 bucks. You could do it. You could have the test in Robin Hood. You could have it at the SEC's website. You could do it any number of ways. And you have to take a course that would be free online or you could take it in

person for a hundred bucks. Man, this would be so perfect, wouldn't it? My take on that is, I think it would be odd if the friction to investing in a company like SpaceX, for example, is significantly higher than investing in a meme coin. It's like you have to pay, you have to take an accreditation test. Yes. Because SpaceX is risky and you have to know what you're doing, but, you know, I would like to have it for both.

Like, and I'm talking like, man, when I took a firearm test in California, it was like, what's the best way to hold a loaded gun? And it was like, pointed in the air, pointed at the ground, point it straight in front of you, or have it in the holster or on the lockbox. And it was like, hmm, it was like the silliest test ever. Yeah. I think there's a lot of solutions. And I think we're excited to be kind of deeper in that discussion. I think that platforms can do a lot here to put private companies in different tiers. For example, you know, some companies have audited financials that are public company quality. And, you know, those should be in a high tier where they provide a lot of disclosure.

And then some don't do anything. And maybe you put like a skull and crossbones and big warnings and say, this is like incredibly risky. Kind of like, uh, meme coins under it. Right. I mean, it's kind of like you have pink sheets and penny stocks right now that really don't have the same type of reporting requirements. So yeah, I'm more in the favor of like self certification and,

really accurate labeling of what type of disclosure the company. If you're a freedom-loving person, you want people to do whatever they want with their money, whether it's Vegas, sports, crypto, stocks, you know, because you get educated. This is what I always told people who criticize Robin Hood. Oh, people are gambling, whatever. It's like people are gambling like a third of the country does sports betting. I bet on every Nick game using prize picks. I love it.

It's my right to do that. I know that I might lose money, but I enjoy putting a Hyundai or five Hyundai on the game. It makes me more engaged. It's fun for me. My choice. It's American. It's American. That's what America is all about. Yes. And the only thing we need to do is disclosures. That's all. Some simple disclosures, some simple education. Vlad, wonderful to have you on. Thanks for taking the time, my friend. I look forward to coming to your all hands. And I will be there for the hood conference next year. Great job. All right, everybody, thanks for tuning in to the greatest startup podcast in the world this week in startups. What an amazing episode.

I think we got to release this one as a one-parter, just Raoul and Vlad. Man, this could be something. Having those two overlap was spectacular for me. You know, and as we were mentioning with Rick Rubin's book, you know, make the art for yourself. This is an example of art for me. That was so engaging. I didn't want to hang up the phone here. We're two and a half hours into this program.

So what an amazing episode. A long one and a great one. And if you're listening to the audio feed, please, please go to YouTube and watch. Roel's demos and you can get a vibe for everything. Go to our YouTube channel. I think Spotify has video as well. So you can get it there, but please go to YouTube and sign up. And if you wanted to, you could have watched this live. If you're hearing my voice in the podcast feed, you could have watched this live. Again, go to YouTube.com and search for This Week in Startups, subscribe and put the bell on so you get all notifications. And you get about 20% more show for free.

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